Turbulence In Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s The Other America

On March 14th, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in front of a hostile audience delivered a speech at Grosse Point High School, entitled, “The Other America,” a speech that examined race, poverty, and economic justice in the United States. Dr. King cogently expressed his view on how complicated the issue of racism is in this country with this statement:

And I do not see how we will ever solve the turbulent [emphasis added] problem of race confronting our nation until there is an honest confrontation with it and a willing search for the truth and a willingness to admit the truth when we discover it. (para. 2)

From this statement, and because the race issue in this country is turbulent, we can recognize that solving the dilemma regarding racial

The first degree of turbulence is light turbulence. It is here issues encountered at this degree are seen as the normal part of the school’s and the district’s day-to-day operations. In this degree, “people continue to work normally because the issues causing the turbulence are ongoing” (1998, p. 114). Here, Gross (1998) identifies three examples that cause this level of turbulence in schools: (1) a disjointed community, (2) the geographic isolation of the school to the district, and (3) the issues that may overwhelm staff. Furthermore, Shapiro and Gross (2013) gives us the following comment about light turbulence, “The key to light turbulence is the fact that it is part of the institution’s environment and that it can be handled easily in a way that will, at least, keep the issue in check” (p. 8). At this level of turbulence, issues faced by school leaders are normal and can easily be dealt

Nevertheless, in 2000, Gross was able to locate and describe a school he named Crafton—a school he considered to have experienced extreme turbulence. During his initial observations at Crafton, Gross saw “an enriched curriculum, motivated faculty and an engaged community” (p. 3). Yet two years later, in visiting Crafton again to observe its progress, to his amazement, Gross found a completely different school, “Hope had turned to resignation and the original pervasive spirit of purpose was now transformed into a split faculty; some holding on to the old vision while others were improvising new approaches” (p. 4). That is to say, a once promising urban school of innovative educational reform was promptly transformed into a volatile condition. What materialized in this school, then, was a cascading of events (an underlying driver I will describe later) that led to a complete collapse of school