This is probably the first time that you've heard this perspective regarding MLK, it certainly was for me. What are your thoughts about what the writer said? Do you agree? Disagree? Did his experience challenge or change any thoughts about this era? This will be a very short diary. It will not contain any links or any scholarly references. It is about a very narrow topic, from a very personal, subjective perspective. The topic at hand is what Martin Luther King actually did, what it was that he actually accomplished.   What most people who reference Dr. King seem not to know is how Dr. King actually changed the subjective experience of life in the United States for African Americans. And yeah, I said for African Americans, not for Americans, because his main impact was his effect on the lives of African Americans, not on Americans in general. His main impact was not to make white people nicer or fairer. That's why some of us who are African Americans get a bit possessive about his legacy. Dr. Martin Luther King's legacy, despite what our civil religion tells us, is not color blind. Head below the fold to read about what Martin Luther King, Jr. actually did. I remember that many years ago, when I was a smartass home from first year of college, I was standing in the kitchen arguing with my father. My head was full of newly discovered political ideologies and black nationalism, and I had just read the Autobiography of Malcolm X, probably for the second time.   A bit of context. My father was from a background, which if we were talking about Europe or Latin America, we would call, "peasant" origin, although he had risen solidly into the working-middle class. He was from rural Virginia and his parents had been tobacco farmers. I spent two weeks or so every summer on the farm of my grandmother and step-grandfather. They had no running water, no gas, a wood burning stove, no bathtubs or toilets but an outhouse, potbelly stoves for heat in the winter, a giant wood pile, a smoke house where hams and bacon hung, chickens, pigs, semi wild housecats that lived outdoors, no tractor or car, but an old plow horse and plows and other horse drawn implements, and electricity only after I was about 8 years old. The area did not have high schools for blacks and my father went as far as the seventh grade in a one room schoolhouse. All four of his grandparents, whom he had known as a child, had been born slaves. It was mainly because of World War II and urbanization that my father left that life.   They lived in a valley or hollow or "holler" in which all the landowners and tenants were black. In the morning if you wanted to talk to cousin Taft, you would walk down to behind the outhouse and yell across the valley, "Heeeyyyy Taaaaft," and you could see him far, far in the distance, come out of his cabin and yell back.   On the one hand, this was a pleasant situation because they lived in isolation from white people. On the other hand, they did have to leave the v.

1. This is probably the first time that you've heard this perspective
regarding MLK, it certainly was for me. What are your thoughts
about what the writer said? Do you agree? Disagree? Did his
experience challenge or change any thoughts about this era?
This will be a very short diary. It will not contain any links or
any scholarly references. It is about a very narrow topic, from a
very personal, subjective perspective.
The topic at hand is what Martin Luther King actually did, what
it was that he actually accomplished.
What most people who reference Dr. King seem not to know is
how Dr. King actually changed the subjective experience of life
in the United States for African Americans. And yeah, I said for
African Americans, not for Americans, because his main impact
was his effect on the lives of African Americans, not on
Americans in general. His main impact was not to make white
people nicer or fairer. That's why some of us who are African
Americans get a bit possessive about his legacy. Dr. Martin
Luther King's legacy, despite what our civil religion tells us, is
not color blind.
Head below the fold to read about what Martin Luther King, Jr.
actually did.
I remember that many years ago, when I was a smartass home
from first year of college, I was standing in the kitchen arguing
with my father. My head was full of newly discovered political
ideologies and black nationalism, and I had just read the
Autobiography of Malcolm X, probably for the second time.
A bit of context. My father was from a background, which if we
were talking about Europe or Latin America, we would call,
"peasant" origin, although he had risen solidly into the working-
middle class. He was from rural Virginia and his parents had
been tobacco farmers. I spent two weeks or so every summer on
the farm of my grandmother and step-grandfather. They had no
running water, no gas, a wood burning stove, no bathtubs or

