The Return of Community History? Hope and Inspiration at C.A.S.A Middle School in the Bronx
Today, i paid a visit to a small middle school in the Bronx headed by a visionary principal named Jamaal Bowman, who I have been communicating with via Facebook for the last year. The school, called Cornerstone Academy for Social Action ( aka C.A.S.A Middle School) is in a part of the Northeast Bronx i know well. It adjoins a small public housing complex called Boston Secor, which is the place of residence of a great Bronx DJ,. Danny Beat Mann Martinez and of Leroi Archible, a long time Bronx polltical activist, veterans leaders and youth sports organizer, who was a Community Researcher for the Bronx African American History Project .
I knew i was going to have great conversations with Jamaal Bowman, but what i saw impressed me as much as what i heard. The first thing i noticed was the way the students carried themselves. It is no secret that middle school students are the most difficult age to work with and are a challenge to the most gifted administrators, but the young people who entered the auditorium at the beginning of school were different than what i expected. They were shockingly well behaved, yet without the aura of intimidation you see in "zero tolerance" school settings. They looked - dare I say- relaxed to be at the school, an attitude helped by the fact that there were no metal detectors, no police and no hovering presence of security guards
The second thing i noticed what was on the screen in the auditorium, where the students assembled, which was a quote from Afrika Bambatta about the positive values of hip hop culture- "Peace, Unity and Having Fun." I shook my head in amazement. Not only was the school promoting hip hop as an integral part of community history, it was actually promoting "having fun" as a positive value, something very unusual in the era of high stakes testing
When Principal Bowman took me up to the fourth floor, where the school's classrooms were located ( the school shared the building with an elementary school and district 75 school with a high needs population) i realized that what I saw on the screen was not an apparatition! The spotlessly clean hallways and newly painted walls were covered with murals celebrating figures in African American and Latino history ranging from Malcolm X and Martin Luther King J to Sonia Sotomayor and Fanny Lou Hamer. Alongside the
