Earlier this month, a New York Times reporter named Andrea Elliott published a book, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City.

In the book, Andrea delves into the life of a family: Chanel, the mother; Supreme, her husband; and her seven children. In 2012, the family resided in a single room in the Auburn Family Residence, in Brooklyn, New York.

Andrea started her investigative reporting on the city’s poor and destitute by drifting around the Auburn’s front door. In October of 2012, she met Chanel, whose seven children would follow her out the building and down the sidewalk. The family soon let Andrea into their home, via the fire escape.

In dismay, Andrea stared at what these seven kids endured: mice, cockroaches, mold growing up the walls, bed bugs, junk food, and most astonishing, a lack of access to federal resources that could help.

Andrea though was most taken by Dasani, Chanel’s oldest, an 11-year-old girl, whom Chanel named after the bottled water company. Dasani changed baby’s diapers, cooked a breakfast for her siblings, made them sack lunches, and walked them to the bus stop or to school.

She tried to pull the family together, to function as normal as she could, and yet, Andrea Elliott wrote, “The family is a picture of chaos and love.”

An exhausted Dasani admitted to Andrea that she often fell asleep or daydreamed in her classes, or skipped school. She missed 52 days of school her seventh-grade year. She said, “I never did my homework. I was always a D or an F.” When boys called her names, she hit them hard with a fist.

Why was this family so poor, so destitute? First, Andrea Elliott pointed to the drug addiction that extended back generations in this family. Chanel’s mother had a crack cocaine addition. But then Andrea learned that Dasani’s great-grandfather was a World War II veteran.

After the war ended, when he was back in the city, he faced a form of iron-clad racism that kept him “from securing a union job or buying a home. The exclusion of African-Americans from real estate laid the foundations of a lasting poverty that Dasani would inherit.” Without a home, life for anyone is hard.

Andrea spent fourteen months observing the family. Then, in a series of five articles that appeared, with photographs, on the front pages of the New York Times in December 2013, Andrea described Dasani’s life. In an instant, Dasani was a celebrity, known across the city.

Money poured into the newspaper, earmarked to help the children exit their poverty. Someone mentioned to Dasani, that she should apply to the boarding school, the Milton Hershey School in Hershey, Pennsylvania. She did, was accepted, and began to attend classes there late in January 2015.

Milton Hershey, the candy maker, and his wife left the bulk of their massive fortune to a trust that established a boarding school in 1909, that was intended to rescue children from poverty, by providing them an exceptional education, superior health care, and a caring home life.

In 2015, when thirteen-year-old Dasani arrived, there were some 2,000 students, pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade. The school boasts of some 9,000 graduates. Officials allowed African-American boys into the school in 1968, and girls in 1976.

The campus covers more than seven thousand acres, in farm country, eighty miles northwest of Philadelphia, and thirty miles north of York and Lancaster.
Officials are proud of their campus. They point to: “203 buildings, six swimming pools, animal barns, a 7,000-seat football stadium, 2,315 student computers, an ice rink,” and a series of group homes, each with houseparents who oversee eight to twelve children.

The student body is about 39% white, 32% African-American, and 18% Latino. Because only low-income families can apply, the average family income is now at $23,574.

The carrot on the stick is that if a student graduates from Milton Hershey School, he or she receive a $95,000 scholarship to attend college. Andrea Elliott though discovered that officials either expel one in ten students for misbehavior, or the student chooses to drop out and return home.

An amazed Dasani stared at what the school was offering her: a selection of clothes and food, tutors to help her succeed in class, free health care, recreational opportunities, and personal safety. Unlike the Auburn, there were no knives and guns outside to terrify her, when she walked out the door.

Andrea Elliott writes, “The school’s staggering endowment—valued at more than $17 billion—provides the amenities of a top university.”

Now enrolled in one of the richest middle schools in the country, Dasani has much to learn. How she will adapt to life at Milton Hershey School, we will reserve for next time in these pages.

Tuskegee University is a “private, historically black, land-grant university” in east central Alabama, with an endowment of $129 million, as of 2019. That same year 2,876 students were enrolled, and of those, 2,379 were black. Of the 560 degrees offered in 2019, women received 358, men 202.

