Dr. John Telford

Symptom of a sick society

2012-02-06T20:21:00.000-05:00

When a black summa cum laude graduate of Yale can be arrested for breaking into his own home, as Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates was three short years ago, this offers clear evidence that the civil rights war is far from won. It also indicates that America continues to maintain two separate societies -- white and minority -- bifurcated by race and class. In the prologue of my 2010 autobiography, "A Life on the RUN; Seeking and Safeguarding Social Justice," I write, "Americans of color continue to be victimized by pervasive discrimination, both overt and covert, both racist and classist."

Despite the landmark election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States, much work in civil rights remains to be done. Former national ACLU legal director john a. powell, my student at Southeastern High School in the early 1960s, has correctly proclaimed that America cannot afford to maintain two societies divided by race and class. It must, he asserted, integrate those two societies into one. This is a lawful and moral imperative that harkens back to Brown vs. Board of education in 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court decreed that "separate but equal" is inherently unequal.

Yet, racist white Americans continue to resist and reject that lawful and moral imperative. Despite Obama's election to the presidency by non-white Americans with the overwhelming backing of non-racist white Americans, the racist portion white America's rank underbelly and descending intestine remains spewing its excreta on black Americans to this day.

However, so too does the well-fed belly of the bourgeois, classist segment of black America likewise reject its economically lower-class black brothers and sisters and eject its excretory offal upon them -- and that additional human rights hurdle is one that grass roots African Americans are going to have to clear internally. It is true that Americans of color continue to be disproportionately exploited by the dissolute white corporate, collusive power structure whose stranglehold clutches ordinary grassroots Americans in an agonizing death grip that affects minorities first and worst.

Nonetheless, it is also true that many of America's children of color continue to be exploited by an elitist educational hierarchy dedicated to its own enrichment and aggrandizement rather than being dedicated to the children.

In my book's epilogue, I write, ""One thing President Obama must do immediately is use the influence of the presidency to get an education bill passed that will include significant money, attached to real reform, for inner-city schools -- longer school days and years, mandated tests for teachers and administrators to pass, strict anti-nepotism regulations, and annual evaluations for all administrative and instructional staff."

There are youngsters in ghettos all across America who yearn to learn and realize they haven't been fully taught; kids like my Finney student Genaro Washington, who in June 2008 asked me if he could keep a grammar book I had used to teach him. I got him one, and in 2009 he made the honor role. One day Gennaro may become a professor at Yale. Hopefully by then no one will be able to arrest him for breaking into his own home.

Censorship and education just don't mix

2012-01-20T18:19:00.000-05:00

If there’s one thing I’ve always believed in as an educator, it is intellectual freedom. You can’t teach kids what they need to know by promoting censorship, which is just another word for ‘fear of pretty much everything I don’t know, don’t control, and don’t understand’. The world is huge, and in many ways both wonderful and dangerous at the same time. The only way to teach our children how to navigate this world of ours in all its complexities is by providing them with as much knowledge as can possibly be crammed into those rapidly developing craniums of theirs. I would contend that we are all much more in danger and at risk from what we don’t know than from what we do.

It is in this spirit that I am re-broadcasting (so to speak) a portion of an article I read today from The News Herald, a community newspaper from Downriver. It seems the restless spirit of censorship is doing its best to short-circuit the education of kids in the Plymouth Canton area schools.

From The News Herald

In a letter today, the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan urged the Plymouth-Canton Community School District to respect the constitutional rights of students and not ban the award-winning novels Beloved and Waterland from the Advanced Placement English curriculum. The books were flagged for removal following complaints from a student’s parents.

“It is alarming that a vocal minority has been successful in denying students these valuable works of literature," said Loren Khogali, ACLU of Michigan Metro Detroit Branch president. “Shutting down ideas in the classroom not only raises constitutional concerns, but goes against the very essence of our educational system. This incident is a stark reminder of the threats still facing educational freedom.”

In its letter, the ACLU of Michigan reminded the district that although schools have broad discretion in setting curriculum, the U.S. Supreme Court has held repeatedly that banning books because they offend some runs afoul of the First Amendment. While parents have the right to guide their own child’s education, that right does not extend to restricting other students’ educational opportunities.

“Removing the books would not only deny all AP English students the opportunity to read, debate and learn from these two critically acclaimed literary works,” wrote the ACLU of Michigan. “But it would send the message to students that censorship of ideas is permitted in our democracy. Such a lesson contradicts fundamental constitutional values of our county – values that public schools are designed to teach.”

Amen to that.

Metro Times says you need to buy my books.

2011-11-28T14:57:00.001-05:00

Looks like the Metro Times has decided to list both of my books, "A Life on the Run," and "What Old Men Know" as recommended gift purchases for the holidays in the Nov. 23-29 2011 edition! This is what MT writer Michael Jackman has to say about my work:

From the other end of the political spectrum a bit ago comes the memoir of Dr. John Telford, A Life on the Run ($25, Harmonie Park Press). From his childhood as the kid of a hard-drinking Scottish ruffian at Sixteenth and McGraw to atrack star of international caliber, and finally a coach and educator, Telford's tale is a fascinating one. With a lifelong commitment to integration learned from his father, Telford spent many challenging years coaching and teaching English in inner-city Detroit schools. Trying to suit his curriculum to the needs of his students while bucking up against unsympathetic administrators, his lifelong educational journey finally took him out into suburban school districts, where he fought new battles against small-minded bigots and racists — at one point having his home sprayed with bullets by skinheads in the night. It's a no-holds-barred memoir that lays bare his sometimes rancorous family life and his long history of womanizing (he's no saint!) — all the more reason to take this tome as the honest memoir of a complex and absorbing personality. (Dr. Telford has also published What Old Men Know [$17, Harmonie Park Press], a sort of devil's dictionary imbued with his personal philosophy.)

And this is what they have to say about the overall heightened interest in and focus on Detroit that could (hopefully) prove to be greatly beneficial for local artists.

National interest in Detroit has never been keener, but this year's bevy of Detroit books range all over the spectrum, and includes some homegrown talents that are hard to ignore.

And here is a copy of the actual review itself as it appeared in the Metro Times (click on the image and expand):

Thanks for your support Michael!

Live performance at Unity Chapel in Detroit

2011-11-08T17:15:00.002-05:00

This is a live reading of my book "What Old Men Know" given on Friday, April 8, at Unity Temple in Detroit. The event, which lasted more than an hour overall, was sponsored by the Detroit writer's group DUPAAS. For the sake of time, I am only including three brief clips of my performance. I hope you enjoy it, and stay tuned. There's more good stuff to come.

"What Old Men Know" TV Ad

2011-10-10T12:52:00.000-04:00

This ad for my book is running on TV stations in metro Detroit!

Get your copy of the book from this link: What Old Men Know

Book Review: What Old Men Know

2011-04-04T09:00:00.001-04:00

A dictionary for grown-ups

“What Old Men Know” offers wisdom spiced with humor

By Keith A. Owens

The nice thing about getting on in years, I’ve been told, is that it becomes considerably easier to be honest about what you think. No more need to sugarcoat your opinions, kiss up to the boss, or convince anyone you’re something you’re not for reasons you will undoubtedly be sorry for later. Once you reach ‘that age’, half the fun in life is the freedom of being you because of all the lessons you have learned thanks to the swift – and repeated - kicks of experience. You know what you know, and can’t nobody take that away from you.

