Noliwe Rooks: I think the truth of change is somewhere between the individual and the systemic. I don't think it's all individual. I think individuals can change themselves, turn themselves inside out regularly. But then it just becomes an idiosyncratic thing about, well, but what else had to go right for you and your individualism to triumph?

Helga: I'm Helga Davis, and welcome to my show of fearless conversations that reveal the extraordinary in all of us. My guest today is Noliwe Rooks, author and chair of Africana Studies at Brown University. Noliwe has been a profound advocate for education equality, and her work has shed sustained light on the challenges that poor and African American communities face.

In our conversation, we explore Noliwe and her family's own decisive experiences with education inequality, its broader cultural context and impact, and the role that family and community can play in fostering success at school.

Hi! How are you? Fine, thank you. How are you? I'm doing very well. I disappeared into the booth so that I wouldn't say anything and that you wouldn't say anything that we should record. That's just what I do. Like, no, I'm not talking to you and then I run in here. 

Noliwe Rooks: It is a pleasure to meet you and hear that voice in person to meet you.

That voice is no small thing, like bottle it. 

Helga: And welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome. Do you want to have a sip of your tea? Yes. So 

Noliwe Rooks: this is so strange. This is the first interview I've done in forever where I had no idea what we were going to talk about. It's kind of exciting. Yeah, it's kind of exciting.

Helga: As I like to say, you have to leave room for the Holy Ghost. 

Noliwe Rooks: Yeah. 

Helga: And if you have everything scripted, there's a way that we prepare so that we are more guarded and less performative. I did this media 

Noliwe Rooks: training and of course she was like, you come in there and you take control of the interview. You have points.

You make those points. And I was sort of like, wow, that just doesn't really work if you have no idea what the questions are going to be, but it's somebody with a great voice who you're happy to talk to them about anything. So that makes me happy. They're worse things, aren't they?

Helga: Like education of poor kids.

Yeah. So worse things. Yeah. Let's, uh, That was a segue.

Not so subtle, but here we are. Here we are. It's great to speak with you and to wrap my head around the systemic issues around educating young, poor children of color. Mm hmm. Will you share your personal experiences that influenced your advocacy for educational equality? 

Noliwe Rooks: Hmm. Yeah, I think as is true with so many people, and especially true with people around education, we all got some kind of education.

We might have hated it, might have been in our house, might have been while we were incarcerated, might have been the traditional sit in a classroom, but so many of us have experience with education that we put ourselves in certain classrooms and assume that those are the classrooms. Everybody's children are sitting in it.

And we put ourselves in the classroom that we most liked or those that we couldn't stand, that we think did us damage. And so much of our philosophy comes from that. I was going along pretty good. With this same life schema, until my kid hit middle school. And what happened was, you know, we were living in Princeton, New Jersey at the time.

Great school system. Mazza and I decided, even though it wasn't ideal, I was working at Princeton, he was teaching at Parsons, that we were going to stick this out so Jelani, our son, could have the experience of having a stable, world class education. And up through elementary school, it was like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. 

Helga: Resources.

Like, the golden ticket had been given to us. Small classrooms, people talking to us about his learning styles. We learned that he needed glasses from his third grade teacher. So we had people who noticed things about our kid that we didn't notice. And they told him he was smart. They told us that he was a good learner.

They told us he was a good test taker. So we were kind of like, OK, this education thing's working out pretty good. So in the end of the fifth grade, you're going to the sixth grade in middle school. And in Princeton, Princeton started this thing called the Princeton Plan back in the 1940s to integrate schools.

So back in the 1940s, before Brown v. Board, which is 1954, When segregated schooling is deemed unconstitutional, in the 40s, people were trying to figure out, what are we supposed to do with these children? They're all in black school, they're not doing well. There was a Black school and a white middle school, and they decided there would be one middle school and one high school, because you can't segregate if there's only one middle school and one high school, and for about five minutes, this seemed like a great idea, a great way to get around, over, through educational inequality, but as many, many people who have had children of color in high performing whites.

Districts will tell you, those buildings end up very segregated. So while there's one middle school, the Black children, the poor children, the Spanish, the English as a second language children, all somehow end up in the lower performing classes. And in the higher performing classes, you have white and Asian students.

At Princeton Unified School District, this was the case. So up until the fifth grade, whatever your testing had been, you had to be like in the 90th percentile, and then your teacher recommendations determined if you wanted to be in the highest levels for math and science. You need it consistent in the 90th percentile and consistent teachers saying, yes, this is, this is a person.

Now, Jelani hit in math and science until his senior year. I don't think he ever got anything but an A. Somehow, Helga, the teachers in the fifth grade recommended our son for the remedial class. And I did not find out that he was recommended until he kept saying he was bored, he was coming home, it was just dull.

