“The Times They Are a-Changin”

It’s that time of the year again to pick the Pennell Elementary School essay winners. This school was in my Philly neighborhood when I was growing up.

In 2006, my mom started the “Councilman David and Florence Cohen Award for Academic Achievement and Good Citizenship” which selects one male and one female 5^th grade student who writes the most compelling piece in response to the question, “What does Pennell mean to you?” 

The winners, which our family chooses each year, are announced at graduation, and they read their essays to the audience. We also present gifts to them.   

If this sounds familiar, it may be because I wrote about this contest 5 years ago (June 14, 2015), to the day. At that time, I didn’t mention that Pennell is predominately black, and that the award was created in the spirit of wanting young black men and women to take pride in their school and school work, to stay in school and achieve great things and to not follow in the path of others who dropped out before graduating from high school.

It didn’t seem necessary back then to mention skin color when talking about an elementary school contest; I was going through life with the assumption that not talking about race was better than talking about race.   

But today’s events – the murder of George Floyd, police brutality, racism in all its ugly forms – has made me realize what a teenager recently said so well:  It’s harder to tackle problems that largely remain unspoken.

After years and years of racial injustices, blacks are now sharing their stories with the world, and lots of people everywhere, of all different ages and backgrounds, are listening. Why did it take so long to get this conversation started? Will change actually occur?

My parents had lived in the Pennell neighborhood since about the mid-1950s, about 50 years before my mom established the essay contest.    

Shortly after they moved in, they got a taste of the black experience, when a white neighbor moved out and a black family moved in. 

This exchange of white for black sent panic to the other white neighbors on the block of row houses as well as to other surrounding blocks and, before long, lots of houses were up for sale, with more and more blacks moving in.

When my parents asked their white neighbors why they were moving out, many of the responses centered on wanting “good” schools for their children and not wanting their own kids to be bused out of their neighborhood as a result of efforts put into place to combat segregation.

No whites admitted to the fact that they weren’t comfortable living among blacks.

My parents were appalled by this mass exodus.  They made the decision that they were going to stay and be of service to the community, however they could.    

Knowing they felt that way forced me to open my eyes, too.    

There was a gang of young black men that hung out on a street corner that I had to walk by to get to elementary school.  They either tried talking to me or ignored me, but every time I walked by them, I wondered why they were always there at that corner, on those steps, at 8:30 a.m. when I walked to school, when I came home for lunch, when I went back to school after lunch, and at 3:30 p.m, when I walked home from school.   

“Don’t any of them work?” I’d ask my parents. They explained that some haven’t been able to get a job for 2 main reasons:  1 – they may not have graduated from high school so their knowledge and skills are limited and 2 – they may have been in trouble with the law – deserving or not – which had prevented them from getting employment…so they had essentially nothing to do all day, and there were no job training programs at the time. This made no sense to me. How would things turn around for them, just hanging out all day? This would likely lead to more bad outcomes.  

A number of our neighbors ended up in jail; calls to my dad by crying and scared parents to help get their kids get out of jail were a regular part of the dinnertime hour. He was so angry about the system that was rigged against blacks:  rampant abuses toward residents regarding the arrest process such as not being read the Miranda Rights and poor access to legal representation and police brutality throughout, with no accountability. He was honored to help and did so free of charge for decades, all the while sickened by the reality so many black families faced on a daily basis.

My parents did all they could in their lifetime to even out the score, to try to provide for the community what whites had at their fingertips, to try to advance the lives of blacks in every way they could. 

Today’s youth has me feeling hopeful. They are open-minded and aware and want the world to be a better place. They are learning to listen to voices of blacks and other marginalized groups, to identify racism in all walks of life and to protest police brutality. 

We will have a ton of new voters come November, and they will be casting their votes for better leadership in all levels of government.

They too will do what my parents and so many others did and are doing:  creating change where they can. 

Maybe one day there actually will be a world that everyone can call their own.