NEWSLETTER OF THE CALIFORNIA ALLIANCE OF AFRICAN AMERICAN EDUCATORS
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Online Issue #35
March 2013
President’s corner
Why Selma still mat ters
After engaging with the
fiery Faya Rose Sanders in
three different educational
settings last year, I knew that
I had to make the pilgrimage
to Selma, Alabama, to experience first-hand the annual
Bridge Crossing Jubilee that
commemorates Bloody Sunday— March 7, 1965. An
accomplished lawyer by
training, Sanders is the coordinator and founder of the
Jubilee.
It pays homage to the day
when about 600 civil rights
activists and concerned citizens attempted to march
from Selma to Montgomery
to demand the restoration
of the right to vote.
Many of the peaceful marchers were brutally beaten,
trampled and turned back
by hundreds of White police
officers. The images of the
attacks were broadcast to
millions around the country
and the world. People were
so horrified by the savagery
that a few weeks later Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. and
thousands marched across
the Edmund Pettus Bridge in
Selma and to the steps of
the capital in Montgomery
without incident.
Outraged by what he witnessed on Bloody Sunday,
within a few months, President Lyndon B. Johnson
passed the Voting Rights
Act. It provided a range of
federal protections for anyone seeking to vote in districts which had a history of
using various means to deprive people of that right.
When I drove over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, I felt as
though I had stepped back
in time. I could almost hear
the cries of innocent people
bludgeoned for wanting to
participate in a democracy
built on the backs of their
enslaved ancestors.
Selma still matters because
Section 5 of the Voting
Rights Act is being challenged at the Supreme
Court level and we must not
allow its defeat.
Selma still matters because it
reminds us that apartheid
schools exist just as they did
in 1965.
What can you do? I will outline some concrete steps in
next month’s newsletter.
A G at h e r i n g o f l e a d e r s — c oa l i t i o n o f
s c h o o l s e d u c at i n g b oys o f c o l o r
The mission of the Coalition
of Schools Educating Boys of
Color (COSEBOC) is to connect, inspire, support, and
strengthen school leaders
dedicated to the social, emotional and academic development of boys and young
men of color.
COSEBOC’s 7th Annual
Gathering of Leaders will be
held April 25—27, at the
University of Illinois at Chicago. Founded in 2007 in response to the Schott Foundation’s call to build a movement committed to the goal
of generating a positive fu-
ture for Black boys, this
year’s conference theme is
Young, Gifted and Literate:
Boys and Young Men of
Color Prepared for the Future. For more information
about the conference, visit
www.coseboc.org. It should
be powerful!
Sites to Check Out
www.caaae.org
www.empoweringparents.org
www.nbcdi.org
www.preschoolcalifornia.org
www.xcelinmath.com
www.culturallyresponsive.org
www.greenescholars.org
According to the Children’s
Defense Fund’s America’s
Cradle to Prison Pipeline report
first released in 2007, a Black
boy has a 1 in 3 chance of
going to prison in his lifetime
compared to 1 in 17 for his
White male counterpart.
Donate to the CAAAE
and help us expand our
award-winning STEM
initiative that defies
these obscene statistics
and sends 100% of its
Black males to college!