By BILL MAXWELL, St. Petersburg Times

I consider myself to be a traveler who attempts to absorb the essence of a place through the behaviors and practices that give its people their identity. My major focus is not the politics but the currents and trends that produce the politics of the place.

Last year on Father's Day, Barack Obama delivered what I believe has been his most important speech directed specifically to black America.

(ital) "Now coming to your college campus: the First Globals. They are the most outward-looking generation in American history, more socially tolerant, and internationally aware. How does higher education need to adapt to a fundamental reorientation of the American character away from consumption and toward a new global citizen?" (endital)

As a college English teacher, I saw my share of students who were unprepared for the rigors of college work. I still see the shocked faces of teen-agers who had been given A's and B's in high school only to learn that their college essays deserved no better than a D.

"The structure is not in place that will allow adjuncts to move out of their Untouchable position in this caste," a blogger wrote a few months ago, alluding to the strict occupational and social class distinction in the two-tiered, or multi-tiered, system of faculty employment at colleges and universities.

St. Petersburg's black communities are at a crossroad. I am using Webster's definition to mean "a time in which important changes occur or major decisions must be made." The recent murder of 8-year-old Paris Whitehead-Hamilton, and other killings and acts of violence during the last 12 months, have hit many ordinary residents and community leaders hard.

Even in the age of Obama, race and other issues related to inclusiveness continue to confound officials at many of the nation's universities.

At last, a semblance of introspection and enlightenment apparently has come to a large number of black people in St. Petersburg, Fla., after the senseless killing of 8-year-old Paris Whitehead-Hamilton.
I am pleased, and I am outraged at the same time.

Gov. Charlie Crist once again has gone against the grain of Florida politics and gubernatorial politics in particular. On March 26, Crist sent a letter to leaders of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers after meeting with members of the labor advocacy group in Tallahassee.

Education in black America at all levels-- from kindergarten through college -- is in a crisis, and the crisis will deepen if something drastic is not done now and if attitudes do not change.