Let's Remember Mary C. Snow: An Open Letter to The Charleston Gazette

 Photo is from a screenshot of  WCHS television's video.

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Thomas Carlyle is reputed to have written, "Histories are a kind of distilled newspapers."

As a lover of your newspaper, that's why I was disappointed today when I checked your archives and couldn't read more about Mary C. Snow, an educator in Kanawha County, West Virginia Schools for more than fifty years and the first African-American principal in the area. By contrast, WCHS television still has a January  video online. Perhaps that's because Wes Armstead, now Managing Editor at the station remembers Snow as one of his teachers.

Mary Snow passed away in January at the age of 97.  Now, as you report, many in the community have asked that West Side Elementary School be renamed in her honor as a remembrance of her dedication to the community's children. And yet, reading the virulent comments on the articles, I'm wondering how many folks know in any depth about the accomplishments of Ms. Snow and her importance in the history of Charleston and of West Virginia.

As the December 19 editorial in The Daily Mail noted of the School Board's 3-2 not to rename the school,

It's a crying shame, and a missed opportunity to teach history.

Snow, who died in January at age 97, was a shining example of the power of public education.

The school should have been named for her - not so much because it would properly have honored her, but because it would have extended her teaching career.

Nothing would have pleased her more.

Born in 1913, the oldest of seven children in a poor family, Snow lost her father to violence when she was 13. Her mother took in laundry to support her children.

But Mary C. Snow overcame poverty and racism to graduate from West Virginia State College and earn a master's degree from the University of Cincinnati.

She went on to serve as a teacher, principal and inspiration on the West Side for more than five decades.

Like West Side educator Isom Cabell before her, she changed history.Snow's story resonates as strongly today as it did when her generation was in elementary school.

As my friend filmmaker Jordan Freeman noted on facebook, "It's very representative of WV government's disrespect of its own citizens that the school board won't name the school after a well-respected community teacher, a small thing in the scheme of things, but a very clear example of unresponsive state government."

Community leaders including Reverend Watts are circulating a petition that already had 500 signatures as of December 15, according to your paper.

Jordan is planning a petition on Change.org (the same site that Molly Katchpole used to used to persuade Bank of America to cancel its $5 debit card fees. Jason explains, "They've been doing great on-the-ground organizing to get this name change, as the tip of the iceberg about basic community respect. An online petition will hopefully help further that effort." (I'll include a link when the petition is online.)

The Gazette has special reports which open its archives on scoundrels such as bank robber Roy Plummer and disgraced politician Jerry Mezzatesta. Also on some of the scourges that let outsides stereotype WV and Appalachia, in general, as benighted: drug overdoses, mining disasters, mountaintop removal. How about a special report on one of its outstanding assets, Mary C. Snow?  A good place to start might be the articles on the current controversy, as well as your obituary and the February 16, 1996 interview and the March 24, 1996 story on Ms. Snow's role in the origins of unity day.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is reputed to have said, "Sin writes histories, goodness is silent." Please don't prove him right.

Are schools following CIA's lead in destroying evidence?

Cartoon from 12/12/07 by John Darkow (email) , cartoonist for the Columbia (MO) Daily Tribune (archive.)

Patricia Wen's (email) Boston Globe article,"Report says shock tapes destroyed against order," caught my eye today. She writes about Judge Rotenberg Educational Center group home in Stoughton, where a video tape recorded staff administering 77 shocks, the to one emotionally disturbed teenager and 29 to another, with one of the students being placed in four-point restraints, limiting mobility of all four limbs. All this, after a "prankster" posing as a supervisor delivered supposed orders from the school's director and a chief aide.

When the investigator with the Disabled Persons Protection Commission asked for a copy of the tapes she had viewed school officials said they did not

want any possibility of the images getting into the media.

The investigator directed the school to preserve a copy of the tapes for use by State Police conducting a criminal investigation, but was later told by a trooper that the school had failed to do so.

School spokesman, Ernest Corrigan, said that investigators from the commission held an "exit interview" on Sept. 30 with school staff, leading them to believe there was no more need to keep the tapes. The school;s founder said that the the school reuses the tapes after 30 days and thought that investigation "seemed to be finished." He gave a similar explanation at the State House hearing on Wednesday on a bill to restrict shock treatments at the school.

According to a December 18 story by the same reporter, the center,

which serves about 250 adults and children from across the country, has been under fire for more than two decades for its unorthodox behavior-modification treatments, including electric shock treatments.

It's ironic that I picked Darkow's cartoon as an illustration for today's post, as I later read in Drawn to Extremes that Darkow and his paper had been sued for his skewering of a school board candidate that preached the value of a return to corporal punishment. In something that sounds like it comes out of Stanley Milgram's infamous experiment on obedience, Wen writes that the

shock devices, which are strapped to some students' arms, legs, or torsos, deliver two-second electric jolts to the skin. The devices are controlled remotely by teachers.