Then he started talking about, well, all we do is watch TV and we fill out little sheets. And we were kind of like, okay, come on now. I mean, he's just starting middle school. I mean, maybe, I don't know, are they watching documentaries? I mean, we, we, 

Helga: That's very generous of you to think that. This 

Noliwe Rooks: tells you how clueless we were, honestly.

How education became a burning passion came from if two college professor parents were this clueless with their own child in a high performing district where he was supposedly liked, accepted, where we were all comfortable. This is his story. So, I go to first parent teacher night, And it's all parents of color and people who English is, again, not their first language.

And the teacher says very clearly, you should all know for your students who are in this class, you will never be on the elite college track. Your math and science top out. The most rigorous math and science you're going to take based on your placement here in the sixth grade means that by the twelfth grade You're not going to have taken anything more than geometry, and if you want to go to a Princeton, or any one of the elite schools, you have to be able to take physics and calculus, and your children here are just not, so let's just get that out of the way. And I was kind of like, well, why? Because Our kid actually is good at math. He likes math. I mean, admittedly, we're talking about the sixth grade, but still. And they were like, well, that's what was recommended.

And parents often overestimate the ability of their children. Just leave him here for the year. And we'll re-evaluate at the end of the year. And I was like, but you just said that his future college attendance is based on what is happening, like, what do you mean, leaving him here for the year? Move him where he's supposed to be.

This turned into a months long saga that I really will save you. Jelani was accused of having his college professor parents write his sixth grade papers, little four paragraph, page long, handwritten, Oh, they must have helped you. This is just, you couldn't possibly have done this. He was accused of cheating, like we were running up to this school regularly.

So the teacher who accused us of plagiarizing and having our kid come in and turn in this work had Jelani write an essay in class while he was watching him. Of course, Child did better on the essay he watched him do than the one that he had turned in from home. This actually enraged these people. This did not.

Have them think we made a mistake and we know all of this because one of his teachers from the elementary school Ended up transferring over to the middle school We ran into her in the supermarket one day and she said I could lose my job for telling you this But you will lose your child if you don't get him out of here.

They're targeting him. They think he's arrogant They think that you all need to be brought down a peg They think, they think, they think. You have to find another school for him, he's not gonna withstand it. And to tell you what that felt like, after all of this running up there, like, when you have faith in this system, you think you can fix it.

You think, let me just have one more meeting. Let me just have one more conversation. Let me just try a little bit harder. Let me just urge Jelani and to hear this woman tell us there's nothing he can do at this point. They don't like you and they don't like him. And I really think you need to get him out.

We had no money. I mean, we had money, obviously, but not Princeton money. We didn't have Princeton private school money. We bought a house that the taxes were supposed to be in lieu of private school tuition. It turned into a complete saga, but we put him in private school. And I have a whole, obviously, stories I can tell about that, but we put him in private school.

He did great. And then after he had been there a couple months, I was like, if this is my kid, what's happening to everybody else's kid? How did I not know? And I teach 18 year olds. I wasn't writing about education. I wasn't teaching about education, but I wrote about Black women and I taught Ivy League kids.

How did I not know that it was this bad? And that became a 20 year Answering that question has been my work for the last 20 years. I bet you you'll ask me shorter questions the next time. Less open ended questions next time. No, I won't. 

Helga: I feel like, well, we're done here. Wow

When I was thinking about this conversation, I knew that my junior high in the Bronx had closed. And I just wanted to see why, what was going on there. So I googled it. Here we go. Failing schools. CIS 166 is closed, having graduated its last class of 8th graders in 2011. It struggled with low test scores, a chaotic learning environment, and a reputation as a dumping ground for unskilled teachers.

Despite efforts by its last principal to turn the school around, in 2009, the Department of Education decided to phase out and close it. In its final two years, As the population shrunk, there were improvements in safety and discipline at the school, but IS 166 was unable to overcome the problems of earlier years, which included high rates of teacher vacancies, absenteeism, and unruly students.

And so I didn't imagine, part of the reason I didn't imagine it is because I had to go back and understand what class I was in. And so to use Prison language, we were pulled out of GenPOP and put into these special classes where our teachers didn't have to deal with kids who were throwing chairs and whatever else they were doing.

And so Inside the school, my classmates and I were getting a completely different education than the other kids in the school. We had the same two teachers, so we went from, let's say, room 301 to 302, and then back from 302 to 301, and we did this all day, depending on what the subject was. And in reading this, I see how many kids did not survive this.

