BETTYE FOSTER BAKER

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Beach chairs and blankets will surround the bandstand in Ocean Park and fill every inch of space tonight, for what is undeniably the most exciting evening of summer, the annual Oak Bluffs fireworks. There is no better view or place to be than with Gwen and Peter Norton and friends on their wonderful wraparound porch and gardens at the beautiful Corbin-Norton House in Oak Bluffs, and this year is no exception. Year after year, the Nortons bring people together in a celebratory salute to the end of summer where folks dine, converse and enjoy the evening just before the spectacular fireworks over Nantucket Sound jettison into the night sky from barges positioned in the sea. The evening never disappoints in its elegance, warmth and community spirit — a throwback to the best of times when people took the time for social communion, which is so much a part of our lifestyle here in Oak Bluffs and has been since the Oak Bluffs Land and Wharf Company created this seaside summer resort in the 1870s.

Three years ago, the late Patricia Neal was one of Peter’s and Gwen’s guests. When I spoke with her she was concerned about Paul Newman because she had heard he was ill. She has been described as one of the most gentle, welcoming persons without ego or self-importance. I found that to be the case wherever we met and she will be missed all over our Martha’s Vineyard community.

When I was 13, I entered the Lions Club essay contest titled Why I Love America, as a seventh grader at Madison Junior High School and won a prize. The Brown Hotel refused to serve me at the awards luncheon. But the Sealbach Hotel allowed me to enter, where I enjoyed lunch and received my prize. Time Magazine and newspapers across the country carried the story. That incident has become an indelible part of my memory. Having grown up in Louisville, Ky., a part of the Jim Crow South left many scars on my memory, but my education was not one of them. I returned last week for a high school class reunion which refreshed many pleasant memories.

I have written on the topic of my schools for a long time and this past weekend, Central High School took front and center stage (dare I say) at my 55th high school class reunion; we also were there one year before the U. S. Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision, Brown vs. Board of Education, which outlawed segregation in the public schools. For three days we revisited our high school days with solemn gratitude for those teachers and what they have come to mean to us over these many years. Mostly we talked about how extraordinary they were. The lessons they taught may have been in a racially segregated system, but their mindset was grounded in what mainstream academia required. They were noble, for they held high the dreams and aspirations our parents had for us regardless of socio-economic status and instilled a pride that has remained for a lifetime. There is no profession that outshines that of a good teacher, for they hold hope in their hands and hearts that each child can succeed and understand that mission too important to fail.

It was our honors English teacher, Mrs. Kuykendall, who required us to read Goeffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Middle English and strove to make the epic Old English poem Beowulf relevant to us. It was Grendel who terrified us and thus remembered most. Then there was Lyman T. Johnson, the great civil rights leader who sued the University of Kentucky to obtain entry in 1947. He was my economics and civics teacher, neighbor and a member of the same church, Plymouth Congregational. From him we not only learned economics, but the responsibilities of citizenship. We learned social justice and how each generation must fight for their freedoms.

It was under the leadership of my uncle, Jasper Andrew Bishop Jr., head of the history and economics department at Central High School and president of the NAACP that our NAACP youth chapter fought side by side with Mr. Johnson and white supporters during sit-in demonstrations and picketed downtown restaurants and stores to integrate Louisville. The list goes on, yet what all had in common was confidence that things would change and they did. Because of segregation, many of our teachers earned graduate degrees paid for by the state at such institutions as New York University where our music teacher, Nannie B. Crumes, studied with the renowned choral director Fred Waring. They graduated from Columbia, University of Chicago, Indiana University, Purdue and others. Were it not for the color of their skin, these teachers could have been physicists, college professors, business men, scientists, pilots, generals in the military. How fortunate we were to have them.

The idea that blacks were not as “good or a smart as whites,” was antithetical to all we were taught and believed. Our self-concepts were too large for such a notion. It was decided early in our lives that whites who viewed us as inferior had the problem, not us because they had so little contact with us and experienced a kind of convulsive anxiety at the idea of sharing the same spaces and accepting black equality and the evidence of black aspirations and achievement. There was no time to dwell on what whites thought, for we were taught that it would be through academic achievement and social prowess that we would succeed. The operative message was: “One day you will attend the same schools as white children and you will be ready.” Ready meant college acceptance and graduation from white schools to include local institutions such as the University of Louisville, Bellarmine College, Nazareth, and top schools such as the University of Michigan, Julliard, West Point, the Naval Academy, Yale, and Harvard. We had classmates from Central High who graduated from all of these institutions.

Contrary to what one might think, today the schools in the nation are more segregated than in 1954. It is within this context that I share an extraordinary experience this past week where I attended the Alphonse Fletcher Sr. fellowship program 2010 reception in Edgartown. The Fletcher Foundation, a nonprofit foundation, has significant ties to the Island. On the 50th anniversary of the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, Alphonse Fletcher Jr., chairman and chief executive officer of Fletcher Asset Management Inc., announced a $50 million initiative in support of institutions and individuals working to further the goals of this landmark decision.

Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard University presented the 2010 recipients: Mia Bay, Richard Thompson Ford and Tyrone Forman.

Mia Bay is associate professor of history at Rutgers University, where she is associate director of the Center for Race and Ethnicity. Richard Thompson Ford is the George E. Osborne professor of law at Stanford Law School. Tyrone Foreman is associate professor of sociology at Emory University, where he serves as codirector of Emory’s Race and Difference Initiative.

Each recipient is awarded a $50,000 stipend to advance their work which can only be described as being in the national interest. If we are to advance our global economic competitiveness, we must educate all children regardless of their economic status, color, and ethnicity and move toward racial reconciliation. Two luminaries were on the Island for the reception: singer Roberta Flack and screenwriter Goeffrey Fletcher, who won the Oscar for Precious, based on the novel Push by Sapphire.