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In the summer of 1960 I took the Erie railroad from Port Jervis to Chicago, my first trip away from home alone, to attend the National High School Institute in journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston.

It was an honor to be chosen as a Medill “cherub” and even better to get a $200 scholarship that covered all costs of five weeks on campus. Since 1931, the NHSI has enrolled high school students between their junior and senior years for an intensive learning experience in several subjects; the enrichment program now costs upwards of $5,000.

The news from Charlotte

The summer was transformative. Every day, we hundred editors of high school newspapers from around the country talked about current events and learned how to write news stories using the inverted pyramid, features, and editorials. We made friends and promises, led by the editors of two segregated high schools in Charlotte, North Carolina, scene of recent unrest following the police shooting of a black man, 43 year old Keith Lamont Scott.

That shooting gave me the goose bumps. I always considered Charlotte to be a liberal university city, a shining light of racial integration and harmony, because when I was seventeen, I had witnessed an historic meeting of minds from the “Queen City” of the South. 

The Medill admissions team had deliberately chosen two Charlotte applicants from segregated high schools, who had never met on their home turf even though each was the editor of her school newspaper. 

School integration was then the hot topic and hope of our generation, the war babies whose civic consciousness developed in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the 1954 the Supreme Court decision that overturned the doctrine of separate but equal. 

By the end of the NHSI program, the Charlotte cherubs were friends who vowed to return home and fight for desegregation. With a bit of research, I might be able to tell their stories, but I suspect they were players on the rocky road toward achieving school integration in Charlotte, legitimized in 1971 by another landmark Supreme Court case, Swann v. Charlotte, which upheld the school district’s busing program. 

After Swann, school districts in the South and across the country began to desegregate using busing; in Charlotte, push back culminated in 1999 with the Potter case, which ended mandatory busing of children on the grounds that the structure of dual school districts, one black and one white, had been replaced by a single district, thus achieving the goal of integration. 

This narrow interpretation, focusing on the administrative structure of a district, not the needs of students, began the slow re-segregation of the schools in Charlotte, until the present day when her schools are again de-facto segregated by class and race. 

“Once a national model for school integration, Charlotte schools have regressed,” writes Rev. John Cleghorn in an Observer op-ed, “In one in five schools, 95 percent of students are all of one race…. Charlotte’s retreat from desegregation is notable because, at one time, we soared higher than any other community. So our plummet is a greater, steeper disappointment.” 

Such is the social backdrop behind the death of Keith Scott, one of 708 citizens killed by police nation-wide in 2016 so far, according to the Washington Post database. By the time you read this, the number will probably have increased, and in each case, particular social and economic factors provide context for the shootings. 

Not just police killings, but all street violence including protests, terrorism, other criminal attacks, and gang warfare, have become a frame for the presidential campaigns, and we old folks who witnessed the election of Richard Nixon following the riots of 1968 are fearful that history will repeat itself, threatening the potential ascension of Donald Trump to the White House. 

This unqualified huckster is a climate change denier, race agitator, and notorious liar. How a wealthy egoist and reality TV personality became the darling of the white working class, or a segment thereof, is a subject worthy of a much lengthier investigation than this. 

The crab mentality 

Here’s my brief and personal take on race and the working class. Since my retirement in 2013, I have been fixing up my 100 year-old house, which requires constant investment of time, money, and energy. But last year’s repairs exhausted my ready resources. To stay within budget, I pitched in with the shopping at Home Depot, bricklaying, painting, sanding, staining, varnishing, cleaning up, and assisting the tile setter, the cabinetmaker, and my handyman who did the carpentry and plumbing. By the end of the year, tendonitis in my right hand required surgery. 

This year I waited six months on a roofer’s queue, followed by exterior painting, and currently I am working with a concrete contractor. In total, over twenty men have worked at my house over the last two years, and not a single one was black. The omission wasn’t intentional. My appliance repairman is African-American, and Nahman Brothers sends one of their diverse crew of plumbers whenever needed. I hire people based on recommendations, n, availability, and affordable rates. 

My landscaper and his family centered crew are Mexicans. All the specialists who worked on my kitchen are white, including my handyman, who is a semi-retired general contractor. I called him the other night to get his take on the first debate. “Trump is really dumbing us down,” he said. 

The painter is a Mexican who left his gringo boss to start his own company, the same as the concrete contractor. By sheer coincidence, I had met the latter’s ex- boss, who gave me a sky-high bid that I declined before I met his former employee. 

The painter told me last week that his father and brother were killed back home for money; he’s happy to work here and support his family. He says in America, if you don’t make money, you’re lazy. These are the workers that Trump wants to send back or keep out. 

Meanwhile, native born, unemployed young black men, are shooting each other on the streets while the building trades hunger for skilled labor. If homeowners have to wait six months to get a roof, there must be a shortage of roofers. 

When I was in business, my African-American accountant told me about the crab mentality, a folksy explanation of how envy destroys initiative, like crabs pulling down those that attempt to crawl out of a bucket. The moral of the analogy was vividly expressed at the City Council Tuesday night (Sept 27), when a South Berkeley community elder came to the microphone and mourned the death of a young black man who had been shot because he got a job. 

