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WEEKSVILLE—MICROCOSM IN BLACK

RAE BANKS

TODAY in Black communities across the nation one finds too little agreement on too many important issues. But there is one glaring reality which every segment of the community agrees— the schools in our communities are failing our children. Parents can compare their schooldays with their children's; students are eyewitnesses to an irrelevant, incomprehensible process and community leaders fight a never-ending, many-sided battle. Searching frantically for the key we have tried integration, busing, decentralization and all manner of manipulative, mechanical devices—all to no avail. It would be ironic, seventeen years after the Supreme Court decision and many such devices later, to imply that the fight to secure quality education is interwoven with a very human factor like identity. But it would be the height of irony to even suggest that the model for achieving such a goal is locked in the history of a Black community's struggle that took place over one hundred years ago.
As the history of the tiny village of Weeksville slowly unfolds it becomes increasingly clear that much of our past is present in both the issues and the dynamics shaping the fight for quality education. Although this community of free Blacks in nineteenth century Brooklyn, New York, has been replaced by another Black community, Bedford-Stuyvesant, the same battle is being waged with the schools that are to serve its children. But how are we to bridge the time and space from nineteenth century Weeksville to twentieth century Bedford-Stuyvesant? The notion that history repeats itself or that we are somehow condemned to repeat our past offers little explanation and no understanding to a people seeking both awareness and change. If our history is to have meaning for us today it must be used as a wedge between age-old, timeworn patterns of behavior and the insidious devices of racist institutions. Black history must act as a catalyst to take us from the level of history as awareness to the level of history as change.

project weeksville
Project Weeksville may be the catalyst that will add a new dimension
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Rae Banks is a New York educator and writer.

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