Having to decide not to start out to rural Arkansas on Saturday (1st weekend of spring break, 2008) was a big decision as the weather in the south was not cooperating with our plans.
Deciding not to cancel the alternative spring break altogether was our 2nd big decision.
Overall, 4 days later we are glad that we waited those crucial 24 hours!
Although a long journey (14 hours by van) and delayed air flights, we begin to leave the state (Arkansas) and place (Stephens) today and tomorrow very, very happy to have made good decisions.
When you teach courses on the “human condition” –both in the past and present–you can only hope that your students leave the classroom understanding the nature of the human condition, over time? As they move on to their next “class”-adult life that follows graduation– is the moment that we cherish and then we start all over again.
We began the south journey back in 2002, scouting southern places of importance to teach a class about Deep South Social Stratification.
It was a long, lonely journey –no cameras, blogs, or anything else. Just two sociologists with a “sociological imagination” that Wake Forest University students would benefit from the Millisian perspective of “theory & practice” (C. Wright Mills).
Six years later we left from the Carswell Hall classrooms to travel to rural Stephens, Arkansas journeying to teach classes (4 in all) at Southern Arkansas University and work with the under resourced high school in Stephens, Arkansas.
If you fly into Little Rock it takes approximately 3 hours to drive rural back roads to Stephens.
What you see on the journey is nothing. What you do see, though, are abandoned cars, burned out homes, and a lot of house trailers. You also see the confederate flag.
For practicing sociologists there is no better laboratory of observation.
When you travel and teach in the Deep South as we have since 2002, and your “team” is comprised of a White and an African American professional sociologist, people want to talk with you.
So it was journeying to Stephens, Arkansas this week.
Where are you from? What are you doing? Where is Wake Forest University?
We have been doing this for about 6 years and used to it.
What we were not prepared for was Stephens, Arkansas.
Studying poverty and differential access sitting in classrooms at one of the Nation’s premier universities is one thing. Looking in the face of a Principal who knows that if another 40 or 50 students move away from his school district (because of the lack of employment and opportunities for their parents) then the school will be closed is something else altogether.
Telling the young women and men from Wake Forest that he checks enrollments daily, that he has to tell teachers they no longer have a job (because families leave the area because jobs have left he area and continue to leave), that his school is the biggest employer in a 25 mile radius, is something else again.
That Principal, Mr. Wendell Cohen, (a graduate of Southern Arkansas University) could also tell us that he has HOPE, brings a smile to the faces of Wake Forest students at the same time we sit in the school cafeteria looking at a menu of federally funded lunches (80% of the students at Stephens HS receives a federal lunch voucher), that looks similar to the lunch served in almost every school cafeteria in the late 1950s and 1960s - prior to the institutalization of food standards for school lunches.
Like a proud parent, it was in the classroom that we saw the Wake Students shine.
Class after class where we had the Wake students present with Southern Arkansas students and the high school students from Stephens, whom we brought to the University, we saw the modeling of EXCELLENCE.
Like proud parents we saw our students model, demonstrate their learning skills: the ability to take complex arguments and explain them at a comprehensible level for others and high school students. Truly amazing.
Yet, it all comes to an end. What have we accomplished?
First, some 300 plus people who attended the lecture now understand the deep dilemma of intercollegiate African American male student athletes who participate at the elite Division 1A level in two demanding sports: basketball and football. What they understand based on my lecture of a few days ago is that life chances comes at you and decisions have to be made. Most of these men will never play after college in the NFL or the NBA and most of the rest of their lives decisions are never captured on ESPN. They become the next batch of forgotten gladiators.
Moreso, we had an exceptional opportunity to work with 10 Wake Forest students, male and female, who are exceptional people.
Having given up their spring break to work with poor high school students is the mark of an exceptional person with not only big hearts but caring souls.
To leave Stephens knowing that with the individualized attention provided by our students maybe a few Stephens high school seniors will enroll in local colleges next fall, as opposed to hustling on the streets and heading to jail, and maybe, just maybe, one will attend college at the University of Arkansas, or even out of state, warms our hearts. What they taught our students and what our students taught them can never be undone.
To see so many young people with little hope smile, ask questions, laugh and know that our five days with them meant something as so many people in their lives could care less, means a lot to me as well.
Thanks for listening.
EARL SMITH
