Jackson, Miss.: the reality of race

Beneath the warm feelings at Thanksgiving, there is tension.  Manuel’s struggles with the basketball coach continue. He’s been benched for every game so far.  He says he’s thinking seriously about dropping out of school.

Manuel wants to go to the job corps, a federal vocational training program.  His counselor, Nancy Sylvester, says he has the academic skills to do much more.

Nancy Sylvester:  Manuel can graduate high school.  Manuel can be successful in college.

Tom Brokaw, NBC News: You have a lot of admirers at the school.

Manuel Sturghill: Yes, sir.

Brokaw: But I’m a little puzzled about why you’re not doing better.  They think you’ve got so much potential.               

Sturghill: I don’t know.  You know, sometimes I just get lazy.

But spending time with Manuel, you can see it’s not just laziness.  He’s lost.  He doesn’t seem to think he can succeed, or know how to go about it.

Ms. Sylvester, who has worked with Manuel since he was in middle school, often finds herself in a maternal role—giving him school supplies, even lunch money on occasion.  But she can only do so much.

Sylvester: When he leaves the school, he may not do homework.  He won’t study for tests.  He gets involved in a lot of activities that are going on in the neighborhood.

The neighborhood around Lanier is marginally safer now than it was a year ago—but across Jackson, violent crime has risen dramatically.

Sturghill: This is the notorious Wood street, the one that everybody talk about, the street that stay on the news all the time for fighting, shooting…  just a whole bunch of violence.

Manuel says he has never been involved. But he does say he is capable of terrible anger.

Sturghill: You want to fight, I probably end up fighting.  And when I get mad, I’m nothing to see. 

If Manuel drops out of high school, odds are he’ll be headed for trouble. One national study found about a third of black male high school dropouts between the ages of 22 and 30 are incarcerated—that’s five times the rate for whites.

Ronnie Agnew, newspaper editor: There’s a ward at our jail that has about 40 juveniles and these folks are accused of murder and rape, all kinds of—

Brokaw: Horrific crimes.

Agnew: Crimes that are unthinkable.  Just unthinkable.  But, the common denominator was they had the free reign to roam the streets and nobody cared.

Vince Gordon, youth minister: Hence the college population drops, and the prison population rises.

Brokaw: What about the community being responsible for all the members of the community? Kid gets in trouble at the other end of the street? In the old days, another momma or another daddy would go out there and grab that kid by the scruff of the neck, right?

Gordon: In the old days, the parents were older.  The parents were being parents, and not being their children’s friend. 

Mayor Frank Melton thinks he can combat the problem with a door to door approach. We rode with him on one of his community policing sweeps of low income neighborhoods.

Frank Melton, mayor: What did your daddy do when you dropped out?

Kid: He wasn’t staying here.

Melton: What did you mother do?

Kid: Nothing really. Coz she didn’t know when I stopped.

Melton: Ok let’s get to the bottom line.  Where do you work?

Kid: Pizza hut.

Melton: So what are you gonna do 5 years from now?

Kid: Five years from now... hmm...

Melton: You getting the picture? You talk to a fourth grader, he’s gonna tell you he wants to be a teacher, a doctor, a cinematographer.  They give you all these great dreams.  But, something is happening between the fourth and the ninth grade where they lose those dreams.

Fameika Thomas never lost her dreams.  And what she has accomplished is nothing less than heroic.

Brokaw: So what’s the lesson of your life Fameika?

Fameika Thomas: I guess I would have to say it would be to never give up.

Fameika is 26 years old. Her mother, like Manuel’s, was a crack addict.  In elementary school, Fameika was forced to act as a mother to her two younger sisters. 

Thomas: I had to make sure that they were fed and that they were clothed, and that they had their school clothes picked out and I had to iron them. 

Fameika’s parents were separated and the family was desperately poor. More than once, Fameika’s school counselor—again Nancy Sylvester—dug into her own purse to buy Fameika clothing.

Thomas: I think everybody else saw a troubled child.  But she saw, you know, a child that had a lot going on at home; and all she needed was somebody to encourage her and to tell her, you know, that “You’ll get through this, and you’ll be all right.” 

Eventually their mother’s drug condition forced their father to file for custody of Fameika and her sisters. He won—and his influence was crucial to getting Fameika into college and graduate school.  But three years ago, he died of lung cancer.  Now Fameika has custody of Mable and Alexandria.

Brokaw: Looking back, what was the hardest time for you?

Thomas: I would say it had to be when my daddy died. 

Brokaw: And what was your proudest moment?

Thomas: Graduating.  Receiving my master’s degree.

Brokaw: What drove you to do that?

Thomas: Well, I made a promise to my daddy that I would not quit school. And if I was going to be able to provide a decent living for my sisters, I was gonna have to get that masters degree.                      

Fameika’s a social worker with 20 years of student loan payments due. She’s the sole supporter of her younger siblings.  She’s the big sister as mother, father—and drill sergeant.

Alexandria is a junior at Lanier and a member of the national honor society.

Mable is a senior, and bound for college.

Brokaw: As a result of growing up with your sister, and seeing all that she’s done for you, and how hard she’s worked, what are your own dreams?  What do you want to do someday?

Alexandria Thomas: Go get my doctor’s degree and be a pediatrician. And show my sister that what she did really paid off. 

Brokaw: What about you, Mabel?

Mabel Thomas: I want to major in education and become a teacher. I don’t want ‘Meika to be like, “All this hard work didn’t mean anything.”  I don’t wanna be no failure.

Manuel Sturghill says he does not want to fail either—but like many kids he doesn’t seem to know how to succeed.  So Vince Gordon runs an after school program that is a kind of substitute family.

Vince Gordon: What we try to do is provide hope.  I graduated from Lanier; I want students to know you can make it. 

Manuel is enrolled in Gordon’s program but nothing seems to be getting through to him.  In December his conflict with the basketball coach comes to a head—Manuel is kicked off the team.

His grandmother is terrified she’s going to lose him to the streets.

Betty Smith, Manuel’s grandmother: I don’t want Manuel out in them streets. And that’s where he going to end up at. He can’t see it, but he going to end up right there in them streets.

Manuel is now chronically late for school. He’s even late the day first semester report cards are handed out.  His grades are dismal.

Vince Gordon says Manuel needs to get his act together... quickly.

Vince Gordon: I’m seeing a kid with potential and everyone around him sees potential but he doesn’t realize the potential he has.

Gordon: He’ll be another inner city black kid in jail, dropped out from high school, no dad in his life so he’ll just conform to that statistical pattern.

The new mother, Alicia Ruffin, is determined to beat the odds against her. On January 4^th, eleven weeks after her baby’s birth, she kisses him goodbye and heads back to class at Lanier.

Alicia faces a mountain of make-up work.  But she is confident she can make it.

Alicia Ruffin: Because I’m trying to graduate cause I want ‘Merie to see me walking cross the floor or the coliseum and he be standing up like that going “Mama, yeah, we made it, we made it we going to college.”

There is another hopeful sign in the New Year. Those blighted apartments down the street from Lanier are torn down, the mayor fulfilling a promise to try to redevelop the site.