What has Reconstruction to do with education today?

Why is Oklahoma last in education and health care. All this when the Democrats were in control and we all thought they were the champions of common education? I started by doing the basics, wandering around the Capitol and asking-why? What are the core reasons for this? I got some really interesting answers and some basic political responses which I will share here, but the common thread goes back to Reconstruction. I'll zip through some of the answers and then get to meat and see if anybody agrees.

"No money." "Republicans cut taxes, no money." "Oklahoma has lowest school days in the world!" "Keating started calling teachers slugs and we didn't fight back." "We didn't fight back because we wanted to be re-elected." "If any of them could read four hundred words they would vote Democrat." "They are all for education, but they vote to cut taxes." "Oklahoman's don't care about education."

The last was the common theme and usually the second answer to the first question. Former State Senator Don Williams from Western Oklahoma put me on to the "Core Reason" Reconstruction. So here goes for what it is worth.

Yankees started beating up on the South (South Oklahoma) through the Reconstruction years and on into 1899. The Choctaws and the Chickasaws fought with the South and the Yankees never forgot it. They put the boot down and kept it there for twenty years. Settlers wanted into Oklahoma. In early 1889 Rutherford B. Hayes yielded to demands of the settlers and opened up two million acres in central Indian Territory known as the Unassigned Lands on April 22, 1889. Fifty thousand home seekers gathered at the Kansas and Texas borders for the signal. By early evening nearly every homestead and town lot in the settlement zone had been taken.

By 1906, only the land of the Five Civilized Tribes remained out of settlers hands.

In order for Oklahoma Territory and the Indian Territory to be admitted as a single state, Congress decided that Indian Territory, as a political entity with land held in common by the tribe, had to be eliminated and individual Native Americans transformed into United States citizens before Oklahoma Territory could become a state. The Federal Dawes Commission, formed in 1889, forcibly divided tribal lands into allotments given to individual Native American families. In 1896, continuing the process, the Curtis Act of 1898 helped finish it by placing residents under federal law and abolishing tribal courts. In 1906 Congress passed the Oklahoma Enabling Act which authorized a convention to meet in Guthrie, Oklahoma to write a state constitution.

During this period, 1863 to 1906, the tribes, primarily agrarian and the settlers, many outlaws and outcasts, fought it out if not physically, surely in a cultural sense. To the federal government, with its boot on the back of the tribes, and to the settlers, and their current heirs, education, common and certainly higher, simply were not issues. Families saw no reason to educate because it didn't take an education to drive mules back then. Families still control the reasons for getting an education. Settlers were more interested in grabbing land and money than sending a kid to the East or West Coast to be educated. If they did, most of the kids never came back.

IN 1920s there were a lot of economic and social disturbances effecting Oklahoma. Although North/South and East/West railroads had been built under Reconstruction,and later manufacturing and financial industries increased during the first war, Oklahoma farmers, if not sharecroppers, were unable to pay debts and went bankrupt. Workers all across Oklahoma suffered as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Daily Oklahoman fought labor unions.

Finally, in the early 1920's the Ku Klux Klan, dedicated to white supremacy that had terrorized blacks and Republicans in the South reappeared in Oklahoma. The Klan received substantial public support and politicians associated with it briefly controlled both major parties as well as the state Legislature. Consequently, blacks and Native Americans suffered another kick in the teeth, if not far worse.

All across Oklahoma there are pockets of education proponents but they are pockets. Surrounding these pockets are vast lands of drug infested poor. No family values or family pushing. Bad jobs and little hope.

If you look at the density maps of Oklahoma relating to the poor, the uneducated and the sick they are all the same. The same high numbers of poorly uneducated that pull the state average down are the same places that pull the healthy/unhealthy numbers down.

Now a lot of white folks, sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters of the settlers, would like to blame the tribes. Well, how far up can you go when your lands, your education and health care facilities and the decisions about them are in the hands on those who are not in your corner and don't have enough sense to realize that it is they and their fore bearers from the Reconstruction that maintain the boot on the back, the failure to fund education and health care and to take the solutions to the problems. Keep in mind the old conservative Oklahoma mantra "I got mine the hard way, they can get it that way too." "They" never had a chance and "Them" got theirs theirs the hard way of inheritance, opportunity not given to others and downright discrimination against their brothers and sisters.

Reconstruction wasn't all that long ago. Just about twice my age.

In Oklahoma, we need an Education and Health Care Mission just like the Peace Corps, to go into our own areas of poor, unhealthy and uneducated. This Mission would identify real problems, create solutions and advocate for results. We need leaders with vision and political strength. We need action. If we don't move we will be laster than the last, sicker than the sickest and dumber than your worst dreams.

We need our own Reconstruction.