Racism In Schools

Martin Luther King once said “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character, that is the goal of true education.” The 1960’s and 1970’s were a time of change, and new ideas. During this period many things changed socially. Society was attempting to do away with segregation and break down the wall between races and genders. Education is the exposure of students to as many different experiences as possible, both through academic achievement but also through social knowledge. Education has many dimensions and to truly educate a student, you must educate on all of those dimensions. In the early 1960’s many aspects of Taft were quite racist and the community was not thinking of
In the early 1960’s the Taft school’s student body only had a handful of black students each year, and even fewer in the faculty. This lead to students who only knew white culture, and the student body was not very friendly towards the few black students at Taft. For example in the 1969 edition of the Papyrus (Taft’s school newspaper), a panel of black alumni was held During this panel all alumni seemed bitter about the racism which flourished in the nearly all white student body. One student by the name of Wesley Williams described how at Taft “Oppression was physical as well as psychological”. These students who had all graduated in the early 60’s and late 50’s, made it known that the Taft school had been a place of racism, in which they were the victims. The fact that so many students were speaking about this problem showed that is was very apparent and needed to be fixed. Racism also appears in the 1966 yearbook, in which there is a picture of a white student in blackface, pretending to be lynched. An act like this in the yearbook is absurd, and shows that the students at Taft had little respect for the black community for an act like this is both racist, and disrespectful towards the whole race. By allowing all this to go on within the school, Taft was failing to educate students about black culture, and about diversity, in in general how to
The counterculture movement was filled notions of desegregation and diversity, and once students were able to see what had been going on in the school they began to speak up against it. In a papyrus article from 1669, the article Racism, by Bill Campbell discusses racial issues at Taft and how they need to be solved. The student talks about how Taft has always made preconceived notions about black students, and how we can not judge them for the color of their skin. The student talks about how races need to come to a medium where everyone can live happily together. By 1970 in around 10 years taft had taken its black enrollment from 1 student to 10 percent of the student body. That is a large change for the good, the more students of color the school can accept the more diverse the community can become.The fact that students are now speaking out about the issues in race, and the school is beginning to accept more students means that they are beginning to be educated on social issues and black culture, meaning the school is able to expose students to many more experiences socially enhancing their education at