2. toilets but an outhouse, potbelly stoves for heat in the winter, a
giant wood pile, a smoke house where hams and bacon hung,
chickens, pigs, semi wild housecats that lived outdoors, no
tractor or car, but an old plow horse and plows and other horse
drawn implements, and electricity only after I was about 8 years
old. The area did not have high schools for blacks and my father
went as far as the seventh grade in a one room schoolhouse. All
four of his grandparents, whom he had known as a child, had
been born slaves. It was mainly because of World War II and
urbanization that my father left that life.
They lived in a valley or hollow or "holler" in which all the
landowners and tenants were black. In the morning if you
wanted to talk to cousin Taft, you would walk down to behind
the outhouse and yell across the valley, "Heeeyyyy Taaaaft,"
and you could see him far, far in the distance, come out of his
cabin and yell back.
On the one hand, this was a pleasant situation because they
lived in isolation from white people. On the other hand, they did
have to leave the valley to go to town where all the rigid rules
of Jim Crow applied. By the time I was little, my people had
been in this country for six generations (going back, according
to oral rendering of our genealogy, to Africa Jones and Mama
Suki), much more under slavery than under freedom, and all of
it under some form of racial terrorism, which had inculcated
many humiliating behavior patterns.
Anyway, that's background. I think we were kind of typical as
African Americans in the pre-civil rights era went.
So anyway, I was having this argument with my father about
Martin Luther King and how his message was too conservative
compared to Malcolm X's message. My father got really angry
at me. It wasn't that he disliked Malcolm X, but his point was
that Malcolm X hadn't accomplished anything as Dr. King had.
I was kind of sarcastic and asked something like, so what did
Martin Luther King accomplish other than giving his "I have a
dream speech."
Before I tell you what my father told me, I want to digress.

3. Because at this point in our amnesiac national existence, my
question pretty much reflects the national civic religion view of
what Dr. King accomplished. He gave this great speech. Or
some people say, "he marched." I was so angry at Mrs. Clinton
during the primaries when she said that Dr. King marched, but it
was LBJ who delivered the Civil Rights Act.
At this point, I would like to remind everyone exactly what
Martin Luther King did, and it wasn't that he "marched" or gave
a great speech.
My father told me with a sort of cold fury, "Dr. King ended the
terror of living in the south."
Please let this sink in and and take my word and the word of my
late father on this. If you are a white person who has always
lived in the U.S. and never under a brutal dictatorship, you
probably don't know what my father was talking about.
But this is what the great Dr. Martin Luther King accomplished.
Not that he marched, nor that he gave speeches.
He ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the
south.
I'm guessing that most of you, especially those having come
fresh from seeing The Help, may not understand what this was
all about. But living in the south (and in parts of the midwest
and in many ghettos of the north) was living under terrorism.
It wasn't that black people had to use a separate drinking
fountain or couldn't sit at lunch counters, or had to sit in the
back of the bus.
You really must disabuse yourself of this idea. Lunch counters
and buses were crucial symbolic planes of struggle that the civil
rights movement used to dramatize the issue, but the main
suffering in the south did not come from our inability to drink
from the same fountain, ride in the front of the bus or eat lunch
at Woolworth's.
It was that white people, mostly white men, occasionally went
berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and
lynched them. You all know about lynching. But you may forget
or not know that white people also randomly beat black people,

