Suggested Answers to the Second Short Quiz

[johnkarls]

.
Suggested Answers to the Second Short Quiz


Question 1

Is “Brown Girl Dreaming” a 349-page memoir of poems by Jacqueline Woodson (the author of more than 30 award-winning books) about her own experiences of how it was to grow up in the 1960’s and 1970’s living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights Movement?

Answer 1

Yes.

Question 2

Born 2/12/1963, did Jacqueline Woodson live for the first 7 years of her life 1963-1970 in Greenville, South Carolina?

Answer 2

Yes.

Question 3

Was Jacqueline Woodson born a mere 5.5 years after the first school integration featuring President Eisenhower nationalizing the 10,000 Arkansas National Guard Troops that Gov. Orville Faubus had called out to prevent 9 African-American students from entering Little Rock’s Central High School – whereupon President Eisenhower, as their new Commanding Officer, ordered the 10,000 Arkansas National Guard Troops to “stand down” while 10,000-plus “Screaming Eagles” of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division escorted the students into Central High School after establishing an impregnable defensive position around the school?

Answer 3

Yes.

Question 4

Was Jacqueline Woodson 1.5 years old when James Cheney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were assassinated in Mississippi while trying to register African-Americans to vote?

Answer 4

Yes.

Question 5

Was Jacqueline Woodson 5 years old when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis TN and Bobby Kennedy was assassinated while running in the 1968 Presidential Primaries, primarily on a Civil Rights platform?

Answer 5

Yes.

Question 6

Although Jacqueline Woodson would, of course, not have been aware of the incident, was she a 3.5-year-old African-American girl living in Greenville SC, when Yours Truly was “within 60 seconds” (literally, according to the NC State Police) of being assassinated in Bertie County NC while serving as a member of the first U.S. Government Task Force to integrate Southern K-12 public schools?

Answer 6

Yes.

[Please see Q&A-20 of the First Short Quiz for details about how Yours Truly was “within 60 seconds” of being assassinated in NC during the summer of 1966.]

Question 7

Fewer than 200 miles apart, were Greenville County SC and Bertie County NC comparable in terms of population density, ethnicity, racial attitudes, etc.?

Answer 7

Yes.

Question 8

How observant do you think even a 5-year-old minority child is growing up in the middle of a racially-tense environment?

Answer 8

**********
Background Information for Suggested Answer 8 –

Among many projects/causes, I was the co-founder of the first homeless shelter in Fairfield County CT in 1976. Although a high percentage of clients of homeless shelters now comprises families that have lost their homes to foreclosure as a result of catastrophic medical bills, loss of employment, etc., homeless shelters 35-40 years ago served almost solely adults with no life skills and, as a practical matter, you could not hope to provide more than a small degree of comfort until they died at early ages.

When Eugene Lang’s first “I Have A Dream”® program first received national publicity (NY Times + 60 Minutes) in 1986 as his Harlem PS 121 graduating sixth graders from 1981 were entering their HS senior year, it was an epiphany – unlike the depressing task of trying to make adults with no life skills a bit more comfortable until the end, one could provide surrogate parents (i.e., tutors and mentors) to young inner-city kids and transform their lives!!!

“I Have A Dream”® programs adopted 100% of the third graders in an inner-city school or 100% of the third graders living in an inner-city housing project and provided tutoring/mentoring through H.S. graduation with the guarantee of college tuition.

With the volunteer tutors and mentors becoming de facto surrogate parents and the entire “Dreamer” class enclosed in a protective cocoon in which education was revered rather than derogated, it should have come as no surprise that the typical SINGLE DIGIT high school graduation rates for the class just ahead and the class just behind the “Dreamer” class IN THE SAME SCHOOL OR PUBLIC-HOUSING PROJECT were replaced with more-than-90% high-school graduation and college matriculation rates for the “Dreamer” class!!!

I was the sponsor/chief benefactor of an “I Have A Dream”® program which served 200 kids living in 3 different housing projects. In addition, I served as the volunteer treasurer of the national “I Have A Dream”® Foundation in the 1990’s when it oversaw 180 similar programs in 50 American cities – most sponsored by CEO’s of major corporations.

More information about IHAD is available in Sections 3 and 4 of http://www.ReadingLiberally-SaltLake.org entitled “Legal Briefs, Etc. – Inner-City Holocaust and America’s Apartheid ‘Justice’ System (In Honor of Jonathan Kozol and In Memory of John Howard Griffin)” documenting how 21 of the nation’s leading U.S. and California governmental officials (starting with President Obama) and 43 of the nation’s news-media superstars (starting with Gwen Ifill and Chris Matthews) refused to “lift a finger” in opposition to what the courts were doing even though each of them knew that any one of them lifting a single finger would probably have been enough to enable 10 million inner-city children to escape “a fate worse than death”!!!

