Roger Wallace

What’s Changed?

To start, I want to share an experience I had at an interfaith service to honor the 25^th anniversary of the bombing of Black churches in 1996. The service took place at Goodwin Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church in Amherst, MA, where my family and I are members. The church is 95% Black, and those in attendance were there to be in solidarity with our sisters and brothers around the country. We could take no comfort when nine people were murdered at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, and another bombing occurred in Springfield, Massachusetts in December 2020. I keep asking “What’s changed?” Of the eight civil rights acts America has passed, seven of them were rewrites, because each one unleashed awful backlash against the previous one.

There were so many obvious obstacles put before us: redlining, unfair allocation of resources, unavailable bank loans, the failed efforts to integrate schools like Central High School in Little Rock where my wife’s sister was in the 8^th grade and subjected to the racist mistreatment of white parents.

It was actions like these and the policies that caused them that resulted in the Kerner Commission in response to the Watts Riots of ’65. The report highlighted the injustices and made recommendations for how to address them. It powerfully pointed out the prevalence and influence of white racism, not Black anger, as the cause of civil unrest in the Black community. It highlighted a flawed justice system, police brutality, high unemployment among Black workers, voter suppression and a host of other examples of the systemic racism that existed.

Almost 50 years later in 2017, unemployment for Blacks was worse. Police brutality was occurring more frequently, and the wealth of a white family was 10 times that of a Black family.

“Island Opportunities”

When I am asked have race relations improved, I see what I call “island opportunities.” One group of examples are the TRIO programs—that’s not an acronym, but stands for the trio of original programs begun in 1965: The Upward Bound (UB), Upward Bound Math-Science (UBMS), and Student Support Services (SSS grant programs). Programs like these are efforts to improve relationships and provide greater opportunity, and they succeed to the extent that they expand the pool of white and Black people who can say, “We just folks,” to one another.

But does anything really change? I don’t think it does, because racism is grounded institutionally, not in the interactions of individuals. The institutions are still racist in much the same ways as they were when Baldwin spoke out. Take, for example, housing. When [my wife] Jacqui and I wanted to move to Amherst, Massachusetts in the mid-70s, I actually got laughed at when we applied for a mortgage. We had to find a shady realtor who found a mortgage company in Agawam that granted mortgages. Has that changed enough in the time since, when it is still harder for Blacks to get mortgages and there’s still redlining?

Then there’s the police. To really change that culture, you’d have to make supervisors culpable for whatever patrolmen did, and, if they couldn’t fix the problem, they’d be gone along with the patrolmen.

I look at voting rights then and now. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed poll taxes, and yet Texas just made it much harder for Black people to vote in 2022! In 2013, the Supreme Court decided that the voting rights of Blacks in Southern states, where the obstacles had been the greatest, no longer needed protecting.

I see a huge contradiction in efforts to integrate schools. Busing was used to take people from their communities, and it was strongly resisted to the point of violence by whites in Boston. Meanwhile, next to no effort was made to enable Black people to live in neighborhoods with better schools. This could have been done through re-education of realtors who continue to stand in the way of more integrated neighborhoods, more affordable housing, and more welcoming neighbors.

I had hopes for affirmative action, even though it took an Executive Order by President Johnson to get it started. From the beginning it was questioned, and in 2006, voters in Michigan banned its use in public education, employment or contracting. What will this Supreme Court, with three Trump appointees now firmly in place, do when it comes before them? [In 2023, the US Supreme Court ended affirmative action in higher education]

Are things getting better? No. Now there’s social media spewing lies and causing more division. Anything you can think of negatively about somebody has fertile soil. I saw someone was getting jeered for wearing a mask. It’s a free-for-all, which is how racism flourishes. It makes dealing with equity and civil rights feel like a losing cause.

Do I see any signs of things change? What I see is an expectation of “over-comingness.” There are laws promoting equality, but many are not being enforced. Black people will overcome this injustice. Take Stacy Abrams in Georgia, fighting the good fight against a racist electoral system, or the Black women in Congress getting arrested for protesting the restrictive new abortion laws that disproportionately impact Black and poor women. Even when it appears that gains could be made, the powerful present new obstacles. The expectation remains that the oppressed will overcome the oppressor, rather than that the oppressor being held to account.

“Endless Hoops to Jump Through”

This next thought is personal. I was recently asked to be on the Reparations Committee in Amherst—I said “no” because of some recent losses in my family, but the reasons go deeper. It goes to the endless hoops I’m still being required to jump through that go back to the start of my 37-year teaching career in the Amherst public school system. I wasn’t a hoop jumper then and the same is true today. The town wanted me to go through an interview process to be on the committee, but if my record doesn’t speak for itself, then there’s nothing else I can tell them.

I was reminded of my first year teaching at Fort River School in Amherst. There were several new teachers hired that year, but the assistant principal persisted in spending more time in my classroom than in the others. It felt like I had to keep proving my worth with each visit. This was following a rigorous interview process. I knew I had to look at the person interviewing me to show my self-worth. I found the write up of that interview years later and it said, “There was a measure of self-assurance and he believes what he says, but I’m not sure he will be tactful enough to handle white parents because of their education.” I remember receiving a note from a doctor parent of a student on his official stationery and I felt compelled to write back signing the note: Roger Wallace, Master of Education and Teacher of your child.

It wasn’t just the parents. The same judgments and lack of acknowledgment came at me from other staff members. When I published a book there was no announcement at the faculty meeting, but when two white teachers published one, it was celebrated.

Where does that leave me? Faulkner said, “The past is not dead. It isn’t even the past.” We’re living in it today.

My hope rests with the next generation of young people. My two daughters’ veracity, speaking their truth to whatever power tries to hold them back. I have to hope a movement will start at the foundation, point out the fallacies and the true history and then just work its way up to the brains and hearts of our culture so change will happen.

When Obama was running for president, NPR heard about my class studying elections and sent a reporter. One student said, “I listen to the debates and they’re only talking about each other, not what they’d do.” I asked, “Why?” The answer was, “They’re into politics and not governing.” I told them that a democracy is actually more like our classroom. I am in charge, but you have a voice that you need to use. Teachers like you and me have been laying down a legacy with the great hope that students like ours will go into the world and make the changes we desperately need.

One source of hope was even more personal. I saw an older white man wearing a Kansas City Monarchs hat recently and I approached him to ask him why he liked the Negro League team. He said, “Back then it was so unfair. I wanted to see Josh Gibson [famed home run hitter for the Homestead Grays and Pittsburgh Crawfords who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1972] face Whitey Ford [New York Yankees pitcher and Hall of Fame inductee].”

So there is still the rage. But rage must always be tempered with, “What are you going to do with it?” I need to do something and not just sit with the rage. If I see injustice I will respond. Just the other day I saw unfairness in a neighborhood basketball game so what did I do? I sat outside and refereed the game.

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