News & Articles

NPR reported on an Idaho elementary school teacher. Her principal ordered her to take down a poster of small hands of many different skin colors because it violated Trump’s executive order to protect racists and fascists from feeling bad. 

I don’t think I’m exaggerating. I’m more brutally honest than gentle NPR, which also has one of Trump’s guns aimed at its head. 

The New York Times has another story about Trump protecting children from the truth. We shouldn’t be talking about environmental destruction in front of them.

Trump forbid, we sing the lyrics of that old Sunday school song, “Jesus loves the little children, All the children of the world. Red and yellow black and white, they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the Little Children of the world.”  

We don’t need a Department of Education (DOE) for that kind of crap.

Colored children in impoverished schools? Trump must hate them, their civil rights, their integration and their housing. He harangued a lynch mob to execute five innocent black kids for rape when he was a New York property developer. 

Back in the White House he has his sights on the Title One funding for the poorest children. Title One and the entire Department of Education are on the chopping block.

We’ve had the DOE for 50 years courtesy of Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter. A little sleuthing helped explain why President Carter talked the Congress into establishing it. 

A good place to start is with the news story illustrating this piece, which I vividly remember from seventh grade in lily white North Mankato, Minnesota. We were new to the land of ten thousand lakes and it was quite a change.

I had been in an integrated school since second grade. My parents knew it was about to be integrated when they moved to the neighborhood in Topeka, Kansas. In 1963, five grades later, I was 12 when we moved north. Not only were my new classmates innocents on the subject of race they called me “Reb” because my Kansas drawl sounded southern.

I was 13 in 1964 when “Axe Handle” Lester Maddox, an Atlanta, Georgia, restaurateur, used axe handles to chase black people out of his cafe. In the news clipping accompanying this column he’s carrying a revolver while his protege waves a handle as they chase a “nigra” wearing a sports jacket. “Nigra!” 

I remember a passel of white cracker politicians pretending they couldn’t pronounce the vowel “O.” They didn’t want their fellow southerners to catch them using the north’s more respectful “Negro.” I guess they thought nigra sounded cleaner than “nigger.” It was a little like wearing white sheets or Trump rallies where you can always find a couple prominent black people sitting behind Donald John. 

This Fourth-of-July story took place the year before the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. After a century of vote theft southern states would no longer be able to easily deny black citizens their votes. In 1967 white voters fondly remembered Maddox’s axe handles and elected him their governor.  A Georgia state website tells me he was a surprisingly moderate governor. 

When Lester’s term of office ended, he was succeeded by the more liberal Jimmy Carter, who served from ‘71-‘75. A Supreme Court ruling in Carter’s first year ended tax breaks for the tuition of children attending segregated white Christian Schools. 

A young attorney, Hillary Clinton, spent time in the South making sure the tax laws were being followed. And, of course, black parents now had a say in school board elections. Carter, who would soon run for president, saw how unruly federal education policy was.

There were more than 200 separate federal agencies enforcing some aspect of laws affecting public schools.  

Carter was a breath of southern fresh air. As President, he talked Congress into creating the Department of Education, which consolidated the many miscellaneous agencies enforcing the law into a single entity. It would make life easier for tens of thousands of public schools.

The department survived a skeptical Ronald Reagan and has grown modestly as befits a nation with public schools under the supervision of the 50 states.

Donald John is a man who tried to lynch innocent black kids, speaks highly of Russian dictators and despises poor kids’ schools. It’s likely he considers them “shithole schools.” He’s wasting little time flushing them down his golden john. That way their Title One money can be used for something useful, like continuing tax breaks for billionaires. 

In his first administration Trump chose a billionaire, Betsy DeVos, to be his Secretary of Education. DeVos had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to undermine public schools as a private citizen before her turn as Education Secretary. She had the integrity to disapprove of his attempted overthrow of the government in 2021.

On Trump’s return to the Oval Office, he has found a more rough-and-tumble Education Secretary. Linda McMahon, owner/promoter of the World Wrestling Federation. She will be sure to body slam public schools with their damned colorful posters of funny colored people holding hands – Ewwwwww!

For more on how an ignoramus is turning America into a pariah state, lincolndemocrat.com 907.