Eshu's blues: Ode to Charles Rex Fisher/Christmas Night in Harlem
by BAR columnist michael hureaux perez
"If we don't recognize that the question of public ownership and governance of education is a black working class question, we're toast."
December holiday break has come around again. We get a little breather from the austere stratification that late capitalism calls public education, and this allows time to reflect and find some renewal of purpose. Renewal of purpose is essential in a country that is run by the best and brightest. Especially when our ruling class is so harried they can't seem to keep the power grids functional, the roads safe to travel, or water mains insulated well enough to keep them from bursting during inclement weather. You know, all those things you just sort of expect people who bray day and night about their technical mastery to have a grip on. For some reason, in the age of high tech, we can't keep the power on during winter storms as well as it used to be done when I was a kid in the interior of Alaska 35 years ago. And those were the days of clunky copper cable. Fascinating.
So, sacrifice of things like public health, safety and public education, well, those things make the top of the triage list. The new list of Seattle Public School closures (for the sake of "fiscal responsibility", whatever that is) hit the news about ten days ago. Our local Data Queen Superintendent, the honorable Dr. Maria Goodloe Johnson (late of anti-teacher's union Charleston SC), her Chief Academic officer Carla Santorno (a sorority sister of hers) and their Alternative Schools hatchet man, uh, Officer Michael Tolley are busy hacking away and closing programs it took black teachers in this city decades to create. The south end's African American Academy, despite its many years of hard work with black and Latino middle school students damaged by factory model education, made the cut list this year.
And so on goes the quest for "education reform," "leaving no child behind," and high stakes testing, which takes deeper root in the Great Northwest. Let us celebrate punitive testing, carved up tables and chairs, chain link fence in the stairwells and high strung civil servants who are just marking time until they can get away from the children of the great unwashed. Let us now praise public schools that are run like private institutions for those upper middle class kids and their families in the new luxury housing downtown who have all the nurturance, academic and cultural support they need at home. Quality education is a privilege which few are gifted enough to take advantage of, or so I hear from "successful" people who are stupider than the table this computer is sitting on.
"Let us celebrate punitive testing, carved up tables and chairs, chain link fence in the stairwells and high strung civil servants who are just marking time."
Forward with the academic fortunes of the professional classes, those people who brought you the Vietnam War, Ronald Reagan, the looming holocaust in the Asian sub-continent and the current international black hole in finance. Let the "best and brightest" do for public education what they've done for all public infrastructure. Big Brothah Hope and Change We Can Believe In has declared his willingness to move with the privatizing agenda. Obama's appointment of Chicago's Arne Duncan (privatizer and high stakes test junkie) to the Secretary of Education post in his cabinet demonstrates that the beat-down of the public interest goes on. Time is running out here, ladies and gentleman. If we don't recognize that the question of public ownership and governance of education is a black working class question, we're toast.
Is that cynical? Ah, well. I'm 51 years old, and there are things I don't believe in anymore. Foremost among those things is the idea that the professional classes in the United States have any real commitment to democratic renewal. There really are a lot of teachers out there working in conditions that people of the professional world would not work under themselves, and so they consciously choose not to recognize the difficulties of public teaching. And there are things expected of teachers that are nothing but a theater of the absurd posing as education discourse.
For example, there is the endless societal request of public school teachers that we somehow make right the socioeconomic farce that marks our daily existence. How else would one describe the expectation that public schools should prepare young people for entry level employment positions that may or may not actually be there depending upon what vicissitudes of the "invisible hand" may be in ascendancy at the moment they enter the workforce? Why is it the fault of educators if glorified speculators in the marketplace ruin the economy? And why are there not enough people asking this trenchant question? Because the education "reform" movement is made up of people who refuse to recognize that the science of education is a work of incremental gains. They'd rather sell miracle snake oil cures that more often then not, are ideas stolen from creative teachers, packaged and sold at profit to the general public. Such "entrepreneurs" are what we used to call "culture vultures."
"Why is it the fault of educators if glorified speculators in the marketplace ruin the economy?"
But you know, what old school Rastas used to call the Fiyamon, will always out. There will always be people who take on this craft of teaching - and it is a craft, not a career - people who will continue to step forward and shake off the deadweight of the culture vultures, come what may. I like to think that I am one of these wild people on my best days, shucking aside my worst habits as a teacher and bringing to my charges not only academic strengths, but a passion for the incremental process of learning which I know is contagious. I had a few good mentors on my way through public school, and though my own effort is far from spotless, I'm upholding a grand tradition of the Fiyamon and the mad leap.
