“Drug War” Comes to East Cleveland; NAACP’s Hilton Smith; Emerging Leaders on Horizon

Twice within the past fortnight I have written about the efforts of the Northeast Ohio Alliance for Hope [NOAH] to bring attention to critical problems that make most of us throw up our hands and turn our heads: the epidemic incarceration of black men and municipal finance.

Dred Scott

There’s a part of me that wonders about the relationship between these themes of our injustice system and muni finance, as represented by the City of East Cleveland: to what extent did the Cleveland police officers who chased Timothy Ray Russell and Malissa Williams into that broke city and killed them in gangland fashion feel impunity to do so because of a subliminal concurrence with the sentiments so indelibly expressed in the infamous words of Chief Justice Roger Taney in Dred Scott, that they echo in the coarse paraphrase “East Cleveland had no laws that white police officers were bound to respect”?

Tomorrow afternoon NOAH will present the Cleveland-area premiere of “The House I Live In”, the top documentary at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. The powerful film questions why the United States has become the world’s leading jailer of its own people.

Danny Glover, John Legend, Brad Pitt, and Russell Simmons were executive producers of the film.

The special screening will be Saturday, January 26, at the East Cleveland Library, 14101 Euclid Ave. Admission is free and doors open at 12:45 PM. The film will start at 1:30 PM. A moderated discussion will follow the screening.

This coming Monday, NOAH will host a forum on East Cleveland’s budget and budget process. Last month the city was recently returned a state of fiscal emergency by State Auditor David Yost, where it has spent most of the past quarter century.

The forum will be held Monday, January 29 from 6:30-8:30 PM at New Covenant Lutheran Church, 1424 Hayden Avenue, East Cleveland OH 44112.

Last week a group of East Cleveland citizens organized by NOAH presented a letter jointly addressed to the mayor and city council president inviting them to the forum. While Mayor Gary Norton accepted immediately, NOAH’s executive director told us in an email that every council member has cited “other obligations” precluding their attendance at the forum.

Why aren’t our most-publicized local civil rights organizations — the Cleveland NAACP and increasingly, the local Southern Christian Leadership Conference — organizing these kinds of events in the community? Perhaps some answers will emerge at either or both of two events scheduled for next weekend.

Next Friday, Feb. 1, the newly installed Cleveland NAACP president, Rev. Hilton O. Smith, will speak at the City Club of Cleveland. His talk will be broadcast live on WCPN 90.3FM at 12:30PM and will be shown on television on WVIZ/PBS on Sunday beginning at 10AM. The taped telecast will include the traditional City Club Q and A from one of the city’s most engaged audiences.

Of course, you may want to have your resident or neighboring teenager TIVO that Sunday telecast so that you will be free to attend a forum that morning at First Unitarian Church of Shaker Heights.

For the past several years First Unitarian has been sponsoring “discussions that matter” community forums on Sunday mornings from 9:30 until 10:45 in their Fellowship Hall, 21600 Shaker Boulevard, Shaker Heights OH 44122.

On Sunday, February 3 the panelists at this “come one come all” event will comprise a representative sample of the next generation of Greater Cleveland leadership. Businessman Clint Bradley, banker Michael Jeans, United Black Fund executive director Cecil Lipscomb, and political organizer and civic activist Gigi Traore will share their ideas on where we are, where we need to go, and how we might get there. Real Deal publisher Richard T. Andrews will moderate.

Clint Bradley

Gigi Traore

Cecil Lipscomb

Michael T. Jeans

• • •

Django, the Drug War, and Black History Month

My blood tends to run a little faster every year when the calendar flips to January. It’s not so much the Cleveland winter — global warming is taking care of that; rather it’s the one time of year when our community kinda sorta celebrates blackness, or at least says it’s ok to talk about it in a positive way. The period lasts about six weeks or so, from the observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day through the end of Black History Month, and then it’s “ok, recess is over, back to normal.”

