But if you let everybody out who was busted for doing crack, and you haven’t engaged on any kind of help or put them in any kind of program that would deter them from using crack cocaine or whatever drug it is, they’ll be back. It’s safe to say they’ll be back. They think they’re not gonna come back if you let them out, but they’re gonna go right back out there with no knowledge of what kind of problem they had. They’ll go out with a problem, knowing they have a problem but with no answers to fix that problem. So they’ll go back living in that same problem; they’ll go back doing the same things that they was doing, especially if you just let them go like that and they ain’t had no kind of help. That’s like coming to jail and they ain’t working on nothing. Like I used to do, working on nothing, caring about nothing, playing cards all day, dominoes, chess, and not really giving thought to what’s been happening in your life, or with what’s going on in your life and what it’s about, what’s to become of your life. Because when you leave society, that’s time that you can never get back. I once heard a man say, if I loan you $100, you can come back and give me $100 back and you’ve paid me everything that I’ve given you. But if I give you my time, you can’t give me my time back.
First and foremost thing is, I’m gonna get out there and stay out there and find a job, simple as that. It makes no difference what it is, ’cause first I had higher standards and now I’m in here heading way down. I’m gonna get a job and take care of my kids, go to church, build my family around the church structure. I’ve had three or four jobs. I worked at the Embassy Suites, I’ve worked at Delaware Cars and Limousines, I’ve worked at Allied Food. It don’t make a difference that I’ve been in prison several times. Who cares as long as you can do the job? A lot of people use that as a crutch: I’ve been to jail and I’m not gonna be able to get no jobs, so I’m just gonna do what I’ve got to do. That’s a crutch. That’s just telling me that you don’t want to do more about it. See, because if you was a real man, against all odds you keep trying. A man is not the man that goes, oh, I got a lot of courage, ’cause courage is not the apple in the field; we already know that. Even if you are afraid and you don’t think you’re gonna get the job, as long as you try and you keep on trying to keep on, trying to keep on trying until something happens, that’s courage. And believe me, if you’re persistent and consistent it’s gonna happen. You just have to be patient, and we don’t have a lot of patience. You have to be patient.
To my knowledge, the only thing that we have in here to give us better preparation is this Mind of Christ and studying the Bible, which has an effect on the interior. But now we need things like teaching people how to fill out applications and even just to hold a conversation without acting like a slave or without offending the person that you’re talking to, especially when you desire something from them and he’s in a position to help you. You’ve got guys that don’t even know how to communicate with those simple skills. We need programs like that set up, designed to help people do those kind of things.
One thing we could do to keep the crime level down, to keep people from going astray, would be to make everything free. I’m just kidding. The people that live in the community are actually their own problems. Say I go back to my community. I could become a professor. I move out of the neighborhood. I know I could become a professor, but I would leave the neighborhood. I wouldn’t stay, so who’s left in my neighborhood if the professor’s not living there, if the police officers are not living there?
If I was Jesse Jackson and I was trying to keep these black men from even going to prison, or trying to get them out of prison, I would encourage everybody that’s in the neighborhood who’s working on something to grab a person that they feel needs help. Not necessarily a person that they like; it could be anybody. And you take that person and show them and teach them and give them certain avenues. Not actually open the door for them; just point them in the right direction. Don’t leave the neighborhood, or if you did leave, then go back to the neighborhood. I’m not saying take all your money and squander it on the neighborhood; no. Show them how you got where you’re at. Give them kinds of programs, teach them how to fill out applications, teach them how to hold interviews, teach mothers prenatal care. You’ve got mothers out there leaving their kids on doorsteps or in hospitals, in garbage cans, for heaven’s sake, in alleys. It’s not because they don’t want the children. They feel that their lives are over. They don’t know what to do, so they say, well, I’m gonna give this child up because I know I can’t take care of it; I don’t even know how. It’s not more so the money; it’s emotionally. They don’t know how to deal with it emotionally.
If I could change daily life in prison to make things better, everybody under the age of twenty-five would have to go to school if they don’t have a GED. Everybody that’s over thirty-five would be in a separate part of the penitentiary, and the guys that’s in between, I’d let them do whatever they want to do, ’cause they don’t need anything. They’re not thinking to a level to whereas they’re gonna be productive for themselves or for anybody else. They can’t hear anything. They don’t want to hear anything, and they block everything in their self. See, the young people you can reach. The older people you don’t have to worry about because they’re like me. They’ve come to a situation in their life where they say, I no longer want to be a part of the problem; I want to be a part of the solution. But the people in the middle, they’re the problem, the people that don’t care. I’m not saying just do away with them. Let them run their course. Just set them inside of the penitentiary or the jail and let nature take its course. They’ll come around. I’m here, and I understand. They don’t care about nothing; they mess it up. They get the officers involved with certain things; they don’t care about anything.
