Last week we talked to Self Enhancement Inc. founder and
CEO Tony Hopson about Jefferson High's revitalized basketball
program. Hopson co-captained Jefferson's last championship
team, in 1972, and was a prime mover behind the success
of this year's team.
Jefferson's success on the court comes at a time when the
school is struggling academically. Ironically, in Hopson's
view, the dominance of that '72 team is linked to the school's
current problems. The threat of Jefferson's continued athletic
superiority, he says, played a part in Portland Public Schools'
desegregation program, which began in the '70s.
While not everybody would agree with Hopson, most observers
concede that more than two decades after desegragation began
in Portland, the academic achievement gap between white
and minority students remains one the district's most intractable
problems.
Today, Hopson wears many hats in the community. At SEI,
he runs one of the city's largest youth programs, serving
nearly 1,000 at-risk kids annually. Along with 30 other
high-profile civic leaders, he's a member of the schools'
core strategic planning team and carries a lot of weight
with school-board members and superintendent Ben Canada.
But Hopson is not an establishment guy, and neither has
he forgotten the lessons of past civil-rights battles, where
standing on tables and shutting down school-board meetings
was the only way to make progress. As a co-head of the Education
Crisis Team, Hopson is leading an increasingly critical
group of minority activists who are demanding greater accountability
from the schools.
Willamette Week: Did desegregation strip-mine
Jefferson?
Tony Hopson: Yeah, it did. I think it probably started
when they built Jackson High School [now Jackson Middle
School]. By choice, there were quite a few African-American
kids who just decided to go out there and be a part of the
brand-new school. And when Jackson closed, those kids moved
on to Wilson. It started with athletics, but it grew into
just kids in general leaving Jefferson, because, you know,
we'd like to think this was not the case, but the most popular
kids garner the respect of other kids. Then, you began to
hear the negative things about Jefferson. And most often,
it really wasn't about Jefferson, it was about what was
happening in the community. But you began to get folks who
became fearful of going to school at Jefferson and [parents]
feeling like, academically, "my kids can't get educated
at Jefferson." So you got all of those things, you put all
that together and no one wants to go to Jefferson anymore.
So how do you turn that around?
I think you take the process and you throw it in reverse.
That's why I think athletics is the place to start, because
that's how it started with kids leaving, that's how it can
start with them coming back. You make kids understand that
you come to Jefferson and be a part of something much larger
than if you went to another school. The idea is to get the
folks in this community to see Jefferson as a place that
they want to be, not a place that they want to run from.
Has the integration process served Jefferson and the
community around the school?
No, it hasn't, and I think that's obvious. I need to distinguish
between the two words, because to me they're different.
Portland had a desegregation program, not an integration
program. See, integration to me gives me the choice. Desegregation
means that you're going to forcibly desegregate me, you're
going to forcibly make me go do something. Any time you
tell a community that racial concentration is a bad thing--how
do you say to a group of black folks in a school that racial
concentration for you is bad, but then all the other schools
are predominantly white, and that's good?
So, are magnet schools such as Jefferson a bad idea?
The concept is good, but what happened at Jefferson is
it was all done through dance, and it worked in terms of
getting a large number of white kids to come to Jefferson,
but they chose dance, and they did it in a way (ballet and
point) that many of the black students at Jefferson couldn't
compete. Very few black kids made it into the Jefferson
Dancers. It was always 80 percent white. I mean, black folks
can't dance? If they can't do anything else, we know they
can dance. If you're going to build up a school, you have
to build it up from within. You can't save a school by busing
anybody in from outside, because they can always go home.
A couple of the leaders of the crisis team, Ron Herndon
and A. Halim Rahsaan, were the same guys who led the desegregation
movement 20 years ago. Is that an accurate
perception that the generations of 20-somethings and 30-somethings
aren't taking a leadership position?
I think that's true, but I would blame it more on those
of us who are in a leadership position not doing what we
need to do to identify and mentor that next group. People
don't just show up. You identify some folks who have potential,
and you begin to bring them. I think that the younger generation
is not without leadership, but it is without visible leadership.
That is a huge problem when you only have a few folks that
are viewed as the leadership, and not that we necessarily
are, but from the outside looking in, that's what people
think. So we always get phone calls and find ourselves having
to speak on behalf of a community when we really can't.
I mean, I can only speak for Tony, and I can speak on behalf
of Self Enhancement Inc., but I cannot speak for the Northeast
community, nor can I speak for Jefferson High School.
Is part of the issue that a lot of talented African
Americans choose
to leave town?
Well, you can't live in Portland and truly understand what
it means to be an African American. There's just not enough
African-American culture here. We don't have black clubs
here. You can't go to a show, you can't go to restaurants,
you can't go anywhere here and be the majority. There are
some people who seek that out, who want that to be a part
of their lives, and if you want that to be a part of your
life, you have to move out of Oregon to find it. So there
are a lot of reasons, in my opinion, for folks not wanting
to stay here. The flipside of that is that there's still
a lot that can be done here--a lot of things that have happened
in other cities have yet to happen here. So it certainly
has its positive aspects.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Willamette Week | originally
published April 5,
2000
|
