Other Columns by Kevin Fobbs
Kevin Fobbs Bio

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Fifty years later, we have begun to stop caring. Fifty years later we have worked ourselves into our own demise, and we can't point fingers at anyone but ourselves.

So when do we wake up?

Do we wake up in mid-March when parents begin to decide where their children will attend school the next school year? If you are a Detroiter and you are one of the unlucky 10,600 students who will be displaced because you attended one of 34 schools that will shut down, do you begin to care now?

What about in April, as students and parents begin to make crucial decisions on where the next step of educational matriculation will occur. But wait it may not include the 33,000 students who left the Detroit Public School system from 1999 to 2003, or the 9,500 who left just this year. With a graduation rate of 45 percent in Detroit alone and far too low graduation rates in other urban cities around the country, we can't afford to wait.

Our children are being lynched, and many of their parents have walked away from their responsibility to care. Our school leaders who run the system and who are more concerned about providing income for the system than providing educational options for our children have built the platform for their demise, and our own people who live in our neighborhoods have helped supply the rope, because we've become too busy to care. We have become too busy to spare a few minutes a month or even a weekend a year for a child.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would say now is the time to make real the promises of Democracy. Now is the time to mobilize even if it is only on your block.

Now is the time for our communities to raise up a new generation of civil rights giants who were the grandmother or aunt who volunteered at the school, or the church deacon or block club leader who pooled their club's money to buy books for the school.

We have to stop making excuses and start making action. We control our children's freedom. We control our children's achievement. We control our children's destiny. If black people can rise from slavery as a race we can certainly use the best weapon out: our own drive to insure educational freedom for all of our children.

Right now. Today make a decision to march for your children's future. Look in your child's eyes, your grandchild's eyes, your younger brother and sister's eyes, or your neighbor's children's eyes and let them know you will stand for them. Let them know that the talking is over, the excuses are over, the pointing fingers and "blame game" is over.

Tell them "I will not allow you to fail and mean it. Hanging out on the neighborhood street corner in June is not an option. Jail is not an option. Death by drugs and crime again is not an option.

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