The school began with an agreement made in 1880, between a former Confederate Colonel, W. F. Foster, who was running for Alabama’s Senate, and a local black leader, Lewis Adams.

Foster asked Adams to try to persuade black voters to vote for him, on a promise that he would urge the state to build a post-secondary school for black students in their county, Macon County.

It all happened. Foster was elected, and the state earmarked $2,000 for teachers’ salaries.

The board’s members wrote to officials at another historically black school, Hampton Institute, in Hampton, Virginia, and requested names of possible teachers. Samuel C. Armstrong, then Hampton’s principal, recommended one of his finest teachers there, Booker T. Washington.

In recent days, I re-read Washington’s 1901 biography, Up From Slavery, and I still find it an astonishing record of one man’s ambitious drive, first to educate himself, and also to train others of his race. With multiple excuses to give up or quit, he never surrendered to doubt or hesitation.

Booker was born a slave on a tobacco plantation near Westlake Corner, Virginia, most likely in 1856. He never knew his father, but he wrote, “I have heard reports that he was a white man on a near-by plantation,” and that his father, “was simply another unfortunate victim” of slavery.

Jane, his mother, was the plantation’s cook, and their 14′ x 16′ log cabin was its kitchen. Jane, Booker, half-brother John, and half-sister Amanda lived in a cabin without doors or windows. Booker said, “we slept on a bundle of filthy rags laid upon the dirt floor.”

As for their own food, the family did not ever sit on chairs before a table. “It was a piece of bread here, a scrap of meat there. It was a cup of milk at one time, some potatoes at another.”

Their white owners expected all slaves, no matter their age, to work, and he said,

“I had no schooling whatever while I was a slave, though I remember on several occasions I went as far as the schoolhouse door with one of my young mistresses to carry her books. The picture of several dozen boys and girls in a school room engaged in study made a deep impression upon me”

“I had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study in this way would be about the same as getting into paradise.” His desire to read, write, and learn from books was a fuel that drove him on.

In 1865, when Booker was nine years old, he, his mother, and his siblings heard the welcome news that they were now emancipated, free of slavery’s grip. Jane packed up and moved to Malden, a town in West Virginia, to join her husband, Washington Ferguson, who had escaped slavery during the war.

Booker wanted to enroll in a new school for colored children in Malden, but his step-father insisted that he work ten or more hours a day before a hot and miserable salt-furnace. His mother somehow found for Booker a Webster “blue-black” spelling book that listed the English alphabet.

Booker tried to learn, but he said, “I could find no one to teach me. At that time there was not a single member of my race anywhere near us who could read, and I was too timid to approach any of the white people.” Day and night, Booker made a case to his parents that he should attend school.

He asked a teacher to teach him nights. Finally, his father allowed Booker to attend school for a few hours each day, but he still must work early morning and evenings at the salt furnace.

One day he overheard two other workers talking about a college on the coast that taught black students. He crept closer and listened. He learned that it was called Hampton Institute, at Hampton, Virginia. Booker decided he would travel to Hampton Institute, 325 miles away.

He almost starved on the journey, but when he arrived, he had no money for tuition. Officials though gave him a janitor’s job to pay his way. He said,

“Life at Hampton was a constant revelation: having meals at regular hours, eating on a tablecloth, using a napkin, the use of a bathtub, of a tooth-brush, of sheets upon the bed, were all new to me.”

He stayed, learned his lessons, and years later taught other Hampton students.

Booker T. Washington’s life work though began when he arrived in Tuskegee, Alabama. It was a startup school. Not only did he teach, but he had to travel often, speaking of his college, and letting crowds of people know of his chronic need for funds to build and maintain a first-class university.

In 1915, when 59, Booker T. Washington died of high blood pressure. On his tombstone were inscribed the words, “He lifted the veil of ignorance from his people and pointed the way to progress through education and industry.”

Next time in these pages: Milton Hershey School, in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

The United States will depart Afghanistan on Aug. 31, after almost 20 years of nation-building, the most recent foreign power to surrender that harsh, cold, Himalayan terrain, “the graveyard of empires,” back to the Afghan people.

