Fifty years ago, when Caroline Fisher, a Missouri pioneer in education, taught at Benjamin Banneker School, the opposite side of Lucas was lined with tenements. Dilapidated townhomes spoke of generations of abject poverty. The children who filled their tattered walls also filled classrooms across the street. They walked to the corner store.
The tenements have now been razed. New homes stand in their stead. The children, however, are bussed. Banneker, a school named for the African American who designed Washington, D.C., is shuttered. Its mid-century structure shows years of neglect; its halls are emptied by bussing. The corner store is now a vacant lot.
This month, six parents traveled from St. Louis to the National Civil Rights Museum to film the 17th session of “Mother 2 Mother” for PBS. In this case, “Parent 2 Parent” is a conversation of black parents to whites about “the talk” they have with their sons. It’s a “talk” that belies the ongoing signs of racial injustice and oppression, an effort to address the school-to-prison pipeline that begins with our very young. Like the demise of Banneker School, change is not always good.
In the 1960s, before the mandate to desegregate schools crept toward fruition, Banneker was bustling with children and educators dedicated to their success. In the ‘60s, before the wealthy envisioned profits from building public housing in inner cities and bussing black children to all-white schools, there were no metal detectors, no in-school resource officers, no uniformed police.
At 91, Caroline Fisher lived to witness reading problems turn to social ills. She saw the principal’s bench turn into a holding cell and parents go from partners to prisoners. In her 41 years of teaching, she had never seen a student arrested, carry a gun or kill another student. But drugs and injustice yielded a generation of babies affected by crack and private prisons reel in more parents than the school’s PTA.
Over the last 50 years we’ve forced teachers to be more than educators. We’ve cowered at the propaganda of drugs and crime and often cheered while our sons were carted off. We’ve stood by while our homes and communities were ravaged by the very gatekeepers who scared us. And in the interest of integrating schools, we’ve let our children and school funding get shipped to the very people who ran away in white flight.
Hours after Ida Woolfolk passed last month, so did my mother, Caroline Fisher. Two pillars who dedicated their lives to educating and elevating students of the St. Louis Public Schools were gone. They inspired their students to make a difference in this world.
Their efforts, like those of so many educators, are too often outweighed by the social ills of a very broken town. If things are to change for the better, it’s up to us to assure Caroline and Ida’s expansive legacies live on.
The life of Caroline Stubblefield Fisher will be celebrated at a Memorial Mass and Service 11 a.m. Saturday, April 30 at St. Elizabeth Catholic Church. 4330 Shreve.
Christi Griffin is the founder of The Ethics Project, a non-profit organization addressing the impact of crime, injustice and incarcerations, and the author of “Incarcerations in Black and White: The Subjugation of Black America.”
Hours after Ida Woolfolk passed, so did my mother, Caroline Fisher – two pillars who dedicated their lives to educating students of the St. Louis Public Schools.