Noliwe Rooks: I am just finishing up a book that's called Integrated, An American Dream, and the arc of the story is based on my family and integration and segregation, and my grandparents were educators in the Jim Crow South. Some of those legendary Black teachers with not a lot financial support, managed to educate.

I say just love Black children into learning is what I say, just love them enough to have them learn. And then my father, who was the first to integrate, but not till law school. So he went from his segregated high school to Howard University, went to law school out in California, completely fell apart because he'd never had teachers who didn't think he was capable.

He'd never, as a Black child going to Black institutions, had teachers who thought him less than human. He didn't know how to navigate that, and he'd never seen it. And I maintain that that was because of his alcoholism that dogged him. for much of his life, but that became unmanageable during that period.

To me, who integrated a school in Florida, because white people in Florida took from 1954 to 1974 in Pinellas County, Florida, to actually integrate the school, so I was a part of the first class, to my son, who I've told you some of his story. And it's this thing about, what do we mean when we say integration or desegregation?

What we mean is, We believe, or somebody believes, whoever the we is, that you can only educate Black children, or poor children, or English as a second language children, adequately if you pull them up out of their communities and or their specific classrooms. They have to have something that the majority don't get.

And in that, when you look at that, there are very few Black people, or people who grew up in modest means, who end up. Scaling Heights, Ascending, who do not have a story about either getting pulled out of their classrooms and given a world class education in a building not available to others. or pulled out of their neighborhoods and schools and sent to schools elsewhere.

Part of the reason that I wrote this book, the integrative book, is because that's my story. There's no way that I'm a endowed professor at, at Brown without being labeled gifted and talented at some point. On a metric that was, it was really, I had to read some books. And my grandmother was a reading teacher.

I've been reading since I was three, which is not a brag, it's just I talk too much. But in general, the reason I wrote the book and the reason I write about education is somebody has to pay attention to what is happening to the majority of Black children in these schools. And what has happened is we focus on those who survive.

And we should. Those who survive and thrive, we should. We need those stories. We need that as inspiration. But the closest that I can get, because I'm not a quantitative researcher, so with my non quantitative research skills, I think only about 25 percent of Black people have ever gone to schools that would have been considered integrated, using the work of others.

Like, all in, all told. The percentages are higher in some school districts, obviously, in some place like Princeton, you're going to have a higher percentage, but all told, North and South, the majority of kids have gone to schools that are segregated. And for huge swaths of time in this country, that meant underfunded.

It meant poor teachers. It meant poor facilities. It meant buildings where there wasn't heat in the winter and air in the summer. And there's just not enough of us paying attention. And so the story that you're telling about, yes, it was the same classroom is the story that I tell about my son. And at some point, somebody's got to care about what is happening.

But why? Why would they? I'm happy for Black people to care what is happening to Black children. I'm happy for civil rights organizations to take seriously how do we fix this beyond just sort of saying, throw some more money at it. I mean, generation after generation after generation, what we're watching inside Black communities are out.

I'm not seeing the organized level of, this is a movement. This is a this far, no further. This is, we know how to educate Black kids. It's not rocket science. Like it really isn't. Why it doesn't happen, I think, is on us. It's on us, not those children. And very often, you know, we're kind of, the children came from better homes.

If they didn't watch so much TV, if they, you know, had more respect for authority, they would do well. You don't understand the environments we are asking most children to learn in. People just don't. Are we going in a depressing direction? 

Helga: It's not that it's depressing, it's sobering. And in addition to being sobering, as I said, I just don't see the incentive for any of this to change.

Because not just the kids, but the parents are strung out on whatever it is, trying to keep their families together, trying to support themselves, trying to feed their kids, trying to keep a roof over everyone's heads. 

Noliwe Rooks: And you have generations who don't know anything but dysfunctional school systems. 

Helga: Who don't know anything.

Noliwe Rooks: That's what education looks like. And you have generations who think that, well, I'm supposed to do it because it's how I get a job. But what is the use? What is for me? in the same way that we tell this story about you work hard, you go from fifth grade to sixth grade, you work hard in elementary so that in the sixth grade you get into the higher performing track.

And the kinds of schools I've been teaching at for decades, you don't get there unless you are having a depth of AP and honors classes and starting non profits. Increasingly, it's really is quite something. But it's a whole Lifetime of preparing for the kinds of colleges that will change your life. It's a lifetime of preparation.

Either maintain your cast, like, maintain your family, your wealth, your cast, or change it. Change you and your generation. I was telling some people at Brown, I think I horrified some of these folks who hadn't thought about this, but I, starting at Princeton, I was at Princeton, then Cornell, then Brown. At all of those institutions, I have taught students who are barely making it at the school.

