By Alva James-Johnson and Gregory Lewis Staff Writers Posted
May 11 2004
For Fernando Wright, the road from high school to incarceration was short and swift. It seemed as though one day he was a ninth-grader suspended for fighting, and the next he was a burglar and drug dealer in and out of jail.
"I wanted to live a comfortable life, not go through the struggle," said Wright, 23. "When I saw what other people had ... I tried to get it. But I didn't go about it the right way."
A high school dropout who earned his GED in prison, Wright represents hundreds of thousands of black youths who have fallen through the cracks of the U.S. education system and into prison.
Now, however, black politicians, educators and activists in Florida are attempting to cut the link between schools and incarceration by beefing up the black presence in textbooks and giving black students a better sense of who they are.
Last week, elementary, high school and college educators met in Miami to discuss education's role in reducing the number of blacks in the criminal justice system.
"The mass incarceration of African-Americans is the most critical issue facing black people, and no one is talking about it or doing anything about it," said former Black Panther leader Elaine Brown, a speaker at the conference and director of political affairs for the National Alliance of Radical Prison Reform in Atlanta. "At least in this academic environment, they have identified the failure of education and are connecting it to the tracking of our people in prison."
Marc Mauer, the project's assistant director, said that one in eight black males in his 20s is in prison or jail on any given day. In Florida, where 77,000 people are incarcerated, 52 percent are African-Americans and 93 percent are males, according to statistics from the Florida Department of Corrections.
Mauer said there's a link between school failure and incarceration. He said more than half of black males who drop out of high school have prison records by their early 30s.
The Miami conference was organized by a consortium of black studies educators and organizations, led by the African New World Studies Department at Florida International University. One key strategy they discussed: finding ways to keep minority students in school.
Carol Boyce Davies, director of the department, said there is an effort to increase the number of students exposed to black history on a college level. The university is also working with members of a statewide task force that is trying to fulfill a 1994 Florida legislative mandate calling for children in K-12 to be taught the history of "African peoples."
"A lot of kids are taught in ways that make them feel so disempowered," Boyce Davies said. "If they don't have a knowledge of their history and self, they have less of a chance of being successful."
Some teachers who attended the conference said they would like to teach children black history, but they're too busy trying to prepare children for the Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test, or FCAT.
Wright, who has been in and out of jail since age 15, said he learned about black history in prison.
In March 2000, he was arrested for drug possession and served 33 months in prison. Fellow inmates exposed him to books about Malcolm X and other black leaders. "It showed me that you have to believe in yourself and be a leader, not a follower," he said.
Mauer said prison is where many black men have learned their history. When Wright was released from prison in December 2002, he wanted to do more with his life. These days he plasters stucco for home improvement projects. On Friday, he dropped off financial aid papers at City College in Fort Lauderdale to pursue an associate's degree in business. He hopes to be in school before his girlfriend has his first child, due in November.
"I just want a productive future now," he said, "make a way for my kids."
Alva James-Johnson can be reached at ajjohnson@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4523.
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