“What Old Men Know” (Harmonie Park Press, $16.95), Dr. John Telford’s second book for the local publisher, is considerably more than what it claims to be on the cover, namely “a definitive dictionary and almanac of advice”. This is a book of both wisdom and knowledge (old men know the two are not necessarily the same), anger and remorse, joy and pain. In many ways, this relatively slim 284-page volume, which indeed is laid out like a dictionary and can be read and enjoyed starting from any page, is The Book of Telford. The retired educator and track star has excelled at both of his chosen skills, but perhaps what he has excelled at more than either is the fine art of hell-raising. In “What Old Men Know,” it is the spirit of the hell raiser who lends the reader his glasses for an opportunity to view the world as he has come to know it. It becomes quickly apparent that Telford’s often harshly critical perspective of the way life works (versus the way it should work) is a view taken from a perch not many have earned the right to attain.

Perhaps the best way to discuss Telford’s most recent volume is simply to offer a couple of examples of what you will find once you take the time to stroll through his written landscape of ‘the way it is’. Just for starters, let’s take a look at the way the word ‘advice’ is defined in the online dictionary, Dictionary.com:

admonition, warning, caution; guidance; urging. Advice, counsel, recommendation, suggestion, persuasion, exhortation refer to opinions urged with more or less force as worthy bases for thought, opinion, conduct, or action. Advice is a practical recommendation as to action or conduct: advice about purchasing land. Counsel is weighty and serious advice, given after careful deliberation: counsel about one's career. Recommendation is weaker than advice and suggests an opinion that may or may not be acted upon: Do you think he'll follow my recommendation? Suggestion implies something more tentative than a recommendation: He did not expect his suggestion to be taken seriously. Persuasion suggests a stronger form of advice, urged at some length with appeals to reason, emotion, self-interest, or ideals: His persuasion changed their minds. Exhortation suggests an intensified persuasion or admonition, often in the form of a discourse or address: an impassioned exhortation. 2. intelligence, word. 3. notice, advisory.

Now let’s take a look at Telford’s take on that very same word:

ADVICE – Something that Old Men like Your Auld Author give liberally, as it is usually of no (immediate) monetary value. We old dudes also recognize that our advice isn’t always received in the spirit in which it is given, and those who need it the most generally welcome it the least. We further recognize that in the rare instance someone gives advice to us at our advanced age, it is ordinarily of little use to us, so we simply and sagaciously pass it on like a hot potato as quickly as we can.

I think we may have time for one more, so just for fun let’s take a look at the meaning of the word ‘plagiarism’. Dictionary.com defines the meaning of the word in the following way:

The unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work.

That’s nice, but let us now consult The Book of Telford for the word’s deeper meaning:

PLAGIARISM – When you lift material from only one writer. (When you lift it from many writers it’s called research.

Priceless.

Keith A. Owens, formerly the Senior Editor of the Michigan Chronicle, is a Detroit-based freelance writer and musician

This book review was originally published in The Michigan Chronicle.

Original Poem: A Good Woman

2010-11-15T10:27:00.000-05:00

Poetry Workshop November 13 2010

A Good Woman

A good woman

will delight

her man—

nurture him,

comfort him,

uplift him,

have his back—

And walk always

by his side.

But if his transgressions—

Present and past,

Imagined and real—

Overtake her,

She will destroy him.

So will a bad woman—

Only faster.

But he must above all

Beware the woman who be

Bad on Monday,

Good on Tuesday, and

Worst on Wednesday,

For she will destroy him fastest—

And for good.

--Dr. John Telford, EdD.

Sanchez Firing was Discriminatory

2010-10-21T19:30:00.000-04:00

Rick Sanchez, CNN’s Cuban-American commentator, was recently fired for calling a White commentator a “bigot” for having a perceived racially condescending attitude toward Sanchez’s Hispanic heritage. Pervasive racism remains alive and thriving in America, and Rick Sanchez’s firing made him a victim. Sanchez has proved to be one of racism’s most outspoken foes. Championing racial justice is a professionally dangerous activity for people of color who have attained high positions in the White corporate world, as Sanchez did.

That the commentator whom Sanchez accused of bigotry happens to be Jewish complicates the issue. American Jews have been the staunchest supporters of Americans of color—particularly of black people, but for brown people, too. Sanchez asserted that the mainstream media is run by what he calls “elite Northeast [translate: Jewish] liberals”—whom he stereotypically accuses of looking upon Hispanics as “second-rate.” He also (correctly) observed that the influence and economic clout of the Jewish community far transcends that of the Hispanic community. This was basically speaking “truth to power,” and in no way were his remarks in that regard anti-Semitic. American Jews—who indeed comprise 2 percent of the population but 33 percent of U.S. Supreme Court justices (for example)—are to be commended for their artistic, political, and corporate achievements in America in the historic face of fierce discrimination. It’s profoundly ironic, though, that CNN replaced Sanchez with a Jew—Elliott Spitzer, a married man who had his own scandal to deal with (patronizing prostitutes). When Jesse Jackson was discovered a decade ago to have fathered a child out of wedlock, CNN fired him immediately. What makes that any worse than what Spitzer did?

There is a pecking order, too, of those who are discriminated against by America’s still-dominant Caucasian or WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) power structure. At the dawn of the 20^th Century, Blacks and Jews were at the bottom, directly beneath Hispanics descended from Caribbean and Central American natives, then southern Europeans and Near Eastern immigrants, then people of Asian descent and of predominately and recognizable Native American descent, and then the Scots-Irish. Now Arabs—and still blacks, due to the ready perceptibility of their blackness—remain at the bottom, despite exceptions like athletes, entertainers, a few corporate executives, and our President. To cite personal examples: When I was nine in 1945, a White candy store owner called me a dirty little Mick. In the 1950s and 1960s I found that I encountered less hostility from White passersby when my date was a Mexican girl than if she was black. One spring day in 1962, a White woman spat in my face as I exited a store with a Pershing High School alumna two years older than me who at the time was one of my main ladies. My young African-American wife Gina and I have drawn hate stares when we were dining or attending a movie in the suburban community where we have a home in a little lakeside subdivision (my other home is in Detroit, where I vote, work, and spend much of my time).

I would like to see Black and Hispanic leaders unite to get CNN to rehire Rick Sanchez. We need more commentators with his courage—not less.

Retired school superintendent and WSU All-American sprinter John Telford’s tell-all memoir on Detroit is available at Barnes & Noble stores and at www.AlifeontheRUN.com.

Should the Mayor control the Detroit Public Schools?

2010-08-18T09:00:00.001-04:00

During the tenures of the two most recent former mayors of Detroit, I weighed in on debates regarding whether the schools should be under board or mayoral control. During the administration of Mayor Dennis Archer, I opposed impending state and mayoral control in columns I was writing in the Oakland Press because I felt that this gubernatorial and legislative decree would disenfranchise Detroit voters. I also suspected that Michigan Governor John Engler wanted to toss an unwilling Mayor Archer that hot potato as a ploy to ruin any chance Archer might have had to become governor. A respected figure throughout the state, Archer would have posed a serious Democratic threat to any Republican opponent.

