If We Ever Needed the Lord Before: The Perilous Closing of Mahalia Jackson Elementary School
by Johari Jabir | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
[In memory of Chinua Achebe, 1930-2013 & the anniversary of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. assassination, April 4, 1968]
Located in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood of Chicago’s South side, Mahalia Jackson Elementary School serves a population primarily of special needs children from African American low-income families. Jackson Elementary uses a highly interactive learning curriculum including arts, technology, and fitness in order to nurture the student’s intellectual, moral, industrial, civil, and spiritual well being. This approach to teaching, learning, and living fits appropriately with Mahalia Jackson’s legacy of art, activism, and spirituality. Under the mayoral leadership of Rahm Emmanuel and the Chicago Public School system the city has recently witnessed some of the ugliest ghosts of Jim Crow racism in public education. The announcement that CPS would be closing Jackson Elementary and more than 50 other schools serving low-income African American students confirms the charges of racial injustice already launched against the city’s top leadership.
It seemed almost uncanny, the sight on March 27, 2012 where Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis, along with a few teachers and families, stood in front Mahalia Jackson Elementary School to protest against the closing of Jackson Elementary. Several decades earlier, on October 22, 1963 a collective of civil rights organizations staged a “Freedom Day” mass protest against the inequities of a racist Chicago Public School system. Looking back, one wonders how it came to be that in the same city that boasts having produced the nation’s first Black president, and in a nation that will soon celebrate the 50thanniversary of the March on Washington, how is it that some children’s lives have remained so unapologetically disposable? The death of public education in this country should call into question our prideful notions of progress, it seems we have nothing to celebrate at all. And yet, this blatant disregard for black life during the modern Civil Rights era was precisely the kind of racial injustice that led Mahalia Jackson, in honor of whom Jackson elementary school is named, to cry in her 1960 release: “If we ever needed the Lord before we sure do need him now!”
Lewis reminded the crowd of Jackson’s legacy, one I argue extends beyond the liberal gesturing of name recognition to claim Mahalia Jackson is an ancestor to these children, a deeper connection for which the city’s officials seem to have little if any regard. The point at which a community ceases to demand that the society revere its ancestors is a confession of collusion in the myth-making of liberal progress: sacrifices of some people must be made if we are going to access the American dream. Progress has such a paradoxically strange meaning in America. For it was only a few months ago that several hundreds were gathered on the Washington Mall to behold the grand sculpture of Martin Luther King Jr., and yet today, a small crowd of teachers and parents stood in front of Mahalia Jackson Elementary to protest its closing.
Dr. King and Mrs. Jackson were partners in activism during the Civil Rights movement. Jackson produced one of the largest fund -raisers for the movement here in Chicago at Soldier’s Field on July 10, 1966. At King’s request Jackson sang “I’ve Been Buked” before he spoke at the March on Washington. Some journalists and scholars even speculate that it was Mahalia Jackson who urged King to “tell them about the dream,” a culminating dream sequence now known as the “I Have a Dream Speech.” Of course, before joining the civil rights movement Mahalia Jackson was already a global phenomenon as a gospel singer, a career she launched right here in the City of Chicago after meeting Thomas A. Dorsey, considered the father of gospel music. Dr. King requested Mahalia to sing Dorsey’s “Precious Lord” at his funeral, which she did. Aretha Franklin, who closed out Mahalia Jackson’s enormous Civil Rights rally with Dr. King at Soldier’s Field in 1964, sang “Precious Lord” at Jackson’s funeral. Whether or not the city’s educational cabinet is aware of these historical connections, I do not know, but one would hope that those in charge of educating our children would know this history and have respect for it when making such sweeping decisions.
Given the legacy of Mahalia Jackson as someone whose artistry and activism were borne out of the experience of her people as a service to humanity, it is critical to examine her legacy in relation to this moment of school closings and its impact on African American children. The assault on public education in favor of privatizing practices of schooling that render some children disposable has made it clear that the current arrangements or “deals” cut between politicians preachers and others will not serve our collective humanity. And, these approaches to democracy are an outright offense to the legacy of someone such as Mahalia Jackson. The current arrangements of power have no regard for the deeper implications of its actions, and this kind of technology, which prioritizes the machinery of profitmaking over and above the development of children’s minds, holds no reverence for the relational aspects of communities and their institutions of learning, nor the classroom as sacred space in which young minds are developed, an activity central to the existence of humanity. Naming a school in honor of Mahalia Jackson is not simply a matter of brick and mortar, but a claiming of Mrs. Jackson as an ancestor to those children the institution serves.