4. and the black people could not fight back, for fear of even
worse punishment.
This constant low level dread of atavistic violence is what kept
the system running. It made life miserable, stressful and
terrifying for black people.
White people also occasionally tried black people, especially
black men, for crimes for which they could not conceivably be
guilty. With the willing participation of white women, they
often accused black men of "assault," which could be anything
from rape to not taking off one's hat, to "reckless eyeballing."
This is going to sound awful and perhaps a stain on my late
father's memory, but when I was little, before the civil rights
movement, my father taught me many, many humiliating
practices in order to prevent the random, terroristic, berserk
behavior of white people. The one I remember most is that when
walking down the street in New York City side by side, hand in
hand with my hero-father, if a white woman approached on the
same sidewalk, I was to take off my hat and walk behind my
father, because he had been taught in the south that black males
for some reason were supposed to walk single file in the
presence of any white lady.
This was just one of many humiliating practices we were taught
to prevent white people from going berserk.
I remember a huge family reunion one August with my aunts
and uncles and cousins gathered around my grandparents' vast
breakfast table laden with food from the farm, and the state
troopers drove up to the house with a car full of rifles and
shotguns, and everyone went kind of weirdly blank. They put on
the masks that black people used back then to not provoke white
berserkness. My strong, valiant, self-educated, articulate uncles,
whom I adored, became shuffling, Step-N-Fetchits to avoid
provoking the white men. Fortunately the troopers were only
looking for an escaped convict. Afterward, the women, my
aunts, were furious at the humiliating performance of the men,
and said so, something that even a child could understand.
This is the climate of fear that Dr. King ended.

5. If you didn't get taught such things, let alone experience them, I
caution you against invoking the memory of Dr. King as though
he belongs exclusively to you and not primarily to African
Americans.
The question is, how did Dr. King do this—and of course, he
didn't do it alone.
(Of all the other civil rights leaders who helped Dr. King end
this reign of terror, I think the most under appreciated is James
Farmer, who founded the Congress of Racial Equality and was a
leader of nonviolent resistance, and taught the practices of
nonviolent resistance.)
So what did they do?
They told us: Whatever you are most afraid of doing vis-a-vis
white people, go do it. Go ahead down to city hall and try to
register to vote, even if they say no, even if they take your name
down.
Go ahead sit at that lunch counter. Sue the local school board.
All things that most black people would have said back then,
without exaggeration, were stark raving insane and would get
you killed.
If we do it all together, we'll be okay.
They made black people experience the worst of the worst,
collectively, that white people could dish out, and discover that
it wasn't that bad. They taught black people how to take a
beating—from the southern cops, from police dogs, from fire
department hoses. They actually coached young people how to
crouch, cover their heads with their arms and take the beating.
They taught people how to go to jail, which terrified most
decent people.
And you know what? The worst of the worst, wasn't that bad.
Once people had been beaten, had dogs sicced on them, had fire
hoses sprayed on them, and been thrown in jail, you know what
happened?
These magnificent young black people began singing freedom
songs in jail.
That, my friends, is what ended the terrorism of the south.

6. Confronting your worst fears, living through it, and breaking
out in a deep throated freedom song. The jailers knew they had
lost when they beat the crap out of these young Negroes and the
jailed, beaten young people began to sing joyously, first in one
town then in another. This is what the writer, James Baldwin,
captured like no other writer of the era.
Please let this sink in. It wasn't marches or speeches. It was
taking a severe beating, surviving and realizing that our fears
were mostly illusory and that we were free.
So yes, Dr. King had many other goals, many other more
transcendent, non-racial, policy goals, goals that apply to white
people too, like ending poverty, reducing the war-like aspects of
our foreign policy, promoting the New Deal goal of universal
employment, and so on. But his main accomplishment was
ending 200 years of racial terrorism, by getting black people to
confront their fears. So please don't tell me that Martin Luther
King's dream has not been achieved, unless you knew what
racial terrorism was like back then and can make a convincing
case you still feel it today. If you did not go through that
transition, you're not qualified to say that the dream was not
accomplished.
That is what Dr. King did—not march, not give good speeches.
He crisscrossed the south organizing people, helping them not
be afraid, and encouraging them, like Gandhi did in India, to
take the beating that they had been trying to avoid all their
lives.
Once the beating was over, we were free.
It wasn't the Civil Rights Act, or the Voting Rights Act or the
Fair Housing Act that freed us. It was taking the beating and
thereafter not being afraid. So, sorry Mrs. Clinton, as much as I
admire you, you were wrong on this one. Our people freed
ourselves and those Acts, as important as they were, were only
white people officially recognizing what we had done.
Originally posted to Hamden Rice on Mon Aug 29, 2011 at
08:24 AM PDT.

