The civil rights movement used to be about access in education but now it’s about what’s allowed to be taught, said Mary Elizabeth Grimes, president of a local St. Louis Catholic middle school, at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event.
“Here in Missouri, public education stands at a crossroads,” Grimes told the audience at the University of Missouri–St. Louis’ annual MLK Day event on Monday. “Classrooms have become battlegrounds over not how well children learn, but over the truth that’s allowed to be taught. History is being narrowed. Books are being removed. Teachers are being watched and restrained.”
Grimes, president of the Marian Middle School, based her speech on a 1948 essay written by King about education when he was a student at Morehouse College, a historically Black school in Atlanta.
Titled “The Purpose of Education,” King argued in his essay that intelligence without character was not enough to form a well-rounded student.
“The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically,” King wrote. “But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.”
The battle over access
In 1957, nine Black students in Arkansas enrolled and later entered an all-white high school in Little Rock under the protection of soldiers in what would later become known as the “Little Rock Nine.”
In 1963, more than 1,000 students marched in Birmingham, Alabama, to protest segregation. Many were arrested, and the police turned to fire hoses and dogs to deter the group of mostly teenagers.
For Grimes, these two events in the American Civil Rights movement exemplifies the battle over access.
“The children of Birmingham were not much older than you,” Grimes told children in attendance on Monday. “Some were even younger. They did not wait until they were ready or grown to matter.”
While there’s been progress since the Civil Rights movement, progress doesn’t equate to perfection, Grimes said, citing statistics from the Annie E. Casey Foundation that shows Black student outcomes are worse than all students.
“Too many of our children, especially children of color, still face barriers King fought to remove,” she said.
A steady weakening of public schools through disinvestment, accreditation loss, dismantling the U.S. Department of Education, closing public charter and Catholic schools sacrifice the needs of the most vulnerable students, Grimes said.
It will take those students and others to solve the problems that lead to worse outcomes, Grimes said. She reminded the audience of what she called King’s “most piercing warning” — silence.
“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people,” King said.
