Game Changers
By: ANationAtRisk Staff
Each month, we will try to bring you the brightest and most relevant game changers in US education. We’ll get insights on topics that face our country from early-childhood development, to which graduate schools offers the best career networking opportunity for you.
We will also archive articles and interviews from the 19th century to modern-day philosophers on the impact of education, and the value it offers to an enlighten society.
Since this is the first interview for the website. We’ll bring you the founder of New Jersey Minority Education Development and the organizer of the America First or Last Movement, Albert Mitchell II.
Thank you for conducting this telephone interview. Can you tell us, why you’ve started this movement?
AM: First, I would like to thank my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, for giving me access to the Almighty God, and giving me the opportunity to work with so many important people. Which includes, everyone I’ve ever met; The America First or Last Movement is a present and future need, just like other historical movements in America. Like the Labor Union Movement’s birth in the late 1700s to early 1800s to the Women Rights Movement in the mid-1800s, to the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-20th century.
The American Dream was put on trial and the American people rose to the occasion, and we benefit from it now.
Today, the idea of America is put in a position those generations faced in building a strong and self-sufficient and a self-sustainable society is in jeopardy. The current problems we face, is nothing to what will happen in the next ten to twenty years, if we don’t wake up.
What do you mean, how can it get any worse with high unemployment, home foreclosures and young people marching in the streets?
AM: Look at the trade deficit with countries like China. Products made in America by Americans are almost extinct. Do you think tomorrow went you wake up somehow magically this problem will go away? And as the world society grows into technology, the need for a higher skilled work force is paramount now and for the future.
With nearly, half, and believe me went I say this, less than half of our country’s young minority population, will ever own a home or have children grow-up in a two-parent household. This will condemn them to a life of poverty. This will destroy America from within. Because of the high rate of poverty that will consume over 40% of the nation’s total population. Check the latest Censuses and it tells you the path America is headed.
Wait, you make it sound like some kind of apocalypse!
AM: No, what I’m saying its time to be proactive, not be in a reactive mold. College students are marching in the street, because the America, they signed up for is disappearing. The jobs they thought, would be there after college are being outsource. Instead of joining the American Dream; they are a part of the nightmare, in the debt they’ve achieved.
Combine this trend with the minority threat of poverty, America has to act now.
How, can we stop poverty and change the way America is going?
AM: We don’t have all the answers, but we can help with the minority problem, right now. Because, we have done it, in the conditions I just outline. Over 70% of the residents lived in poverty, 84 percent came from a single-parent household, and we worked with the nation’s highest dropout population- minority males. And turned around that population, not one, two, three or five years, but for 10 years in a roll, by increasing their high school graduation rate (53%), college enrollment (44%), college graduation rate(16%), and having them have fewer children out of wedlock by 32%.
The America First or Last Movement can address this problem; with the same support, we used in that community, which already exist across the country. It just how you approach the problem, and get others to buy in. That’s why; we created a movement that will help America rebuild its infrastructure that will give us a better chance to address the second problem, as well.
Homeownership, tax-dollars and votes are the remedy that the other movements achieved to get what they wanted. That’s what we will achieve too.
I want to thank you for your time, and is there anything you like to add?
AM: Thank you for your time. And I want every American to understand; America is no longer feared or respected around the world. Other countries can tell how things are going, by just looking at the number of our young people that are lost and disillusioned with the country. It’s something they’ve been waiting for a long time. We may have military bases in 158 foreign countries, but what we treasure here in America may all be lost, if we are absent from our own best interest. We are the solutions, and everyone is accountable.
Interviews Conducted by ANationAtRIsk Contributors: Preston S. Brown, Cynthia Primas, Donald B. Henley Jr., Albert Mitchell II, and Delgreco Wilson.