My opposition to Engler’s move was right on: The subsequently non-elected “reform” board sank the then-solvent district into a $250 million deficit that by the beginning of the aborted second year of Superintendent Connie Calloway’s administration had ballooned to nearly half a billion, forcing Governor Jennifer Granholm to appoint an emergency financial manager.

During Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s administration, I had lent my name to a widely-circulated flyer opposing mayoral control of the schools. We succeeded then in getting control voted back into the hands of an elected school board. That board ended up not only being worse than its precedent appointed “reform” board—it performed worse than the elected board that had preceded the “reform” board. DPS’ student population plummeted to last place on national tests, and its dropout rate soared to an incredible 79%. Before the elected board named chief financial officer William Coleman superintendent in an egregious display of “insider trading” and later hired Dr. Calloway when Coleman got compromised by indictments in Texas (with both DPS superintendents being given salaries topping $250,000), I had offered twice to serve as superintendent for free for one year to show what I could do. Naturally, they didn’t take me up on that offer: The incompetent and corrupt seldom (intentionally) employ the competent and incorruptible. At those times, I was working under a post-retirement contract at the wild Detroit Finney High and berating the board’s classism and nepotism regularly on my radio show on WCHB and in my Telford’s Telescope column in the Michigan Chronicle.

Around the time I was appointed superintendent in the suburban Madison District Public Schools in February of 2009 and brought out hundreds of DPS refugees as open-enrollment students (against raucous suburban opposition), I decided that DPS needed to be put under Mayor Dave Bing despite his already daunting task-overload, because nothing else had worked. I said this on Rev. Wendell Anthony’s cable TV show when he touted my new memoir on Detroit and the schools. Former state school superintendent Tom Watkins recently said it, too. However, now that Detroit has a better board president and some good new members, I’m no longer so sure that DPS’ reins should be handed to the Mayor. There’s one thing I am sure of, though: Rather than have Lansing make that decision, the issue must be put before the voters. Maybe they’ll make a wiser decision in this regard than we did when we elected Mayor Kilpatrick. If they do vote to retain the board, members will hopefully be elected who aren’t seeking higher office and who can keep their hands out of taxpayers’ pockets when awarding contracts (and out of their own pants in the presence of a lady). [Note: the most recent board president resigned after publicly confessing to fondling himself in the presence of the recent and now laid-off female interim school superintendent.] Also, this time it is to be hoped that the voters will elect a board that can find and hire a gifted and honest superintendent—one who won’t place corporate interests over the needs of the children.

Dr. Telford’s tell-all memoir on Detroit and the schools is available at Barnes & Noble stores, at www.AlifeontheRUN.com, and at Harmonie Park Press – (586) 979-2077.

Dr. John Telford Receives Track and Field Award

2010-06-17T11:25:00.000-04:00

Detroit Pershing High Memories: a Doughboy Passes

2010-06-11T11:16:00.000-04:00

On Saturday evening, May 22, I opened this stark email forwarded to me by a Pershing alum: “Elliott Haskins has passed. His funeral is today. There won’t be much fanfare, but he will be missed. He was a superb athlete and a war hero. He won a Purple Heart and the Bronze Star.”

Only five feet six inches tall, Elliott Haskins had muscles on his muscles. He was a star running back and the best sprinter on my elite 1966 and 1967 corps of Doughboy dashmen who included future U-M and NFL receiver Glenn Doughty, 49.5-second 440 man Tom “Outlaw” Jones, PSL 440 champion Andre Broadnax, 440 runner-up and later U-M star Reggie Bradford, future Eastern Michigan 440 star and Westland track coach John Kitchen, and Joe Ezidore, whose late wife Rose was on my parent-liaison staff when I was Detroit Public Schools’ executive director of community affairs in 2002-03.

Other members of those Pershing teams—which never lost a dual meet, won several titles, and broke the state record twice in the mile relay—included high jumper and later U-M basketball star Jon Lockard and shot putter and later Olympic and NBA star Spencer Haywood, who also high jumped.

I didn’t let Elliott compete in the 1967 state meet because he missed a practice without permission after I had given him a warning. I second-guessed myself on that decision many times in the years to follow. With state exposure, he might have attended college on a track scholarship instead of ending up in Vietnam, becoming a habitual drug-user there, and exhibiting resultant questionable behaviors upon his return.

In my 2010 autobiography, A Life on the RUN – Seeking and Safeguarding Social Justice, I describe a 1972 incident when Elliott came to my office in Berkley, where I was the school district’s athletic director, and asked me to help him find a job. He also asked me if there was anyone I wanted to have him kill. I told him there wasn’t—and that he had to stop making offers like this unless he wanted people to think he was crazy. With just a dollop of misgiving, I sent him to the late Del Russell, then the security director for Borman Foods, who as a Detroit probation officer had helped me get my athletes jobs and enroll them in college. Elliott showed up for the interview high on weed and smelling of wine. Del didn’t hire him.

I’m in touch with hundreds of my former students—recent and ancient—but I lost touch with Elliott for 37 years after that. He resurfaced in late 2009 and called to tell me he’d been a mercenary for several years fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Elliott Haskins was a hero who served his country well and deserved better from it. I believe that the Vietnam War killed him—it just took him forty years longer to die. He was one of the toughest kids and fastest sprinters I ever was privileged to coach. I pray now that he may forever rest in peace.

Retired school superintendent and NCAA All-American sprinter John Telford’s tell-all memoir on DPS is available at Barnes & Noble stores, at www.AlifeontheRUN.com, and at Harmonie Park Press – (586) 979-2077.

Wolverine’s Wollack pens pivotal memoir

2010-05-31T17:14:00.002-04:00

R. E. Wollack, the one-time convicted felon who later founded the magnificent Detroit-based Wolverine Human Services, has written a turning-point memoir. In my most recent column in the Michigan Chronicle, I boasted about the standing-room-only crowd that packed the Detroit Historical Museum auditorium to hear me read from my own pivotal memoir, A Life on the RUN – Seeking and Safeguarding Social Justice. My new book, incidentally, is reviewed in the May 2010 issue of The Detroit Teacher, and like Wollack’s, it is endorsed by no less a judge than former Detroit mayor Dennis Archer. In it, I describe how PSL coaches rehabilitated me after my own 1950 incarceration—and how discriminatory treatment of my relay teammates at WSU, on the U.S. team, and on the Detroit Track Club catalyzed my lifelong civil-rights activism. Those caring coaches’ mentorship—and my black teammates’ racialized treatment—were the turning points that changed my life. The first saved me; the second radicalized me.

