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BOOK REVIEW
STEIN

This is not merely an interesting study of the conflict of the two psychologies. It is far more important. It is the root mechanism by which it has become possible for our schools to keep education from the Negro child. What Dr. Fuchs may perceive bu does not express is that the "self-fulfilling prophesy" of failure drilled into every Teachers' College graduate is, in truth, not failure but success. It is absolutely essential to our society to educate the white child to run the world. It is equally essential to maintain the status quo of white supremacy, to prevent the Negro child from learning. The segregated school with its ready-made "scientific" explanations of why the Negro child cannot learn, is the ideal tool our society has forged to make sure this happens.

That is why three-quarters of our Negro and Puerto Rican children, after eight years of "education" in our segregated schools, cannot read or write beyond the fifth-grade level--"functional illiterates" by Army definition--preordained in the first grade to become our hospital orderlies, kitchen workers, unskilled factory hands and, more and more, our reserve of unemployed.

Case Study Two "I'm a Macon fighter from Herkimer Court. My freedom won't be sold or bought," wrote a 14-year-old leader of the seven-week long boycott in New York's junior high and "600" schools last spring. Dr. Fuchs, in vivid, sturdy style describes the background, the goals and the successes won by this massive boycott led by the Reverend Milton A. Galamison. She has succeeded in distilling the key factor in this boycott: the leadership assumed by the children themselves. In a breath-taking series of interviews with the 14-, 15- and 16-year-olds who led the boycott, she portrays the dynamic changes that took place in the young people in the course of their heroic struggle against the Board of Education, the police, the courts and their own fears.
Of profound interest is the young man, a gang leader who had daringly fought many a street battle but who wrestled with a new fear in making up his mind to join the picket line at the Board of Education, sensing that social protest was more feared and more bitterly punished by the threatened establishment than individual acts of anti-social behavior.

I lay in bed, you know, before I go to sleep and I think to myself...and I was saying to myself that I want my kids to grow up, you know, in a decent school and a decent neighborhood. So I said, "Oh, I'll go ahead and do it," I said. "It won't kill me and if I do die, I'll die trying..."

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