All of us who have benefitted from it—and certainly I am one—are rightly concerned with how to address, or at least talk about, the injustices inherent in this class and race hierarchy, which for too long we have tried to ignore, even while secretly and silently uncomfortable about it.
As I begin to re-read piles of research, looking for details I may have missed and will want to include in this final revision of Little Brother, I find myself face to face with this issue. In the white upper-class world of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, the last years of my little brother’s life, the advantages that came with his birth were taken for granted by all of us. Efforts we might now call inappropriate to ensure that he was accepted at the “right” boarding school were simply the way parents functioned, if they were in a political and social position to do so. The crass buying of spaces for offspring in Ivy League colleges that shocked many people when it was revealed a few months ago is only a more crude version of what my parents, and Jonathan’s, attempted.
After he had applied for admission to an East Coast boarding school in 1956, Mother wrote the headmaster, who knew, “I’m afraid his academic record is not very impressive. I hope you will be influenced in your decision, however, by his aptitude tests. He is, I think, the most able of our boys. His performance, however, is extremely uneven, and that is due altogether to the fact, I think, that he has never learned to study, and has never accepted the yoke of homework as inevitable. The marks he has made he has achieved without, I can honestly say, any work at all. He is not in any way a discipline problem. But he is one of those children who is so absorbed in his own projects at home that school work has merely seemed to him an unrewarding interruption.”
She went on in a letter written on the family company’s letterhead, the Courier-Journal and Louisville Times, impressive in its own right: “I feel, in a rather deeply frustrated way that, if he could only fall under the influence of a really inspiring teacher, some inner spring might be touched, and that he could make a really distinguished record…”
After describing his Scout uniform, “covered from head to toe with merit badges of one kind or another which I am continually sewing on,” Mary Bingham concluded, “I really believe he has an excellent moral character, and has shown the capacity for leadership.”
Jonathan was accepted. But how many others, equally talented and equally individualistic, would never even have been considered for admission?
It is worth wondering.
Michael Harford says
Little Brother is bound to be filled with the details of privilege tempered by a sister’s emotion. I’m looking forward to reading it.
Bonnie Lee Black says
Yes, and how many others have had mothers who would go to bat for them the way Mary did? I’m sure her persuasive letters made all the difference.