Now I want to boast about another large, appreciative crowd. This one came to the 23^rd Annual Wolverine Human Services Dinner to celebrate the accomplishments of that marvelous agency’s youthful second-chance clients and to learn about its president’s equally marvelous, newly-published memoir. Like mine, WHS guru Wollack’s inspiring autobiography, They Will Be VICTORS –The Remarkable Story of One Man’s Passion for Second Chances, poignantly chronicles a turning point in his life. Like my turning point, his turning point carried him from the dismal depths of incarceration to a prominent professional leadership role. Like my book, his book is endorsed by several prominent folks, including Dennis Archer. (I also had a recent opportunity to review the manuscript of Wollack’s thrilling story prior to printing.)

Detroit’s intrepid former mayor writes, “They Will Be Victors demonstrates the results that can come from being given a second chance. This book should be on the bookshelf of every teacher who encourages dropouts to get a GED, of every college professor who teaches courses on prisons, and of anyone who has made a bad choice early in life but paid his debt to society. While in prison, Robert Wollack decided to make something positive out of his life. He maintained a relationship with his children even in the face of a divorce from their mother. He was influenced by a professor who helped him envision his future avocation. He also found a saint in his second wife, Judy, who motivated him.”

Last year, Mr. Wollack turned over the Wolverine CEO reins to Judy Wollack. For information on buying his inspiring and historic book, call (313) 824-4400.

David Gorzelski, the vice president of Harmonie Park Press, has asked me to write an autobiographical chapter in an upcoming book tentatively entitled Turning Points. The book will recount the pivotal life episodes that enabled men like Wollack and me to triumph over serious setbacks. Mr. Gorzelski has also deputized me to recruit other writers whose lives had definitive positive turning points and thus would make relevant chapters.

In addition to Michigan state senator Hansen Clarke, Metro Detroit TV2 news anchor Huel Perkins, and former U-M football coach Lloyd Carr, I have invited Mr. Wollack to write a chapter. I believe that like mine, his harrowing but redeeming life story would be a perfect fit for this book.

A Martyr's Work Still Undone

2010-05-09T21:11:00.001-04:00

The fiercely egalitarian legacy of Malcolm X is celebrated today by sincerely egalitarian Michiganians, both black and white. However, let me hasten to point out that the magnificently in-your-face egalitarianism of that fearless man once known as “Detroit Red” is also safely “celebrated” by many far less-than-sincere, covertly racist whites and some classist, bourgeois blacks like those who were recently and destructively in charge of the Detroit Public Schools. Such self-serving hypocrites would be rightfully fearful of Malcolm X were he alive today instead of safely dead.

A man named Thomas Hagan (aka Talmadge X Hayer) who was convicted of killing the mighty Malcolm 45 years ago was just released from prison. No way would he ever have got out had his victim been white. (Note that Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of the 1968 murder of the social revolutionist Robert F. Kennedy—continues to languish in prison with no hope of parole.)

Personally, I would have preferred that the powers-that-be show Hagan the same lack of lenience that Sirhan Sirhan is appropriately being shown. Although my professed sentiment in that regard is unforgivingly non-Christian (and I profess to be a forgiving Christian), I can’t help feeling this way. As the scholarly professor Boyce Watkins has written, Malcolm took most of black America and some of white America in the last years of his too-short but legendary life.

Still, with young Malcolm’s early death, much of his egalitarian labor remains uncompleted, and much of the young King and Kennedy’s similarly egalitarian dream remains unfulfilled. In 2008, more than half a century after the 1954 Supreme Court school-desegregation decision declaring “separate but equal” to be inherently unequal, I was still administrating in a huge, all-black public school and teaching in an all-black classroom at the dilapidated Detroit Finney High in the most segregated metropolitan center in Michigan (and America). This segregation is the direct result of more than a half-century of accelerating white flight and resultant corporate flight.

Native Detroiter john powell, my student and runner at Southeastern High in 1960, now directs the OSU-based Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. In January, he and his staff put together a report that includes these words: “The U.S. has not lived up to its obligation to review and correct policies that perpetuate disparities manifested along racial lines, and it rationalizes these harms as a product of conditions beyond its control.” Until America’s (and Michigan’s) leaders recognize that these disparities are far from beyond their control and set about obliterating them, our country’s four great egalitarian martyrs won’t rest easily in their graves.

Retired public-school superintendent John Telford’s memoir on Detroit and suburban schools is available at www.AlifeontheRUN.com and at Barnes & Noble stores.

Detroiter Conducts Underground Railroad Tours

2010-04-30T23:17:00.002-04:00

Stewart McMillin—my enterprising fellow Scot—is at it again. Stewart, who at 70 is four years my junior with four times my energy, is also my fellow past-WSU educator, my fellow Detroiter, and a long-time tour guide for Underground Railroad sites.

On May 6, Stewart will offer an educationally intriguing local tour. The bus will leave from Jefferson Avenue Presbyterian Church at 8625 East Jefferson at 9:30 a.m. and return at 6:30 p.m. The cost is $55 (lunch not included). However, lunch will be at the wonderful Steve’s Soul Food in downtown Detroit, where they have a luncheon special for $5.99 that includes a meat, two sides, and a corn muffin. To get more information, call Stewart at (313) 922-1990 or email him at stewartmcmillintours.com. His website is www.mcmillintours.com.

Highlights of the tour will include visits to old Paradise Valley and Black Bottom, to the Charles H. Wright Museum and the Tuskegee Airmen Museum, to the former home of pioneering integrationist Dr. Ossian Sweet, and to a site where the Detroit Stars of the old Negro League played baseball.

The tour will also visit historic Elmwood Cemetery. Many prominent Black Detroiters rest there, including my fellow WSU Athletic Hall-of-Famer and old coaching rival Lorenzo Wright. A 1948 Olympian, Lo rose to direct the PSL, a job later held by two of my protégés—former WSU quarter-miler Roy Allen and now the sterling Alvin Ward, a former football star at King.

The tour will visit other historic points, too—including the site of the old Finney barn. It was there that Seymour and Jared Finney—a father-son duo of freedom-loving Scots—hid runaway slaves as their last stop before crossing the river to Canada and freedom. In a one-on-one breakfast meeting I had with DPS financial manager Robert Bobb on April 1, I told him the Finney story, and I also let him know that the track there is named for me. He assured me that the new school will retain the Finney name at least partially, and the track will retain mine. (I don’t think he was April-fooling me.)

Stewart will conduct tours this summer and fall that will sojourn out of state to Railroad-related sites in Canada, Ohio, and Kentucky. They will include complimentary lunches and films shown en route, featuring the original and the later remake of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The tours will again depart from the Jefferson Avenue Presbyterian Church. Presbyterianism was long the national religion of Scotland. Stewart is a member of the Scottish-American Society of Michigan, as am I. He is also a Presbyterian, as once was I. The fiery, white-bearded Scottish-American abolitionist John Brown was a Presbyterian. Brown led an attack on a United States arsenal and seized guns to arm slaves (and was caught and hanged for it).

Had Stewart and I been born and lived in this country in pre-Civil War days, we would have been abolitionists. I see in him a trait that recalls the Scot freedom fighter William Wallace. Indeed, my friend Luther Keith, the intrepid director of Arise!Detroit, once wrote in a Detroit News column, “Stewart McMillin doesn’t just march to his own drummer—he marches to his own drum!”

