Local Voices: Road to Redemption

Submitted by Bob Malkas

My second book, Road to Redemption, has been released. It is an unauthorized teacher’s guide for the study of American history. It can also be looked at as a revisionist history of what those who have been writing revised history have been doing for decades. Those who have been setting educational policy for our public schools will not want it to be read, because it challenges what is now being taught.

It can be purchased before it gets to Amazon on the Dorrance Publishing Co. bookstore for $13.00. Readers will find it unique in many ways because it will ask them to become proactive in dealing with now accepted policies that are common in schools. It should be easy to see the pendulum is swinging in the country. And the public is searching for ways that will position them to be able to take back control of their lives, and the lives of their children.

One chapter assigns an American History Constitution test without giving the answers. Getting the correct answers is left to the reader as a way for them to determine if they are adequately versed in what the Founding Fathers intended.

13 additional assignments have been constructed to set a stage for encouraging public thought on issues that face our nation. The public will have to decided for themselves what road to take, and it should be their decisions and not what our elected leaders want us to accept. I will give you one example of how the book explains the history of racial segregation in the United States.

To understand how the United States Supreme Court was designed to function can be seen by examining some of their landmark decisions. In 1892 an African-American train passenger, Homer Plessey, refused to sit in a train car reserved only for black people. He said his rights as an American citizen were violated. The U.S. Supreme Court of that time rejected his argument and those who supported him. The Court ruled that his constitutional rights would not be violated if all were the same. Thus, the concept of separate but equal was established and gave states the okay to continue separate but equal practices if they chose. That would extend to public schools. That became accepted policy for 50+ years and would not be corrected until 1954 when Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, overturned it. American history students should know our system allows changes when the people are prepared to endorse them, as new Justices and new laws are established.

In 1951 Brown’s daughter was denied entrance to an all white elementary school. In his lawsuit Brown claimed schools for black children were not equal to white schools, and that violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

In 1954 that court unanimously struck down Plessy. When that decision was rendered, what some states believed that separate but equal was constitutional would no longer stand. A better interpretation of what is a right was evolving and making America stronger.

This is just one of the assignments given in the book. There are 12 others that if read and discussed in a mature and public forum would provide children and parents alike with better understandings of the problems facing us.

Bob Malkas