What I’m saying is that they must let nature take its course. Let old age catch up with you, ’cause once old age sets in, you’re too old to do anything. You can’t fight, and there ain’t nobody here that’s gonna listen to you. At least with the younger guys you can scare them straight. You can set up things for them and you tell them like to make certain things, make learning fun to them. Too many times they’ll be involved with things that they feel is boring. It’s designed to help them, but they can’t see themselves take a part in it. But when it becomes fun and they’re learning more too, then they want to do it. I would keep the food the same, the TV the same, the phone the same, ’cause that’s designed to keep you from not coming back. Every time you go to that phone you have to make a collect call.
So if you take some guys out of here that use drugs, man, and not give them some kind of program, you know, man, you’ve got a problem. Now, this is what you need to do to fix that problem. You ask, do you want help with this problem? And if they say no, then okay, well, okay, you want to come back? All right; go. That’s the thing about it: they want help, give them help, but if you just let them go, know that they’ll be back. If you was to let at least 95 percent of the people out of this jail at a quarter to three, at about five o’clock they all be back. You’ve got to know that to be true. They’ll be back ’cause they have nothing else to do. They have no means of being satisfied or fixing their problems, so they just wallow in stuff that they’re already in, the mess that they’re already in. That’s basically what happens, how they’ve got themselves into everything.
You have to watch what you say in here. Certain things you can say out there in the street, you can’t say here. I don’t like saying them, but they use words like that. Like if you call a guy a bitch, man, them are grounds for getting beat up. You call a guy a whore, them grounds of getting beat up. If you call him a punk, them’s grounds of getting beat up. So you have to really watch what you say. So a guy like me, you see, I know that respect is not something you demand, it’s something you share, so I share with them. That way, I deter any of that. And then I’m kind of like a fairly big guy too, so that helps, ’cause people don’t want to mess with me. But it’s really hard; it is. You have t
o watch what you say, even when you get angry. You have to be careful of what you say to another inmate. You can’t just say anything that comes to your mind. You have to pick your words, because what you might say from minute to minute might cause a fight, a very, very, very, very, very dangerous fight. And then it depends on who you’re saying this to. If you’re saying it to the wrong guy, it’s gonna cost you your life. Yeah. It will cost you your life. You will die in jail, yes, you will. It will happen; it will. You will lose your life by what you say out your mouth to one of these guys that’s in these places. So you really have to be careful about that, you know what I mean? It’s not normal.
DR. EMIEL HAMBERLIN
Ticket to Success
A 2001 inductee into the National Teachers Hall of Fame, Dr. Emiel Hamberlin has been a renowned teacher at Chicago’s Du Sable High School for thirty-six years. Famous for his ability to encourage any child to learn, he asserts that “it’s not human to fail.” But he remains concerned about the future. “The reason our kids do not value education in the same way we did is that we almost teach them how to be helpless,” he said. “We think we’re helping them when we do not allow them to attach themselves to some degree of responsibility, and that’s what I try to bring out in my classroom.”
For people of my generation, education was part of the Civil Rights Movement. We were taught that even in a racist system, we would succeed and be okay if we worked hard. I was born in Fayette, Mississippi, and it was terrible, in terms of what blacks went through. I grew up during the time of Emmett Till, and I know what people in the United States must feel when they think about terrorists. I lived among terrorists, and we could identify them, but nothing was ever done to them. The Klansmen were terrorists.
When I was attending Alcorn State University in Mississippi, my brothers and my sister were living in Chicago. I used to visit them and work in Chicago during the summer months, and then go back to school to study. I didn’t like Chicago, and after finishing at the university, I planned to join the Peace Corps. I was waiting for an assignment and my brother said, why don’t you come and substitute-teach until you get the assignment from the Peace Corps? And I did. I went to the Chicago Board of Education and they sent me to Du Sable High School as a substitute teacher. And I never stopped teaching.
It wasn’t love at first sight. I didn’t like the Chicago weather; it was kind of cloudy, and I expected it to be more sunny. There was smog, and the streets were not as clean as where I was coming from. But after about two or three weeks, I said, gee, this is what I like doing. As I continued to teach and to find satisfaction in teaching, that somehow gave me the desire to stay. And now I wouldn’t want to live in any other place but Chicago. Kids come out to my house all the time on 85th and Winchester. They landscaped my house. Some of the students are members of the church I belong to.
Being average frightens me. Students realize they don’t have an average teacher when they walk into my classroom. If you don’t have an average teacher, you’re not going to have average students. You’re going to have above-average students. Each one of my students also realizes that he or she was born an original; there’s no need to dye a copy. You’re what you ought to be when you want to be it. And when people misunderstand you, it’s because you’re great. You’re not supposed to be understood; you’re not that simple. You’re good, you’re bad, you’re great. You’re anything you want to be.