7. Advisory from Professionals
Preparing Information Systems (IS) Graduates to Meet the
Challenges of Global IT Security: Some Suggestions
Jeff Sauls
IT Operations Professional
Austin, TX, USA
Naveen Gudigantala
Operations and Technology Management
University of Portland
Portland, OR 97203, USA
[email protected]
ABSTRACT

8. Managing IT security and assurance is a top priority for
organizations. Aware of the costs associated with a security or
privacy
breach, organizations are constantly vigilant about protecting
their data and IT systems. In addition, organizations are
investing heavily in IT resources to keep up with the challenges
of managing their IT security and assurance. Therefore, the IT
industry relies greatly on the U.S. higher education system to
produce a qualified and competent workforce to manage
security
challenges. This advisory discusses some security challenges
faced by global companies and provides input into the design
and delivery of IS curriculum to effectively meet such
challenges.
Keywords: Information assurance and security, Curriculum
design and development, Computer security
1. INTRODUCTION
Information security and assurance management is vital for
the success of organizations. It is particularly relevant for
global companies whose customers demand a high level of
security for their products. Meeting such high expectations

9. requires companies to study security best practices,
continually invest in technical and human resources, and
implement a secure corporate environment. The goal of this
paper is to discuss some security challenges faced by global
organizations and to provide suggestions to IS academics
concerning security curriculum to effectively educate the
next generation IT workforce to meet these challenges.
2. SECURITY CHALLENGES FACED BY GLOBAL
COMPANIES
This advisory focuses on security challenges faced by global
companies. For instance, security challenges faced by a
multinational company operating manufacturing plants in
several countries are likely to be much different than those of
a company with a manufacturing plant in a single location.
The goal of this section is to present some security
challenges faced by global companies.
What many companies do in terms of security is driven

10. by the needs of their customers. For instance, consider the
case of a global manufacturing company that makes
hardware for a smart card. Smart cards include embedded
integrated circuits and customers generally provide the
manufacturer with a detailed list of functional and assurance
requirements for security. The manufacturer of the hardware
is expected to comply with the specifications of the
customer. If the company decides to manufacture in two
plants in Europe and the U.S., it becomes important for the
manufacturer to have uniform security standards in both
plants. These security standards may include many aspects
such as how firewalls are managed, how data is encrypted,
type of security policies, and implementation of security
policies. Having uniform security standards in both plants
makes it easier for the company to support these plants and
the customer to audit the security.
Some customers require the manufacturers to conform to
the Common Criteria for Information Technology Security

11. Evaluation (abbreviated as Common Criteria). Common
Criteria is an internationally recognized technical standard,
Journal of Information Systems Education, Vol. 24(1) Spring
2013
71
which includes a framework that is used for evaluating the
security of Information Technology (IT) products and
technology (SANS Institute, 2003). Common Criteria
assures that the processes involved in creating a computer
security product have been conducted in a standard manner.
The extent to which manufacturers meet specifications can
be tested by laboratories. For global companies, meeting
Common Criteria standards presents a challenging task
because of the time and effort involved in preparing the
documentation for security evaluation.
Having the ability to meet the needs of customers with

12. high security requirements helps companies meet the
security demands of other customers as well. However,
achieving this high level of secure environment comes at a
great expense. Research by Gartner finds that global
spending on security is expected to increase 8.4% to $60
billion in 2012 and projects the spending to increase to $86
billion in 2016 (CIO Insight, 2012). Thus, organizations
must incur large costs from an IT perspective to implement
and maintain this high level of security environment.
Some security challenges faced by companies may not be
technical in nature but related to human elements. A majority
of the communication between customer and vendor is back
and forth. Given that not everything can be automated in
companies, the jobs performed by humans can result in
mistakes. For instance, an employee could mix up the order
specifications and another employee could show incorrect
data to a client. Therefore, to mitigate these human errors, it
is important for companies to provide training to employees

