Rev. Dr. Floyd H. Flake
Former U.S. Rep. (D-NY)
Sr. Pastor, Allen A.M.E.
"Shifting Paradigms, Changing Perceptions and New Perspectives"
February 5, 2002

Rev. Flake: We are at a very critical juncture as it relates to changes that are occurring in our society. And tonight we title this "Paradigm Shifts and Perceptual Changes" in large measure because we are in the process of change that a lot of us really have difficulty in accepting and certainly understanding. Particularly as we have seen the most release of Census data that we received last April. And people are having all kinds of reactions to this.

They are reacting because suddenly they come to the realization that those persons who have been in power largely because of the historical stake in this land and in many instances because of their ethnicity, suddenly find themselves threatened because they assumed that by virtue of the power and the positions that they have historically occupied that there could never possibly be anything to threaten their positions. And so, now as they look at the Census data, suddenly there is the discovery that those who are a particular racial backgrounds will no longer be the largest class as it relates to the numbers…the majority that table to clearly define everything that represents the essence of what this country is all about.

Not only that, but as that paradigm shift takes place with those who have come to this land seeking for liberty and freedom and believing that this place offers them the greatest opportunity and possibility to ultimately achieve that which they can not achieve in the places from which they come…the ultimate goal of being able to see dreams come true that they dared to hope for…on this American soil knowing that the kind of freedoms that are expressed as a part of this democracy is something that they do not get in the places where they come from. And so, although they speak a different language, they come to America hoping to be able to at last provide for not only the needs of their family but also to provide for the means by which they may be able to reach back and bring other members of their family into this country.

The threat is brought about by the virtue of the fact that the white population now deals with the reality that by the end of this decade, they will not be a majority. And the African-American community is faced with the reality that it will not be the number one minority. And so in the midst of all this change, people are now finding themselves trying to develop new kind of allegiances, alliances and coalitions that allows them to be able to maintain some measure of power with the hope that by doing so they will be able in the face of all this shifting to still control those things which are defined as the essence of what makes us this great America that we are.

And as we look at these changes and we look at political posturing and political structures, and we look at most recent elections…one being the presidential election and recently the New York City election for mayor and the Los Angeles election for mayor…one of the things that we discovered is that people who are coming into this land are coming with the sense and a belief and a feeling that they have power. And because they have this power, it is causing those who ordinarily would have been aligned in one direction to seek for persons who may or may not share their political persuasions but as a means of trying to maintain power are now reaching beyond what have traditionally been our party lines. The party lines are becoming skewed because people are dealing with a reality that no longer can we define ourselves exclusively along terms of democrats and republicans. But we are now having to try to look at how we are able to revive cities, how we are able to change the very culture of the societies of which we are a part, how we are able to deliver better for the education of all of our children, how we are able to re-plan these urban communities while at the same time dealing with the reality that the urban sprawl of the last two decades or the last three decades will probably have to cease, but in its’ ceasing it also means that many of the persons who were in the first wave of those leaving from urban communities to what is now the inner tier suburbs and then out to the outer tier suburbs are now empty nesters who are coming back into the city because there are re-residential programs in all of these cities. And as those re-residential programs have begun to emerge, it means that a lot of the issues of the inner city are now being pushed out to the suburbs.

So, people are trying to figure out with all these perceptual, with all of these paradigm shifts, what is society going to look like by the end of the next decade. And I hate to tell you; I don’t have all the answers. But, I would like to offer you some things that I think I see occurring today. One of the things that we have to admit is that as others come with an inability to speak the language, and as we open up possibilities for them to learn English as a second language, our reality is that if we are going to have young people in this society who are competitive who are already a part of this landscape, we are going to have to encourage them not only to an understanding that they ought to be able to speak that language better than anyone else who is coming to their land, but also just as others are learning English as a second language, we must teach our young people other languages so that they will be able to communicate in the future.

Back in 1982 when I started…founded our school, one of the things I said was, we are going to start young people learning Spanish by the time they are in the first grade. And I did not know the value then of how valuable that would be for our young people. What I discovered was that when we get a child from pre-K through eighth grade, all of our young people generally are very fluent in Spanish. So fluent that even all four of my children when they got to high school, they went and took the Spanish class and I knew one thing when the report card came, there was one class they would have an "A" in if they didn’t have an "A" in any other class. And then my daughters went off to Spellman and they took Spanish again. My son went to Morehouse, took Spanish again because they knew that was a guaranteed "A".