The British tried three times to tame the poor but fierce Afghan fighters. In the first Afghan War, 1839-1840, the British marched in with high hopes, but suffered one of the worst military disasters of the 19th century, an outright slaughter.

The Afghan people, the British discovered, were not easily subdued.

British soldiers suffered a similar fate in a second Afghan War, 1878-1880, and again in 1919, near the end of World War I, in a third Afghan War.

The Soviet Union tried to take control of Afghanistan throughout the 1980s. Coming from the north, the Soviet Union’s Army pushed across the border into Afghanistan on Dec. 24, 1979, and by a pincer movement swarmed into Kabul in 1980.

Soviet officials claimed that they were there to “secure roads and towns, stabilize a new Afghan communist government, but that they would withdraw in six months to one year.”

U.S. officials read the Soviet Army’s invasion as another of their Cold War aggressive tactics. The U.S. President Jimmy Carter was so dismayed by the blatant aggression that he insisted that U.S. athletes boycott Moscow’s Summer Olympics in 1980, a retaliation that pleased no one.

The Soviets though were soon stunned by the ferocity of the Afghan Mujahideen, guerrilla fighters, who resented the Soviet’s presence on their land, took enormous losses, but refused to surrender.

The Soviet-Afghan War lasted for almost a decade, until Feb. 15, 1989, when the last of the Soviet soldiers departed. The Afghan communist government collapsed three years later, in 1992.

A British journalist, Patrick Brogan, wrote in 1989, “The simplest explanation is probably the best. The Soviets got sucked into Afghanistan much as the U.S. got sucked into Vietnam, without clearly thinking through the consequences, and wildly underestimating the hostility they would arouse.”

Soviet officials dispatched a total of 620,000 soldiers into Afghanistan; of those, 14,453 were killed, 53,753 were wounded, and 415,932 were sick, due to hepatitis and typhoid fever. The broken men returned to their homes, but took with them physical injuries, mental difficulties, as well as alcoholism.

The Afghan people though suffered far worse. The Soviets killed between 562,000 and 2 million Afghans. Best estimate is 800,000. Another 1.2 million were disabled. Millions were turned into refugees. Five million fled the country, mainly into Pakistan, and another 2 million were displaced.

The Soviets were in a vicious fight. Through Operation Cyclone, the U.S.’s CIA funneled funds and arms to the Mujahideen. Then, “volunteers from other Muslim countries, known as ‘Afghan Arabs,’ who wanted to wage holy war, jihad, against the atheist communists,” came swarming in.

One of those Afghan Arabs was Osama bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi, then in his late 20s, who paid for arms, built crude roads, recruited volunteers from Saudi Arabia, and fought alongside Afghan rebels, who numbered between 175,000 and 250,000.

In recent days, the journalist Peter Bergen published a new biography on Osama bin Laden. Bergen writes, “For the Arabs, it was emotional to travel among the Afghans. When villagers heard that there was an Arab outside, they all came out of their homes, because he spoke the language of the Prophet.”

On April 17, 1987, some 200 Soviet Airborne Troops attacked Jaji, Osama bin Laden’s compound, nicked-named al-Masada, meaning “the Lion’s den,” a training facility. The fight lasted into May. Osama bin Laden fought alongside Afghan rebels, suffered a foot injury, and may have breathed in napalm.

In 1988, he established al-Qaeda, meaning “the base,” an organization designed to inflict terror.

An elated Osama Bin Laden witnessed the Soviet Union Army’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.

What drove him towards terrorism? Possible answers: His religious nature. His frantic need to copy and emulate the Prophet’s thoughts and actions. His disgust for Western powers’ cultural and military influence upon Islamic nations. His refusal to listen to others. His scant regard for innocent people.

But, the fact that the Mujahideen had driven out the Soviet Union, a superpower, was convincing proof that he and his fellow Muslims could win, that Europe and the United States were weak, that he and al-Quaeda would drive all the western powers out of Islamic countries.

Henceforth, he would live to strike terror in the hearts of Americans.

On Feb. 22, 1998, Osama bin Laden issued his first of two fatwas, a declaration. “The United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula. The ruling to kill Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is a duty for every Muslim.”