Five (Ignored) Steps to Urban School Reform

2010-04-05T00:40:00.000-04:00

Detroit has the lowest test scores in America. After a decade of inept and corrupt boards and central administrations and ballooning deficits, emergency financial manager Robert Bobb was brought in to clean up the mess. I had breakfast with him the other day. What I told him is that, while he’s doing a yeoman’s job under nearly impossible conditions (closing 41 schools, replacing and streamlining building instructional and administrative staff, involving the community in decision-making, etc.), there are five reform components that he hasn’t addressed (racial segregation and classicism not among them).

The first component is the fact that (and I continue to use Detroit as an example) there are between 20,000 and perhaps as many as 50,000 Detroit teens who have either dropped out or are playing semi-permanent hooky, and there are no longer any truant officers on the district payroll to round them up. These kids aren't in charter schools or in suburban schools on the city's border. They simply aren't in school at all, and their families are unable or unwilling to control them. So Detroit is undoubtedly closing too many school buildings, because these kids need to be in school—not on the streets running drugs or running from the police.

The second component is chronic student misbehavior. We must funnel this misconduct into a small education setting; e.g., closed elementary buildings staffed with remedial teachers (especially reading teachers), social workers, truant officers, security, and caring, battle-hardened principals. With improved behavior and academic achievement, students can return to a traditional setting. In the meantime, the financial balloon must be squeezed to accommodate this expense: the class size among the better-behaved students left behind will need to swell accordingly.

The third component is the need to return to instruction in traditional grammar, K-12. Dialect can cause severe comprehension problems for the African-American (and for the Latino and Arabic) student. This is especially the case for the younger student, as exemplified by the young black girl who when asked to use the word "so" in a sentence comes up with, "I got a 'so' on my laig." Also, there are actually some sounds in "standard" English that a number of black kids, for example, haven't been acculturated to hear because these sounds don't appear in corresponding usages in their dialect.

The fourth component involves the restoration of vocational courses and art, music, and athletic programs that have been curtailed in Detroit and in many other secondary schools across America. In my experience as an athletic coach in Detroit five decades ago, the in-school opportunities to compete on a team or to play in a band or to learn a trade are the only reasons many kids remain in school.

I spent some time as the deputy superintendent of Rochester schools in Detroit reforming street gangs on the east side. Young men were killing each other over girls, shoes, and coats while their sisters worked in dope houses. Kids carried .38-caliber pistols in potato chip bags. Despite my efforts to re-enroll high school boys and engage in conflict mediation, it didn’t always take. I went to more funerals than I care to remember.

That’s why the fifth component may be the most important. It’s the need to institutionalize programs for restorative justice, anger management, and conflict resolution to induce rival gangs in a given school building to put aside their rivalries during the school day. I tried to do this (admittedly with less-than-glowing success) in the mid-1990s when I was the executive director of the HUD-sponsored Detroit SNAP (Safe Neighborhoods Action Plan) working with rival gangs out of a police mini-station on Chene Street on Detroit's teeming east side.

We can talk "reform" until the cows come home about curriculum, testing, smaller high schools, larger high schools that can offer more courses, closing schools in districts that APPEAR to be losing enrollment, etc., etc., but until we address some these components, we’re just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Being Honest About Racism

2010-02-28T23:16:00.000-05:00

Black (and many white) reactionaries are still calling Nevada senator Harry Reid a racist for simply stating a probable truth—that many of President Obama’s white (and some black) supporters were swayed to vote for him because he’s light-skinned and speaks “standard” idiomatic American English. It’s known in southeastern Michigan that I’ve battled racists throughout my career and called them what they are in print, in board halls, and over the air. As I said regarding Rochester’s resident racists when I was the deputy superintendent there, and as I said again two decades later on television regarding Madison Heights’ racists when I was the superintendent there, “If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and talks like a duck, you can be pretty sure it’s a duck.” Sen. Reid is a liberal Democrat with a record of supporting African-Americans. A “duck” he definitely isn’t.

This brings to mind the Dale Lick case of 1993. Dr. Lick was the Michigan State University governing board’s favored candidate   for the MSU presidency until word got out that he had said blacks are innately superior in some aspects of athletics. When confronted with that statement during the interviews, he refused to recant. By all accounts, he was the best candidate.

Many mainstream publications, including Runner’s World in a 1992 article, have stated the obvious in asserting that athletes of West African descent are generally faster sprinters than are athletes of purely European descent. Throughout the past half-century, Track & Field News’ annual listings of the world’s top times in the dash races confirm that 95% of them were clocked by Caribbean or American Blacks, who some anthropologists hypothesize are collectively stronger due to muscular-skeletal traits, hybridization, and slavery’s brutal “natural selection.”   In the 1950s in national and international competition, nearly all of my toughest opponents at 100, 200, and 400 meters were African-Americans or Jamaicans.

Dale Lick’s statistically supported statement cost him the MSU job, even though he also made this relevantly redeeming remark: “Just because Blacks are superior in athletics doesn’t mean they’re inferior in something else.” When we insert the word “intellectually” in place of the words “in something else,” we reach the crux of this issue. I taught black youngsters from disadvantaged backgrounds who became top academicians, including john powell (uses no caps in his name), the executive director of the Kirwan Institute at Ohio State. I encouraged them to be able to switch from dialect to the “standard” English spoken by leaders like Obama when the situation requires it. Also, as Sen. Reid implied, favoring lighter-skinned blacks socially and politically remains a discriminatory practice of many Americans, both white and black. Reid simply told the truth. So did Lick. “Political correctness” shouldn’t supersede plain truth—or plain justice.

King’s 1963 Dream Still Deferred in Black History Month 2010

2010-02-11T23:54:00.002-05:00

King’s 1963 Dream Still Deferred in Black History Month 2010

In 2003, nearly half a century after the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education had decreed that “separate but equal” schools are inherently unequal, I was the only retired school superintendent in America who has ever dared to return to teach in an inner-city high school. The school was the wild, impoverished Detroit Finney High, which didn’t have a single white student. Thirty-six years earlier (on Wednesday, October 18, 1967), as a 31-year-old administrator at Detroit’s equally wild and impoverished Butzel Junior High and a doctoral candidate at Wayne State University, I had written a longer version of this column that ran in the University’s newspaper, The South End. While the terminology is dated—e.g., “Negro”—much of its premise remains valid:

“If there were a federal law punishing real estate agents who ‘steer’ Negro clients to predominately Negro neighborhoods, busing for integration would become unnecessary. Lacking that law, busing will remain necessary indefinitely—even though it can be but an artificial substitute for the uncontrived integration that open housing would ensure. Although Negro children’s intellectual capacities are on a proven par with White children’s, most Negro children in segregated schools read at a level far below the national norm for their age. Inexperienced or untrained teachers, crowded classrooms, and low-achieving classmates from the same deprived backgrounds perpetuate a generational cycle of illiteracy. Equal education demands integrated education. If our great cities are to be saved from degenerating into totalitarian camps with soldiers patrolling the streets as they did here in Detroit after last summer’s rebellion, we must have a federal open housing law with teeth. Opening the suburbs to everyone will eventually establish a residential racial balance at all economic levels.

