I have thought long and hard about HOW to start talking about this, and I was stunned to see, when I googled my name and Kennedy on the web, that instead of anything about the GSA-related violence back on 2000, I got back the articles I referred to below, and a blog-comment from George Schmidt -- with whom I have worked with for years, and who has a heart of gold beating under an extremely crusty exterior.
I post this letter, slightly revised, that I wrote to him. I know, his note is a year old, I don't deal with other questions like, DO we need a LGBT high school (maybe) and issues, still hanging, about my experience -- like, how it triggered PTSD for me.
But I thought it might be a good place to start the unravelling -- or, no, the opposite, the picking up of the dropped stitches which has led to my unravelling. So here goes. And I'll see if I can find a picture.
Tina Beacock |
Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 12:20 PM |
George, you are the ultimate archivist and resident memory, but this time you got it wrong. I am writing you about a year-old article on a nine-year old case, because I realize you shared the same misconception of many of my friends and comrades in the fight with the boss.
I thank you for the compliment, that I was a fighter, and that's why they came after me. But class fighter is only a piece.
You said in blog exchange below, "And nobody will claim she had a hard time because of her sexual orientation."
I would. It was one part of the reason I was blacklisted, as you (correctly) observed.
I didn't start the FIRST GSA at CPS, there were many, in schools from Curie, Whitney Young, Jones High School. You notice the list? Kennedy was one of the first neighborhood schools where we tried to organize. It was the working class neighborhood of Garfield Ridge, where lots of cops and firefighters lived, to meet the residency requirements, and the students came from everywhere-- including Little Village, before the Little Village was built, and LeClaire Courts, which every few years had to fight to stay included in the attendance area. The kids weren't calling the shots, or setting the tone.
I WAS attacked because I helped start the GSA. The kid , Daniel Cummings, bragged about it to friends, how, "I got that lesbo faggot teacher," and that is how I was told who did it, and how I told the POLICE who to arrest. He'd already had confrontations with me in the classroom about the "safe space" pink triangle on my bulletin board. He torched my car after a failure notice (not a grade), but he thought it was safe to do this, because of the hostile environment the local LSC helped establish. ('We can't let a gay in here! They'll be marching down Archer Avenue!!") The young man's grandfather was a firefighter who worked with a detective on an arson squad, who showed up pounding on my door at 1 AM to discuss the case. The police and the state's attorney's office made sure the charges were reduced from hate crime (never charged) to arson(dropped)...to property damage. MANY elements (police, school board, others?) wanted the case to go away quietly, and hence, the widespread circulation of articles you probably read, George, within two weeks of the arrest, that said, no, no, it was just a dust-up over a grade. No problem here, no hateful violence, just aq little student anger. Don't we call that spin control?
I got really active in the union AFTER my car was torched, I was made to learn the hard way, teachers, you can't just shut the door and teach in your classroom, you have to organize to defend yourself as workers, or they can chew you up and spit you out, for all kinds of reasons. I represented all the members at my school, including the homophobic ones who told me they loved me, 'just like a murderer or a thief,' who were the same ones who said "No students in MY class are gay!" who told students in their"student-led" bible clubs that gays an lesbians had no r i g h t to l i v e . I could be fearless on the House of Delegates floor, and still be forced out of one school, marginalized in the next, and never hired again, for several reasons at once. I had not endeared myself to the (police and shopkeepers) community there when I helped students petition for Mumia Abu Jamal's case, or supported a strike at the Aztec tortilla plant. The first policeman investigating the arson asked, was there any group I belonged to, which might make me a target? Yes, somebody had my name on a list. But it wasn't till the GSA issue that some thug thought it was OK to torch a teacher's car. The expected level of backlash for a grade would have been KEYING the car, not smashing the tail-light and windshield, and then setting it on fire.
Someone once said, I don't get to wake up in the morning and choose how I will be
oppressed today -- we don't get to pick our oppressions-- they come in a package.
On the other issue of, what's the climate like now(then, in 2008), I suggest getting in touch with the various Gay Straight Alliances who network with the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance-- and sponsor the Day of Silence/Night of Noise, or the residency programs for kids who get kicked out of their parents' homes, or places that counsel LGBT students when they consider suicide, or THEY get expelled for carrying knives to school to defend themselves from constant attacks. The climate's definitely, mercifully changing, but a bit of hard data would be helpful.
from http://www.catalyst-chicago.org/RUSSO/index.php/entry/1181/Can_A_Gay_White_Motorcycle-Riding_Principal_Help_Libby_ES_Improve%3F
By: Maureen Kelleher Can A Gay White Motorcycle-Riding Principal Help Libby ES Improve? Hey, George-
While you're right that economic class and racial segregation are huge and pressing problems that many people would rather forget about, I think the possibility of a high school that expressly welcomes gay and lesbian students is in a whole different league of news from pointing out some principal's orientation. And harassment of teens about orientation is a problem for CPS kids--both those who are gay and lesbian and those who are not.
There are CPS students who are dropping out rather than face harassment about their sexuality in regular schools, and let's not forget the Kennedy High School teacher whose car was bombed in the school parking lot some years ago because she dared to start the first Gay-Straight alliance in the city.
For more on the proposed Social Justice-Pride school, see this link:
http://www.windycitytimes.com/gay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=19257
Wed Sep 17, 2008 at 1:24 AMBy: George N. Schmidt Can A Gay White Motorcycle- Riding Principal Help Libby ES Improve? "...and let's not forget the Kennedy High School teacher whose car was bombed in the school parking lot some years ago because she dared to start the first Gay-Straight alliance in the >city..." (Lois Lane, yesterday).
Maureen, Tina's car was not bombed because "she dared start the first Gay-Straight alliance in the city", as the investigation later showed, but because she had run afoul of a student who didn't agree with her grading policies. Call her up and ask her for a full clarification of the story as it turned out to be -- not as you can Google it in a short cut substitute for reporting.
Fag bashing was once a major problem in CPS, and as a disciplinarian at Bowen, I >had to deal with a little of it, but in fact by the late 1990s it was in abatement across >most of CPS. Just ask any of dozens of the kids who went through the schools in those days. When my eldest went to his prom in 2007, one of the couples that shared the limo was a young person who had began high school as one gender and graduated as another. There was no problem with that reality by graduation day for the Class of 2007 at Whitney Young.
While it may be true that there are pockets of problems, still, to maintain, as the project does, that they are significant is simply ignoring an awful lot of current events and evolving historical reality. Before my brother came out in the 1960s, these were major problems (Thomas Lanigan Schmidt, a Stonewall veteran; Linden New Jersey High School, Class of 1965; Google him) in the schools (elementary and high >schools). To reprise realities of a decade or more ago is to ignore the changes that have happened.
No matter how many people cite that "example" reported in the Tribune about Tina's problems at Kennedy a few years back, it turned out that the reality was different (but the correction never surfaces when the story is recycled for whatever purposes). The real story there might be how Arne Duncan's administration has blacklisted that teacher, after moving her through DuSable and a few other places. And nobody will claim she had a hard time because of her sexual orientation.
They went after her for class reasons. She was a strong union delegate.
Get the whole story or start making your living writing fiction, instead of fictionalizing complex realities based on preconceptions and Google clips that need to be checked as carefully as last week's report on the "bankruptcy" of United Airlines.
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