A thought experiment. Imagine for a moment what would happen if Iowa Citians read the following in the Daily Iowan:
While many community members expressed they wanted the day off to celebrate and honor [Thanksgiving], [the board president] said she is not confident that all students and their families celebrate the holiday. She noted that some students’ parents have to work, therefore the children might be left unattended during the holiday.
For the currently scheduled school day, the district has planned a plethora of activities to encourage recognition for [Thanksgiving] among students such as assemblies and service-opportunity fairs during [the holiday].
Because these events have already been scheduled, the board worried that moving them would cause issues.
The main issue board members found was finding a day to hold school if classes were canceled on the holiday. Board members had concerns about cutting into graduation and ensuring Carver Hawkeye Arena could hold the ceremony if the time were to change.
I’ve chosen Thanksgiving advisedly in repurposing this Dec. 11, 2013 news story on the Iowa City schools’ decision to hold classes on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I am a Canadian immigrant, and hold dual citizenship. We moved to the United States in 1959, as the civil rights movement was beginning to seep into the consciousness of mainstream white America. As a five-year-old, I noticed Houston’s segregation long before I realized that people in the United States celebrate Thanksgiving a month later than people in Canada do. My first political act, when I was nine, was to write a letter to President Kennedy asking him why racism was so strong in the United States.
To someone my age, the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. has to do with the courage and suffering of black America over hundreds of years, from slavery to Reconstruction to the Great Migration to the Civil Rights era to the first African American presidency. His day acknowledges and honors African Americans who, from the start, stood up and said, “We are people and we demand our rightful place.” It honors Americans of all races who worked and sweated and shed blood to make things a little more just.
When the MLK federal holiday was first proposed in 1979, I was ambivalent about it, since while he was alive, the US federal government tapped his phones, slandered his name and opposed his efforts, not only with respect to civil rights but also with respect to economic justice and the war in Vietnam. The notion that the government of the United States led by a white conservative president (by 1983, when it was signed into law) would honor someone that a white conservative had assassinated a decade before seemed obscene to me.
But then the opponents of the MLK Day came out of the woodwork. Jesse Helms filibustered the bill, having earlier articulated the segregationist party line, “Dr. King’s outfit … is heavily laden at the top with leaders of proven records of communism, socialism and sex perversion, as well as other curious behavior.” The vile language around King and the movement he came to signify convinced me that the day was important, not because of the imperfect man it honored, or the sanitized secular saint he’s been turned into, but because the United States can be a better place than his enemies imagine or desire.
The Iowa City Community School District would never schedule class for Thanksgiving. It would be—literally—unthinkable. But it’s a completely artificial holiday, on a date pulled out of our collective ear, that obscures what actually happened between Europeans and Native Americans during the colonial period and after.
Not everybody celebrates Christmas. No school board president would ever mention that in describing how the board chooses its holidays. Many people work on Labor Day. The schools don’t seem to think of that as a reason to hold class and teach about the labor movement.
Children are not stupid. They can see that, to the ICCSD, that is, to us, the adults of Iowa City, Martin Luther King, Jr. and all he stands for are not as important as Christmas or Thanksgiving or Labor Day, or even the University of Iowa’s spring break.
That’s infuriating. It shouldn’t happen.
Yes, I just emailed the below to Mr. Murley and the ICCSD Board Directors over “lunch”. I feel better, and it damn well took more than 3 minutes to write
Good Morning Dictator, um, oops, I mean, Mr. Murley and ICCSD Board Directors, oops, I mean, Monarchy:
Backlash Blues: A Tribute to Nina Simone
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAQh5MB8BpY
“Mr. Murley”, I suppose you’ll be happily “working” away in the school district smiling with those big white teeth and that shiny suit for pictures with as many people of color as possible on what is, in my opinion, one of the most RELEVANT U.S. Holidays on the calendar which you have decided school cannot be rescheduled for because not budging an inch of your and your staff’s authority is more important than the public’s blood paid right to recognize the holiday that honors Civil Rights not all that recently gained in this country, and the Man who paid the ultimate price towards achieving dramatic nation-wide change. I disagree with YOUR choice. My son will not be attending school that day unless I am able to go with him to the presentation of our choice as a family. That is my intention. I don’t know if a petition needs to happen, although it would be a formal way to let the school district know first, so they are not concerned about his safety, that no, my child will not attend school formally on Monday. NO, WE WILL NOT BE FORCED BY YOU TO HAVE TO CALL IN THAT DAY TO ASK THE OFFICE FOR OUR RIGHT TO HONOR THE NATIONAL CIVIL RIGHTS HOLIDAY. How can you and the board NOT see that by having to call in that day, try as you may to spin it otherwise, is to MAKE families ASK the school district for their Civil Rights recognition?