“In the meantime, a policy must be established whereby a substantial percentage of inner-city students and suburban students will be bused to the schools in each others’ neighborhoods. Suburban children are as culturally deprived as are their contemporaries on 12^th Street. As Martin Luther King, Jr. observes, the suburban setting promotes an unrealistic concept of what constitutes the human experience on our majority non-white planet. Suburbanites must become willing to accept students bused from the 12^th Streets of our central cities to their schools and send their children into schools in urban neighborhoods. Even more significantly, a national open housing law must be passed and enforced. [It was passed the next year…but ever since, it has been enforced only sporadically.] Such a law can save our democracy—but only if Americans of European ancestry acknowledge that their fellow citizens of African ancestry must have total equality. A nation predicated on the premise ‘equality for all’ that cynically practices an unwritten policy of ‘equality for some’ shall in the final analysis grant equality to none: All of its citizens shall find their freedoms forfeit.”

It turned out that busing wasn’t the solution—open housing is. As we celebrate Black History Month 2010 here in Detroit in the midst of the country’s most segregated urban center 56 years after the Brown decision and 43 years after I wrote that column, the still-unaddressed issue of racial segregation remains the huge elephant in the living room of our national conscience.

To Press and Beyond Interviews Dr. John Telford

2010-02-08T19:31:00.003-05:00

Lucy Levenson, from To Press and Beyond, sits down with

Dr. John Telford to discuss his new book; "A Life on the Run"

Lucy: Why did you become a teacher?

JT: I became a teacher because I wanted to coach track, and I enjoyed substitute teaching in Detroit when I was a twenty-year old junior in 1956 at Wayne State.

Lucy:What makes a great teacher?

JT: Passion. Love for students and for the profession. Intensity. Dedication. The determination to make a difference. An eagerness to study and train and sacrifice to become the best.

A great teacher is indomitable. A great teacher, like a great violinist or a great quarter-miler, is as much born, as he or she is made.

Lucy: Why are you such a passionate supporter of black students?
JT: Because they need it more than white students. My fighter father and grandfather were ethnic Scots and lifelong egalitarians whose heritage and ancestral code dictated that they should fight for the underdog; thus, I became a lifelong egalitarian and fought for the underdog. My affinity for black causes originated with my dad, who taught me to fight injustice as he did, and it was further sparked by prejudicial and discriminatory incidents I witnessed over the years that were directed toward my black schoolmates, teammates, students, athletes and friends –some incidents which I describe in the book.

Lucy: Our schools are failing. What 3 INNOVATIVE things would you do to change how we are teaching our students?

JT: It is most of our urban schools that are failing—not our suburban schools.

The first innovative thing I would do would be to ensure that all urban schools be regarded by the school district’s leadership as choice schools, rather than have just a few elite schools of choice, as is the current case in too many districts, including Detroit.
The second innovative thing I would do would be to squeeze the financial balloon and lower the class sizes in the early grades to ensure that all of the children learn to read.
The third innovative thing I would do would be to further squeeze the financial balloon in the secondary schools in favor of the misbehavers—most of whom ordinarily can’t read—in order to put them in special schools with additional remedial, social, and security services and then return them to the traditional setting only when their academic and social skills have vastly improved.

Lucy: You have had a controversial record as a superintendent. Do you have any regrets or anything you would do differently?

JT: No. Even though many of my egalitarian initiatives hurt me professionally and economically, I wouldn’t do a single thing any differently. In that regard, I can look in the mirror without flinching.

Lucy: Although you have been an active supporter of black students, not so black administrators. Why single them out?

JT: When I retired and came back to teach and administrate in Detroit again after a quarter of a century battling racism in the suburbs, I discovered to my surprise that Detroit had become perhaps the most flagrant example of elitist, incompetent, and/or corrupt central-office-level black administrators exploiting impoverished black students, although this is happening in many other large urban school districts, too. In my book A Life on the RUN – Seeking and Safeguarding Social Justice, I elaborate on that theme with multiple examples.

Lucy: What would you do to better control drugs and gang activities in schools today?

JT: Legalize the sale of marijuana and regulate it governmentally and decriminalize the use of other drugs. Then use the money previously dedicated to the enforcement of the drug laws to educate against the health and social hazards of drug use. Also, keep the secondary schools open at night for tutorial and recreational activities, and staff them partially with carefully screened volunteers where possible.

Lucy:What would happen if we only let into schools students who want to learn? Should schools simply be a policed alternative to being on the streets?

JT: Students aren’t born with the intent to fail. Negative experiences at home and at school cause them to no longer try to learn. There must be a place for all students in some school somewhere. No educator worth his salt ever gives up on any student—even though in many cases, society has.

Lucy: What is the responsibility of the more affluent cities and towns to provide resources to inner-city schools that are failing?

JT: In many states, including Michigan, districts where the residents are more affluent get more money than do districts where most of the residents are impoverished. The reverse should be enacted legislatively. Poor children need many more social and remedial services than do children from middle- and upper-middle-class homes.

Lucy: What would you say to teachers who are burning out and leaving because it is no longer about teaching but about policing their classrooms?

JT: Never give up. Teaching isn’t a job—it’s a life’s mission. Even the toughest, most thuggish kids will become mesmerized by a great teacher. All teachers must aspire to greatness and become crusaders; else, they aren’t true teachers.

Lucy: Do you believe in tenure for teachers? Why or why not?

JT: I always did; but lately, I’m no longer so sure. Most teachers are dedicated, but those who are there mainly to collect a paycheck should be encouraged to go and sell toy whirly-bird helicopters on some street corner.

Lucy: Who is one of your heroes, and why?

JT: Over the span of seven decades, one of my greatest heroes has been Ali because he fought indomitably for what was right. He had only himself to depend upon in the arena, and he was very nearly invincible.

To Press & Beyond are experts in book publishing consulting and support services who will take your book project and shepherd it through writing, editing, layout, printing, distribution, sales and promotion. They have worked with over 300 authors and independent publishers around the globe. Visit ToPressandBeyond.com

Dr. Telford's Radio Interview and Amazon.com Book Review!

2009-12-17T11:14:00.019-05:00

Dr. Telford's Radio Interview and Amazon.com Book Review!

Here is the link to my recent radio interview with Cyrus Webb on his Conversations LIVE! Radio Show. You can hear the stream by clicking the link

Here is the link: http://tobtr.com/s/792363 and below is my Amazon.com review

"It takes a great deal of courage and comfort with one's own self to write a memoir like that presented by Dr. John Telford in A LIFE ON THE RUN. While some might want to just focus on their achievements and what others believe make them great, Telford gives us the whole man, showing that imperfect, broken beings can be used to do things others just talk about but never accomplish. "The book is about action. Whether you are referring to his wide range of accolades, working on race relations and seeking change within the school system, one thing you can't say about the author is that he was just waiting on others to make a difference. He realized early on the importance of being the difference you wanted to see. The work may not ever be finished, but as long as there is a work in progress there is work to be done. "A LIFE ON THE RUN is a great book to reflect on in the New Year. With a life that spans many reincarnations, it seems one of the biggest lessons we can learn from John Telford is the importance of being true to yourself. If you are able to do that, maybe your life will be seen as a model for other
imperfect individuals to learn from when it comes to making a difference."

