This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
What a criminal enterprise our country truly is. And I do mean enterprise. After all, according to the latest figures, there are" honestly, you're not going to believe this" but, according to PrisonPolicy.org, there are roughly 1.9 million people incarcerated in this country, 803,000 Americans on parole, and a staggering 2.9 million on probation. Imagine that! When it comes to incarceration rates, no other nation compares. In fact, of our 50 states, 24 have rates higher if you check this link than any other democracy (whole countries!) on the planet.
And then consider this: "At least 113 million adults in the U.S. (roughly 45%) have a family member who has been incarcerated, and 79 million people have a criminal record, revealing the ripple effects of locking up millions of people every day." And I doubt you'll be surprised to learn that, in such a country and with our past, Blacks remain distinctly over-represented behind bars. In fact, they make up just 12% of the population, but 38% of the prison and jail populations.
In that context, consider Tamar Sarai's first TomDispatch piece, an all-too-symbolic tale of how one institution in Topeka, Kansas, once a vocational college for Black students, became over the decades and all too symbolically a women's prison. Then consider the remarkable story of one man who tried not just to stem but turn the tide there. Tom
One School's Missing History
A Family Heirloom, Lost in Plain Sight
By Tamar Sarai
Not long after moving to Topeka, Kansas, in the early 1980s, community organizer Curtis Pitts learned about a hidden slice of that city's history that would come to shape his life's work over the next four decades. He was introduced to the Kansas Technical Institute, or KTI, a Black vocational college that had prospered throughout the early twentieth century, only to close in the mid-1950s.
Founded in 1895, KTI enjoyed the distinction of being the second Black college established west of the Mississippi. Built in part by its own students, the school became a self-sustaining campus, training them in agriculture, nursing, printing, tailoring, and theology, among other subjects. The story of KTI almost immediately captured Pitts's attention, both because of its grandeur at the time and the ways its absence had impacted the city.
"Thinking that this was the Brown v. the Board of Education city, this should be just like Atlanta with the Black community prospering," Pitts told me, recalling his early observations of Topeka. "Once I found out that the school closed, you can see a direct correlation to the demise of Black businesses and families and communities because it was a hub and many of the business owners had learned their trade from the school."
The benefits both tangible and intangible of any school, particularly one designed with Black students in mind, compelled Pitts not just to educate himself in the history of KTI but also, in the end, to try to reopen it, ushering in a new twenty-first-century version of the school. If its closure was sobering, its later transformation should have been confounding.
The shock of that change was captured in the moment, more than 40 years ago, when a friend first told Pitts about the school. "At that time, we were standing in his front yard and he kept looking across the street and he started talking about the college and why he came [to Topeka]," said Pitts. "I'm trying to figure out which college he was talking about because all I could see was a prison."
Retaliation for Brown v. Board of Education?
KTI's role in contributing to the rise of local business owners speaks to the importance of vocational training for young Black students nationwide at the time. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such training was the underpinning of many Black secondary schools and colleges. Most of them focused on specific trades with the goal not just of preparing their students for decent, steady work but also indoctrinating them with values like industriousness, efficiency, and self-reliance.
Perhaps the best-known and most influential leader of that pedagogical approach was Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He crafted its curriculum in a way that married vocational trades to academic study and famously instructed Blacks to "cast down their bucket where they are" and acquire the skills needed to take care of themselves.
Though a controversial stance at the time, Washington's invitation encapsulated the mission of Tuskegee and came to serve as a model for other Black vocational schools, including KTI. In fact, the school's founders, Lizzie Riddick and Edward Stephens, would successfully enlist the support of Washington when establishing KTI and former Tuskegee professors and directors would go on to hold prominent positions there. As only the second historically Black college established west of the Mississippi River, the Topeka-based school would come to be known locally as "the Tuskegee of the West."
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