They're there, they got in, but for whatever reason, their preparation just wasn't thinking to me that kids come in from some prep schools where they're kind of like, Princeton is easy. Cornell doesn't seem like this is because of the rigor that they had in high school or before. And so I said that out loud to some of my colleagues about While I stay up with some of my students, so I know that getting, coming from the South Bronx, coming from Oakland, getting into a Princeton or a Cornell or a Brown, and getting out, change not just their lives, but the lives of their family.

Hopefully forever. Hopefully it is a real intervention, but they were getting out with C's and D's. Here's the thing. I teach students who are graduating and happy to graduate with the 2.1. The people I was talking to were completely horrified that I thought of this as an inspirational story, as a good use of my time.

or of their time. Because what they were saying is, but they couldn't do the work. Why would we be letting in students who can't do the work? And I was like, they couldn't do the work. They did the work at a level of a C. It's not like they couldn't do the work. They didn't fail. They're graduating. They have a Brown degree.

What I did not understand, that while I see that as an inspiration, I see that as a look at these schools. If we can get them in and take care of them, look What can happen for them? They saw this as a cautionary tale. Like, what about the brand? We're an elite school. Why would we be marketing ourselves as a school where you can graduate with a D and it might do you some good?

Helga: Well, I'm going to get you a sweatshirt that says, George W. Bush got Cs. That is actually great. I'm going to go back a little bit. How were we educated during Reconstruction after slavery? 

Noliwe Rooks: The thing that is, I think, inspirational about education and Black people is to see the beeline newly freed Black people made to some kind of schoolhouse.

The commitments they made in Black churches and from the North. I mean, people talk about Freedom Summer 1964 with SNCC, but following Reconstruction, there was an issue. equally significant group of folks from the North who were educated, who went South to train the newly emancipated. That was their whole purpose in life.

Little schoolhouses, but the South being the South and everybody knows. We had Reconstruction, and Lincoln did his Emancipation Proclamation, and they do some economic redistribution in the South, low level, for a little bit. Sherman did this order where he was like, so, you know, we're going to divide up all these Georgia Sea Islands into little 40 acre plots and we're going to have 400, 000 black people who are there and he said it's going to be a black homeland and there won't be any white people.

It's going to be completely all be but all of that got pulled back and you had the re-institution of this idea of Black inferiority, which is important in thinking about the idea of education, because the excitement that Black people had about freedom, where they, in many, many Southern states, it was illegal to even teach enslaved people to read, because they could write their own passes.

So, The educational order that got re-instituted was, but you can't be educated like white people are. That's not in this re-visioning of the South post reconstruction, after they re empowered former owners, cleared them of treason. and decided to allow them to be full citizens again. They took back all of the land that had been given to Black people.

They paid reparations to white slave owners for their property and their inconvenience. And, uh, Hurled black people off the land and into abject poverty and homelessness and -

Helga: Okay But talk about Clarence Thomas who I think is a really interesting case study for this conversation about education Because he was educated and he was equally shamed demoralized, everyone thought he was less than, he was taught that he didn't actually belong.

And not only is he on the Supreme Court, he now uses his experience. To hurt other Black people. To hurt other Black people. 

Noliwe Rooks: And you don't  really see him with many Black people either. I mean, you don't have to be around Black people, but it is notable that his world seems to have cut out from what we can see publicly.

We do not know. Um, what is happening privately. All of the black folks who are in his family and who seem to tell a very different story. about education and the dynamics there. So what Clarence Thomas does, which is actually is a very Southern Black kind of thing, his grandfather was someone who consistently told him the issue is not with these systems.

The issue is your character, your ability to burn the midnight oil, your hard work. It's a survival strategy that I recognize my grandparents having Employed to survive in the Jim Crow for all those years. There's not a lot to be gained by full throated conversations analyzing the racial order in the South.

There's not a lot that's going to be gained for you. You can join with other people, start a movement, you can call it self help, you can start to collect for aid, you can start to do things on your own. But to criticize The government, the structures, the state, to talk about something like systemic racism that we talk about today, it just wasn't done.

It really was. We as a people have got to put the structures in place as best we can. We as Black people, for a lot of Southern Black people. Between 1920 and 1960 or so, this is in our hands. 

Helga: You're listening to Helga. We'll rejoin the conversation in just a moment.

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Helga: Now, let's rejoin my conversation with author and chair of Africana Studies at Brown University, Noliwe Rooks. So, how do you feel about that question? 

Noliwe Rooks: About the whole self help thing? Yeah. I had just been thinking about this. There's this tension between the idea of black capital and black capitalism. So this is the idea of black capitalism that is just sort of embrace the idea of capitalism.

