Other Columns by Kevin Fobbs
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Twenty three years ago, as officers in the Detroit Chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists we began to craft a way to start building a farm team of young minority journalists. But we noticed something very alarming as we worked to create the weekend journalism workshop series for those students.

What we encountered was the fact that far too many young minority minds were only receiving a marginal education. Many of the young minds we were seeking to enhance were instead barely performing at a reading or writing composition level one or two grade levels below their current grade.

Now, twenty-three years later what was a small storm front facing young black students in cities like Detroit, Cleveland, New York, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Philadelphia and too many others is a full term hurricane decimating their future.. We are heading backward with far more deadly results than even the Ku Klux Klan, the white Aryan

Race separatists and the neo-Nazis could have imagined if they had, had a hand in it. But they have not.

We have unleashed that weapon on ourselves. We have learned to not care, to not be involved and to look the other way.

I have to wonder, just when is the right time to speak up about hundreds of thousands of our young people who are growing up in school systems that have walked away from their responsibility to educate. When is it the right time to come correct to save our children from being permanently trapped behind a wall of educational enslavement?

When is it permissible to say that for twenty years or more, many urban educational systems headed by blacks, are still pointing fingers at the white man as the reason why our children, will not only not graduate, but will forever be trapped on a plantation of low expectations, and even lower self esteem?

We have been looking the other way for too long. We have been pretending that we were going forward as a people and we really are going in reverse.

Sure, some of our children will make it out. There are the parents who care, even if only one parent is the head of the household. Sure there are exceptions to the rule, because one parent or two children or three teachers or four schools expected more of each other, and understood that their children's future, their student's future, the survival of the race, was more important than trying to find blame.

Right about now we better be sending our own wake up call to ourselves or we are in danger of becoming extinct.

For instance, Detroit has a public educational system that would have shamed Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. What would this change agent for equal educational opportunity say today, fifty plus years after the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court's decision to strike down segregation and open up full educational opportunity?

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