Black History

While Some Minority Students and Teachers Thrive in Distant Learning, Others Struggle Daily

NNPA NEWSWIRE — “There’s a bunch of research about the value add of Black teachers in school. It turns out that Black teachers help all students to perform better,” says Sekou Biddle, the Vice President of Advocacy and Student Professional Development Programs at the United Negro College Fund. “White students perform better too. When Black people do well, everyone does well. The problem is that when others do well without us doing well, they leave us behind,” concluded Biddle, who leads advocacy efforts to ensure that more African American students will be college-ready and better prepared to enroll in and complete college.

Published

4 years ago

December 26, 2020

Oakland Post

Dr. Peggy Edwards-Jones has spent much of the past two decades as a principal at the Friendship Collegiate Academy Early College Campus in the Northeast section of Washington, D.C. (Photo: iStockphoto / NNPA)

By Stacy M. Brown, NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent
@StacyBrownMedia

Sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the NNPA continues its campaign to raise awareness about education barriers for students of color and help bridge the learning gap for minorities, especially during the coronavirus pandemic.

In a series of interviews with Dr. Edwards-Jones and other educators and community stakeholders, the NNPA hopes to push the importance of bridging the education gap and digital divide that has long proven challenging for minority students.

Dr. Peggy Edwards-Jones has spent much of the past two decades as a principal at the Friendship Collegiate Academy Early College Campus in the Northeast section of Washington, D.C.

Incoming freshman at Friendship Collegiate Academy are referred to as scholars.

And with good reason.

In an interview with National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) President and CEO, Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., Dr. Edwards-Jones relayed what she called her proudest moments in education thus far.

Those moments include graduating over 3,500 scholars, with a 100 percent acceptance rate to a college or university. Some of her scholars graduate with one to two years of college courses completed before leaving high school.

At least 80 percent of those scholars who graduated completed their first year of college. Ninety-nine percent of the students are African American or individuals of color.

“The biggest issue for minority students is an opportunity,” Dr. Edward-Jones offered.

“At our campus, students can select majors like science, engineering, and computer science and take courses toward graduation,” Dr. Edwards-Jones added.

Dr. Edwards-Jones sits on several boards and committees, including the National Save Our Schools Coalition, the American Federation of Teachers Program and Policy Council, D.C. Community School Task Force, and the Advisory Panel to the National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools.

“The overall goal is to make sure that the students are college-ready, so we give them college courses. The biggest thing we have found across the country is access,” Dr. Edwards-Jones posited.

Other professionals noted that access for the underserved is vital.

“We can see our students prevail with access, just like any other groups across the country.”

“Black children need to hear about and learn about Black excellence, not as a set of exceptional stories, but that these are happening every single day,” said Sekou Biddle, the Vice President of Advocacy and Student Professional Development Programs at the United Negro College Fund (UNCF).

“The thing that people miss is the importance of Black educators,” Biddle offered further.

“There’s a bunch of research about the value add of Black teachers in school. It turns out that Black teachers help all students to perform better,” he pronounced.

“White students perform better too. When Black people do well, everyone does well. The problem is that when others do well without us doing well, they leave us behind,” concluded Biddle, who leads advocacy efforts to ensure that more African American students will be college-ready and better prepared to enroll in and complete college.

Biddle manages UNCF’s advocacy platform, including three major components: grass-tops partnerships, grassroots engagement, and messaging and research.

Elizabeth A. Davis, the new president of the Washington Teachers’ Union (WTU), told the NNPA that the pandemic had magnified the digital divide.

“The digital divide is not new, and I am familiar with a lot of the inequities that have existed in D.C. public schools,” Davis noted.

She has helped transform the WTU into a social justice, solution-driven organization dedicated to advancing and promoting quality education for all children regardless of their zip codes or results of a school lottery.

“The pandemic has pulled back the covers on a lot of these inequities, and they’ve been glaring,” Davis added.

“I refer to the achievement gap as the ‘opportunity gap’ because the achievement gap goes to capacity to learn.”

“In our students, I have not met a student in my 40 years of teaching that did not have the capacity to reach whatever bar I set for them. What I have noticed is that the opportunity to learn for African American students, not only in the District but throughout the country, has not been there.”

