A week ago, we celebrated Martin Luther King day in St. Cloud just like
many other communities. Two major events served as the center-piece
of our community's celebration. The first was the annual Freedom Fund Dinner hosted by the local NAACP. The thrust of this event was a
celebration of the things that we are doing in this community to make things better for disadvantaged youth. The NAACP service award went to a white police
officer, an assistant chief, who has made a significant contribution to
improving police community relations.
The President of the NAACP
reported on this year's activities by the NAACP, which has
focused heavily on volunteer activities by members and their partners
to improve the education of minority students. They've been
tutoring, mentoring, and partnering wherever they can, to realize the
goal of high quality education for all students. While we have a long
long way to go, the NAACP celebrated the efforts of the school district
and its partners in addressing these issues.
The NAACP has made it clear,
however, that we need to do more. The "guest speaker", the main
event, was an inter-racial group of teenage students from South Side Family Charter School,
Minneapolis who traveled for three weeks to visit the landmarks of the
civil rights movement, in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi,
where they interviewed past leaders of the civil rights movement. With
a slideshow, they described the efforts of students and others during the 1950's and 1960's at the risk of their personal security, and sometimes their lives, to
realize the dream that all young people would have access to a quality
education.
The message at the Freedom Fund Dinner was that we are
working together in St. Cloud to overcome the vestiges of bigotry, but its going to
take a lot more work, and we need to work a whole lot harder, in the
police department, in our public and private schools, and among our
families and children, to realize the dream. They celebrated the
efforts of the Mayor, the police chief and his administration, the
school district, and partners for student success, a coalition of
volunteers seeking to make a difference for young people in our
community. This message received virtually no coverage in the media.
The following day, the Mayor of St. Cloud conducted a
breakfast at St. Cloud State University. Before that breakfast, a
college professor called upon the community to apologize for past
wrongs, and at the breakfast, the Mayor made a point to deliver that
apology. You can read the coverage by following this link to front page headlines focusing on the apology. If this gesture helps heal the wounds arising out of 400 years of
national bigotry....from slavery, from Jim Crow, from differential
access to jobs and from unequal access to federal programs that assist the development of farms
and businesses, then that's a positive tiny step forward. But just a
tiny step and hardly warrants the headlines, or the laudatory editorial that followed.
The primary issue in our community, is
not the bigotry of the past, but what we are going to do to address the
impacts of that past bigotry, especially as it addresses the younger
generation. Attacking those problems will not be advanced simply by
declaring who is to blame. Its going to take a considered effort by
community leaders, by parents, and by young people themselves to assure
that all of our young people become self-sufficient by completing high
school successfully, and by getting enrolled in post-secondary
opportunities, (college, community
college, vocational training, etc) and then seeking, and finding,
productive employment. Its going to take dedicated support from the
academic community to focus now on supporting the hard work required to
develop autonomy among our young....all of them. Theories of racism and
an understanding of history are important in their own sphere, but we
need to take appropriate action, and the best apology we can deliver is
to get to work, all of us.
Without in any way diminishing the
importance of the Mayor's words, if we are going to address the after
effects of centuries of bigotry, we need actions, not just words.
The actions of the renewed NAACP in St. Cloud points the way. They have
recognized that the best way we can apologize (if you want to call it
an apology) is to make a difference for our young people, so when they
are adults, they will have the skills they need to participate in the
world of work on an equal basis. To make this a reality, the city's
leadership, business leaders, school districts, and communities of
faith need to provide concrete support for the things that need to be
done to invest in our children. We can't deliver a real apology, if our
position is that we can't provide parks and park programs for children,
because we can't afford it. We can't deliver a real apology if our
position is that we can't afford to build 21st century schools, and can't
extend learning time, because those things cost more money.
There are too many people who frame the
issues that confront us as if they will be resolved with a simple
apology for the wrongs of the past. These wrongs of the past have
consequences today that cannot be addressed with an apology. We need
to buy into the approach advocated by the new NAACP leadership here,
and that's the real story in St. Cloud. If we are going to overcome
the vestiges of the past, we must provide early childhood education for
all students who need it. The day that the Mayor steps forward and
announces that he will not rest until that happens, the day that he
calls for our community, to find a way to meet that need, all of it, that will
be the day that counts as a real apology for me. If we are going to
overcome the vestiges of the past, the leadership of our charitable
organizations have to stop taking the position that immigrants should
live only in St. Cloud, and that it is the responsibility of only one public school
district only to educate them. The day that they step forward and
recognize that addressing the needs of all our our children isn 't the
responsibility of just a few neighborhoods and just a few schools, that
will speak more eloquently that we have overcome the vestiges of
bigotry.
The NAACP is sending a message that they intend to
take a leadership role in promoting success for all of our students,
and they intend to do it with resilience and hard work. We need to
honor that message in the school district and at city hall by
responding in kind. Our Somali community is taking the same approach
to overcoming disadvantages. Many of in the Somali community arrive
here having been the victims of civil wars and unimaginable hardships.
They arrive here having demonstrated extraordinary resilience in the
face of adversity, but always their message to us in the school
district has been, give our children the educational tools so that they
can speak English fluently, can graduate from high school with skills,
and so that they have a chance at post-secondary education. Like
other immigrants before them, they recognize that quality education is
the road to success in America.
This community has a long
long way to go in addressing the needs of our young people, and an
apology isn't going to accomplish that objective. Its going to take
more resources --and wiser use of those resources; its going to take
volunteers; its going to take a bold vision by all of us in government and by community leaders
to take actual concrete steps. The day after the Mayor's apology, we
were still as far away from realizing the dream of meeting the needs of
all of our children than we were the day before. Let's get to work.