Next time in these pages: “9-11.”

School begins this month, perhaps this week. Teachers again will introduce students to questions on math, science, English, social studies, and foreign languages. I wish them all well. No subject is easy, but some say math is the hardest.

I remember geometry as my hardest. Theorems spooked me. The following year I found algebra more enlightening. Graph coordinates with x’s and y’s, as well as logarithms seemed to click in place.

Jordan Ellenberg, a math whiz from Wisconsin, just published a new book, Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else.

In an early chapter he describes Abraham Lincoln’s admiration for the Greek mathematician Euclid, who wrote Elements of Geometry, “the most successful textbook of all time,” around 300 BCE, in Alexandria, in Egypt, in northern Africa.

Lincoln’s law partner, Billy Herndon, remembers watching Lincoln struggle for two days to square a circle, “almost to the point of exhaustion.” He “was trying to construct a square with the same area as a given circle, using two tools, a straightedge and a compass.” He gave up. He found the job too difficult.

For centuries, “squaring the circle” has been synonymous with “completing an impossible task,” or like “passing an act of Congress.” Yet, Lincoln tried.

The job involves first finding the area of a circle, using the formula πr². Then, finding the square root of that product will produce the length of each of the four sides of a square. Both the circle and the square will have the same area.

It sounds easy, and it is with computers and hand calculators, but only to an approximation, and the reason is because π is an irrational number. It is 3.141 . . . , without any recurring pattern.

Lincoln though took to heart Euclid’s talent for making sense out of the bewildering. Euclid started with 35 definitions, a handful of postulates, a dozen or more axioms, a series of postulates, and argued for a set of theorems, all about triangles, lines, angles, squares, and circles.

In so doing, he created a complete body of mathematical work, 2300 years ago.

As a young man, Lincoln was reading a stack of law books, hoping someday to practice law. He said, “I constantly came upon the word demonstrate.” He looked the word up in the dictionary. He read, “Certain proof,” and “proof beyond the possibility of doubt.” But then, “what is proof?”

Finally, he gave up, and said to himself, “Lincoln, you can never make a lawyer if you do not understand what demonstrate means. I went home to my father’s house, and stayed there till I could give any propositions in the six books of Euclid at sight.

“I then found out what ‘demonstrate’ means, and went back to my law studies.”

Lincoln read a lot of Thomas Paine, the American revolutionary writer, who in his The Age of Reason, declared his unwavering admiration for Euclid.

“I know, however, but of one ancient book that authoritatively challenges universal consent and belief, and that is Euclid’s ‘Elements of Geometry,’ and the reason is, because it is a book of self-evident demonstration, entirely independent of its author, and of everything relating to time, place, and circumstance.”

In Shape, Jordan Ellenberg points out that Euclid understood the “extreme and mean ratio.” Form a line, A to B. At a certain point on that line, between A and B, but closer to B, place a point, called C. If you divide the length of AB by the length of AC, you will get a number about 1.6.

If you divide the length of AC by the length of CB, you also will get 1.6. If the point C was placed correctly, the actual ratio will be 1.6180339887 . . . , another irrational number, but less popular than π.

Mathematicians since Euclid now call this the Golden Mean, identified by the Greek letter φ, that that pronounce as “fee.” They find this number when they count leaf arrangements in botany, when they measure the swirl of galaxies, and when they look into number theory.

For example, consider the Fibonacci numbers, a series in which the next number is the sum of the previous two numbers: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, and so on. The ratio of 3 to 2 is 1.5, 5 to 3 is 1.666, 8 to 5 is 1.6, 13 to 8 is 1.625, 21 to 13 is 1.61538, and 144 to 89 is 1.61797.

The ratio keeps getting closer to 1.618 . . . .

Ellenberg writes, “In Lincoln, we find a more appealing character: enough ambition to try, enough humility to accept that he hadn’t succeeded.” He further says, “The ultimate reason for teaching kids to write a proof is not that the world is full of proofs, but that it is full of non-proofs.”

Assertion is not evidence. To assert is not to demonstrate a proof.

I wish all this year’s crop of math students the best. You might ask your teacher about Euclid.