PALM BEACH COUNTY, FLA. -- Like a champion boxer with one hand tied behind his back in the ring with a ruthless killer wielding a 90-pound sledge hammer, Curtis Sherrod, a veteran school teacher, is fighting with the school board and he is winning.
"This is a battle that all teachers in the country are engaged in, whether they know it or not," he says.
A proud African-American with more than 20 years of experience in the classroom, Sherrod says he is a descendant from a long line of warriors who know how to fight to the finish. "I am relentless," he says boldly, his bearded face casting a stern profile against the deep blue Florida sky. "I have nothing left to lose. They've tried to take everything, but they won't get my pride and my integrity."
Curtis Sherrod has been a teacher and a coach his entire professional life, but you won't find him in any classrooms or football fields this school year. The Palm Beach County School Board has taken Sherrod out of the classroom, off the field, and put him on hall-monitoring duty, he says, because he has been teaching African and African-American history.
When a group of white students complained about his claims that black people once ruled the world, he got kicked out of his own classroom.
And that's not all, says Sherrod. When he started suggesting that the white coaches were not only sending in the wrong players, but they were also depriving the black football players of college scholarship opportunities, the coaching staff turned on him and his son.
But Sherrod is not accepting his hall-monitoring assignment without a fight.
His father, an 82nd Airborne veteran, was among the first black paratroopers at Fort Bragg, N.C., where Curtis was born in 1954. He says he has uncles on both sides of his family who served in the United States military. His ambition was to do the same.
He never assumed that he would do anything other than military service himself, until his father retired when he was 9 years old. That changed everything for him and his five brothers. Another brother followed him into teaching and two went into the corrections field.
Curtis became a history buff, "reading everything I could get my hands on, including every set of encyclopedias in the house." He says his father was a sucker for door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen, so there were several sets in the house when he was growing up.
He has taken his one-man battle for truth and justice out of the school to United States District Court, where he filed a lawsuit demanding his job back and $10.5 million dollars in damages.
He is no stranger to the courts. Three years after he started teaching in Florida at the Carver Middle School, Sherrod's contract was not renewed. He said it was not about his teaching abilities then, either.
"It was a lot of petty infighting and schoolhouse politics," he says, that got him into trouble with the administrators.
It took 10 years and petitions to the Florida Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court before he won another classroom position in Palm Beach County in 1993, when he was assigned to JFK Middle School until 1995.
In 1996, he was moved to Olympic Heights in predominantly-white Boca Raton, where he began to run into trouble with the administration again.
He says they have been harassing him since the day he arrived there, completely ignoring his right to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution by constantly engaging in retaliation against him for his insistence that he teach African and African-American history as part of the curriculum.
He was notified again this academic year that his contract would not be renewed after teaching at Olympic Heights for nine years.
Sherrod, who has been a certified teacher and a football and girls basketball coach in the State of Florida since 1980, says he has engaged in independent research and studies over the past 20 years to become an expert in the infusion of the African and African-American curriculum mandated by Florida law.
He says the school board refuses to stop submitting him to derogatory and humiliating evaluations and false accusations, creating a hostile work environment, making it almost impossible for him to perform his duties as a teacher. Although he has worked as a coach for several years at different schools, "they won't have anything to do with me anymore, but this is not just about me," he says.
"They've been cheating us for decades," he says. "Our children deserve more than what they are getting out of their educational experience. Most of them find it difficult to relate to the images the curricula present. For the most part they are not there, and when they are, they are poorly represented."
Sherrod is suing the school board for over $10 million in damages and to force them to comply with Florida laws that require all teachers to teach African and African-American history wherever it applies, including in math and science, as well as in world history and literature.
So far he has managed to ward off the school board's attempts to have his case thrown out. United States District Court Judge Daniel K. Hurley denied the board's motion to dismiss his case.
He says he has been the subject of hateful retaliation by his superiors as well as his co-workers for teaching what the law requires him and all other Florida teachers to teach.
Sherrod is not the first African-American to file a lawsuit against the Palm Beach County School Board. There have been many.
In fact, the history of litigation for equal education opportunities for blacks is as old as the Civil Rights struggle itself.
For decades, many whites stood firmly opposed to the education of blacks. Some favored limited "training," just enough to make blacks perform better as servants and farm hands. Few encouraged real education for African-Americans.
As far back as 1873, when a black man, Jonathan Gibbs, the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, originally organized the Florida Public School System, blacks stood little chance of getting an education in Florida.
In 1885, the infamous Section 12 of the Florida Constitution became law. It provided that "white and colored children should not be taught in the same school, but equal provisions shall be made for each." The problem then, as today, is that "blacks don't get an equal share," according to Sherrod.
In those days, black teachers' pay was less than 50 percent of that of white teachers with the same educational background. Facilities such as buildings, books, libraries and science labs were nowhere near equal. Most black schools simply did not have anything. "Not even books," says Sherrod.
In 1937, a group of black teachers, many of them members of the Florida State Teachers Association, organized an effort to challenge the unequal treatment and facilities, arguing that "separate but equal" was a myth. They began filing lawsuits all over Florida.
In 1938, Noah Griffin, the black principal of Gibbs High School in St. Petersburg, was fired for participating in the movement, but others followed in his footsteps, including Mrs. Annie Hogan Brewer of West Palm Beach.
As predicted at the time, the Florida Supreme Court refused to grant the relief sought by the petitioners, opening the door for an appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States. But Thurgood Marshall, attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and a future United States Supreme Court Justice, convinced the group to hold their appeal in abeyance, because the United States 4th Circuit Court of Appeals had already ruled in the black teacher's favor.
Over the years, black teachers continued to file "equalization" suits at the Federal District Court level. In time, they won all of their lawsuits, including a case filed by Mr. G. Steffan, the plaintiff in a West Palm Beach case. Although the lawsuits resulted in better equipment, supplies and buildings, all of the black plaintiffs were eventually fired.
It would take another 20 years, until 1954, before the United States Supreme Court would step in and declare the whole "separate but equal" myth unconstitutional, but as Curtis Sherrod points out, "We still have a long way to go. Too many people on both sides of this issue still have that old attitude about Africa and African America, that our history began with slavery and that Africans are savages."
He says the struggle to get it right is not limited to the South. "Teachers, not just African-American teachers" all over the country are trying to get more attention focused on the issue.
"Until we begin to see ourselves in a more truthful, more positive light, the negative stereotypes we are teaching our children will continue to produce generations of low achievers, because they don't believe that we expect them to do any better," says Sherrod.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | November 26 2002 |