--- Cyrus Webb, Conversations Book Club/Conversations LIVE! Radio*
I look forward to working with you all more in the New Year.
Cyrus A. Webb, Founder/President
Cyrus A. Webb's official website www.cyruswebb.com
CelebRealAcy, http://www.celebrealacy.com
Conversations Book Club, http://www.thebestbookclub.info
Conversations LIVE! Radio http://conversationslive.blogspot.com
"The Write Stuff" reality show, http://www.thewritestufftv.webs.com
JOIN THE ADDICTION: Get hooked on books! 601-896-5616

Labels: A Life on the RUN, Cyrus A. Webb

Detroit Public Schools Test Scores: A National Disgrace

2009-12-14T12:31:00.003-05:00

It was recently reported that the students of the Detroit Public Schools had the LOWEST standardized test scores in the entire United States. Here are my thoughts:

Arne Duncan--President Obama's education guy--has correctly pronounced theDetroit Public Schools "education ground zero," and DPS definitely didn't sink into this disgraceful condition overnight. It began with white flight from the city in the 1940s and 50s, accelerated in the late 60s and early 70s with the hasty promotions of unqualified black administrators within an ill-conceived (but NOT ill-advised) affirmative action program, and reached its current nadir due to generations of resultantly miseducated parents and the accelerating incompetence and corruption at the very top. I supported then, have always vocally supported, and continue now to support--and have indeed caught raucous community flack for INITIATING--affirmative action programs that are CAREFULLY AND COMPETENTLY DESIGNED AND FAIRLY IMPLEMENTED. However, within the past fifteen or twenty years, what we have had in DPS is inept and/or corrupt black central-office administrators and inept or corrupt black school boards all favoring a few elite, state-of-the-art schools like the new Cass Tech and the new Renaissance high schools, at the expense of tens of thousands of impoverished, nearly illiterate black youngsters in the rest of the schools--schools like the wild Finney High, where I was the only retired executive educator in America who actually was crazy enough to return to teach in an inner-city high school (actually I loved it), and where the swimming pool hadn't functioned for a DECADE. (I was still teaching there in my SEVENTIES.)

If the swimming pool didn't function for a DAY at Cass Tech, or at Grosse Pointe North, Birmingham Seaholm, or Rochester Adams, they'd have called out the National Guard, the Marines, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

In "A Life on the RUN - Seeking And Safeguarding Social Justice," I describe DPS' decline in implicative and starkly accusatory terms--and offer common-sense remedies. Circulate this email and tell everyone you know who cares about the future of our state (and indeed, of our country, as I told a local television audience when I was in Los Angeles last month), to call Harmonie Park Press at 586-979-2077 or email dgorzelski@harmonieparkpress.com and ask that the still-available pre-order discount copy of my book ($19.95 hardcover, 419 pages, illustrated) be mailed to them. Shipping and handling is free.

"A Life on the RUN" is also available on Amazon at its full price of $24.95. I expect that the book will soon be reviewed in Dome Magazine, an electronic think tank that features essays by prominent folks for improving the state of Michigan (domemagazine.com).

After I have excised some of the references to my national and international running (and to my romances--some of which references have upset my wife), HPP will release a thus-abridged paperback edition focusing entirely on the book's main theme (and on my life's pre-eminent crusade) for and of human rights. I will do one of my readings/signings for this abridged edition at the Detroit Historical Museum: A former press secretary to two Detroit mayors (not Kwame!) calls the book the best memoir on Detroit he has ever read. A retired vice president of OSAS - the DPS administrators' union - says it is the best book he has read since reading "The Autobiography of Malcolm X." Former Detroit mayor Dennis Archer calls it "Spellbinding!"

For more background information on my book and on me, please refer them to my website - www.alifeontherun.com. Also, please feel free to invite any of your select NOW or ACLU constituency to call me at the 586-803-3586 number or email me at this email address if they would like to share ideas for improving the sad state of DPS. When I appeared with emergency financial manager Robert Bobb and DFT president Keith Johnson on the Huel Perkins Show on FoxTV2 last spring after I got fired from the Madison District Public School superintendency for bringing in hundreds of black kids, I commended Mssrs. Bobb and Johnson for jointly undertaking many of the long-overdue reforms I have been calling for during the past decade and more, but they will need a lot of support, because despite the progressive inroads they have made in a very short amount of time, reforming DPS--like cleaning out the Aegean Stables--remains an absolute Labor for HERCULES. Even more crucially, it bears constant pointing out emphatically that until its SCHOOLS are fixed, the city of Detroit--which a study last year pronounced America's most violent and dangerous--will continue to wallow in decay and suffer from a debilitating young-adult illiteracy rate that threatens to exceed 50 percent and will prevent thousands of Detroiters from being able to qualify for Michigan's universities, and thus further compromise the already faltering economy of our entire state.

Open Letter to the Michigan Chronicle and Robert Bobb

2009-12-07T12:17:00.001-05:00

I am a former regular columnist for the Michigan Chronicle, the weekly Black Newspaper in Detroit MI. I recently sent a communication to Bankole Thompson, the present Senior Editor at the Michigan Chronicle and cc'd to Mr. Robert Bobb, the Emergency Financial Manager for the Detroit Public Schools. I await their responses.

Bankole, perhaps no POLITICIAN has contributed out of his/her own pocket
to help DPS or assist an individual child, but plenty of grass-roots
EDUCATORS do it every single day. I have seen DPS teachers and principals
buy art supplies, paper, pens, supplemental books, and other instructional
paraphernalia--and even toilet paper--to have in classrooms for kids on a
routine basis.

If you seek an example, you need search no farther than your own "backyard,"
so to speak. One of your current long-time columnists who started teaching
and coaching in DPS in 1958 and also has been a longtime intermittent
DPS educator purchased a set of encyclopedias, two sets of dictionaries, a
globe, three pairs of track shoes, and many other things for his classroom
and for his athletes at the wild Finney High School between 2003 and
2008--including supplemental books on various subjects relevant to their
educational and co-curricular needs, and to their lives.

This same teacher/administrator--a former activist school executive in
several local districts including DPS, (and including Rochester, where his
house was shot up at midnight in a highly publicized 1989 incident for
hiring black administrators)--also made the following offers throughout the
past decade in many arenas--including in his column and on his radio
show--to do the following DPS jobs GRATIS:

superintendent
assistant superintendent
executive director
principal
ombudsman
etc.

He also offered to take a $35,000 pay cut from his job as curriculum
coordinator/teacher/athletic director/local community liaison at Finney to
serve as a parent/community liaison in the downtown division he had
directed in 2002-3 (until the Chief of Staff stripped him of his executive
directorship unjustly and without due process because he had protested
her writing a memo to his community liaisons gagging them from communicating
with community leaders without first clearing it with her. An April, 2003
editorial in the Chronicle condemned her for that gag order when its
existence was leaked to the daily newspapers. It marked the second time he
had been fired from a DPS executive directorship in three years for blowing
the whistle on malfeasance near the top level. During the year in-between,
he directed the Detroit Team for Justice at 3000 Gratiot.)

