Burgess Owens: “I want to talk about the continuing state of emergency in African American education. I have come here many times to…”

“I want to talk about the continuing state of emergency in African American education. I have come here many times to talk about education, and I may seem repetitious, but I only come because I do not see enough movement among the decisionmakers at any level to deal with the emergency that we confront in the African American community. I do not see enough movement at the Federal level, I do not see it at the State level, I do not see it at the local level either, and I think that it sort of contradicts the intense feeling of the American people about education. They really want us to make some movements in a more rapid and a more positive way toward resolving some of the problems that our schools face. Despite the fact that the polls continually show that the American people rank education as a priority problem, there is this slow movement, and the problem faced by the mainstream community is serious enough. However, the problem faced by the African American community, where most of our young people who are school age are concentrated in the big cities of America, in the inner-city communities, they are staggering. The schools in many of our big cities are literally basket cases, and that is no exaggeration.”