How L.A. Charter School "Celebrated" Black History Month

Teachers Fired for Honoring Emmett Till

(Young Spartacus pages)

LOS ANGELES—Last month, administrators at the overwhelmingly black Celerity Nascent Charter School in L.A.’s Jefferson Park district prohibited pupils from reciting a memorial poem and laying a wreath for Emmett Till, 14-year-old victim of an infamous 1955 Mississippi lynching, as part of Black History Month. Intoning that the presentation was “unsuitable” for the elementary- and middle-school children and that it lacked “positive images,” the school administration then fired Latina seventh-grade teacher Marisol Alba, organizer of the reading, and Sean Strauss, a white math teacher, for signing one of several letters from pupils protesting the ban.

We demand that the teachers be reinstated immediately, with no disciplinary action against them. Also calling for their reinstatement is renowned black poet and University of Connecticut professor Marilyn Nelson, author of “A Wreath for Emmett Till,” the poem on which the presentation was based. In a stinging rebuke to the school’s censorship, Nelson asked: “Do you allow the students of Celerity Nascent Charter School to know that slavery existed?”

Emmett Till is a symbol of the long history of racist lynching in America. The young Emmett had left his home in Chicago on a trip to stay with relatives in Mississippi. Within days of his arrival, he was kidnapped, tortured and murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman. The two white men who boasted of the crime were never convicted. Till’s mother wanted everyone to see firsthand the stark reality of race-terror, displaying her son’s mutilated body openly at his Chicago funeral and undertaking a speaking tour of the country. Emmett Till’s gruesome murder and his mother’s courageous campaign helped galvanize thousands to join the burgeoning civil rights movement. Mass rallies against lynching were held nationwide, including in Los Angeles (see “The Lynching of Emmett Till and the Fight for Black Liberation,” WV No. 852, 5 August 2005).

Alba and her students heard the school principal, Grace Canada, stating that Till’s actions could be viewed as “sexual harassment.” Sexual harassment?! Till’s racist murderers would have said that he had violated white womanhood. The black executive director of Celerity, Vielka McFarlane, explained how the presentation was not compatible with the school’s “educational mission,” saying, “We don’t want to focus on how the history of the country has been checkered but on how do we dress for success, walk proud and celebrate all the accomplishments we’ve made.” Spoken like a latter-day Booker T. Washington, who over a century ago preached accommodation to the racist status quo by telling impoverished blacks to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Erin Aubry Kaplan wrote in the L.A. Times (23 March): “Black people excising, or glossing over parts of our history for the sake of uplift, commit the same crime of denial as whites excising those same parts because they’d rather not think about black history at all.” But a number of black liberal spokesmen have supported the Celerity administration. At a press conference held at the school on March 20, the day after the L.A. Times broke the story, Reverend Eric Lee of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference railed that the newspaper had “engaged in irresponsible reporting” based on the “disgruntled” teachers’ complaints. While pro-Democratic Party commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson initially called for reinstating the teachers, he dropped this demand after meeting with the school administration, stating that he had been reassured that the fired teachers’ “rights” to a hearing and appeal had been protected. In fact, the teachers had no rights: their work contract stated that they could be fired without cause.

This outrageous incident highlights the reactionary nature of charter schools, which are publicly financed but independently run, mostly by union-busting, for-profit corporations. As we wrote in a Young Spartacus article titled “Charter Schools: An Attack on Public Education” (WV No. 825, 30 April 2004): “We oppose charter schools because they are an attack on the democratic right of public education and the separation of church and state; they increase racial segregation and class inequality in education and are utilized as a tool to smash the teachers unions.”

According to a July 2002 study by the Civil Rights Project, 70 percent of all black charter school students attend intensely segregated schools, compared with 34 percent of black public school students. Celerity Nascent in Los Angeles is itself 80 percent black and 19 percent Latino. As for the status of charter school employees, according to the California Teachers Association (CTA), unions represent staffs at fewer than 10 percent of the state’s charter schools. The CTA leaders talk about the importance of organizing these teachers. But their program of reliance on the capitalist Democratic Party is an obstacle to the hard labor struggle that is necessary to organize unions.

Honor the memory of Emmett Till! Celerity Nascent: Reinstate Marisol Alba and Sean Strauss!