130 Years of Sumner High School (St. Louis)

As a counter to the post on the anti-lynching resolution, I thought I'd mention a more positive historical story, that of Sumner High School in St. Louis, Missouri.

This year, Sumner turns 130 years old, making it the oldest public high school for Black students west of the Mississippi River.

Sumner was founded in 1875 as the "High School for Colored Students" during the Reconstruction era (which Rutherford Hayes would end a year later in his successful ploy for the Presidency), and was named after the then just-deceased Massachusetts abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner, whose personal dedication to the freedom and equality of African-Americans was exemplary. In 1848, he helped to found the Free Soil Party, some of whose adherents later went on to establish the anti-slavery Republican Party.

In 1849 he legally challenged the segregation of schools in Boston. In 1856, he was caned to unconsciousness on the floor of the Senate by Southern pro-slavery Congressman Preston Brooks after insulting Brook's uncle in an attack on the slavery partisans in Kansas; because of his injuries, Sumner could not attend to his Senate duties for three years. During the early days of the Civil War, he was one of the first to push for the enlistment of Black soldiers, and strongly supported Union General John C.

Frémont, later Senator from California, who unilaterally freed the slaves in Missouri in 1861 without federal authorization. Later he pushed through the Civil Rights bill of 1866 and the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, all of which had a dramatic effect on the participation, at least for a brief moment, of African Americans in American public and civil life. Sumner also led the impeachment proceedings against Southerner Andrew Johnson, and during Ulysses S.

Grant's first term fell out with the Union War hero over what Sumner perceived to be his insufficient attention to the cause of Black liberty. Sumner died of a heart attack in 1874.

In sum, then, an appropriate person after whom to name the first public school for Black students.

I should also note that ex-slave John Barry Meachum established the first St. Louis school for Black children in 1827, yet was forced to close it shortly thereafter. In 1847 Missouri outright banned the education of Blacks on its soil, fearing that intellectually armed they might revolt, so Meachum ingeniously started a school on a riverboat shortly thereafter.

Also, William Greenleaf Eliot, the founder of Washington University in St. Louis and grandfather of the poet T. S.

Eliot, co-founded a school to educated free and escaped Blacks at the height of the Civil War, in 1863; two days after it was opened it mysteriously burned down, though it continued at different sites for several years. Finally, Hiram Rhoades Revels, who became the first Black member of the United States Senate in 1870, from the state of Mississippi no less, also established schools for Black children. Revels, who had earlier been a principal of a school for Black children in Baltimore, started his St.

Louis school around the start of the Civil War, and it also was located on a boat. I should also add that last fall I actually met Revels's grand-daughter, now an octogenarian; she lives in Chicago and is one of the premier collectors of African-American art in that city.)

I didn't attend Sumner (my own turns 50 years old this fall), but my parents, one of my grandfathers and both of my grandmothers did, one of my godmothers and one of my godfathers, many of my aunts, uncles and cousins did, as did the majority of Black teenagers through the period of integration of St.

Louis's schools, which began in the late 1950s and continued well into my own high school years, in the 1980s. St. Louis's public (and private, for that matter) schools were racially segregated, as were most of its facilities and institutions; as the (once) chief city in a former slave state, it applied Jim Crow laws with a vengeance.

(Actually, Blacks still were expected to get their food through the back doors of some restaurants as late as the mid-1960s, though "colored" drinking fountains and required back-of-the-bus seating were no longer officially in effect. )

Originally Sumner was located at 11th and Spruce Streets downtown, but after parents protested that the students were required to walk past the gallows and morgue, officials moved the school in the 1880s, and then in 1910, after parents again petitioned the school district, Sumner moved to its final site, 4248 Cottage Avenue, in the historic neighborhood, with the building designed by famous educational architect .

Sumner remained St.

Louis City's only Black public high school until 1927, when Vashon High School was founded. (Vashon was named for (1824-1878), an abolitionist and jurist who was the first Black person to graduate from Oberlin College and later became the first African-American lawyer in New York State in 1847 and the first Black person to run for statewide office in New York in 1855; and his John B. Vashon (1859-1924), a noted Black schoolteacher, lawyer and linguist who taught in the St.

Louis Public schools for 34 years.) St. Louis's lone suburban Black high school for many years, (Frederick) Douglass High School, was established in 1892 in Webster Groves (home also to writer Jonathan Franzen), just up a hill from where I grew up.

Among Sumner's most famous are Arthur Ashe, Chuck Berry, Grace Bumbry, Hon. William Clay, (of the Fifth Dimension--group members Ron Townson and Lamonte McLemore were also from St. Louis), Dick Gregory (who graduated around the time of my mother and whose brother was her classmate), Robert Guillaume, Elston Howard (Yankee great), Robert McFerrin (the opera singer and father of Bobby "Don't Worry, Be Happy"), and Tina Turner (who was there when my uncle James was in school).

