The Howard Fuller You Probably Don’t Know: An Advocate’s Remarkable Life

Fifty-five minutes into Thursday’s one-hour “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” program, prominent education advocate Howard Fuller finally began talking about the last 20 years of his life. Because the conversation was dragging on? Definitely not. It was because Fuller has led such a remarkable life, with so many chapters (and so many stories to tell) that talking about earlier years was appealing and confining even a well-paced interview to an hour was hard.

Many people in Milwaukee associate Fuller with his nationally significant role as an advocate for private school vouchers and charter schools in the last couple decades. But the full story of his life offers not only a remarkable personal narrative, but provocative perspective on the development of political thinking and advocacy among African Americans in the United States since the 1950s.

Fuller, 73, provided a healthy dose of that narrative and perspective in the session with Gousha, Marquette Law School’s Distinguished Fellow in Law and Public Policy, before a capacity audience in the Appellate Courtroom of Eckstein Hall. In much more detail, it is what he provides in his autobiography, No Struggle, No Progress: A Warrior’s Life from Black Power to Education Reform, published this month by Marquette University Press.

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Brutality Touches Down at Home

imagesVR6YYD65Anyone living in the United States who has watched TV in the last two weeks is undoubtedly aware that the NFL is in the midst of a storm of bad publicity. First, we saw the chilling videotape of Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice delivering a punch to the head that knocked out his then-fiancée (now wife) Janay Palmer, and then roughly dragging her off the elevator and dropping her like a sack of potatoes on the floor. Only days later, the Minnesota Vikings found themselves in the midst of a similar scandal when their star running back Adrian Peterson was charged with felony child abuse in Texas, where it is alleged he beat his 4-year-old son with a “switch.” Perhaps learning from the debacle that ensued when NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell originally imposed a meagre two-game suspension on Rice for his misdeeds, the Minnesota Vikings have suspended Peterson from games and team activities indefinitely, although since he continues to draw his $11 million dollar salary, he is hardly a sympathetic character at the moment. Meanwhile, the incidents involving NFL player violence against their partners and children keep surfacing.

A lot has already been said and written about these cases, and much of the discussion is thoughtful and educational. Numerous commenters, including New York Times columnist Michael Powell, have pointed out that we should not be so shocked that players who are rewarded for brutality on the football field revert to violent behavior at home. He makes an excellent point. After all, the NFL is not the only place where people who use force, sometimes brutal force, in their jobs have a hard time turning it off at home: the military and various police forces have faced similar issues. Moreover, we live in a society with a high tolerance for violence, at least violence of a recreational sort—as evidenced by numerous TV shows, video games and movies.

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New Marquette Law School Poll Puts Enthusiasm of Voters in Spotlight

How important is enthusiasm among voters in determining the outcome of an election? Very, and the closer the election, the more important enthusiasm usually is because it indicates who will actually turn out to vote.

So how important are the “enthusiasm” results in the Marquette Law School Poll released Wednesday? That remains to be seen, starting with keeping an eye on the remaining rounds of polls that will be released before the Nov. 4 election.

But it is a sure bet that people working in the campaigns of Republican Gov. Scott Walker and his Democratic challenger, Mary Burke, are paying close attention to the new results. While the poll showed that the race for governor remains essentially tied, there was an uptick in how enthusiastic Walker supporters are and in the percentage of people who identified themselves as Republicans.

Overall, the poll found that Walker and Burke are tied at 46% each among registered voters. Among those considered likely voters (people who said they are registered and are certain to vote), Walker was supported by 49% and Burke 46%. In both cases, the outcomes were within the poll’s margins of error.

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