13. on the best practices to avoid making such mistakes.
Global companies experience additional challenges when
dealing with different cultures, laws, and practices. For
instance, in some far eastern countries, users can be lax with
passwords if they feel sharing passwords will help someone
else. Typically, internal audits expose such inconsistencies
and force global companies to implement uniform password
policies. In addition, global companies must respect local
laws before making and enforcing any security policies. For
instance, creating a uniform policy for remote access control
across the U.S., China, and Korea may not be a good idea
because local laws must be researched and incorporated
when creating such a policy in each of the countries.
The discussion so far highlights security challenges faced
by global companies. The need to meet security needs of
customers, use common security standards, manage technical
and human security threats, and meet cultural and legal
aspects of security policies require a next generation IT

14. workforce that is well trained. The next section discusses
skills needed by IS graduates and some general advice for
designing IS security curriculum.
3. SKILLS REQUIRED FOR GRADUATES
SPECIALIZING IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS (IS)
SECURITY
The IT infrastructure of modern day global companies is
very complex. The large number of systems and applications
can easily be overwhelming. Succeeding in such an
environment requires the IS graduates to have solid
foundational technical knowledge. Different programs may
offer different technical foundations. For instance, a
computer science student may take different foundational
courses compared to an information systems student. A
computer science student may take courses in data structures,
programming, operating systems, and software engineering,
while an IS graduate may take courses in data

15. communications and networking, database management, and
systems analysis and design. Regardless of the content
differences, the core idea is that an IS security entry level
employee must be able to understand what is going on in the
system when encountered with a problem. Having solid
foundational technical knowledge will help graduates
correctly diagnose the problem. Therefore, it is important for
today’s graduates to understand the IT infrastructure as a
system as opposed to focusing on a specific component such
as a database or a specific application.
In addition to having foundational technical knowledge,
IS graduates must have analytical thinking and problem
solving skills. For instance, an employee working with an
Oracle product, when encountered with an issue, could first
call Oracle support. However, it is advisable for the
employee to first think about the causes of the problem
(analytical skills help here), dig deeper into the problem, and
try to solve it on his or her own before reaching out for help.

16. This could result in a solution sooner than going through a
vendor’s support structure. Similarly, an entry-level
programmer, in addition to writing good code, must think
about the environment in which the code will run and keep
the whole system in mind when programming. Therefore,
foundational technical knowledge, analytical skills, and
problem solving skills constitute the core competencies
needed by today’s IS graduates to work in the IT industry in
general and IS security in specific.
4. ADVICE TO IS FACULTY FOR THE DESIGN AND
DELIVERY OF IS CURRICULUM
This section presents practical advice to IS faculty
concerning improvements to the IS program and curriculum.
Though these suggestions may not address every challenge
discussed in this advisory, some key inputs are provided to
design and deliver IS security curriculum with a view to
graduating a competent IT workforce.

17. 1. The IS curriculum to prepare the next generation of
security professionals must provide students with strong
foundational technical knowledge. The inclusion of
courses and the orientation of teaching must help
students think about IT infrastructure as a system and
not as an individual piece of the puzzle. The role of
analytical thinking must be highlighted in solving
problems.
2. There must be a strong emphasis on practical exposure
to concepts in terms of hands-on experience for
students. It is advisable to have each course
accompanied by a lab in which students work with
technologies and apply concepts. An example is a lab in
which students could be divided into two teams, red and
blue, with the red team enacting the role of an attacker
and the blue team playing the role of a defender. The
use of such hands-on activities enables students to
better retain knowledge. In addition, students with

18. Journal of Information Systems Education, Vol. 24(1) Spring
2013
72
hands-on exposure tend to do well in interviews in
terms of answering questions or explaining concepts.
3. Student internships must be strongly encouraged. While
classroom learning is important, nothing substitutes for
the knowledge acquired from real-world experiences.
4. Students must be encouraged to take electives in
interdisciplinary areas. For instance, knowledge of
operations management, in terms of process analysis,
setting up policies, and optimization techniques can
help reduce mistakes at the workplace.
5. Faculty could explore the possibility of applying for
grants from National science foundation (NSF) and
Department of Defense for innovative curriculum
design.