The Council had been listening to a report on Vision 20/20, a school and community program that supposedly addresses racial inequities but emphasizes readiness for college, not the trades, which prompted Susan Wengraf to wonder about the fate of the 11% who drop out of BHS and whether vocational education was offered. “When I went to high school, a long, long time ago,” she said, you could learn how to fix a car, do electrical wiring, and work with wood. “Not everybody is interested in academic achievement.” 

Wengraf’s comments prompted me to search the Vision 20/20 report and indeed the words vocation and trade yielded 0 results, labor only appeared as part of the word collaboration, the word manual only referred to text, job got 6 hits, but career came up 64 times. Methinks I smell a middleclass bias. 

Not everybody needs to go to college, but all young people should be able to discover and exploit their innate talents, and for many that means learning how to master tools and machines other than the gun. 

High schools and community colleges should step-up vocational training leading to jobs in the trades. The unions can help with expanded apprentice programs like the successful Biotech Partners, a community benefit of the 1992 Bayer development agreement. I was a member of the citizens advisory committee that recommended a job training program and other benefits. 

We can support the schools by voting YES on Berkeley Measure E1 and California Measure 55 and then advocate for vocational training. All levels of government should fund not only up-to-date machine shops in the schools but also a major effort to repair and rebuild our crumbling infrastructure like FDR’s CCC, a civilian construction corps that could provide jobs and instill pride in skilled labor. 

Trump, for all his appeal to the working class, would never try this, but Clinton would. The Democratic Party 2016 platform states, “We will put 

Americans to work updating and expanding our roads, bridges, public transit, airports, and passenger and freight rail lines. We will build 21st century energy and water systems, modernize our schools, and continue to support the expansion of high-speed broadband networks.” 

But even if a Democrat holds the presidency, little gets done in Washington because of political gridlock. A recent Harvard Business School report on national competitiveness, Problems Unsolved and a Nation Divided, found that “dysfunction in America’s political system is now the most important single problem facing America.” 

Right wing Republicans are pulling Congress down, like a bucket full of crabs. 

The Kennedy Kids 

Fate made me an educator, not a journalist, but the writing skills that I learned at Northwestern have served me well. The Medill faculty taught respect for the facts and a plain style that helped me survive graduate school, that great subverter of the succinct. 

They were a perspicacious bunch. For the final exercise, our instructors set up a news worthy situation and staged incident locations around the campus that represented the White House, campaign headquarters, a residence, and a hospital. The fictional event was the attempted assassination of then candidate Jack Kennedy, and the suspect was a disgruntled Cuban. We ran from one site to another, took notes, and returned to the class newsroom to write our stories on manual typewriters and to file them by a deadline. 

On a field trip to Chicago, where the Republican Convention nominated Richard Nixon, many of us had discovered our inner Kennedy kids, so the final exam was a rigorous test of detachment. Little did we know. 

We left Northwestern able to compose at the keyboard, a skill that found its way into most schools only after computers were introduced into the writing classroom. And we took with us a youthful determination to change our world. 

But school desegregation, the great enterprise of our generation, failed to unravel institutional racism in America. We overestimated the role that education could play in eradicating distrust and differences. 

We thought that integrating schools would inevitably lead to a more just society, but time revealed that desegregation was a necessary but not a sufficient cause for achieving equality. We underestimated the hard-core hate that we thought resided in only a small fraction of the white community, namely the KKK, and failed to anticipate the fear of the white middle class who fled to the suburbs, taking their financial support for urban schools with them. 

Without realizing it, we embraced W.E.B. DuBois’s notion of the talented tenth, whereby the educated African American elite would lead and elevate the rest of the race. Many liberals voted for Barack Obama, believing that a black president would serve as a positive role model, and he has. But very few young people can get into Harvard law school, and many others cannot complete a college degree. Those with other aptitudes need to follow achievable paths to financial security and self-respect. 

The Vietnam War overshadowed the civil rights struggle, fueled by the self-preservation of the baby boomers, who reached draft age starting in 1964, just when the conflict escalated. The assassination of the Kennedy brothers and Rev. King gave rise to a more militant black power movement. 

Other social concerns captured the front page: the women’s movement, gay rights and the AIDS epidemic, and the “war on drugs.” Race equality took a back seat as increasing numbers of black men were incarcerated in what Michelle Alexander calls The New Jim Crow in her 2010 bestseller. 

The Arc of History 

Rent Board candidate Igor Tregub quotes Rev. King in his email signature: “The arc of history is long but it bends toward justice,” a saying attributable to several people, and it’s not history that bends in some versions but the moral universe. 

Imagination shapes history as an arc, a serpent with tail in mouth, or a Gordian knot. Maybe human history is just a straight line of cause and effect after all, with progress occurring two steps forward, one step back. In the arc metaphor, justice appears like the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. 

The young activists who motivate the Black Lives Matter movement grew up with the slogan “No justice, No peace.” But October 2016 demands cool heads and no surprises or we may end up with the worst law and order president ever. Both cops and citizens need to cool it. 

Not just the campaign, but also the whole world is getting hotter by the day. Has anybody actually calculated the carbon footprint of a war? What the world needs now is peace, sweet peace, including peace on the streets of America. Let’s either reverse the proposition to honor first things “No peace, No justice” or better yet, honor the positive and work for both peace and justice. 

The last day to register to vote is October 24.