**********
Suggested Answer to Question 8

[Originally posted by johnkarls Mon Oct 22, 2007 4:14 am for our 11/8/2007 meeting 12 years ago on the subject of “The Controversy That Is Bill Cosby” and his career of child molestation – the posting entitled “Perceptions of Inner-City 5-Year Olds.”]

“When I was a sponsor of an “I Have A Dream”® program that served 200 kids in housing projects (please see “Background Context for John Karls’ essays), we decided before adopting our first group of 67 third graders to create a brochure illustrated with “kid art” for recruiting tutors and mentors.

“The minister of the Baptist Church across the street from our first housing project was on my Advisory Board. Accordingly, he was requested to have all of the kindergarteners in his Sunday School spend one Sunday-morning class doing nothing but drawing what they would like to be when they grew up.

“We received a wonderful group of 30-40 crayon drawings – nurses, teachers, firemen, chefs, etc.

“But after we printed our first 1,000 or so brochures, we were severely criticized by the adults living in the housing project!!! They pointed out that every “kid art” drawing in our brochure depicted a white person!!!

“We apologized profusely!!!

“But then had the ‘brain storm’ of going back to check the entire universe of 30-40 crayon drawings that we had received.

“All 30-40 crayon drawings depicted only white people!!!

“AT THE AGE OF ONLY 5, THE HOUSING-PROJECT KIDS ALREADY BELIEVED THAT THEY WERE NOT ELIGIBLE FOR THEIR DREAMS BECAUSE THEY WERE BLACK!!!”

Current (2019) editorial comment – even very-young children are incredibly observant and vulnerable to permanent scarring!!!

Question 9

After 7 years 1963-1970 in Greenville SC, would Brooklyn NY have probably seemed like The Promised Land for a “Brown Girl Dreaming”?

Answer 9

Presumably yes – please read on.

Question 10

Was Brooklyn the third-largest city in America when the Dodgers (who abandoned Brooklyn for L.A. in 1958) began playing baseball in Brooklyn in 1883?

Answer 10

Yes.

Question 11

Did Brooklyn not merge with NYC until 1898, 15 years after completion of The Brooklyn Bridge?

Answer 11

Yes, Brooklyn did not merge with NYC until 1898.

Question 12

For many, if not most, African-American slaves fleeing north before the 1861-1865 Civil War, was Brooklyn the terminus of the famous “Underground Railroad”?

Answer 12

Yes.

Question 13

Had the British Empire abolished slavery in 1807 [except for the possessions of the East India Company – Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Saint Helena]?

Answer 13

Yes.

Question 14

Accordingly, was Canada the co-terminus of the famous “Underground Railroad” comprising abolitionists stretching all the way to the Canadian border and willing to secretly shelter escaped slaves as they fled the American South?

Answer 14

Yes.

Question 15

Nevertheless, was Brooklyn America’s first “Sanctuary City” – though providing “sanctuary” for escaped slaves (vs. Brooklyn’s modern-day counterparts which provide “sanctuary” for “undocumented” immigrants)? And was Brooklyn more effective in providing “sanctuary” since bounty hunters pursuing fugitive slaves didn’t dare to enter Brooklyn?

Answer 15

Yes. Yes.

Question 16

HOWEVER, was Brooklyn THE POLAR OPPOSITE of modern-day “sanctuary cities” because Brooklyn was OPPOSED to slavery while (as we have studied many times beginning with our 2/14/2008 meeting 11.5 years ago focusing on Dana Milbank’s “Homo Politicus” and Robert Kuttner’s “The Squandering of America”) concluding that “The Establishment” (which we have always defined as the billionaires who “own” both political parties, who “own” many, if not most, members of the Mainstream Media, and who “own” many members of academia) have conducted a “War on American Workers” since 1992 in the form of exporting American jobs via so-called “free trade” agreements AND IN THE FORM OF REVERSING THE OUTCOME OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR BY IMPORTING “SLAVE LABORERS” (ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS WHO CANNOT COMPLAIN ABOUT ANY CONDITIONS METED OUT TO THEM FOR FEAR OF BEING REPORTED TO I.C.E.)?

Answer 16

What do you think??? Let’s discuss!!!

[And no, in order to have an opinion on The Establishment’s two-prong “War on American Workers,” you do not have to have read the Washington Post’s long-time OpEd Columnist, Dana Milbank, who is syndicated nationally, or Robert Kuttner, Brandeis U Prof and former long-time liberal columnist for Business Week who continues to write columns for The Huffington Post and The New York Times.]

Question 17

Do Jacqueline Woodson’s poems seem to reflect the vast differences between Greenville SC and Brooklyn?

Answer 17

What do you think??? Let’s discuss!!!

Question 18

Which of Jacqueline Woodson’s poems are your favorites? Why?

Answer 18

What do you think??? Let’s discuss!!!

Question 19

Have you memorized any of them?

Answer 19

Let’s discuss!!!