19. 6. Faculty are strongly encouraged to integrate latest
knowledge concerning best practices in information
security into their courses by attending the following
workshops: The Colloquium for Information Systems
Security Education, Information Security Curriculum
Development Conference (InfoSecCD), and World
Conference on Information Security Education (WISE)
(Whitman and Mattord, 2004).
7. From many years of interviewing, it seems that there is
a dearth of qualified technical graduates from U.S.
universities. A substantial number of job applicants
seem to come from foreign countries and, hence, it is
very important for U.S. universities to recruit, train,
retain, and place a substantial number of technically
qualified degree students to meet the demands of the IT
security industry.
5. CONCLUSION

20. While the need for global information security and assurance
is increasing, it appears that the supply of qualified technical
IS students is on the decline. Given the increasing necessity
to protect the IT infrastructure and deliver IS assurance,
organizations will become increasingly dependent on the
U.S. higher education system to provide a workforce with
adequate skills to meet these challenges. Therefore, the onus
is on the IS academia to design a curriculum that excites
students, trains them with hands-on exposure, and provides
them with the necessary skills to achieve success in the IT
industry. This paper presents practical advice in such
direction.
6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors would like to thank Venkata Ramana Jetty for
facilitating this work.
7. REFERENCES

21. CIOinsight (2012). Gartner Predicts Security Market Will
Top $86 Billion in 2016, Retrieved June 24, 2013, from
http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Latest-News/Security-
Infrastructure-Market-to-Top-86-Billion-in-2016-Gartner-
591583/
SANS Institute (2013). Common Criteria and Protection
Profiles: How to Evaluate Information. Retrieved June 24,
2013, from
http://www.sans.org/reading_room/whitepapers/standards/
common-criteria-protection-profiles-evaluate-
information_1078
Whitman, M. & Mattord, H. (2004). A Draft Curriculum
Model for Programs of Study in Information Security and
Assurance. Proceedings of the 1st annual conference on
Information security curriculum development, 1-7.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
Jeff Sauls manages corporate IT operations for a

22. multinational company, in addition to
providing architectural and policy
guidance to multidisciplinary teams as
they relate to IT. After graduating
from Texas A&M University, he has
had over 15 years of experience in
various roles of system administration,
software development, database
administration and management. Jeff
has designed large and small systems to support varying
global business needs with overarching goals of reducing
long term support costs while increasing security and
capability.
Naveen Gudigantala is Assistant Professor of MIS in the
Robert B. Pamplin Jr. School of
Business Administration at University
of Portland. He received his Ph.D. in
MIS from Texas Tech University. His

23. research interests include Web-based
decision support systems, information
systems education, and containing
gray markets for Information
Technology products. His work has
appeared in the Communications of Association for
Information Systems, Decision Support Systems journal,
International Journal of Information Management, among
other journals.
Journal of Information Systems Education, Vol. 24(1) Spring
2013
73
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All papers published in the Journal of Information Systems

24. Education have undergone rigorous peer review. This includes
an
initial editor screening and double-blind refereeing by three or
more expert referees.
Copyright ©2013 by the Education Special Interest Group
(EDSIG) of the Association of Information Technology
Professionals.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this
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provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or
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Permission from the Editor is required to post to servers,
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Permission requests should be sent to the Editor-in-Chief,
Journal of Information Systems Education, [email protected]
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