My most memorable high school teacher was a pariah in the world of education "professionals." His name was Charles Rex Fisher, he was an organizer for the American Federation of Teachers, and he had a nasty habit of teaching Civil War and Reconstruction history in depth and breadth. His understanding of the Reconstruction period led him to teach a continuity that went straight up through the Black-led struggle for Civil Rights, alongside the rise of radical labor, the CIO and the industrial union movement. The North Star Borough School Board of Fairbanks, Alaska had attempted to fire him for teaching communism several times, but it never stuck because those school district officials wouldn't have known communist ideology if it had walked up and bitten them in the fat part. The truth was that he came out of an Ohio Mennonite background and that upbringing led him to strive to help non-white and working class students develop intellectual curiosity about our own histories.
Without teachers like Rex Fisher, a lot of students with academic and social skills as low as mine were in high school might never have found any life of soul or mind for ourselves. But he introduced me and my peers to the words of David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delaney, WEB DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Fannie Lou Hamer and Malcolm X and that was a rare thing from teachers in the public schools of 1973. Fisher was proof that the public schools don't have to be a valley of dry bones, and even when they are, there can be found teachers who play the role of mentor in service to the work of personal and cultural integrity. Mr. Fisher taught labor history and black culture as a living and vibrant thing rather than as a collection of names and dates, and that made all the difference for many of the young people who were students in his classroom. He was the teacher as mad fool who rejected the class privilege of the "professional" world and he inspired the mad fool in several of his students.
"Fisher was proof that the public schools don't have to be a valley of dry bones."
I went into all this because I'm raising my first holiday toast to him during this Christmas break. His respect for the persistent rebels in both black and labor history put me also on the road of the teacher as hoodoo fool; it led me to take one protracted mad leap. On the road to teaching, I became a groom of Afro Cuban music, black poetry, black theater, black classical music and other celebrations of the lives of black people in the Americas. I have never regretted any of the places this road has taken me or the things I have seen or done as a result. What a long, good, warm road it has been, smiled on by the Old Black Folks.
When I still lived in New York City, I became active with the Black Radical Congress. In New York, the BRC found itself with two branches, one led by Manning Marable and cadre who met up at Schemerhorn Hall at Columbia, and other BRC folks led by S.E. Anderson, who met down at the Brecht Forum of the Monthly Review Offices on 23rd Street. I used to go back and forth between both meetings because there were so many interesting new and veteran fighters at both.
Eight Christmases ago, there was a holiday party on Christmas Eve that Marable's branch of the BRC hosted in the basement of the Schomburg Institute. Amiri and Amina Baraka were there, as were Charlene Mitchell, NYC City Councilman Bill Perkins, Preston Wilcox and a few other elders of the tri-state area struggle. The red wine was warm, the food was grubbin'. There was a lot of heavy political discussion; most of it connected to the triple zero election, which that year had netted the country the triple zero who's only now leaving national office. Much of the conversation was about whether G. Dubya's ascension was Ralph Nader's fault, and Amiri Baraka was sparking up the debate with his comparison of the 1999 WTO rebellions and the Nader vote in the 2000 election to the premature German worker uprising of 1919. The argument was as warm as the wine, and it contained subject matter as abstract and remote from concrete struggle as Baraka is ever likely to be guilty of.
"On the road to teaching, I became a groom of Afro Cuban music, black poetry, black theater, black classical music and other celebrations of the lives of black people in the Americas."
The best part of the evening came when all the verbal struggle got set aside, the boom box got cranked and we all began to break it down with early soul stepping that I'm sure must have stirred the ashes of Langston H., which rest under the floor of the Schomburg just down the hall from where we were partying that night. Stop, the love you save may be your own and as I walk this land of broken dreams, I have visions of many things. What becomes of the broken-hearted? The place was jumping.
I can't know how many great celebrations I have left to attend in my life, but I do know that that was one of the best Christmas Eves I can remember, and I got to spend it with people who were longtime fighters for black self-determination, black leaders some of whose power in art and music and word music sustained me during some of the worst years of my life. There we all were, dancing with the unsung stars of a wilder muse, one Christmas night in Harlem. And I might have missed the whole of the road that led me there had it not been for the untiring efforts of a mad teacher fool in Fairbanks, Alaska almost thirty years before that nutty moment. So here's a tip of the rum to Charles Rex Fisher. A touch more while we may. One more mad leap.
michael hureaux is a writer, musician and teacher who lives in southwest Seattle, Washington. He is a longtime contributor to small and alternative presses around the country and performs his work frequently. Email to: [email protected]