Other things I've been reading today:

• The New Hampshire primary recount (hat tip to the News Dissector)
  
• Mr. Fish at LA Weekly
• January 24, 2008, at 12:00 PM, The Constition project sponsors a panel discussion "What You Don't Know Can Hurt You: Congress, the Courts, and the State Secrets Privilege"
  
• Interior withholding key documents on arctic drilling from PEER
• Shutting down the Federal Elections Commission from Captital Eye
• EPA et. al.'s threat to clean water from EarthJustice
• Latest reports from POGO

The Need for a New GI Bill

Photo from UCLA's web article on the GI Bill.

For some reason, my newsletter from Jim Webb (D-VA) (email) went to my spam folder. This is his Veteran's Day plea for a better GI Bill for Afghanistan and Iraq veterans. I'd add that I wouldn't be opposed to backdating this to include Vietnam vets, if any of them would like additional education. Heck, how about education for anyone willing to perform national service? As Webb says,

The United States has never gone wrong when it has made sustained new investments in higher education and job training.

It would be especially fitting to make such an investment, given the fact that the "All Volunteer Force," and for that matter, the draft before it, is hardly an equal opportunity employer.

The Department of Defense has published an annual report Population Representation in the Military Service starting in 1974. The 1998 report notes that,

Analysis of Vietnam era veterans indicated that individuals of high socioeconomic status comprised about half the proportion of draftees compared to their representation in the overall population.

Interestingly, the reports for 1997-2004 are available online. Thus the last information is for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2004. The 1997, 1998, and 1999 reports included a chapter examining socioeconomic status v.s the general population. This is no longer the case. The 2000 report did have a chapter about representation in the army.

Webb's measure S.22 received a hearing in the Senate Committee on Veteran's Affairs on July 31 with no action since then. Bobby Scott's companion bill, H.R. 2702, introduced June 13, has been referred to subcommittee and there the tale ends to date.

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Webb writes,

In terms of providing true opportunity and creating a level playing field among Americans of all walks of life, the original World War II G.I. Bill was perhaps the most important piece of legislation in our history. Designed to help veterans readjust to civilian life, this landmark legislation helped 7.8 million World War II veterans pursue a college education. The program cost about $14.5 billion (in 1940s dollars), and for every dollar invested, the government estimates that seven dollars were generated.

From political figures to Nobel Prize winners, the effectiveness of the G.I. Bill has been demonstrated by the broad success of those who benefited from it. As former Senator Bob Dole, himself a recipient of that G.I. Bill's benefits, mentioned recently during a hearing before the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, "It made a big difference. I think it's the single most important piece of legislation when it comes to education. It changed America more than anything I can think of."

We have an opportunity to enact equally important legislation today for those who have served post-9/11 in Iraq and Afghanistan. On my first day in office, I introduced the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2007 in order to provide our returning troops benefits that mirror those provided to our veterans after World War II.

In the current debate about how to properly support our newest generation of veterans, history has taught us that we must not overlook the great transformative power of education. This Veterans Day, I believe it is time that we commit to a more robust educational assistance program and that we provide a first-class education for the men and women who have served us honorably in Iraq and Afghanistan.

First as an infantry combat Marine in Vietnam and later as a full Committee Counsel on the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, I saw first-hand the inequities of the Vietnam-era G.I. Bill and the difficulties that so many veterans of that era encountered as they re-entered the civilian world.

Under the current Montgomery G.I. Bill, designed primarily for peacetime not wartime service, a service member must pay $100 a month for the first year of his or her enlistment, in order to receive up to $1,075 a month toward an education up to a total of $38,700. The average amount a veteran receives these days is $666.67 a month.

This amount is insufficient for readjustment to civilian life after serving two, three, or four tours of duty, as many of our post-9/11 servicemembers have. This compensation is hardly enough to allow a veteran to attend many community colleges, let alone a traditional four year institution.

Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, himself a Vietnam combat veteran, has since joined me in leading the charge in the Senate, in addition to 23 Senate colleagues who have signed on as co-sponsors to my legislation. Congressman Bobby Scott introduced a companion bill in the House of Representatives, which enjoys the support of 75 co-sponsors, including Congressman Jim Moran.

The United States has never gone wrong when it has made sustained new investments in higher education and job training. Enacting a more robust G.I. bill akin to that of the World War II era is not only the right thing to do, but its the smart thing to do, in terms of investing in the economic health of our country. As someone who hails from the soldier-citizen tradition, I hold immense personal pride in those who answer our nation's call to duty.

Now as a U.S. Senator, I hope to put into place the mechanisms that will allow future generations of Presidents, Senators and Nobel laureates to rise through the ranks on a sturdy educational foundation provided by the G.I. bill.