From: www.xxlmag.com

I encounter beautiful black children in my travels. Their coconut brown, amber, almond, yellow and vanilla faces often stay in my memory, and my prayers are with them. I pray for them because I know the dark future they may encounter if they are not properly prepared.

Preparation through education is the key that will unlock boundless opportunity for them, yet they live at a time and in places where education has become a broken relic, a ruin of black people’s past glory. Public schools are named for relics, great African-American educators and emancipators like Frederick Douglass, Benjamin E. Mays, Martin Luther King Jr. and others. The buildings named for them have become holding cells that detain our children for four years or so and release them unprepared and ill advised to prosper in the real world. Truthfully public schools are barely giving them the most basic of coping skills: reading, writing and arithmetic.

We all know the problems. We all know the cities that host the problem of under educating our young: Atlanta, Little Rock, Detroit, D.C., Newark and the list continues to grow. I want to talk about solutions.

African-American children are in dire need of intervention. The schools must be fixed or closed. When Dead Prez rapped “Fuck They Schools,” we all should have listened.

Neal Boortz and Sean Hannity advised their W.A.S.P. listeners to pull their kids from public schools. They know the American public school system has become the feeder program to welfare and prison. The proof is in the pudding − where education fails, crime prospers and gangs prevail.