I’m not referring to “our community” as either just black folks or white folks. It’s almost as if an unspoken pact exists between in-laws. Most everybody around here tiptoes around race. We know the subject is explosive; we know it’s problematic. We know it’s the Eight Ton Gorilla in the family room. Which is why we stay in the kitchen and visit the family room only on special occasions, and even then according to carefully scripted rules of engagement. So during MLK day we talk about the content of our character but not about our national propensity for warmongering and sustained violence at home. And during BHM African Americans can salute our ancestors and how they overcame the Middle Passage, Slavery, and Jim Crow, without any discussion or analysis of why we are not doing anything about 21^st Century New Jim Crow in education, criminal justice, or the economy.

This year feels a little different to me. Thank you Django! It seems everywhere I turn people are talking about the movie, and therefore talking about ticklish aspects of our history. If there were an Oscar category for most provocative film, Django would be a hands-down winner.

Of course a lot of our discourse on race is echoed in views long ago forged into cast-iron. Many times when we think we want to talk about race we can’t get past skin. So an ESPN commentator questions the racial bona fides of Washington ‘Skins quarterback Robert L Griffin III — is he a ‘down’ brother or a ‘cornball brother’? — because RGIII: a) has a white fiancée and b) disdains simplistic comparison to other mobile quarterbacks who happen to be black, aspiring to one day achieve the status of the best QBs ever. (The commentator, Rob Parker, was first suspended and then let go. This was an appropriate result, not because Parker crossed some forbidden line but because his analytical frame is too flat for him to be a social commentator in any medium.)

Jeffrey Blanck, Reno NAACP president

In a similar vein is the reaction of many across the country to the headline that the Reno NAACP elected the first white president in its 66-year history. Many blacks greeted this news with groans from a familiar grab bag of perpetual victimization and helplessness: ‘white folks gotta run everything’, ‘couldn’t they find a black man’, ‘black people always think white is right’, etc. They were oblivious to the story of the NAACP’s interracial founding, its guiding principles, or the decades of civil rights advocacy that justified the fellow being entrusted with the honor of serving as branch president.

These examples of call to mind the succinct and wise counsel my friend Julian Earls likes to share with young, aspiring black folk: “Every black person is not your friend, and every white person is not your enemy.”

Agentic African Americans

Still, this season seems different to me because I see local African Americans who are not making automatic skin responses but choosing instead to be agentic in the struggle to address core community issues. Microsoft Word doesn’t seem to like “agentic”, giving it the red underline; it is a fine word, and I use it here to describe people who do not accept victimhood but are “active agents in their own deliverance”.

That quote is from another friend Trevelle Harp. Trevelle is a community organizer who heads the Northeast Ohio Alliance for Hope [NOAH]. In two weeks his group will present the Cleveland-area premiere of “The House I Live In”, which last year won top documentary honors at the acclaimed Sundance Film Festival. The powerful film questions why the United States has spent over One Trillion Dollars on drug arrests since the beginning of the Nixon Administration, only to become the world’s leading jailer of its own people, while drugs remain cheaper, purer and more available than ever.

To quote Eugene Jarecki, the film’s director, a prime result of the “drug war” is that “We have more black men incarcerated today, in one form or another, than were enslaved at the end of slavery 10 years before the Civil War ended.”

The special screening will be Saturday, January 26, at the East Cleveland Library, 14101 Euclid Ave. Admission is free and doors open at 1 PM. The film will start at 1:30 PM. A moderated discussion will follow the screening.

NOAH under Harp has concentrated its efforts on the East Cleveland community. Its organizing approach involves training and developing local leadership, identifying common issues, finding collaborative and strategic ways to address those issues while systematically strengthening the institutions in our regions. They are on a perpetual search for agentic partners.

South Euclid councilwoman Ruth Gray is advancing a second example of agentic approach. Concerned about her community’s failure to offer sufficient resources to its youth, she has convened a forum next week to address this issue. I will talk about this effort more on Monday but I encourage you to put the event, “Youth in Peril”, on your calendar. It will be held Wednesday, January 16 from 7-9 PM at the South Euclid Community Center, 1370 Victory Drive, in South Euclid OH 44121.