(I think I heard that Congresswoman Maxine Waters also attended Sumner, but I'm not sure.)

In addition to a reunion in February and a black-tie fundraiser this upcoming Saturday, a core group of Sumner alumni have envisioned a mentoring program to reach its current faculty and students, whose socioeconomic profiles and educational backgrounds differ considerably from students during the school's mid-20th century heyday, when Sumner drew from all sectors of St. Louis's Black community.

The alumni's involvement can help to ensure that despite the changed conditions, Sumner remains a vital institution and continues to play a vital role in the African-American communities of St. Louis and the nation. I hope the effort takes flight, not only at Sumner but at other similar institutions across the country, and to Sumner High School, I wish it 130+ more years of remarkable service!

"I think it [hip-hop] did save my life. It made me look outside of where I was.

When I was living in the estate, I used to think the reason other kids thought I was shit was because I was not like them, and that I'd have to go out and aspire to be like them. Either I could spend my life trying to fit in with them and make them like me or find something else that was my own. At the time, hip-hop was just taking off and it was through the underground and I was hearing it.

The only person I was getting it through was this guy who lived on one side of my flat; my radio had been burgled by people who were beating me up on the other side! So there was a 14-year-old boy on this side and a 19-year-old boy on the other side and I was like 11 or 12, I could barely speak English. People started giving us stuff for our flat-- we'd just got it-- and so we had a video and a telly and I always slept with the radio on.

I was listening to Paula Abdul, that's all I was listening to-- mainstream radio. And I'd be like, "Man, this is what the kids at school are listening to--Madonna and Bananarama and stuff."
--M.

I.A. (DJ and musicmaker Maya Arulpragasam, in an )

Anxiety of Unarrived Books + Congrats to Tasha! The anxiety of unarrived books! But what do I really mean?

The books' anxiety, which is personification and therefore projection, or mine, as I await their appearance on my doorstep in New Jersey, after a week's (or less) journey from a UPS store in Chicago? Clothes, toiletries, etc., I never worry about; in fact, after having to switch my ticket at the last minute on Monday, which led me to be subjected to an IML-style pat-and-poke down (by a very thorough but polite TSA rep at O'Hare who slightly favored Ving Rhames), I momentarily worried about my four pieces of checked luggage (which included an elaborately taped iMac box that I'd filled with clothes and desert boots) being ripped open and half my summer clothes ending up in some underground quarantine room, but then thought, I do have some clothes in New Jersey, and my partner has great taste and I can always wear his clothes, so.

..but those books, a number of which are university library volumes!

Please let them get here, and in as close shape as possible to how they were when I shipped them!

My worst experience with shipping books occurred once during a trip to Europe. Whenever I travel, I inveterately start acquiring books.

I can't help myself. I love books, I always have, I like holding them, reading them, putting them on the shelves, pulling them off, stacking them--I love the sheer materiality of books, as well as what's in them. And if they're by unknown or Black or LGBT or other authors who fall outside the mainstream traditions in the societies I'm visiting, so much the better.

On one trip, my partner and I got very affordable tickets to Brussels (a city that is worth seeing, with some of the most delicious food I've ever eaten), and so we decided we once again try the European train system, which ought to be a model for the US, except that it receives extensive government subsidies so it'll never have a chance here. The previous time we'd traveled cross-country by train over there, we went south from France to Spain (Barcelona, well before the Olympics, and people stared at us in the street, and Madrid, where we met beautiful Egyptians we mistook for Puerto Ricans) and Portugal (where I was shooed out of a restaurant until I challenged the waiter in English, at which point he immediately backtracked and invited me to stay; this is the only overtly racial incident I've ever experienced outside the US); this time we decided to do a loop through Paris, on to Amsterdam, and then return to Brussels.

At each stop I bought books.

In Brussels, I picked out one novel whose cover stood out, and 2 or 3 that a bookseller suggested were new or different Belgian literary works (in French, not Flemish); in Paris, I snapped up a number of tomes, from works I'd wanted for a long time (a novel by Martinican Edouard Glissant, collections of poems by Michel Deguy, Anne-Marie Albiach and Dominique Hocquard) to relatively recent LGBT literature (Erik Remès, Rachid O., etc.) at several bookstores in the Marais (including les Mots à la Bouche, which I've previously blurbed in an earlier blog entry); in Amsterdam I found a wonderful poetry store (the name escapes me) along one of the canals, and bought books by the young Moroccan Dutch poet Mustafa Stitou, whom I'd never heard of and the Netherlands Antillean writer Astrid Roemer, whose work I knew only from brief translations.

