Mrs. Judy Sheldon of the Booker T. Washington Elementary School has a very noteworthy project on tap for her students. Aware children nowadays are barely cognizant of the notion of segregation, she’s asking Booker T. alumni to talk about what it was like to live under legally sanctioned racial separation.
Sheldon took up the project because she found her students actually knew very little about their school.
Built in the 1920s as a school for “colored” children only, the school was pushed along and financed in part by the DuPonts. Its story is tied inexorably to that of segregation in the First State.
I wish Sheldon a lot of luck.
But it seems that despite all the progress made since steps were taken to outlaw segregation, it remains in the hearts and minds of many.
I bring this up because I recently heard a little girl, upon seeing some monkeys on television, remark one of the primates was “just like our president.”
The child said her mother’s family doesn’t like blacks and considers the president to be little more than a monkey.
Her father was not pleased to hear his daughter’s family, of which he no longer is a part, harbors such views. That his child is being taught these views pleased him even less.
Sadly, it goes to show something as all pervasive as racial prejudice cannot be abolished with a simple stroke of a pen on a piece of legislation. It takes understanding, tolerance, and hard work. And despite the literal blood, sweat and tears that have helped whittle away at such narrow-mindedness, it manages to live on in dark corners of some people’s souls.
It would be nice if seeing the results of Judy Sheldon’s project could help enlighten such benighted people, and failing that, at least enlighten their children.
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It looks like we will not be returning to the moon any time soon, as many in NASA had hoped. The moon is 239,000 miles away, but the decision has implications here in Kent County.
In his new budget, President Obama essentially calls for the cancellation of the Constellation program, a new system that would have served both the International Space Station again put Americans on the moon by 2020. This was to replace the shuttle program, which ends this year.
It isn’t known how the president’s decision, provided Congress goes along with it, will affect ILC Dover of Frederica, which was to be a subcontractor on the program’s new line of space suits.
ILC has diversified considerably since it was reduced to a mere shadow of its stature following the Apollo program, and it has many other areas of manufacturing that will keep it viable. But given the current state of things, the decision could mean a substantial loss to the county’s economy.
Email Jeff Brown at jeff.brown@doverpost.com.