Davis said the inequities in education must be addressed in meaningful ways.

“We can’t exclude poverty and homelessness,” Davis proclaimed.

“We have 6,000 students in our public school system in D.C. that report to school from homeless shelters. It is going to take a heavy lift and a deep amount of understanding. We cannot overlook the fact that our students, Black and Brown students, have been trying to catch up, and collaboration is key to that. It’s quite critical.”

Finally, Davis offered that teachers also require support.

“In mid-March when teachers had to transition very quickly from brick-and-mortar teaching to distant teaching, they did so in five days with no professional training,” Davis recalled.

“We know we will be in a hybrid model of teaching for some time, so we need to get distance learning right. The first step is closing the digital divide,” she said.

“We want each student to have one-to-one devices, and we need to talk about preparing our teachers with sustained and ongoing professional development that not only help them develop the know-how to use the digital platforms but the know-how to transition to vigorous and well-rounded content.”

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Activism

Four Bills Focus on Financial Compensation for Descendants of Enslaved People

This week, CBM examines four more bills in the package — each offering ways for Black Californians to receive restitution for past injustices — from housing assistance and reclamation of loss property to fairer pay and the establishment of a state agency charged with determining eligibility for reparations.

Published

7 hours ago

April 28, 2025

Oakland Post

iStock.

Edward Henderson
California Black Media

Last week, California Black Media (CBM) provided an update on four bills in the California Legislative Black Caucus (CLBC) 2025 Road to Repair package.

The 16 bills in the Black Caucus’s 2025 “Road to Repair” package focus on “repairing the generational harms caused by the cruel treatment of African American slaves in the United States and decades of systemic deprivation and injustice inflicted upon Black Californians,” said the CLBC in a release.

This week, CBM examines four more bills in the package — each offering ways for Black Californians to receive restitution for past injustices — from housing assistance and reclamation of lost property to fairer pay and the establishment of a state agency charged with determining eligibility for reparations.

Here are summaries of these bills, information about their authors, and updates on how far each one has advanced in the legislative process.

Assembly Bill (AB) 57

AB 57, introduced by Assemblymember Tina McKinnor (D-Inglewood), would require that at least 10% of the monies in the state’s home purchase assistance fund be made available to applicants who meet the requirements for a loan under the home purchase assistance program and are descendants of formerly enslaved people.

The Assembly Judiciary Committee is currently reviewing the legislation.

Assembly Bill (AB) 62

AB 62, also introduced by McKinnor, would require the Office of Legal Affairs to review, investigate, and make specific determinations regarding applications from people who claim they are the dispossessed owners of property seized from them because of racially motivated eminent domain. The bill would define “racially motivated eminent domain” to mean when the state acquires private property for public use and does not provide just compensation to the owner, due in whole or in part, to the owner’s race.

AB 62 is currently under review in the Judiciary Committee.

Senate Bill (SB) 464

SB 464, introduced by Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas (D-Los Angeles), aims to strengthen the existing civil rights laws in California concerning employer pay data reporting. The bill mandates that private employers with 100 or more employees submit annual pay data reports to the Civil Rights Department. These reports must include detailed demographic information — including race, ethnicity, sex, and sexual orientation — pertaining to their workforce distribution and compensation across different job categories. Furthermore, beginning in 2027, public employers will also be required to comply with these reporting requirements.

The Senate Committee on Labor, Public Employment, and Rules is currently reviewing SB 464. A hearing is expected to be held on April 23.

Senate Bill (SB) 518

SB 518, introduced by Sen. Akilah Weber Pierson (D-San Diego), establishes the Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery to address and remedy the lasting harms of slavery and the Jim Crow laws suffered by Black Californians.

SB 518 is under review in the Senate Judiciary Committee. A hearing is expected to be held on April 22.

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Arts and Culture

BOOK REVIEW: Love, Rita: An American Story of Sisterhood, Joy, Loss, and Legacy

When Bridgett M. Davis was in college, her sister Rita was diagnosed with lupus, a disease of the immune system that often left her constantly tired and sore. Davis was a bit unfazed, but sympathetic to Rita’s suffering and also annoyed that the disease sometimes came between them. By that time, they needed one another more than ever.

