Black issues

 

As you will read below, some of my early reporting included interviews with famous Black authors Toni Morrison and James Baldwin. Both talked candidly, and insightfully, about the ‘Black experience’ in America. Part of Ms. Morrison’s upbringing included going to a school in Kentucky where the highest grade level you could achieve was: 4th grade. Baldwin said at the time: “Everyone in the country is blinded by the optic of color… All people, ultimately, came from the same place.” Both Baldwin and Morrison talked, at length, about the plight of many Blacks. In fact, Baldwin drew a corollary to slavery. That is, he said many Blacks are “…still on the auction block.” That is, they are often first to be fired and last to be hired.

 

These interviews, and a host of other things, would propel me to look a lot deeper at the transgenerational plight of many Blacks stuck in poverty loops in inner city and rural America. This ‘looking’ even motivated our family to move to a hardscrabble area of Cleveland to see some of these issues extremely up-close-and-personal. From all this, we put together a position paper that advocates for, among other things, tangible amends to many Black Americans, moving back into the cities to reverse “white flight,” a “Marshall Plan” for rebuilding these cities…