Many people from Niger/Congo wound up on slave ships and as sailors working for foreigners who pronounced the word as it looks, hence it was not meant as what politically correct dumbed downs and other idiots think of as a “hate” word, it was simply a mispronounced word denoting where a person was from and who he/she was.
Young Williams and his peers will probably never know the beauty of America’s Aesop’s Fables by Joel Chandler Harris, loved by children of all ages and races. Or the hauntingly beautiful poems of Howard Weeden about plantation life and his wonderful black and white watercolors of the people he wrote about, knew and loved. Shakespeare and the Moors; today’s students learn little of the great literature but a lot about Black hate from authors who never knew anything but inner city ghettos and impoverished countries run by dictators that still enslave people. The well educated person of any color, never seems to have a problem with vernacular or patois of cultures, it is only the deliberately dumbed down American public school student and those teachers who ascribe to Political Correctness that are the loosers.
The Portland School Board will continue a disservice to their teachers and the children entrusted to them to teach if they bow to this childish and silly accusation of Charles McGee and Johnnie Williams, a form of racism in its self.