Published

7 hours ago

April 28, 2025

Oakland Post

Love Rita Book Cover. Courtesy of Harper.

By Terri Schlichenmeyer

Author: Bridgett M. Davis, c.2025, Harper, $29.99, 367 Pages

Take care.

Do it because you want to stay well, upright, and away from illness. Eat right, swallow your vitamins and hydrate, keep good habits and hygiene, and cross your fingers. Take care as much as you can because, as in the new book, “Love, Rita” by Bridgett M. Davis, your well-being is sometimes out of your hands.

It was a family story told often: when Davis was born, her sister, Rita, then four years old, stormed up to her crying newborn sibling and said, ‘Shut your … mouth!’

Rita, says Davis, didn’t want a little sister then. She already had two big sisters and a neighbor who was somewhat of a “sister,” and this baby was an irritation. As Davis grew, the feeling was mutual, although she always knew that Rita loved her.

Over the years, the sisters tried many times not to fight — on their own and at the urging of their mother — and though division was ever present, it eased when Rita went to college. Davis was still in high school then, and she admired her big sister.

She eagerly devoured frequent letters sent to her in the mail, signed, “Love, Rita.”

When Davis was in college herself, Rita was diagnosed with lupus, a disease of the immune system that often left her constantly tired and sore. Davis was a bit unfazed, but sympathetic to Rita’s suffering and also annoyed that the disease sometimes came between them. By that time, they needed one another more than ever.

First, they lost their father. Drugs then invaded the family and addiction stole two siblings. A sister and a young nephew were murdered in a domestic violence incident. Their mother was devastated; Rita’s lupus was an “added weight of her sorrow.”

After their mother died of colon cancer, Rita’s lupus took a turn for the worse.

“Did she even stand a chance?” Davis wrote in her journal.

“It just didn’t seem possible that she, someone so full of life, could die.”

Let’s start here: once you get past the prologue in “Love, Rita,” you may lose interest. Maybe.

Most of the stories that author Bridgett M. Davis shares are mildly interesting, nothing rare, mostly commonplace tales of growing up in the 1960s and ’70s with a sibling. There are a lot of these kinds of stories, and they tend to generally melt together. After about fifty pages of them, you might start to think about putting the book aside.

But don’t. Not quite yet.

In between those everyday tales, Davis occasionally writes about being an ailing Black woman in America, the incorrect assumptions made by doctors, the history of medical treatment for Black people (women in particular), attitudes, and mythologies. Those passages are now and then, interspersed, but worth scanning for.

This book is perhaps best for anyone with the patience for a slow-paced memoir, or anyone who loves a Black woman who’s ill or might be ill someday. If that’s you and you can read between the lines, then “Love, Rita” is a book to take in carefully.

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Activism

Faces Around the Bay: Author Karen Lewis Took the ‘Detour to Straight Street’

“My life has been a roller-coaster with an unlimited ride wristband! I was raised in Berkeley during the time of Ron Dellums, the Black Panthers, and People’s Park. I was a Hippie kid, my Auntie cut off all our hair so we could wear the natural styles like her and Angela Davis.

Published

7 hours ago

April 28, 2025

Oakland Post

Karen Lewis. Courtesy photo.

By Barbara Fluhrer

I met Karen Lewis on a park bench in Berkeley. She wrote her story on the spot.

I got married young, then ended up getting divorced, raising two boys into men. After my divorce, I had a stroke that left me blind and paralyzed. I was homeless, lost in a fog with blurred vision.

Jesus healed me! I now have two beautiful grandkids. At 61, this age and this stage, I am finally free indeed. Our Lord Jesus Christ saved my soul. I now know how to be still. I lay at his feet. I surrender and just rest. My life and every step on my path have already been ordered. So, I have learned in this life…it’s nice to be nice. No stressing, just blessings. Pray for the best and deal with the rest.

Nobody is perfect, so forgive quickly and love easily!”

Lewis’ book “Detour to Straight Street” is available on Amazon.