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Marchers Told: Get On The Ball

Marchers Told: Get On The Ball image
Parent Issue
Day
17
Month
January
Year
1995
Copyright
Copyright Protected
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Donated by the Ann Arbor News. © The Ann Arbor News.
OCR Text

MARCH IN MEMORY

Marchers told: Get on the ball

■ Education is the key to maintaining the dream, principal tells assemblage.

By Jo Collins Mathis News Staff Reporter

► Benjamin Hooks, Shirley Chisolm speak, C3

Before he spoke to those gathered at Brown Chapel to honor the memory of Martin Luther King Jr., Joseph Dulin told a joke.

There was a very bad golfer who took two swings at a ball, hitting only dirt and grass both times. As he prepared to strike a third time, one ant beneath his feet said to another ant: “If we want to survive, I think we better get on the ball.”

Dulin, principal of Roberto Clemente Development Center in Ann Arbor, believes the African-American community needs to do the same.

“If we wish to survive into the 21st Century, we have to get on the ball, too,” Dulin told the crowd, which responded with one “Amen!” after another.

Most of those packed into Brown Chapel on Monday had marched there from downtown Ypsilanti, carrying signs that read “Keep the Dream Alive!” and singing, “We Shall Overcome.”

Sponsored by the Washtenaw County Ministers’ Alliance, the sixth annual march and memorial program was the largest yet. The spirited, two-hour program included prayer, scripture reading and musical numbers reflecting the message of King.

“I think it’s important for us to keep these issues on the front burner,” said Janis Williams of Ypsilanti, who took a personal day off from her job with the Ann Arbor Public Schools to attend the march and program. “We have to realize that we have not yet realized the dream - even in 1995.”

Dulin said that although there have been many positive changes since King’s death, the community must not lose sight of King’s dream.

And that starts with education, he said.

“Education is essential to our future, and it hasn’t kept up with social changes,” said Dulin. “Lack of education is the biggest contributing stumbling block to our success. No education, no job. No job, no money. No money, no happiness."

Insisting that “ignorance tends to breed ignorance,” he said that too often the uneducated have children, and soon it’s “mommy, dumb; daddy, dumb; whole family dumb.” He contrasted black youths who are wasting the chance to become educated with the slaves who risked their lives to teach other slaves by candlelight to read and write. “I believe the missing ingredient is the willingness to risk,” he said. “Change and growth can take place only when one is willing to risk. Only the person who risks is truly free.”

He challenged the crowd to become actively involved in children’s lives, and to let them know they have choices in their lives, to set goals, and to understand that there are consequences to one’s behavior.

“Show them they have choices,” he said. “They can select happiness over sorrow, action over apathy, growth over stagnation and knowledge over ignorance ... To save our children is to save ourselves.”

The entire community - parents, teachers, ministers, friends, and neighbors - must take part in child-rearing, he said.

“This may be the first time in the history of this nation that this generation may not surpass, or equal, or even approach that of their parents,” he said.

Dulin said crack cocaine has been another plague on the black community, and explained that because crack is so accessible and addictive, people have sold everything to chase that “elusive high.”

Citing statistics that blacks are over-represented in prisons, poverty, school suspensions, and families headed by single mothers, Dulin stressed that changes must be made. The high rate of unwed pregnancy in the black community “essentially guarantees poverty from the womb to the tomb,” he said.

“We’re in trouble. We’re in serious trouble,” he said. “We must get ourselves together.”

Dulin ended his speech with another joke: A lion asked both a tiger and a leopard who was the mightiest animal in the jungle. “You are!” they both assured the lion, who roared with approval.

But when he asked an elephant the same question, the elephant threw the lion in the air and slammed him against a tree. The battered lion looked up from the ground and said: “Just because you don’t know the answer, you don’t have to get mad."

Said Dulin: “I think it’s appropriate to look at ourselves and ask: Are we getting mad?”