This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 7, 2011 - Angela Glover Blackwell, founder and chief executive officer of the national research and action agency, PolicyLink, has been fighting for equity in America for the past three decades. Last year, when President Barack Obama hosted a roundtable meeting to discuss his $50 billion infrastructure proposal, Glover Blackwell was the only public-interest advocate among the gathering of governors, mayors, labor leaders and four former transportation secretaries.
Glover Blackwell, a St. Louis native, has become a leading voice for the voiceless -- low-income people and people of color. Last week, she spoke at the symposium, "Housing: Building a New Foundation for Economic Prosperity," hosted by Focus St. Louis. The conference geared toward developers, policy-makers, local government representatives, grassroots groups and others involved in housing, including affordable housing, in Missouri and southwest Illinois.
Local journalist, Sylvester Brown, Jr., sat down with Glover Blackwell moments before she delivered her address at the Millennium Hotel in downtown St. Louis to discuss proposed cuts in Obama's 2012 budget, mean-spirited politics and revitalizing low-income communities. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You've been on this path a long time. Obama, whom you support, is in office, but you still don't have the change that you've worked for all these years. Are you disenchanted?
Angela Glover Blackwell: I'm not going to be disenchanted. I refuse to go there. I do get disappointed though. I am disappointed that America keeps missing its moment. Missing moments is something we keep doing again and again. I'll give you three examples.
We missed the moment in 1954 with Brown vs. the Board of Education. If we had gotten on a different path, we'd be telling a different story about urban and metropolitan areas today. We missed the moment after 9/11 when [President] George W. Bush used a word, and I was surprised because I hadn't heard it in so long. He used the word "united." We missed that moment. We went right back to business as usual. We went back to separate camps, back to being small-minded.
Then we elected Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the United States. I was in New York the day Obama was elected. When I walked out onto the streets that morning, there was a difference. People were just smiling at each other; we had done something as a nation. New York is probably more liberal than the rest of the nation, but I think all of America -- and I heard it on the news -- people who had not voted for him said they were proud the nation had taken that step.
Rather than going forward we went right back to being small-minded. The economy turned out to be worse than anybody thought and when you have bad economic times, people get scared and start looking for enemies. Those of us who were so happy he got in and worked to put him there, underestimated how quickly the right would organize. I mean when you think about what the tea party has been able to do in two short years, it is stunning.
So, I'm disappointed but I'm not disenchanted. I think the issues are on the table and there are a lot of us who see them and if we keep pulling forward, I think we'll go forward.
There are historical patterns of white flight across the nation. Now whites are coming back to urban centers, and many blacks and low-income people fear that they will, once again, be shifted out of communities. How important is it that we consider what communities can be?
Glover Blackwell: It's essential that we re-imagine communities and that we get over the divide that race has created in this city and in this nation.
In some ways this conversation is all about race and in some ways, it's not about race at all. It's all about race because it was our failure to deal with the opportunity to be a racially integrated nation in 1954 with Brown vs. Board of Education and beyond. The failure to embrace integrating the schools and living in integrated neighborhoods caused white flight. Then as the schools and communities went down, it caused middle-class, black flight. It left communities of concentrated poverty. It's no question that momentum had a racial base.
But, when I say it's not about race, what I mean is, we have left communities and cities that have suffered from disinvestment, decaying infrastructure, poor schools, no grocery stores, no drug stores, no retail activity to speak of. You don't have to be a racist to choose not to live there. What you have to be is somebody who's concerned about your family.
We have to get people to understand the legacy of racism got us here, but it is the desire to have vibrant communities and a prosperous nation that will get us out. We have to overcome the remnants of continuous racism but, mostly, we have to be smart about the future. The future is one where we are living in denser communities because dealing with climate change demands it. The future is one where we have a workforce that can contribute to a 21st-century economy. That means we have to educate the people who are going to be that workforce in America. Those people happen to be black and brown -- that is the nation's future. It means we have to re-capture the infrastructure investments made in the past, which means that cities and older suburbs become the place where we fix it. It's cheaper. Fixing it creates more jobs than just building new highways. So the future demands that we live in way that causes us to imagine a way in which we can all live together.
Considering that so many Americans have been affected by the recession, why aren't more people on the same page with regard to providing safety nets for those facing hard times?