This old Chronicle columnist's offers to do those DPS jobs for
free were repeatedly rejected by incompetent, corrupt boards and executive
administrators not because your old columnist was CRAZY--as no less an
authority than fired Supt. Connie Calloway tells him they warned her
he was--but because he was both highly competent--TOO competent, and even
more threatening to them, because he was absolutely INCORRUPTIBLE.
They knew that as superintendent he would lose absolutely no time exposing
the malfeasances that Mr. Robert Bobb is now uncovering, and they also knew
that as superintendent he would lose absolutely no time putting in place
many of the reforms that Mr. Robert Bobb is now undertaking Well they knew
that he had been calling for most of those same reforms for lo this past
decade on his now-silenced radio show on NewsTalk 1200 (his sponsors ran out
of funds) and in his Telford's Telescope columns in the Michigan Chronicle.

Even though he is 74 years old now, the old columnist remains available to
Mr. Bobb to make these same pro bono contributions in any strategic capacity
Mr. Bobb may designate, as he told him when he appeared with him and DFT
president Keith Johnson last spring on the Huel Perkins show, just after he
was fired as superintendent by the frightened Madison school board for
bringing hundreds of Detroit kids to the Madison District Public schools.
(The board buckled to a few hundred raucous resident racists there.)

Mr. Robert Bobb has this old columnist's phone number. To get this expert,
experienced, old administrator's services for free, Mr. Bobb need only pick
up the phone and call him at 586-803-3586 or 313-574-2767.

P.S. - Bankole, did you finally get your old columnist's new book, A Life on
the RUN - Seeking and Safeguarding Social Justice? (Over a thousand
preorder copies have been sold so far, two-thirds of them to Detroiters,
even though no reviews have been written yet or solo book-signings scheduled
yet. Sales via Amazon and the website, www.alifeontherun.com , are starting
to pick up as the publicists' work accelerates. The old columnist has also
GIVEN copies away to several of his former Finney students whose names are
in the book .)

Bankole, the publisher has sent two or three galley copies addressed to you
at the Chronicle. If you didn't get one, your old columnist will bring one
to you personally on the morning of Wednesday, December 16 and give it to
you (or put it on your desk). In fact, the old columnist--namely, me--will
bring you a hardcover copy and autograph it for you, if you would like
me to.

Rebels, Renegades, and Revolution

2009-11-24T08:35:00.000-05:00

During the eight mendacious, murderous years of the Bush/Cheney administration, rebellious ideas regarding real, bloody revolution began to encroach upon my renegade egalitarian mind. These thoughts were more than mere musings. Gentle old literary lion though I am--a man of words rather than weaponry--I was actually pondering how I could organize a righteous rabble of rebels made up of millions of activist and/or impoverished African-Americans, Hispanics, Arab- and Asian-Americans, blue-collar whites, and laid-off white-collar whites to march on Washington and take the treasonous president and vice president out on the white house lawn to face a citizens' firing squad. In those dark days of that callous, brutal Bush/Cheney regime, I thought long and often about righteous rebels and renegades of the present and storied past.

And about pirates. I pondered hard about pirates. The pirates who recently commandeered a ship off the coast of Somalia told a reporter that they regarded people who illegally fished and dumped waste in their seas to be the real pirates.  By their definition, they were not pirates but patriots--or at least, patriotic pirates.

Like Bush and Cheney, the pirates of the 17th century were incorporated, capitalistic thieves and torturers. Still, there was something refreshing about the pirates' alternative to Bush/Cheney's elitist, bureaucratically engrained corporatocracy, rankly overt classism, covert racism, and abject contempt for the democratic ideal--an alternative that those swashbuckling buccaneers of olden times professed and presented so memorably and so boldly. Pirate society in the Carribean Sea of three-and-a-half centuries ago embodied a form of democracy that featured fairly elected leaders (no "malfunctioning" Floridian ballot chits), economic parity (they divided their loot), racial and gender equity (some pirate captains were black or female), and even universal health care--the current bugaboo of raucous Republican politicians, several faux-Democrats, and assorted similar yahoos. I fail to see what is wrong or undemocratic about the egalitarian concept of health care for everyone--women, children, the uninsured, the old and infirm. If that makes me the leftist I've so often been accused of being, then I glory in being called a leftist--and perhaps a pirate, too. (I've been called worse.)

All righteous, insightful Americans despaired when the two great Kennedys and King were killed and the tide of global history turned horrific with Nixon andWatergate--and ultimately with Bush/Cheney's deregulated WallStreetgate, Iraq-gate and Afghanigate. Now President Obama and his humane, reasoned, enlightened platform are the great and final hope to turn back that horrific tide and preserve American democracy for the world. Bush and Cheney were well on their way toward trashing that democracy with their warmongering over oil, their condoning of torture, their rescission of civil liberties regarding illegal wiretapping, their support of bank deregulation, and their fostering the exploition of the world's scarce maaterial resources at the evil altar of their evanescently greedy, cash-engorged, corporate fellow travelers.

America recently lost the last great Kennedy--the longest-serving ally the common man ever had in the United States Senate.   Ted was a staunch proponent of universal health care and other such "socialist" bugbears of the political right. If the Democrats don't get their act together pronto and support the leader of their own party in this and other egalitatrian endeavors, America will go the way of the Spanish Empire in what was then the "new world"--an empire the pirates and privateers so thoroughly plundered. When we reach the explosive point where unemployment insurance runs out and ordinary citizens are permanently out of work and can no longer feed theirr children by legal means, the time will inevitably have arrived when pirates and righteous rebels alike will rise up and ignite a real revolution.

[Reprinted {and slightly revised} from the Telford's Telescope column in the Detroit-based Michigan Chronicle, October 7 - 13, 2009]

- (Dr.) John Telford, age 74
retired school executive;
NCAA All-American, 440-yard dash, 1957;
Wayne State University Distinguished Alumnus of 2001 (for human-rights activism);
Author of A Life on the RUN - Seeking and Safeguarding Social Justice (Harmonie Park Press, 2010)

For more information about me and my memoir (and its distinguished list of endorsers, including former Detroit mayor Dennis Archer, celebrated trial lawyer Geoffrey Fieger, and world-renowned self-help author Dr. Wayne Dyer), google http://www.alifeontherun.com/.

Correction of correction

2009-11-24T06:40:00.000-05:00

The number of Harmonie Park Press is 586-979-2077--NOT 586-803-3586. (Can you tell I'm new at this?)

Correction

2009-11-24T06:37:00.000-05:00

The phone number for my publisher, Harmonie Park Press in Sterling Heights, Michigan, is 586-979-2077, 586-803-3586.

my book pre-order sales

2009-11-19T15:11:00.001-05:00

My pre-order sales are now approaching 600. Get yours now by calling Harmonie Park Press at 586-803-3586. My book is about the civil and educational rights of Detroit Public School students and how they have been violated. It is also about my many romances and the days when I was outrunning Olympic champions.