Preparing Black Youth in the 1960s: Education and Class Issues

This documentary from 1968 in Brooklyn highlights the controversial Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict that focused on community control of schools. It also reveals past problems in the education system decades ago, and the struggles of parenting our Black youth, and inculcating in them the desire and love for learning. In the backdrop, we get young Black school students play boxing with gloves in the school yards, while the mothers interviewed describe how difficult it is to keep their young boys disciplined for education. It shows that the same problems today still existed some time before and during the time of my parent’s youth, since my mother often states, that nothing we see today is new. Here is a demonstrable example from the 1960s era.

The formative years of the child from the crib to their early teens is incredibly important, and in the documentary the problem is that, specifically, many boys struggle to project themselves into the future. The boys in particular struggled to see the importance in their education within the education system and in the workplaces of the country.

“Middle-class values” never changed any races’ perception of our dignity and worth. The change of clothes, speech, mannerism, thought and political view never really mattered, when it comes to how we have been viewed (Theosophy versus Evola’s “Ultra-Fascism” on Race: Julius Evola’s view of Black People in “Negrified America”). However, these are things a people must want to change for the sake of a new and greater vision and expression of the people, than to appease other races. Many in the Middle Class were struggling, but also learning this, and finding their place in the civil struggle and revolution.