Dakota Beacon

Today is the first day of February.  It is also known in America as “Black History Month”.  Usually I am not in favor of categorizing people by their color.  However, I am also aware that throughout February the media will feature stories on many Black Americans, and knowing the media, I expect much of their attention will be focused on movements like “Black Lives Matter” or individuals like Angela Davis or Jeremiah Wright.  This, in my belief, does not do justice to the great accomplishments of so many Black Americans. So for February I will put the spotlight on some of the important people who have influenced American history and who happen to be Black.  

Because I truly believe that the most important thing we can do is to bring up our children with good values and good character and prepare them to achieve, my first (and arguably my most important) person to feature is Marva Collins.

Collins was born in 1935 in Alabama where she was raised by her sharecropper parents. This would have been an enormous challenge in itself.  Her father insisted she study, giving her special assignments which she said built her self-confidence. She attended a one-room school and then taught for two years in Alabama.  In 1959, Marva moved to Chicago and for many years worked for the public schools system as a full-time substitute teacher. This would be another enormous challenge.  She saw many failures by the system which she believed compromised the future success of the students.  She felt she could not stand by and let this happen to these children. In 1975 she took action. Her conscience would not allow her to stand idly by while students were being cheated by the system.  She opened a school in her apartment, the West Side Preparatory Academy. There she accepted students whom the system had already labeled hopeless - “learning disabled”, and not only taught them to read, but taught them the classics, taught them Shakespeare and taught them of the Greek philosophers.  

Obviously this did not sit well with her former employers and she had many accusers and detractors.  Yet the truth kept coming out through the success of her students.  She did not believe in an inferior curriculum for her students or any students.  She had, more than anything else, a profound belief in her students’ abilities to learn and she did not want them cheated out of the abundant wealth of Western culture.  She would no doubt be appalled by Yale’s recent announcement that they were abandoning Renaissance art because most of it was created by white artists. (In fact she invoked Michelangelo in referring to some of the troubled children she taught successfully - “It’s like Michelangelo said about the piece of marble . . . there’s an angel trying to get out.”)  She would rather forget the labeling by race and get to the point - what it was that has made it great, just as with Shakespeare, and what we can learn from it. 

Her success predictably brought her into conflict with the school system and its proponents were undoubtedly embarrassed by the contrast in her success and their persistent failure, between the economic way in which she brought the best outcomes to her students and the lavish budgets, never “enough”, with which the public school system continued to fail.  This inevitably brought criticism with it. Collins just kept on doing what worked.  She consistently rejected government aid for her effort.  She felt that government money was not only not the "cure", but it was, actually, "the disease".

Her life and her work attracted the attention of Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush,, both of whom wanted her to be the Secretary of Education.  She turned this down, prefering to continue the work she was doing. She eventually became the supervisor of three of Chicago’s schools when they failed to keep their certification.  She has written numerous manuals, an autobiography and won awards including a National Humanities award. In addition to her one-on-one teaching and her own school, she worked tirelessly to reform schoolroom teaching approaches and methods.  Among those who admired her work was Prince, who donated generously to her training programs for teachers and featured her in one of his music videos. Marva Collins’ work lives on through the enriched lives of her students and the continuing gift to America of her talents through them.  She passed away in 2015.

There is such a wealth of videos about Marva Collins that it is difficult to pick out the best.  There are a couple of 60 Minutes segments, but I will link two - a brief, 28-minute feature and the full-length movie which starred Cicely Tyson and Morgan Freeman.  I hope you will take the time to watch one or both and be inspired!  And please, please, share!

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