ABSTRACT
We have slept through the alarm. Nearly 30 years ago, the children’s mothers spoke and Judge Joiner responded. From Ann Arbor’s Green Road housing project, mothers called out that schools were failing to educate their young. Unprepared to understand the language of their African American students, teachers disparaged children, suspended them, diagnosed kids as learning disabled, and banished them to speech pathology remediation labs. For talking while Black, children suffered teachers’ disdain and low, low expectations. After years of such treatment, the children were at risk of functional illiteracy. In the “Black English Case,” Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School Children v. Ann Arbor School District Board, Judge Joiner said it had to stop. He ordered the school to “take appropriate action to overcome linguistic barriers” that vernacular speaking children suffer in mainstream speaking classrooms (Labov, 1995, p. 46). That was 1979.