Make a lot of money yourself, and like capitalism tells you, once you're a billionaire, you'll give charity, you'll blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, Nixon was, really came in hard for this in the 1970s, he was sort of like, we don't need the Black Panthers, we don't need, what we need is Black capitalism. But this earlier period that Clarence Thomas grandfather was really cutting his teeth in, What they thought was there was enough money in Black communities that you could stop looking at and being disappointed at the government.

They really believed that it was possible to have Black insurance companies and mortgage, you know, to write mortgages. And like, they really believed that that self sufficiency could work without the government. And Clarence Thomas, in his career, has really espoused that. pretty consistently. And a lot of Black folks that are Republicans, that first group, really believe the same thing, that why are we first looking at the federal government and critiquing them?

We need to first try to get our own selves educated. And they may have gone a little far. Like, I think the truth of change is somewhere between the individual and the systemic. I don't think it's all individual. I think individuals can change themselves. turn themselves inside out regularly. But then it just becomes an idiosyncratic thing about, well, but what else had to go right for you and your individualism to triumph?

There were other things had to happen that you couldn't always control. And that grace, that needing grace that you can't see it, it just sort of comes. You can't count on, because there's a whole lot of folks like, I just can't catch a break. I'll never have the grace. I never, it never comes to me. So you have that.

Versus people who are kind of like, if I got trouble in my world, it's because of the systemic issues. That's a consistent kind of tension. Is it the individual? Is that the way that we need to organize and be activists and that we change? Do I just teach my son to be very, very smart? To burn the midnight oil?

To Be deferential. I teach him that, and then that helps Black people in a way. There's a train of thought that is, if we have enough of that, the reputation of the whole will be pulled up. And then there's others who are more Maybe radical in their thinking, who are kind of like, we need to be treated as citizens like everybody else is a citizen, and we should not have to go on our own and lift ourselves up and succeed.

Helga: Why do we keep going back to the well? I see it in orchestras. I was at a performance the other night. There were a hundred musicians on the stage. There were three black people. Three. 

Helga: Viola, trombone, and double bass. No, not drums.

Noliwe Rooks: I don't know, I was guessing. What are you, are you a singer? Also. Yeah? Like an opera? I always 

Helga: say, put it on the paper. And hand it to me. So anything? Just put it on the paper. 

Noliwe Rooks: And tell me, were you trained? Did you come up through music schools? Or did you just have grace? Did grace allow you to find? 

Helga: I had a piano teacher who had gone to Juilliard and Curtis and came back to Harlem to teach the Negro children.

I had a singing teacher who was from Hungary, who was an opera singer, who taught me, and who had the opinion that I was going to ruin my voice with the rock and roll. But then I just kept getting all of these opportunities to do things. So, I would be in a show, and there would be a song that would need it, and I could write that song, and I could sing that song.

So a lot of my experience has come from that, and And that's just innate. And That was just something Who knows 

Noliwe Rooks: No, it's just something that was a gift. 

Helga: Yes, and the gift combined with the opportunity is why I'm sitting across from you now. 

Noliwe Rooks: And let me ask you about the, thinking about the orchestra. You felt like three was too little.

You wanted to see what, because I thought you were going to say there were none. So I'm kind of like, three? Oh my God, it's a horde.

Helga: Here was my issue with it. There was a person who stood up on the stage and said, These are the best and brightest musicians. And I just wanted to stand up and yell, Bullshit!

It's that if everyone does not have the same opportunity to succeed, then you can't call this the best orchestra in the world because you've left out, I don't know, 90, 95 percent of the musicians who could be in a first violinist's chair. That person never even had an opportunity. It's not a numerical issue.

It's that we don't have the same chance.

Noliwe Rooks: I am really grappling with this as we all wait to hear what the enrollment at some of these elite schools is going to be like in the absence of affirmative action. What I don't believe academics and others have done a particularly good job of is making clear that it's that opportunity piece that Affirmative Action was really supposed to be addressing.

Like, it's all just, we want to see equal numbers, it collapses under the weight. Agreed. The crisis is so big. And there are people who have always known how to educate these kids, always, in various locations in inner city Chicago, Philadelphia, east of the Black Panthers in their community school. That's my 

Helga: other thing, right?

The Black Panthers in education. They had the free breakfast program and it was run inside St. Augustine's Church in Oakland in 1969. The breakfast program's enormous success drew the attention of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who stated that All of the radical black groups, and the Panthers in particular, were the greatest threat to the internal security of the country because of their free breakfast program.

And the fear was that It would create loyalty among youth, and that the youth would join the movement. And it focused national attention on the urgent need to give poor children nutritious meals. meals. That was seen as a threat to democracy. 

Noliwe Rooks: The free breakfast program comes from the Panthers, and not because they cared about poor kids.

