(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Leonard Greene of the New York Post turns in an account of Colin Powell telling it like it is at the NAACP convention:
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell joined an NAACP panel of civil-rights giants yesterday and urged a new generation of leaders to declare war on failure in America’s schools. “There’s nothing more important for us as a nation than to sit back down with our kids and return a sense of pride and dignity,” Powell said at the Hilton New York. The retired general was joined by a who’s who of activists, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, former UN Ambassador Andrew Young, Washington power-broker Vernon Jordan and five of the famed Little Rock Nine students, who faced violent mobs to integrate an Arkansas high school in 1957.
Powell rattled off a string of ignoble statistics, including a 50 percent dropout rate among African-American students, 30 percent of whom are born out of wedlock. “There’s a connection,” Powell said before pointing to the Little Rock alumni. “Is this what they fought for?”
Jay P. Greene's Blog 