Why should I have to ask the school district for the honor of teaching my son about civil rights this Monday? I certainly don’t stop them from doing it better the rest of the school year (yes, even more often than just Black History Month). Do I ask the school district to tell my child and our family how to celebrate the 4th of July (deity of one’s choice forbid I had to be First Nations and explain that to my child)? NO. Do I ask the school district to tell my child and our family how to celebrate Thanksgiving (again, deity of one’s choice forbid I had to be First Nations and explain that to my child)? NO! Do I ask the school district to tell my child and our family how to celebrate ANYTHING OF ANY DEEP EMOTIONAL IMPORTANCE (since the majority of our school holidays honor WASP valued/centered celebrations). NO, I teach my child about disparity and try to help him understand how people he is not exactly like might feel differently about things and why EVERY DAY. So, NO TO YOU ON THAT TOO!!! YOU DAMN WELL KNOW THAT, I EXPLAIN ALL OF THE ABOVE TO MY CHILD VERY CAREFULLY SO HE MAY BE AWARE OF, AND HOPEFULLY SOCIALLY CONSCIOUS ENOUGH, TO REALIZE THAT HIS LORDSHIP, THE SUPERINTENDENT, AND THE BOARD’S ACTIONS ON THIS ISSUE DIRECTLY REFLECT THE KIND OF DISPARITY THAT NEXT MONDAY IS SET ASIDE TO RECOGNIZE because YOU all didn’t have the courage to do the RIGHT thing on this issue.
Every explanation/justification for this from you and the board members falls flat and is incredibly insulting. So then, please invest the 9ish minutes the above important documentary lasts, to try to understand what you can’t teach and why, particularly as descendents of the same national public school system of Brown vs. Board of Education. This song is what I’ll be listening to on the way to the board meeting tonight…oh what I wouldn’t give to hear Nina Simone rub your noses in this pile.
Mr. Murley, I and many others clearly heard your carefully spun, pre-scripted statement at the last meeting AS that the State Department of Education’s answer that there was not currently a protocol in place to change the certified calendar. It didn’t by ANY MEANS CLARIFY WHETHER OR NOT IT COULD BE DONE, PARTICULARLY SINCE IT DIDN’T STOP THE DES MOINES SCHOOL DISTRICT FROM DOING IT LAST YEAR WITH NO SUBSEQUENT SKYFALL!!! STFW, there isn’t a process in place already, CAN YOU THINK OF A BETTER TIME TO FIGURE ONE OUT…ESPECIALLY WHEN OUR STATE CAPITOL’S SCHOOL DISTRICT DID IT LAST YEAR, MAKING THE RIGHT CHOICE UNLIKE THE ICCSD? Really, Mr. Murley, is this something, when there is such excellent precedent only one year ago, that you COULD NOT HAVE DONE. Seriously, I will be listening to this song in my car tonight. I hope I have managed to sufficiently burden you to understand the shame I feel about the choice you’ve made for all of us. If you think it’s over just because you stuck to your stubborn, irrational choice, you underestimate the detriment to future success of your leadership here, particularly on gaining community buy-in for bonding, that not having sufficient understanding of the community you serve will cause you. I hope you become sufficiently sensitized to the price of your redundant tragic flaw, of not valuing the diverse feelings of the people you serve enough to gather public sentiment, and ACTUALLY heed any of it, on this one in particular is sufficient to “Leave you with the Blues.” You have only further demonstrated how little you understand the community that borders your $250,000+ house and therefore, as usual, only further alienated more of the working, living wage (if that lucky), public from any hope that you’ll be doing any better in the future.
God I hope they didn’t actually take the time to read the letter allegedly written by Julie Van Dyke.
This article is stupid, you are taking exception to the wrong thing – you think having the day off for MLK day means the students care more about him or it one way or the other? They just want a day off – there is no ‘special message’ being sent to the students if they choose to hold classes that day.
As far as labor day goes, schools weren’t even open for the new year in September when I was a kid, so labor day and school had no crossover.
Your statement that ‘not everybody celebrates Christmas’ is lame, at best. Just really stupid. It’s true that not everybody ‘celebrates Christmas’ but most businesses are closed, banks are closed, schools are usually closed that ENTIRE WEEK for winter break – so are daycare centers – and it has been that way and will stay that way – the clear MAJORITY of Americans celebrate Christmas, and as far as MLK day goes, are you telling me that people ‘celebrate’ MLK day? okay. Well, people don’t celebrate Labor day, they just get the day off. Most people don’t even know what it represents.
Hey, you felt secure enough to target CHRISTMAS but decided to dodge a ‘real’ bullet and not bring up MEMORIAL day, huh? You got some nerve.
Yeah, so they put his holiday where Washington’s birthday used to be, because he was SO much more important than George Washington.
Whatever. Get a life.
This is ridiculous. Ms. VanDyke’s comments read like a sixteen year-old’s blog post. One really needn’t go any further than the observation that sheclaims to be objecting to a lack of respect for a civil rights leader, but opens her comments with a decidedly uncivil tone. If you are particularly board, or are in need of some aggravation then read her entire letter which outlines a white woman’s OUTRAGE over the lack of similarity in her understanding of what it means to be black in America, and the boards decision to hold classes on MLK day. Of course their were stated logical reasons, and rather than a normal curriculum they would spend the day learning about MLK and his place in American History. Kinda valuable since…you’re in Iowa and maybe could benefit from something like that. Particularly since the dynamics of Iowa City have changed so much in the last 10 to 20 years. How quickly vehicles of love are willing to assume that everyone else is a vehicle of hate, or at least of disrespect. That seems to me to be the EXACT opposite stance that MLK took in his lifetime, and a really unthoughtful response to people who I think deserve some congratulations for an creatively spending energy in a thoughtful and engaging way.
Informative comments ! Just to add my thoughts , others need to fill out a SSA-821-BK , my kids encountered a sample document here
https://goo.gl/xTqD6L.