The year 2011, to quote Charles Dickens, was the best of times and the worst of times.
The year opened with certification of our African-American community’s robust population – 256,418 in the city and 283,549 in the metropolitan area; both record highs.
With two of every seven persons in the city/county and one-in-six in the metro being African-American, the 2010 Census documented that this city and metro’s growth in the century’s first decade was driven by African-Americans. This was a high-water mark for what is now the country’s 13th largest African-American community of any city.
But that great news masked the disturbing circumstances our community faced in 2011. Starting this century’s second decade, it seemed our Black community and Indianapolis were sliding backwards into an abyss of racial tensions, negative race relations and a growing disdain and dismissal of our Black community, by Indianapolis’ white leadership and power structure.
The best example of what I mean was the nearly year long, consuming debate over a depiction of the Black experience in America with the proposed placement of a statue of a slave on the city’s ill-advised, pretty but unfunctional downtown Cultural Trail.
The debate over the Fred Wilson sculpture highlighted how out of touch white civic leadership is with the goals, aspirations and values of our growing African-American community. The statute debate demonstrated how deep the racial chasm is in this city. A chasm epitomized by the benign neglect shown our community by its chief political leader Mayor Greg Ballard.
In his infrequent Black radio appearances, Mayor Ballard openly displayed a dismissive, haughty and condescending attitude towards our community.
Publicly he proclaimed himself to be “the most African-American friendly mayor in history,” confirmed he’d never met with Black elected officials during his mayoral tenure; and dissed Indy’s NAACP chapter as “just another civil rights organization.”
In a live prime time TV debate, he referred to the Black community as “a difficult population.”
Ballard’s administration has the fewest African-American department heads of any mayor in the UniGov era. Under Ballard’s leadership, scores of veteran Black police officers and firefighters have retired. The percentage of Blacks in public safety are steadily declining, especially in the command ranks.
The mayor publicly said it would take “at least 20 years” for Blacks to attain parity with their percentage in the population today (2011) in the police and fire departments.
During the mayoral campaign, when Ballard’s shortcomings were exposed, Ballard and his campaign attacked it as “race baiting.” Indy’s whites don’t want to accept the truth that under the current mayor, who squeaked to re-election because of white (and some Black sexism) and the Ballard campaign playing a “race baiting” card of their own stoking whites’ fears.
This year revealed the damage the Great Depression has done to our African-American community. Black unemployment in Indianapolis is 21.3 percent, ninth highest of any major big city Black community.
One reason for the high Black unemployment is the failure of the mayor and the city’s economic development gurus to take seriously the employment of African-Americans as a major priority.
So, I wasn’t surprised when the City and Develop Indy along with the Greater Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce dismissed the seriousness of a city where one-in-five Black adults are jobless.
More ominously, Develop Indy’s leader, Scott Miller now heads the Indianapolis Chamber. The first time the chamber’s hired a leader in decades that’s shown no sensitivity towards or familiarity with the African-American community or leadership.
In 2005, Dr. Eugene White assumed the leadership of the Indianapolis Public Schools as the district’s second full time African-American superintendent. White promised to move IPS forward into greatness.
But in 2011, seven years later, IPS’ enrollment has fallen 16.9 percent from when Dr. White took over. Just a third of Indianapolis’ Black public school students even attend IPS.
While White and IPS have made some progress in increasing ISTEP scores and graduation rates, the deep, deep academic problems at IPS’ middle and high schools and White’s seeming inability to turn those schools around, caused the state to take over four IPS schools and place two others in a remedial program.
Worse, we have a severe leadership vacuum within IPS as the School Board has reverted back to the 1990s when this column regularly called the board out as “Silent Sphinxes” for the board’s bizarre refusal to publicly engage the IPS community to explain IPS policies and direction.
The year ends with IPS losing roughly 1,400 students; including some 900 Blacks; most to the townships and suburban districts; some to charters and even some to parochial schools under the state’s voucher law.
Our Black community suffered self-inflicted wounds when our city’s most treasured institution, Indiana Black Expo, was torn by internal strife usually found in Iraq or Afghanistan. Nearly every Expo employee accused the organization’s president of behavior somewhere between incompetence’s and insensitivity.
The firestorm of controversy impacted IBE’s Summer Celebration at the box office. The Circle City Classic was a box office disaster. Though IBE claimed some 31,000 “attended,” the real attendance was sharply below that.
The result, revealed last Wednesday by IBE, was that IBE’s 2011 revenue has fallen from $6,777,017 in 2008 to $5,229,749 in 2011; a 22.8 percent or million and a half dollar drop.
The organization limps into 2012 searching for relevance and direction and increased revenues, with at least a third of the staff new.
Then there were those community lions God called home in 2011. The latest, Prince Julius Adeniyi, the Nigerian immigrant whose love and devotion of his native land helped educate thousands of youth (and adults) about African heritage and culture, through his Drums of West Africa.
My deepest sympathies to Prince Julius Adeniyi’s family. His contributions to keeping our community’s history and culture alive will be sorely missed.
Happy New Year. See ‘ya next year.
You can email comments to Amos Brown at acbrown@aol.com.