Glover Blackwell: You would think that this would be a time when we would see more robust support for programs that deal with poverty and opportunity than ever before. There are very few families in America today that aren't one paycheck out of poverty. So you would think the middle class, who's on the verge of slipping into poverty itself, would be asking, "How do we create strategies that will help us all?"
The reason they are not is because of the media, partially. They have given too much attention to extreme voices that have tried to pit one segment against the other. They try to create two enemies -- government and people of color -- rather than saying the enemy is the way we have been investing, the way we have created artificial wealth, the way we are creating this vast gap between the haves and the have-nots. It is a system that has not rewarded work, has not been creating jobs and has not been thinking about the future.
Some people believe it's in our self-interest to pull back on the spending?
Glover Blackwell: We do have a fiscal crisis and we do have to tighten our belts. But it doesn't make sense for those who need the most to have to lose out in the process. We certainly can't allow those people that I characterize as being mean-spirited to use this fiscal crisis as a way to hurt America's most vulnerable even more. We need to ask, "What about tax cuts for the wealthy?" We can't give the wealthy tax cuts and then take away food from women and children through a cut to the WIC program.
We need to call out these things that are just mean and wrong. Yet, at the same time, we need to engage in the conversation about where we are going to cut. Let's get rid of waste. Let's get rid of things we absolutely don't need. But programs that feed infants are essential. We cannot cut there.
Many people who are conservative talk a lot about having to protect their grandchildren from carrying the weight of our financial misdeeds. I'm concerned about people's grandchildren but I'm also concerned about our children today. Our grandchildren will not inherit a wonderful country if we don't invest in our children today. I am not a person who says, "Let's not cut anyplace." I'm saying let's be surgical in our cuts so that we don't kill the patient in the process.
You mentioned the media as part of the divisiveness in our society. How are the media different today than during the civil rights movement?
Glover Blackwell: I grew up in St. Louis during the civil rights era and I remember how proud my parents were of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's editorial pages. It was a time when our private values were aligned with our public values. We were still a nation mired in segregation, but it took the pages of our newspapers and the aggressiveness of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to pull the American people in a different place. We have a model and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was a part of that.
Now, as a nation, our private values are ahead of our public values. People in their hearts are much more inclusive, much less likely to be labeled as "racist." As a matter of fact, most Americans are appalled to be labeled a racist. We haven't had a public response that people have been able to identify with. I don't think this nation is going to have the breakthrough it seeks until our public values become more aligned with our private values. Then we can move to a different place together.
Last year around this time, you were one of the panelists for the "We Count" symposium in Chicago. There was much criticism of Obama during that debate. At one point you asked the host, Tavis Smiley, "What is our job?" I'd like you to answer that question. What roles should black churches, black leaders and black voters play in today's social justice movement?
Glover Blackwell: Our job, as African Americans and as part of a community that envisions a more inclusive nation, is to educate ourselves. We know the budget is the place where the aspirations of the nation either get realized or don't get realized. I don't care how soaring the rhetoric was in the State of the Union, it doesn't get translated until a budget is passed. We need to be educated about that. We have to make sure our faith institutions are engaged, we have to put ourselves on committees, we have to go to meetings, we have to demand that this be a transparent process so that housing and education really gets developed in ways that allow us to live in communities of opportunity and have access to opportunity wherever it may be in the region.
During the civil rights movement everybody wanted to say that they were a part of it. People talked about it in church and in their neighborhoods. They identified with it. We need to begin to identify with opportunity. The word I often use now is "equity." When I use the term I mean just and fair inclusion into a society where everybody can participate and everybody can prosper.
We need to start thinking of ourselves as part of the Equity Movement which means you educate your children, your fellow church-goers, your neighbors -- you educate yourself, you speak out, you hold people accountable. You have new standards and expectations for life and community. You become part of a force that demands equity at every turn.
What are the key points you want the St. Louis audience to remember after you're gone?
Glover Blackwell: I hope all the people at the conference, who really are the choir, will be emboldened to keep going down this road that they are on -- that housing alone does not solve the problem for poor people. It is imperative that housing be connected to good schools, with job centers, with transportation that puts people where the jobs are located, with grocery stores and safety -- because it's all of those things together that create communities of opportunity.
Sylvester Brown, Jr. is a freelance journalist and founder of When We Dream Together, a local nonprofit focused on urban revitalization.