I was so excited by this cache, which I had already begun cataloguing that it was only as we were getting ready to leave Amsterdam that I realized it was too large to carry back with us. I've stuffed my bags full of books before, but this was pushing it. So I made a logical decision to mail them back to the US.

I took them to the post office, purchased a box which the attendant meticulously taped up, attaching my clearly penned mailing label right in front of me, then I headed back to the hotel, never once thinking that anything bad might happen to that box.

Something bad, however, did happen to that box. That box arrived in Jersey City, but encased in a plastic sheath with an apologetic pre-printed message from the US Postal Service.

I've seen both the sorry wrap and the message before, and my blood pressure rose. Inside the body-bag, my box was badly smashed up, half-torn open, crumpled. One of its flaps was missing completely.

It looked as though it had been kicked across ten Dutch soccer fields by several grade school teams, dropped from an airplane into the Grand Canyon, fished out, then shot by rocket against every wall along the Eastern seabord. It wasn't a box anymore; it was a deconstructionist's or minimalist's idea of a box. And not a talented or inventive one's.

Naturally and worst of all, many of the books were no longer in it. In fact, most of the books were no longer in it. Most of the French books, and the Belgian books in French, and the Roemer book.

..only 3 remained, and of those, only the Stitou book hadn't also been mangled.

Remarkably. The other two were in bad shape. The spine of the Deguy book was broken.

I was so disappointed...

and enraged. Shit happens, I know. But what shit had happened in this case?

Who or what had done this to this box? And where were all those books? I assumed that postal inspectors had assumed it was filled with bricks of hashish (which is legal in the Netherlands and which I imagine some visitors to that country may believe can be mailed without incident back to their home countries), or an automated machine process had gone very, very awry, or it'd been unfortunately perched on a mountain of boxes being loaded onto an airplane, whereupon it fell off, onto the tarmac, and another's plane's wheel or wheels could not break its/their fate with the rectangular, heavily taped, cardboard object lying before it/them.

...

On top of this, the disappearance of almost all the French-language books (this was well before the widespread US hatred of France because of its vocal anti-Iraq War stance) made me wonder...

.

Now I've had mail "accidents," mail nightmares, mail horrors before. In fact, every time I return to Chicago in the fall to teach, I realize how great the learning curve is for our postal service in terms of its "temporary" forwarding option.

As a kindly postal worker told me just this past week, sometimes there are "situations," so I should be extra-vigilant in taking my mail's destiny in my own hands (notes to the postmaster, forms, you name it). I've had letters ripped open, "accidentally," gnarled, scrunched into two-dimensional bellows. Reggie H.

sent me a musical flier that a gremlin or gremlinesque machine gnawed into one diagonal strip that I took to be a kind of appetizer--this is just a taste, so bring your ass down to Baltimore and hear the music live. But I'd never had a mail experience quite like this one. I contacted the US Post Office, using the claim number that was attached to that bizarre, clear sleeve.

Of course they were no help. They directed me in all directions, I spoke to a postmaster (or assistant postmaster, I can't remember), blah blah blah, they were so sorry, Johnny, but they didn't know where the books might be, etc. Et cetera.

That about sums it up. I never saw the books again. And as I've posted before, one of the publishers ceased publishing one entire, important line I'd sampled a few volumes from, so that was that.

Nevermore.

So I await the books from Chicago with some trepidation. The brotha who owns the UP Store from which I shipped them assured me that DHL, the carrier I used this time, isn't a problem (and I once worked in an office that only used DHL, with no problems I can ever recall or was blamed for), unlike UPS, which "lost" one of my boxes at a transit point in rural Illinois last fall--they still can't account for what happened, it simply separated itself from the others--though I finally did get it shipped to me, a bit battered but containing all its expected contents.

But then the Dutch postal worker had also assured me my box of books--far smaller, far better wrapped--would reach my US address, as it was, without fail. I have faith in the brotha, but still..

..

*****

I want to give a special shout out to Tasha Hawthorne, an excellent graduate student I had the pleasure of reading late 19th and 20th century American and European poetry closely with this past winter and spring, who passed her Ph.

D. orals today! I knew she would, because she's brilliant!

CONGRATULATIONS, Tasha!

A little of this, a little of that.

We'll have a real viewing--i.e., theater in the oldest sense--with the gods and orisas, the muses, and the ancestors all working their magic!

A writer and artist who professes, a lover of books and all the arts, I thought I'd try out some fragments of thinking here. Join in as you will.