"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

You probably recognize, in the post title, the words of Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797).

He was an Irish statesman and supporter of American independence while a member of the British House of Commons,

The inscription on his statue (Bristol, England) reads: Burke 1774-1780. "I wish to be a member of parliament to have my share of doing good and resisting evil". Speech at Bristol 1780.

This blog is about education, but we're at a point where education and political activism may be running down the same track.

I'm not talking about partisan politics, I'm talking about educators taking their proper places in public life as leaders and persons of good example. We are some of those people Burke is talking about.

By now, the story of the Jena Six should be familiar to edubloggers worldwide. I posted about Lessons From Jena just a few days ago, hoping to remind teachers and administrators to bring some enlightenment about racial tolerance to their students (yes, looking to break or weaken the cycles of prejudice that infest entire families). The fallout from the Jena story makes me wonder if we ever entered the twenty-first century.

Today's New York Times carries a story about the Canarsie High School Principal, Tyona Washington, who received a package yesterday at school with a hate note and a noose. According to the article, "The Canarsie episode was at least the eighth time in the past few weeks that a noose was discovered in the New York area. In one instance, a noose was placed on the doorknob of the office of a black professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College."

The eighth time!?

And here's a story dated two days ago from the Times that deals with incidents that are on-going in Nassau County, where I spent most of my elementary and all my secondary school years. I'll be 63 years old next month, folks, and I assure you that this sort of crap wasn't going on there even in the pre-civil rights legislation days of the 50s and early 60s.

Looks like we need to do the thinking I was talking about on the move, pick the lesson plans well, and get to work now.

This is not something we can put off until our curriculum guides say it's time. The fallout is raining down now, and we have to step up to the plate.

Another reminder of our need to act comes from a poem by Pastor Martin Niemoller (1892–1984) about the failure of German intellectuals and other public figures to respond to Nazi bullying and terrorizing of the German population. Some of you may have seen a famous filmstrip that dramatized the poem.

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

Speak out folks, talk about race and racial tolerance. Teach about it.

Lessons From Jena

Six African-American high school students targeted for excessive criminal justice prosecution in Jena, Louisiana, will continue to be in the news for some time to come, and that's a good thing, because we all need to think hard about the attitudes and events that led to the exposure of a racially biased local social structure, including its criminal justice system.

After thinking, we need to do some working.

According to Howard Witt, a national news reporter for The Baltimore Sun, U.S. Justice Department officials told members of a House Judiciary Committee this past Tuesday that they "are weighing an investigation into allegations of systemic racial bias in the administration of justice in the small, mostly white Louisiana town." (Click here for the article.)

While the Justice Department investigates, what can we teachers do to mitigate and eliminate racial bias in our schools and communities?

The Southern Poverty Law Center has a web project called Fight Hate And Promote Tolerance. Here they present Six Lessons from Jena, that you can use now in your classroom. If you followed the news story, the logic of the lessons will not surprise you.

Teacher Magazine reports, "According to a 2006 survey conducted by Teaching Tolerance, the National Education Association, and the Civil Rights Project, most teachers claim their schools are free of ethnic or racial bias, yet federal studies reveal that one in four students are victims of racial or ethnic incidents during the course of the school year."

Take this opportunity to help eliminate racial bias in your community, and give us your assessment of the effectiveness of the lessons from The Southern Poverty Law Center.