The reality is we are living in a society where we can no longer afford to allow ourselves to be defined by what we consider to be the limitations especially in the ability to have the oral and written communication skills that will allow us to deal in a global economy, in a global world that is changing and shifting almost everyday. These young people then can not continue to be locked into these urban communities without a sense that they have capabilities and skills and competencies and talents and abilities that are synonymous with those of other young people. Because no longer are they competing merely with the young people from the blocks from which they grow up, they are no longer competing with the young people in the schools of which they are a part, they are competing in a global society where tests have become so much a part of the requirement and so much a part of setting the standard for who has the ability and who does not have the ability. That if we do not give them basic skills they will not be able to survive. They will become a part of that next generation that probably will be left out in some form or other. We know today that means the majority of them will be so marginalized and neutralized, that they will find their way into the jails. But, in the future we cannot afford to continue to build jails to house kids simply because they did not get the educational tools. And our solution for them oftentimes in our school community is to put them into special education.

The tragedy of special education, as far as I am concerned, is that it represents the first step toward incarceration. If you take them out of the classroom, you remove them from the population, you put them in an environment where they are among others who like themselves are not learning, ultimately they drift to the streets because if they stay out of the classroom for four years or stay in a special ed class for three or four years, they are not coming back to that class. They left that class at 10:00, at 4:10 they are no further advanced educationally than they were when they left, they are not coming to sit in a classroom with those kids. So, the reality is they begin to drift. And then they begin to try to identify themselves and their strengths in relationship to others that they share with as a part of gangs, or others that they share with and the choice of behavior patterns that ultimately wind up with them becoming a part of this growing population.

So, this nation has to deal with how it is going to change the very structure, this very focus as it relates to who gets educated and who does not. I tend to think that there are very few young people in this nation that cannot learn. Our challenge is to try to raise levels of their expectation, allow them to understand that there are certain standards, and we learned how to live and function toward reaching those standards even when we lived in our segregated society. Even as I got on a bus to go fourteen miles out into the country past the white schools in order to get to a black school. But, being met there by four black teachers who dared to make us believe that not only could we learn but that if we did not learn properly they had means of encouraging us because it was the days of the more corporal kind of punishments that were generally not only reinforced, but oftentimes you got dual punishment for the same things. So, by the time you got home, your parents punished you. And if you lived in a house like mine, if mother punished you she did not think that was severe enough and so she would say something like wait until your daddy comes home. And so, anything you did in school, you knew that you would ultimately have to pay a price for it by going into a little back room where there would be a razor strap or a little paddle. Somebody here knows what I am talking about, I see. I see your face. You are putting your head down in shame even as you thank God for what they did for you. Because it made a difference in all of our lives. I don’t know what our lives would have been like.

But, we went to that little schoolroom; four rooms where we had open classrooms so that we might be able to sustain segregation. So that we went from the first to the second grade in the same room, from the third to the fourth in the same room. But, the plus of that was a person like myself who could do well in English and spelling oftentimes in my third grade class I was really taking fourth grade English and fourth grade spelling. And all the way up the line. So, that the reality is that it had its minuses because it was rooted in segregation, it’s plus was here were teachers who gave of themselves and committed themselves fully to raising a standard and challenging us to understand that we had to expunge words like "can’t" from our vocabulary. And to understand that we were only second-class if we thought we were second-class. And that we could not spend our time merely trying to define ourselves in relationship to our race, we could not spend our time blaming other people for conditions but that we had a responsibility to try to be better so that our future would be better and we would have a greater promise of success.

As we look back in history, we come to the realization that education has always been a primary tool for giving empowerment to a people who came to these shores not by their own choice, but came to these shores because others brought them here. And as they came to these shores, they had sense enough to know that following their release and by the emancipation that in order for them to be competitive, they had to create means by which they would educate people. They started institutions of secondary…of higher education and then came and started elementary schools and normal schools so that they would be able to provide an education. Knowing that this was the one key that would give some means of equanimity to a people who by every definition had been told that they could not learn, that they could not compete, that they could not function in the society.

We need to get back to that kind of modality because as we hear the arguments about why these urban kids can not learn, too frequently the discussion has to do with lack of parents who have education, lack of parents who have the capabilities and competencies to educate and train their children, or lack of the kind of parental involvement in the schools. Well, I come from an environment where daddy worked two and three jobs. He couldn’t be involved in school but what he could be involved in was the process of assuring that whatever we needed, he had provided for us. And after they had had the marches and he followed Dr. King everyday…everyday he read that newspaper, he would keep us…he would keep us, he would talk to us about what all of this meant. And when they did Brown v. Board of Education, when he saw what had happened there in Kansas, he and the neighborhood parents got together and rather than passing those three schools on one morning, they decided to stop and they took us and they sat there in cars. And then got out and went to the front door. And they were turned away. But the next year, the school board had built a school in our community that was one of the best schools of all the elementary schools we had ever been a part of…the elementary schools that we had passed by in order to get to that little school fourteen miles out in the country in Coryville, Texas.

