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The Root: Education Is the 21st-Century Liberator
Black Leaders on Education: UNCF's chief notes today's freedom struggle, 150 years after slavery.
By: Michael Lomax
(Special to The Root) -- Continuing their historical practice of working together to address issues of concern to the African-American community, the NAACP, National Urban League, United Negro College Fund and NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund are working cooperatively to improve educational opportunities for all students. This week we will run op-eds by the leaders of each organization that address a crucial aspect of what it will take to prepare our young people to succeed in life. Today: The president of UNCF addresses college readiness and the gap in four-year-college graduation rates. See previous essays in the series here.
Jan. 1 marked the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. But has a century and a half of progress lived up to the freedom for all races that the proclamation and constitutional amendments that followed seemed to augur?
Two years after the proclamation, as chronicled by the current film that bears his name, President Abraham Lincoln would succeed in passing through Congress the 13th Amendment to the Constitution that formally and finally abolished slavery throughout the nation.
Today, especially in the area of education, which has been my life's work, Lincoln's proclamation and the landmark victories during and after the Civil War can produce a feeling of inevitability, a sense of our history as the narrative of unalloyed triumph in the hard-fought struggle on what Frederick Douglass so eloquently labeled "the pathway from slavery to freedom." That sense of victory is reinforced this Jan. 21 -- the national holiday of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birth, and with rich and powerful resonance the date of the second inaugural of our first black president.
Click here to read the full article on TheRoot.com.