No! They said, why? So they could be successful in school. Yes, hungry children. Yeah. Imagine that. There was a time when people were unclear that it was hungry children. I spent some time looking at Washington, D. C. when they desegregated in 1956. And the first wave of hand wringing, because the Washington, D.C. schools used to be majority white. I mean, they turned majority Black after desegregation, but The big shock was, these children are hungry. Like, after they were not just shoved in little schools that no one ever goes to, that no one ever paid any mind to. They're hungry. They have no clothes. They're dirty.

And so you have this breakdown where half of the teachers, white and Black, are trying to figure out how do we feed and clothe these children before we start talking about education. It's not possible. Make sure that they've slept, that they've had a night's sleep. Like, you know, we have to do that. And then the other people were like, they're all delinquents.

Look, they can't concentrate. They can't sit still. They're falling asleep in class. I think what you're kind of getting at was It's just an ethic of care. It's who we care about. And can we extend the care that we have in our hearts and in our homes, beyond our homes, beyond the people who we gave birth to, who gave birth to us, or who we chose to live a life with?

Do we see other people's kids as in need of those same things? I don't think we do. I think too few of us. Just trying to survive. I'm not saying we're bad people, and especially after COVID, the wheels have fallen off a little bit more, but we just don't care. And the, I think one of the most shocking things that I found out about a decade ago is 70 percent of Black people who get BAs, who get college degrees, The majority get community college degrees, which are two year degrees.

So between that and online degrees, that's 70 percent of Black people. Such a few number are even getting degrees that actually make the difference. But more shocking than not getting it, back to your point about what are we doing, is how few even know that there's a difference between a community college degree.

and your state university. I mean, not even talk about private school or Ivy League school, but just that there's a huge difference in how much you can earn in the kinds of jobs that you can go and get. The fact that that's unknown, that that is to a large extent unknown. is another kind of, how did that happen?

That's one of my questions. How did that happen? That you, you, it was shocking to me to hear the majority of folks be like, oh yes, black people are getting more college degrees and you start digging around in the corners and they're separate and they're unequal and they're not the transformative degrees and we need to talk about it.

Helga: When I think again about the Black Panthers starting this program in a church. Yeah. Do you think that could happen now? What do you think the role of our religious institutions can be in solving 

Noliwe Rooks: these issues? You know, my former colleague at Princeton, Eddie Glaude, he wrote an article called The Black Church is Dead.

And it turned into this whole, you know, people are like, my church not dead? I was at my church last week. But what he was talking about is the easy associations. that we often make between politics and a radical politics in the black church. And so much of the slavery abolition to the civil rights movement to black power is centered around the black church.

I mean, you just don't have a narrative. What he was trying to say is, but what has happened since as the Black church as an entity, which again is not to say there aren't individual Black churches that are doing different kinds of programs, but as a whole, what he was trying to point out is it's difficult to make the same associations between freedom and protest and in Black church you're more likely to be talking about the These megachurches, or the prosperity gospel, there are other things that are focused on something else.

These things happen, but having an organization like the Black Panthers, I mean, try to imagine having the Panthers today. Forget the Black Church. How do you have a group of young people who are about armed, principled resistance to aggression in their communities and are using the law to make clear it is legal for them to walk around with guns in order to protect themselves?

Helga: And that it should be legal to feed their kids, the kids in their communities, and have great schools. 

Noliwe Rooks: And they took senior citizens at medical clinics. They had senior centers because the folks in some of those communities were just sitting at home all day. 

Helga: So then let's go back to the question of Who's responsible?

Noliwe Rooks: What Panther leadership will say is they ended up providing schools and food and services for the elderly and all after it became clear that the federal government, despite the fact that they were due as citizens, some of these services just weren't going to provide it. And so what their thinking was, is let's fight on two fronts.

Because at the same time that they were doing armed self defense and let's speak out against the police and blah, blah, blah. They were feeding kids. They were recruiting doctors. They were just running up in med schools and saying, you're Black. You know, we got a clinic, like, knowing nothing about these people.

Elaine Brown came to Cornell a few years ago. She was saying, really, we just went to the med schools, and, and we were like, you're a Black person. You need to come work at this clinic over here sometime a week. That, and you need to bring things. You need to bring Band Aids. And, you know, when you come, they just did it.

To imagine a grassroots organization in this day and age rising up in that same kind of way when you no longer have the infrastructure that we had at one point. Churches have gotten up and left a lot of communities and are megachurches out in the counties. Fraternal. Organization sorority. Most of those folks are not living in, I mean, who wants to live in a high poverty, high crime area?