So, our reality has been that we have seen education as the way to open the door to create the possibility, to bring people from a level and a standard where people had relegated them to, to a level and a standard whereby there is a sense that if I can achieve educationally, then at least I will have a possibility of being able not only to take care of my own responsibilities but also to take care of the responsibilities of my own family in the future.

All of this was working relatively well, businesses emerged. In our communities you could almost find any kind of business that was necessary to support the work of that community from the pharmacist to the doctor. Dr. Johnson came actually and did house calls. And he came rather regular because my mother had a number of us. And so when we saw Dr. Johnson at the house, we knew that something was about to happen. That another child was on the way. And so, we developed a great relationship with Dr. Johnson as well as the midwife because I am the only child in my family that was actually born in the hospital. The rest of them were born at home. We could not understand why a family with a two-bedroom house where the boys would roll their roll-a-way beds out into the kitchen and the girls were sleeping the bunk beds in the bedroom and mother and daddy had their own room. They probably should have been the ones separated from each other. (laughter) But, at any rate, we couldn’t understand why we were continually having all these children. But in many ways it helped us because we were a very close family even now…the eight of us who are still living. And it is in part because we learned how to live and to love and to appreciate and have an appreciation for not only ourselves but other people. And out of that, I think all of us have been somewhat successful.

But the model was that we could go to Mr. Hopkins’s pharmacy, we could go to Dr. Johnson’s office, we could go to the print shop, which was right there in the neighborhood. Everything was in the community. People decided that if we are going to live in segregation, we are going to live with a standard.

What most people don’t understand is that African-American people had a standard. They had communities where they kept lawns, and kept houses looking beautiful and mother taught us as did most of my neighbors, how to wash and cook and iron and sew and my children will tell you today, when I am writing my sermon, I have got something in the oven because that is the way I got through college. Because my parents couldn’t afford to give me any money just before the affirmative action programs. Therefore I had to work my way through college. But because I could cook, five o’clock in the morning I could go to the cafeteria at Wilberforce and cook. Came back and served the line at lunchtime. And then got favor with the manager of the cafeteria who provided me with the keys to clean up the cafeteria at night. And clean up I did because what I was able to liberate and extract and take back to the dorm obviously made me a very popular person among my fellow classmates.

But, the reality is we saw change. And for all of the good that we anticipated coming out of the 1960s when we are able to bring about changes…I remember being a part of a sit-in at a place called Louis Gegner’s Barbershop in Yellow Springs, Ohio. And I say to myself today, if I had been Louis Gegner and I saw my hair…my hair came in the room before I did…I would probably have been like Mr. Gegner and I would have probably would have said no way am I going to take a chance on putting my clippers in that head. Nevertheless, we were round there. And we thought it was important that Mr. Gegner begin to cut our hair. Mr. Gegner, of course, closed his business rather than having to open it up to cut our hair. What is strange about this is if you know anything about Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, those kids hair looked worse than our hair did.

But, anyway he chose to go out of business. And that was an appropriate response if he did not understand what this American freedom was really all about. We built these homes. We built up boarded up properties. We allowed ourselves to believe that we could do for ourselves. And then the sixties came and we saw the riots. And today as we look at the many cavities in those communities, we wonder what happened. What happened to the dreams that most of us had that by the turn of the century we would be living a different kind of lifestyle by the turn of the century. Our children who had moved upward to what we call middle class status would be able to enjoy the benefits and the fruits of the labor that we had put forth. For those of us who had gotten on freedom busses and ridden down to South Carolina, North Carolina sat at the lunch counters and then discovered that we had to have more than that. And therefore tried to apply ourselves diligently in terms of educational pursuit in the hopes of being able to provide for our families, came to the realization that over the last few years as we look back in retrospect, much of what we had thought we would have by now has not happened. Because there is a connect between what we see in most urban communities and that is young people are not getting…performing well as it relates to school. Communities where that have been ravaged by the drug culture of the last few years, the absence of the African-American male in the family, and the number of women who are trying to bear the burden of trying to take care of the responsibilities of raising the family as a single family head of household. And the number of high rates, the high rates of unemployment among minority youth. Whatever the number is that he labor department puts out, clearly is oftentimes low in comparison to the number of African-American young people who have opportunities to entry-level positions that give them the kind of work ethic and work discipline whereby they might be able to develop the tools to survive in this society.

So, with that kind of change, with that kind of paradigm shift and as we saw when middle class families moved in places like New York where I am out of the Bronx…moved out of Harlem, moved out of Brooklyn…came over to Queens expecting that they would find the kind of amenities that they had hoped for and dreamt about, suddenly discovering that they were not there. And then eventually moving as they made more resources out into the suburbs and then discovering that now they have brought these middle class African-American youth to the suburbs, they are still not getting the kind of quality education. And we face the great challenge even now of how we are going to bridge a tremendous gap that is occurred. And a part of bridging that gap, I think, has to do with us trying to redefine not only how we give education to young African-American kids but also how we change the face of the communities of which they are acquired.

