Transcripts

MARY STUCKY: Minneapolis Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton believes the future of a neighborhood is linked to its school.

SHARON SAYLES BELTON: If we want to have a strong neighborhood, in South Minneapolis, North Minneapolis, or anywhere where there is a large number of people of color living and low-income people, then it's going to be important for me to have strong institutions in those neighborhoods that can support those families.

MARY STUCKY: For some, the mayor's views on neighborhood schools are tantamount to calling for segregated schools, since housing tends to be segregated by race. For years, many African Americans have called segregation their archenemy. But now there's a growing segment of the community arguing that desegregation is no longer a top priority.

Peter Bell is the chairperson for the National Institute for Traditional Black Leadership.

PETER BELL: I think there is a sea change in the African American community. I go and give a lot of talks to a broad array of groups. And often, when I'm speaking in front of a predominantly African American group, I pose that question directly. Is integration still a goal? And it is kind of received with a hushed silence. I mean, you can feel the anxiety in the air about that.

MARY STUCKY: For many African Americans, desegregation as a goal is losing importance. This may be particularly true for those people of color who have not benefited from efforts at integration-- in other words, the underemployed, undereducated residents of the inner city. Spike Moss is a highly visible and vocal advocate in the inner-city African American community in Minneapolis. He stands wholeheartedly behind the mayor's call for neighborhood schools.

SPIKE MOSS: I think it's being said all over the country. I don't go anywhere where it's not being said. This has been an issue now for the last six years. And we have to take ownership on creating our own new day. We have waited far too long, thinking that this equality was going to happen, was going to come. And the time that we lost has been dangerous to our children's future.

MARY STUCKY: A separatist viewpoint has long existed in the African American community, but the broad range of opinion on desegregation may be something new, according to Yusuf Mgeni, president of the Urban Coalition.

YUSUF MGENI: The African American community is no longer the homogeneous, segregated, "we will follow any one voice" community that it was as recent as 20, 30 years ago. The African American community is of many opinions on any particular issue and does not-- and, many would argue, should not-- speak with one voice.

MARY STUCKY: If there is any unanimity of viewpoint, it may be a feeling that the mayor is right in raising the issue of school desegregation. Even stalwarts of school desegregation battles, like former Minneapolis School Board President Harry Davis, have faith that the mayor will do what's right for children. Davis was president of the NAACP in the early '60s, an organization that almost singlehandedly forced the desegregation of public schools.

HARRY DAVIS: The approach that I took, I thought, was the proper thing at that time. And when I accepted responsibility as a young man in the '50s to step forth and to expose what I think was wrong and to expose myself to violence-- and we did achieve it-- we've come too far to turn away.

MARY STUCKY: But Harry Davis, who ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Minneapolis in 1971, has tremendous respect for the current mayor, even if she places less priority than he does on desegregation.

HARRY DAVIS: I love the mayor. I think that she is history. She accomplished something that I couldn't accomplish. I think the community, they have a confidence and a hope in her that they've never had.

MARY STUCKY: The local Black community's political support for the mayor is almost universal, even among those who do not agree with the idea of neighborhood schools. Bill Green is on the Minneapolis school board. He thinks a turn from desegregation toward neighborhood schools is a bad idea but says the mayor's position has not hurt her standing in the Black community, even among staunch segregationists like himself.

BILL GREEN: The Black community, for all the reasons in the world, has felt betrayed. So many experiments that society has embarked on to try to bring equality, or equity, at least, to African Americans, many of those experiences have backfired. On the other hand, there are a lot of people in the Black community who recognize that the solution is not stepping back. It's going forward.

And what going forward is is a problem for us because we don't really have the language. We don't have the ideas that we need to have a sense of what forward means.

SHARON SAYLES BELTON: I think that there are people who will say, oh, god, what has she done? Has she undermined our efforts around civil rights, or my own political base or my own political future and all of that sort of thing? You know what? I was hired to do a job.

MARY STUCKY: Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton thinks her political capital in the African American community is as strong as ever, at least in these early stages of her effort to return to neighborhood schools.

SHARON SAYLES BELTON: I haven't taken a hit yet, and I think I haven't taken a hit yet because we started this conversation maybe about four years ago. And I will also share with you that I spent some time talking in advance of making a public statement to members of the NAACP.

When people still talk about it today, they suggest that, by making a statement like this, that you don't support integration. I support integration. But I support building community, too.

BILL GREEN: She's giving voice to an issue that people perhaps felt awkward to mention before.

MARY STUCKY: School board member and ardent desegregationist Bill Green.

BILL GREEN: Desegregation has become-- had become, for some people, the politically correct thing that you don't challenge. I don't care whether it's a political move on her part. All I care about is that the issue has been put on the table, and now it must be joined.

MARY STUCKY: Longtime civil rights activist Harry Davis agrees.

HARRY DAVIS: If we all agree on one thing, we'll lull ourselves to sleep and never accomplish anything. We've got to have differences of opinion. We've got to have issues to debate. We've got to be able to stand up for what we believe in and debate those issues the best we can with the knowledge that we gain from experience.

MARY STUCKY: There seems to be some reluctance to criticize a mayor who rose from within the ranks of the Twin Cities African American community. Sharon Sayles Belton, whose civil rights credentials are firmly established, has credibility in the eyes of many African Americans. And so, because it is Sharon Sayles Belton who calls for a return to neighborhood schools, and because a growing number of African Americans agree, the mayor's position makes very good sense politically. For the FM News station, I'm Mary Stucky.