Egalitarian Dream of America’s Great Martyrs Remains Unfulfilled

Guest Column
by John Telford

June 16, 2010

The fiercely egalitarian legacy of Malcolm X is celebrated today by sincerely egalitarian Michiganians, both black and white.

However, let me hasten to point out that the magnificently in-your-face egalitarianism of that fearless man once known as “Detroit Red” is also safely “celebrated” by many far less-than-sincere, covertly racist whites and some classist, bourgeois blacks like those who were recently and destructively in charge of the Detroit Public Schools. Such self-serving hypocrites would be rightfully fearful of Malcolm X were he alive today instead of safely dead.

A man named Thomas Hagan (aka Talmadge X Hayer), who was convicted of killing the mighty Malcolm 45 years ago, was recently released from prison. No way would he ever have been set free had his victim been white. (Note that Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of the 1968 murder of the social revolutionist Robert F. Kennedy, continues to languish in prison with no hope of parole.)

Personally, I would have preferred that the powers-that-be show Hagan the same lack of lenience that Sirhan Sirhan is appropriately being shown.

Although my professed sentiment in that regard is unforgivingly non-Christian (and I profess to be a forgiving Christian), I can’t help feeling this way. As the scholarly professor Boyce Watkins has written, Malcolm took most of black America and some of white America to higher levels of understanding in the last years of his too-short but legendary life.

Still, with young Malcolm’s early death, much of his egalitarian labor remains uncompleted, and much of the young King and both Kennedys’ similarly egalitarian dream remains unfulfilled.

In 2008, more than half a century after the 1954 Supreme Court school-desegregation decision declaring “separate but equal” to be inherently unequal, I was still administrating in a huge, all-black public school and teaching in an all-black classroom at the dilapidated Detroit Finney High in the most segregated metropolitan center in Michigan (and America). This segregation is the direct result of more than a half century of accelerating white flight and resultant corporate flight.

Native Detroiter John Powell, my student and runner at Southeastern High in 1960, now directs the Ohio State University-based Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. In January, he and his staff put together a report that includes these words:

“The U.S. has not lived up to its obligation to review and correct policies that perpetuate disparities manifested along racial lines, and it rationalizes these harms as a product of conditions beyond its control.”

Until America’s (and Michigan’s) leaders recognize that these disparities are far from beyond their control and set about obliterating them, our country’s four great egalitarian martyrs won’t rest easily in their graves.

Retired public school superintendent John Telford’s memoir on Detroit and suburban schools is available at www.AlifeontheRUN.com and at Barnes & Noble stores.