No one really wants to do that. So, those folks aren't doing that. Racism being racism, in California at the time, you had people from different socioeconomic backgrounds who were living. In and around this community and easily identifiable, now you'd have to drive God knows where to go try to find some Black medical students.

The infrastructure has changed in ways, and the Black poverty and concentrated Blackness got left, but some of the other things, they gave Black kids breathing room. They gave them the hope, like Black teachers, like having, uh, multi generational Black teachers in a school so that your grandmother, I mean the school that my grandmother taught in, like she would teach three generations of kids.

People knew they could trust Ms. Rooks. with their kids. They could trust Ms. Rooks if they said child needed glasses. They could trust Ms. Rooks if they said she's a little slow with the speech development. Because Ms. Rooks had probably taught the mother and the grandmother, right, to have that kind of infrastructure where people know you.

It's a community where y'all have been to each other's birthday parties and you buried folks together. A lot of those in the post industrial world have really just changed. And what you put back in, I don't know. Like, I don't have that. If I had that, I'd be out here getting startup money, you know, trying to figure out how to fix it.

How do you bring back that sense of familiarity and that sense of wanting to strive at the highest levels and not just survive? Like, so many, we were talking about Oakland and the Panthers, and my mother still lives out in the Bay Area. We were out there this Christmas. Oakland is a completely different, I mean, the homelessness.

in that part of Oakland is stunning. California in general, I mean, homelessness in general in the U. S. is something, but California is on a whole other level. So you can't even walk around Black communities anymore. I know, I feel like this coming back home when I go to Oakland, I feel like, what is happening here?

But I'm like, I don't live here anymore. But people who've lived there their whole lives and still do are like, this is a change. You can't, it's just dangerous. Like, windows get smashed regularly with their cars, people walking around with guns, like, Oakland is really going in a direction. And in the midst of that, to start talking about education, well, California has fallen from one of the top public education systems in the country to near the bottom, because the infrastructure, even though they have more millionaires than anybody else, you know, out there, it's not translating.

It's not. Yeah, it's not saving them. So if it's not going to be education, it's not going to be the vote, what is it? What is it? All these folks who have been disenfranchised for this long, what we have generally to offer is education, and then there's voting, and then there's just entrepreneurial, you know, you might hit upon something.

And the rungs, the rungs are looking far less sturdy. for Black people right now. And we're just not talking about it. Like, I fully believe I can't see an answer, but I think that's why I write about what I write and talk about what I talk, so that maybe some people who can see an answer, can see a way to stop this slide, can figure out how do we just, at least we're on education to circle back there, just get people to notice.

Just get people to notice the education you had might not, in fact, be what is on offer. And what are you prepared to do about that? 

Helga: Boom. I want to go back and answer better your question to me. So I have had very important teachers in my life. I did not come up through a formal music program or school. I don't have any of those diplomas or degrees and I can also tell you that I've performed in almost every major opera house in the world.

I'm not supposed to be anywhere I am and I'm still here. 

Noliwe Rooks: When's the first time you realized that or you thought that that I'm not supposed to be here? 

Helga: I think this thing of being the only one, or one of very few. 

Noliwe Rooks: That fueled you? Or it -

Helga: No, it fuels me. 

Noliwe Rooks:It fuels you. 

Helga:And having had experiences where I learn that Despite having a principal role in a show, I am paid the least amount of money.

But when I walk out on the stage, I don't care about any of that. And I walk with As you were speaking about earlier, with grace and knowing that my place in a place has never been contingent upon where or how, rather, I was educated. That my being there and being able to perform at that level is a bomb.

And I want to drop that bomb as often as I can in as many places as I can. 

Noliwe Rooks: But who loved you enough to give you that? 

Helga: I would have to say the most significant person who was all of those things for me was my piano teacher. 

Noliwe Rooks: A music teacher in Harlem. 

Helga: She was in Harlem. And I'll never forget my first piano lesson when I walked into the studio and I didn't understand where I was and what was going to happen in this place.

And She reached out her hand, she sent my mother away, and she took my hand and she helped me sit up on the piano bench, and she got a little Now I'm gonna cry. I embrace tears, but I embrace humanity like that. And then she put my hand on my music notebook paper, and she drew my hands. She outlined my hands for me. 

Noliwe Rooks: Oh my God.

Helga: And she said, now when you go to school Your index finger is one, but here, your thumb is one, and she talked about making a little cup with my hands, and she just had me kind of press down on the keys to see what they sounded like, and to help me understand that in my hands was another world, and that it didn't look like the world that I came from, though it was part of the world as well, and that both worlds were in me.

