Why is There No Modern Day Roscoe Nix in Montgomery County?

Montgomery County civil rights leader, Roscoe Nix died on Jan. 4.

Read The Washington Post obituary here.

I’m glad that as a Montgomery County Public School employee, I knew Mr. Nix. For more than a year in the late 1980s, I served as a consultant to a NAACP Blue Ribbon Panel that Mr. Nix established to examine why so few black males enrolled in and graduated from Maryland colleges and universities. And I have defended Mr. Nix’s role in putting race on the MCPS table—long before Jerry Weast arrived in our county.

For some odd reason, many in Montgomery County credit the former MCPS superintendent for this achievement. That is ridiculous! I summarized what I think are the real facts on this issue in this post on the Parents' Coaltion of Montgomery County, Maryland blog.

But for this blog post, I would like to say more about a paragraph that appears in the Washington Post obituary. Reporter Michael Alison Chandler wrote: “Mr. Nix also was a loud critic of the conservative majority that swept the school board after he left in 1978. The board advocated a back-to-basics curriculum, closed more than 25 schools because of declining enrollment, and reversed many integration efforts. Mr. Nix battled repeatedly with the board.”

I’m glad I lived and worked for MCPS during this period. This particular paragraph is not wrong, but I think it is overly simplistic.

First, “conservative majority” in this paragraph makes it sound as if Bible-carrying, Bible-thumbing Texans had taken over MCPS and had imposed creationism on our children. Nothing was further from reality. O.K., these so-called conservatives—lead by Marian Greenblatt—were not your typical Montgomery County social justice (progressive) liberals, but they were not outright racists either. And I’m struggling to come up with a list of integration efforts that the Greenblatt board majority reserved. That board cut back on school pairings for racial integration purposes, but that is not a list. By the way, today one finds a wide-range of county leaders (some progressive) supporting the annual Greenblatt teaching award. Click here to read more.

Second, Mr. Nix was a “loud critic” of everything MCPS, and not just the so-called Greenblatt conservative Board of Education. Pretty much everyone who worked for MCPS back then—late 1970s and throughout the 1980s—was afraid of Mr. Nix. I do not mean this in a bad way, but when Mr. Nix walked into 850 Hungerford Drive—MCPS headquarters—a lot of people literally ran and hid under their desks. Why? Because Mr. Nix was a straight-shooter that called it like it was, and if that meant calling you out in public, then you got called out. Let’s face it—no one ever likes being called out, especially when one might end up being called something unpopular that ends up being reported in The Washington Post.

Third, Mr. Nix not only criticized MCPS, but he offered concrete suggestions for making things better. It would be wrong to summarize Mr. Nix’s legacy as just another loud critic. Mr. Nix put solutions on the table. Take, for example, MCPS’s disproportionate suspension rates for black students. In the mid-1980s, Mr. Nix was responsible for MCPS setting up an ad hoc committee on student suspensions. That committee engaged in a series of activities to understand why black students were disproportionately suspended from schools and to investigate ways to reduce the suspension rates for black students. I worked on and wrote one of the committee’s studies. Click here to download, or on the PDF at the top of this post, to read that study.

Let me stop here and say this about Mr. Nix: I appreciated every single time when he was loud. Along with the county NAACP and a lot of other committed black people (e.g., Jim Robinson always comes to mind with his annual assessments and reports on MCPS and its black students), he moved MCPS in directions it probably would not have moved if he had not been so vocal and public. Frankly, there are times when people need to be shamed into doing the right thing.   

Roscoe—thank you for shaming us.

So, MCPS is years ahead of where it was back in the 1970s and 1980s—we made significant leaps forward. Nonetheless, there are many issues that still negatively impact the school achievement of black, brown and poor students. We narrowed some achievement gaps, but we have not come close to closing them. And so the passing of Mr. Nix leads me to raise a really important question—as part of his legacy: Why is there no modern day Roscoe Nix in this Montgomery County?

And please do not insult me by suggesting we live in some kind of utopian suburb where all is great for all citizens.