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“Hey Nellie Nellie, come to the window
He says the black folks should all be free
Hey Nellie, Nellie look at what I see
To walk around the same as you and me
He’s riding into town on a sway-back mule
He’s talking about a thing he calls democracy
In a tall black hat and he looks like a fool and it’s 1859”
But he sure is talking like he’s been to school”
— Shel Silverstein
Education and race are two issues that are endlessly intertwined in the American experiment. In 1865 over 600,000 American lives had been given up to affirm, in part, Jefferson’s words that “all men are created equal” meant exactly what they said. Silverstein’s man in the tall black hat had not even started out to make racial equality a primary issue in the Civil War. But that’s where it ended up, sort of. The Black folks were finally indeed free to walk around like their white countrymen. And ‘talking like one had been to school’, which had been outlawed for slaves in the 1830s, was now to be available, theoretically, to all citizens, Black and White. But there were catches, there always seem to be catches.
Times change but some aspects of the human condition seem eternal. One of these perpetual problems is that we human beings can never seem to get it into our heads that people who are different from us are just simply that, different. No better or worse than us, only different. A 1950s tune by the Kingston Trio expresses this sardonically:
“The whole world is festering with unhappy souls, the French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles, Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch, and I don’t like anybody very much.”
The words still bring a chuckle. The reality however is more nuanced: those who are different are not only to be
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