With bright decorations, tents, souvenirs, live music and refreshments, the parking lot of Fountain of Life Covenant Church resembled a carnival in the late-morning heat of the Juneteenth holiday.
The occasion was the groundbreaking for the Center for Black Excellence and Culture, a place for Madison’s Black community to tell its stories and celebrate its achievements in a modernistic, three-story building next to the church on the city’s historically Black south side.
For years, the Rev. Alex Gee, founder and CEO of the center project and senior pastor of the church, and other Black leaders have told me about a Black brain drain in Madison, that many considering a job here lament the absence of a definitively Black place to go for an outside-of-work cultural experience.
The center is meant to be that, and Gee was beaming as we talked before the festivities. (He told me later that about 700 people attended.) The center will provide a cultural and educational home, including theater and gallery spaces, and it will also have rooms for after-school and senior programming.
It’s part of what is probably the most dramatic era of bricks-and-mortar projects built by and for people of color in Madison’s history. The Cap Times noted that trend in a 2022 program at our Idea Fest. Recent projects also include the Urban League’s Black Business Hub and the new headquarters for Centro Hispano, among others.
Speakers at the 2022 discussion wondered whether Madison’s philanthropic dollars, controlled mostly by white people, would continue to flow once the emotional aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, a Black man killed by a white Minneapolis police officer, faded. That question has stayed with me and makes me wonder how leaders of color — local and not — continue to push forward with a positive, can-do attitude despite the country’s backward steps since the years of Barack Obama’s presidency.
After all, American racism is still firmly rooted and central to far-right messaging. Opposition to affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts are at the core of their beliefs.
Just last month, a Virginia school board made national headlines when it decided to restore the name of Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson on a high school, reversing a change that accompanied the Floyd fallout. Such racial backtracking is a national trend, according to a New York Times story about the Virginia school naming.
The Times said curriculums about America’s racial history are increasingly being curtailed or eliminated. Right-wing politicians rail against “critical race theory,” which seems to encompass any teaching whatsoever about the history of American slavery.
In a recent column, I mentioned a new book that topped the New York Times bestseller list: “The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War.” In it, author Erik Larson meticulously chronicled the runup to that war.
One disturbing passage stuck with me. It should be required reading for any American who might question whether slavery was the war’s central cause.
Larson described how in February 1861, shortly before the fall of Fort Sumter started the war, leaders of the secession movement met in Montgomery, Alabama, to design their new government. Half of the nearly 9,000 residents of Montgomery at the time were enslaved people, Larson wrote.
“The choice of Montgomery did make a certain sense … in that it was the center of the domestic slave trade in Alabama and for much for the Deep South,” Larson wrote, explaining that scores of enslaved people “arrived daily by riverboat and by train, and by overland coffles (lines of people chained to one another), to be deposited in slave depots, or pens, located throughout the city.
“On Market (Street) alone there were nine businesses engaged in trading, auctioning, or investing in slaves, and at least eight pens where men, women and children alike were stored before sale,” he wrote.
One pen was a block from the capital building. “Additional depots and trading houses operated on side streets,” he wrote. Auctions were typically held at a convenient spot for sellers: “The state courthouse stood on an adjacent corner for the filing of slave mortgages, probate agreements, and other instruments; nearby stood a row of banks and insurers that specialized in financing the slave trade, including the founding office of a firm even then called Lehman Brothers.
“Advertisements in the Montgomery Daily Post touted enslaved people for sale,” Larson wrote, describing one that he wrote “offered a distinctly Southern service” — renting dogs to hunt down escaped Black people.
Larson made it abundantly clear throughout his 565-page book that slavery was the cause Stonewall Jackson fought for, the one that Virginia high school is once again honoring.
Which brings me to my final point.
My job as publisher and columnist brings me in contact with most of the leaders from Madison’s communities of color. I am also privileged to know many of them as a board member of the Evjue Foundation, the Cap Times’ charitable arm.
My takeaway?
As a group, they are equally passionate and altruistic. This city is profoundly fortunate to have people like Gee and many, many others — young and old, men and women — who never seem to lose hope.
Another such person is Lisa Peyton , founder, president and CEO of The Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness. People who have more expertise than I marvel to me how she and her team do so much for Black women here given limited resources.
A few months ago, I visited Peyton and her team in their offices.
As I left, I recall imagining myself in her situation. The work is interpersonally stressful, and Madison is a predominantly white, often quick-to-judge city. Nonprofit work is also rarely a road to riches. Could I be that selfless?
Probably not, I thought as I drove away.
What about you?