For most of my thirty-six years of teaching at Du Sable High School, my day has started at seven and ended at seven. In the evenings we work in the lab. I get to know more about the children at that time, and I teach more then than I do the rest of the day. The children are relaxed, and I sneak the information in on them. They are in a learning environment, but the structure is such that they don’t know I’m evaluating them while they are going through the subject matter—photosynthesis, respiration, adsorption, development, animal behavior, and so on. We have a lot of fun.
Part of my philosophy is, I never fail a child in class. If he comes 80 percent of the time, he’s going to pass. It’s never his fault that he has not learned. It just so happens that I may not be the right teacher for him, so there’s another doctor in the house for him. I would not let a child sit there for ten weeks and then fail. We don’t live long enough to fail. It’s not human to fail. There’s another problem going on, and it’s not the child’s problem. It’s beyond the child, so let’s find out what it is. It’s not you, I tell them; there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s I who was not able to teach you, so let’s go to another teacher.
The kids are in school about six hours a day, and they have eighteen hours out there in a difficult world, sometimes a nightmare world. But that’s the hand we’re dealt. And since I’m an educational physician, it’s my job to make the students become educationally aware. I’m not worried about where they’re coming from; I’m worried about how well I can make them. And if they keep taking my assignments, which are a prescription, they’re going to become educationally well. If a student does not get completely well, I’m going to at least make him feel better. This is my charge. This is my duty. This is my passion.
Of course, I am concerned with bolstering the children’s self-esteem in the classroom setting. I tell them, do you know how great you are, how wonderful you are? You’re an original—don’t you feel it, can’t you see it, don’t you see what I see? Can’t you feel what I see? There’s the inner part of you, I tell them, that must say yes to what I’m trying to get into you. Once I get your mind and change your attitude, I’ll change your behavior, because you can be anything you want to be. It’s your mind—it’s your attitude—that limits you. And when there’s no limit to it, what do you want to be?
So when a child walks into the classroom, it is up to me to hype him up, to pick him up, to energize him, to bring happiness into his life, to enter his morning. And you get the very best you can out of the moments you have.
Many of the children are not being nurtured and praised and prepared for school at home. Where a home is not as happy as it possibly could be, and parents are scrambling and scraping and trying to make ends meet, it stresses the children, even though the parents are doing all they possibly can. The children’s attention span is limited, and they’re easily annoyed even by someone touching them; they’re ready to almost go off. They’re constantly under stress and in one or another of these emotional states.
Another thing that happens with the central city children is that when their friends are murdered or killed—and that happens often—they do not know how to grieve. There’s no way to grieve. They come right back to school. This is where they find the best possible sanctuary. So not knowing how to grieve, these children many times will hurt another child to get over the grief. They think, I must hurt somebody else. And that is not a positive way of grieving.
The parents are doing all they can do, and many times their spirit is broken because their income is fixed and they wonder, how do I get out of this hole? I’m in a trench; I’m pulling up, trying to get out. At the end of the month you can barely make it out, and by the time you get out and the money comes in, you’ve become a part of the negativity; you’ve slipped back into it again.
I involve the family, even where family support is difficult to obtain. I never dwell on negatives and on what can’t be done, but seek to discover new ways to do the most difficult tasks. I start where the student is, and in urban areas such as where I teach, it’s not always on page one of the biology or horticulture textbook.
One thing I want in my classroom is to surround the students with their subject matter. I have many animals and many plants in the classroom, so once you walk in, it takes your mind completely away from where you’re coming from, into another world. And I want to give you something to talk about when you go home other than negativity. I want you to be able to go home and say, this is what happened in the classroom—the alligator was eating, and we fed the piranhas today. The macaws were talking; they have spee
ch teachers. There are many activities that we have in the classroom, and the aim is to overpower the negativity that the students are walking through in terms of getting to school; to counteract the crises that they’re going through.
One of the most popular programs I implemented with my students is the Urban Ecology Sanctuary, an indoor-outdoor laboratory where students grew and cared for a large variety of plants and maintained a habitat or ecosystem for peacocks, pheasants, and other exotic birds. The sanctuary won national acclaim as an innovative idea generated by students with school support, and was highlighted in the New York Times and other publications around the country. The project was open to the entire community and required many hours of professional consultation, workshops, and seminars for the students as well as collaborations with teachers and community leaders.
Students involved in the sanctuary, along with other teachers and myself, were invited to Cornell University’s School of Architecture to share with its students the origin and significance of the project. The Du Sable students also explored the possibility of the sanctuary being duplicated by other urban high schools, and discussed the impact this would have on urban environmental education. All of the students who participated in the project have since gone on to colleges and universities around the United States.
America Behind the Color Line Page 56