Noliwe Rooks: You were channeling. You're a conduit for both. It comes out through your music. I love that. I think that art I'm married to an artist and I really do think that y'all artists, Black artists, a lot of Black artists, not all, the path to your virtuosity is not like others. The path that he and his friends who are artists tell me about, the path that they have to walk to see themselves.

as an artist to claim it. And then often the path that artists have to walk through Black communities with parents who are kind of like, I need you, good job. So I really do wonder, there's a particular kind of scholar artist lens that has to do with that journey that y'all take, I believe. 

Helga: What is one thing that you do every day that we can all do?

Noliwe Rooks: Since I was a little girl, I've looked up at the sky every single day and I've told a story about a cloud there, usually just in my mind. I just see an image and tell myself a story about it. But I've been blessed every day, even when it's a fully cloudy day, you know, you can tell a story about that because the gray has depth and shades and so every day.

That I'm breathing, I look up at the sky and figure out what the story is there. Thank you. 

Welcome. 

Helga: That was my conversation with Noliwe Rooks. I'm Helga Davis. Join me next week for my conversation with journalist, Jenna Flanagan. 

Jenna Flanagan: Everybody one way or another has a story to tell. But because they've convinced themselves that nobody really wants to hear it or nobody cares what I think, and so they will hold back.

But if you can create a space where your guest legitimately knows what you say matters, you will get some amazing gems out of just about anybody on earth. 

Helga: To connect with the show, drop us a line at helga at wnyc. org. We'll send you a link to our show page with every episode of this and past seasons, and resources for all the artists, authors, and musicians who have come up in conversation.

And if you want to support the show, please leave us a comment and rating on any of your favorite podcast platforms. And now for the CODA. I

Noliwe Rooks: have a book coming out in July of 24. It's a book about a woman named Mary McLeod Bethune. And it's really my reflections on her, my thinking about her vision and what it tells us about today. So what I want to read is the last few pages of the book. It's the coda to the book. Then I saw the second image.

It shows what happened a few minutes later and a whole other side of publicly circulated images of black women and girls. In this one, two black women, one older than the other, appear to be hitting a defenseless white man over the head with a flag attached to a pole. When asked by a writer from Ebony Magazine what was going on that day, the mother of the young woman told the full story of both photographs in the moments between the first image being snapped and the second one.

She said, the man in both photographs hogs spit at my baby. He hogs spit. He took everything out of him and spit in my daughter's face. She's a minor. That's the absolute worst thing you can do when you spit on another human being. She was just saying, no justice, no peace, and he spit at and then smacked my baby.

At that time, there was no more being peaceful. Police arrested the mother, Tiny, and her daughter, Dasha, and charged them with two felony counts each. None of the white protesters were even questioned or detained. Spitting, the mother and daughter learned that day, is not considered assault. Disrespect is not a prosecutable offense.

Tiny said, quote, we shouldn't have to feel this way, end quote. That day, spitting and disrespect further radicalized 19 year old Dasha, who was also a member of an organization called Lost Voices. When asked about what she had seen as she watched, she said, I saw the true colors of our country today.

There's still so much racism, and it's gonna take a minute, but me, I know I'm gonna get it done, end quote. For me, this image encapsulates much about how and why the spirit of Mary McLeod Bethune matters today. It's not because we somehow have no freedom fighters without her. This image shows us this is not the case.

It's because Bethune's faith in the power of Black girls and women is so important. To stand up and fight for change is exemplified here. It's an image that clarifies what it means to begin from a place of believing that it's possible for Black women and girls to quote unquote, get it done. Bethune's thinking, development, and strategizing provide a roadmap so that each generation does not have to keep recreating the map from scratch.

The truths of one century and generation connect with those of the next. In understanding that it's never okay for spit of either the metaphorical or the actual variety to drip from the face of a Black teenager. That can never be the end of the story. So many of the images and pictures we have of Black women and girls in this country are at best partial truths, without a contextualizing story we must look for or find a way to let Black women and girls tell that story for themselves.

Writing this book about Bethune taught me that there is strength in number, always a reason to hope, and that if someone disrespects you and yours, it's in your best interest to find a way to use the metaphorical flag that professes your citizenship, rights, and humanity as a weapon, and quote unquote, get it done.

These are Bethune's truths. This was Bethune's life.

Helga: Season 6 of Helga is a co production of WNYC Studios and the Brown Arts Institute at Brown University. The show is produced by Alex Ambrose and David Norville with help from Racheal Arewa and recorded by Bill Siegmund at Digital Island Studios in New York. Our technical director is Sapir Rosenblatt, and our executive producer is Elizabeth Nonamaker.

Original music by Michel Ndegeocello and Jason Moran. Avery Willis Hoffman is our executive producer at the Brown Arts Institute, along with producing director Jessica Wasilewski. WQXR's chief content officer is Ed Yim.

 

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