Here’s some advice for Mitt Romney, soon to be the Republican nominee for president: Get a new director of black outreach. A week ago, Romney visited the Universal Bluford Charter School in West Philadelphia, a predominantly black section of the City of Brotherly Love.
Romney got no love in West Philadelphia. Kenny Gamble, the record mogul and songwriter who wrote songs so exquisite that he even made the horrible singing Intruders sound good, presumed to lecture Romney about the educational history of black Americans.
“Where there was a time when it was against the law of the country for people of African-American descent to even read or write, it is even more important today that we discuss education for the African-American community,” Gamble told Romney, according to news stories.
Can’t you almost hear the harrumphing in Gamble’s voice as he said that?
I’m not sure what political party, if any, Gamble belongs to. But I’m betting he’s a Democrat. Democrats treat history the way they treat the Constitution: They love making both up as they go along.
It is at this point I must ask the esteemed Mr. Gamble — hey, I still love those songs, bro — to name the federal law that made it illegal to teach black Americans, as slaves or freedmen, to read and write.
I’m sure he’d be able to find plenty of state laws, but no federal ones. Makes you wonder about the history classes at Universal Bluford Charter, doesn’t it?
When Romney tried to tell Gamble that he had an excellent education record as governor of Massachusetts, Gamble interrupted: “Governor, you’ve got to go back and remember how the whole concept of education has failed. You go back a few years, even in Boston, when they were trying to integrate schools and they had young black children going to white neighborhoods and they were throwing eggs at the little black children, spitting on them, calling them all kinds of names.”
I’m guessing that at this point Romney was thinking that talking to Gamble was like playing Russian roulette with his sanity, and with bullets in five of the revolver’s six chambers.
Romney could have — and possibly should have — mentioned that the racist incidents Gamble referred to happened in South Boston, a typically Irish-American section of the city that is strongly Democratic. Philadelphia is also strongly Democratic, and West Philadelphia is especially so. While Romney was subjecting himself to Gamble’s harrumphing inside Universal Bluford Charter, there was a crowd outside the school, shouting this City of Brotherly Love message: “Get out, Romney, get out!”
Yes, get out, you mean, old, vile, rich, white, male Republican you! Because Democrats have done so much for Philadelphia, right?
If, as Gamble claimed, “the whole concept of education has failed” in Philadelphia, then it failed on the watch of Democrats, didn’t it? And Democrats haven’t fixed it, have they?
A few years ago, Philly averaged one murder per day. I heard the lame-duck mayor and the lame-duck police commissioner — both black men — tell a group of visitors from Baltimore that the average profile of murder victims and perpetrators was this: young, black, male. Third-grade reading level, criminal history and from a home with no father.
I defy any of those residents who shouted “Get out, Romney, get out!” to show how Romney is responsible for that situation. In fact, inside Universal Bluford Charter, Romney was telling Gamble and staff members that the key to closing the black-white achievement gap in education is for more black kids to live in a home with a mother and father.
I’m betting his words fell on deaf ears, and that he’d have had better luck getting a dead dog to roll over.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