Sadly, the community…the face of the communities are changing but they are not changing in relationship to the population that is there. They are changing because, as I stated earlier, those persons who moved out into the far reaches of the suburbs are now coming back into the inner-city communities. I sit on the Fannie Mae Foundation board as well as the Brookings Institute for Urban and Metropolitan Policy. One of the things that all of our studies clearly indicate is that every urban city has a re-residential plan. And generally those re-residential plans drive the property values up so high that the persons who are living in those communities will not be able to stay.

The question becomes where do they go? Those persons will really wind up being a part of the inner tier suburbs. The old suburbs. That is where they are going. So that the problems you are seeing in the inner city today are problems that will soon drift across the boarders and become a part of the inner tier suburbs. And those persons in the outer tier suburbs who do not have to worry about the problem of trying to get a child educated in urban America are coming back in. And so in places like Pittsburgh, if you look at the area directly behind the dome going up into the hill district where I met with about forty ministers there and their main complaint was that at the foot of the hill district, they were building these 3 and 400,000-dollar condominiums. In the hill district as you went up to where the black churches and the historical black community is, what you found is the cavities that are there, the deteriorated properties. And the question I asked them was, what are you doing about it? Is there any…you are sitting here merely complaining about what is happening in terms of the re-development. What is happening around your church? These nice, beautiful buildings that you have. What are you doing about it?

And the greatest challenge for them was trying to understand that if you could get these vacant lots for 3 to 5,000 dollars and buy these deteriorated houses for less that 20,000 dollars, perhaps you ought to have these community development corporations in place so that you become the conduit that begins the process of bringing about change in communities. Now, I have been struggling with this thing for the last 26 years in my pastorate because when I first started out with the notion that the church had the power to transform communities, I got into battles all the time because people were trying to define for me how theology did not allow for the process of the church being able to reach beyond it’s walls, it’s border. And then I did my dissertation and came to the realization that at least in the black church, there has always been a sense of responsibility not just to church and place and building, but a sense of obligation and responsibility to community. It goes all the way back to Richard Allen in Absalom Jones when they started the Free African Society. And then that Free African Society movement, what they did was obligated themselves as they purchased their own freedom to try to do everything in their power to help other free people to be able to have the benefit and access to things like insurance and various society…their own loans and savings programs.

And so today what we are doing is not as new as people seem to suggest it is. It is really kind of going back and retrospectively bringing forward and idea that was operative, that worked, and that succeeded as it relates to trying to develop and to make minority communities as great as they are.

So, today as we look at all of this empty vacant land, as we look at all of the number of individuals that are without jobs, we have to find the way to put those jobs in the communities where people live. One of the things, I am on the board of a group called Initiatives for a Competitive Inner Cities up in Boston. And one of the things that we have found in the analysis is that what these cities offer low wage individuals who have the capability to work generally without access to jobs in the places where they live also the land is relatively cheap, if investments were made in those communities those communities could easily become thriving communities where there would be job opportunities offered to people who live in them. And the challenge is to try to get investors to look in those communities in the same ways they look at other communities.

One of the great challenges that we face is I was at the Brookings board meeting the other day and one of the discussions we had was about how it is that a community like Prince Georges County, Washington…outside of Washington…you may not know the community. A community where middle class African American people moved to in the hopes of being able to take care of the responsibilities of educating and having good homes for their children…if you look at the map that they had up on the board what you see is Prince Georges County just outside of Washington, DC. Income variables of people compared to the same people who lived in places in Virginia like Tyson’s Corner. And so the question becomes, if you are an African American, why didn’t you move to Tyson’s Corner where the investments were being made? My questions as I got up was why is it that if these African Americans have the same kind of income variables, why is it that the investors are only investing out in Tyson’s Corner as opposed to investing right outside of the District of Columbia and passing Prince George’s county and going in and investing in Montgomery County? We still have some issues in race that we are going to have to deal with. And America if we are serious about trying to change the perception of what this nation is all about, and we are going to have to make those changes relatively quickly because now it is not a question of black and white, it is a question of black, and white and brown and yellow. And if we don’t begin the process of making those changes, what we are going to discover is the places that we have created outside of the historical communities that we have known and given over to the classes of people that we thought we couldn’t live with, we will soon find that they are drifting closer and closer to us everyday.

So, our distinctions cannot be made on the basis of a sense of a historical pattern of merely running away from the problem. We have to have a new paradigm and the new paradigm has to be let’s address the problems and the places where the people are. Whether those problems have to do with educations, whether those problems have to do with the rebuilding through investment and communities that we have historically ignored. Because these communities offer for us a great possibilities but they have to have the same thing that any other community has.