When Mahalia Jackson cries, if we ever needed the Lord before we sure do need him now, the “now” of this phrase cries out urgently that we attend to the “now” of our current dilemma. The closing of Mahalia Jackson Elementary School ought to cause us to pause and ponder the dilemma of our democracy. Mahalia Jackson Elementary is a school that strives to provide children with the intellectual, moral, industrial, civil, and spiritual elements, aspects that are evidence of the ancestor’s legacy that bears its name. The casual closing of this school and the over 50 others is a symptom of the perilous times in which we live. In times like these, we sure do need “freedom now.” While it seems we are on the global fast-track of evangelizing the world through the gospel of democracy, the current school closings in Chicago are a sign that perhaps, we might interrogate such notions within American democracy – now! As Chinua Achebe once wrote, “a functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an education, morally grounded leadership.” It is simply not true, that some of Chicago’s children can be rendered disposable in order for others to achieve an American dream.
If we ever needed the Lord before, we sure do need him now.
The connections between ruthless profiteering, education inequality, racialized poverty and incarceration, and empire are masked in the name of progress. After centuries of Black people returning to a table of democracy that seems determined to exclude us, perhaps the time has come for us to come to terms will the cancerous nature of this society when it comes to race. No wonder, Dr. King told an audience in Memphis on April 3, 1968, “The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around.” On the day before he was assassinated, when Dr. King delivered his last public sermon, he said:
It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today….And also in the human rights revolution, if something isn't done, and done in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed.[i]
The symptoms of a sick society are made obvious in the moments of violent self-destruction, which the city authorities assume to be something akin to the “negro problem” of the 1960’s. But the country has never admitted to the criminal ways it created the “negro problem.” Though it may seem as if the military violence enacted upon “other” countries is a violence that is contained elsewhere, this assumption is a matter of self-deception. More specifically, the pervasive violence among black youth in Chicago is the result of the longstanding commitment, on the part of this society, to the ongoing ‘hurt and neglect’ of its African American citizens. The violence among young people “appears” to be something pathologically black, but even this misguided perception has already seen signs of violence in some of the most safe-guarded sections of the city.
For those of us who still believe in freedom now it is time rethink our commitments and strategies. Now that we have been integrated into this burning house of an American society, surely we understand by now that any sole reliance upon the “master’s tools”[ii]will not deliver our freedom. We cannot shore up the impulses of imperialism and seem surprised when it feeds us to ourselves. Perhaps, instead of organizing large commemoratives celebrating the March on Washington we might consider ways to stage the loudest lamentations on injustice, louder than the drones dropped upon innocent Iraqi children who, like impoverished black children in America, did not ask to be subjected to the ruthless inhumanity of empire. If we ever needed the Lord before, we sure do need him now!
I am aware that using terms like Empire can give the impression that we are dealing with an abstract notion of region and/or territory. Not true, at every local, state, and even federal level we are dealing with a savvy technology of power[iii], one that has co-opted clergy, politicians, and several progressive projects of public intellectualism to carry out the bidding of inequality. In this regard, the coercion and thrust of empire is so overwhelming that it is simply too late for any politics of politeness. The death of public education at the local and national level is the result of an arrangement and agreement of power and governance whereby even the oppressed are convinced that the disposability and death of their own will serve their higher good is, to say the least, clever. The whole contemporary network of power – both the power brokers and the structural practices that both sustain and are sustained by the them must be “deconstructed”[iv] in such a way that asks: how are we, the people, colluding with that which does not serve our collective humanity?
The current state of emergency demands a deeper and more rigorous practice of justice, a “critical justice” that begins with our individual relationships to institutions and forms of power. The current technologies of power are often cleverly disguised in various forms of labels and categories: liberals, progressives, radicals, leftists, allies, etc. When we are not deeply reflexive the suffering of persons can be reduced to mere causes, a political view can be turned into a bureaucracy and/or an identity of separatism. Critical justice calls us to ground our practices of justice in the context of our relationship to institutions of power, our relationships with each other, and our relationships to the environment. We need freedom now, and we have run out of time settle for anything less. Our only option (and this has always been the case): we must create caring communities of love, justice, and freedom. Here, I speak of love as a force, a flow of energy that renders ALL of us feeling visible and embraced. We must now move our social justice toward a “critical justice,” a self-reflexive practice that always takes into account our individual practices of power, which can easily be disguised as liberal and/or progressive. Lastly, but by no means least, I put forth this working definition of freedom: that each of us is allowed to cultivate the individual and collective strength, courage, and wisdom to live and love honestly in the world. Indeed, the economic, militaristic, capitalistic, and nihilistic realities of empire are dire and designed to convince that freedom is impossible. A critical justice that enables caring communities realizes that the creed of neoliberalism is not only wrong but destructive: all human activity is not the domain of the market place. If we ever needed the Lord we sure do need him now, because time is running out, we need freedom now.
[i] Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” delivered April 3, 1968.
[ii] Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House in “Sister Outsider” (New York: Random House, 1984)
[iii] Michel Foucault, C. Gordon, ed., Governmentality in “The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991)
[iv] See Elisabeth Weber’s discussion of Jaque Derrida theory of deconstruction in her essay, “Deconstruction is Justice” in the journal SubStance, Issue 106, Vol 34, No. 1, 2005.
Title: 'If We Ever Needed the Lord Before': The Perilous Closing of Mahalia Jackson Elementary School
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