St. Louis County Health and Human Service Conference October 5, 2010
CJMM workshop presentation Tuesday, October 5th 8:30-10:00, "Working Together for Racial Equity in Our Schools."
2010 Week of Remembrance:
CJMM, Inc. will recognize these milestones with an expanded week of programs: June 12, 2010, 6:00 PM, Mitchell Auditorium at the College of St. Scholastica — screening of Older Than America followed by a discussion of the Indian boarding school experience with writer-director-producer Georgina Lightning.
Click here to view the trailer and learn more about the film.
• June 14, 2010, 7:00 PM, Park Hill Cemetery — Eve of Remembrance laying of flowers and short musical program at the gravesites of Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson and Isaac McGhie.
Click here for directions.
• June 15, 2010, 5:30 PM, Downtown Duluth at Lake Avenue and Superior Street — Gather for the Day of Remembrance march past the old Duluth jail on Superior Street and up to the Memorial.
• June 15, 2010, 6:00 PM, Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial, 1st St & 2nd Ave E — Day of Remembrance observance with keynote speaker Susana Pelayo-Woodward, UMD Office of Cultural Diversity. We invite the public to maintain a candlelight vigil with us until nightfall to close the Week of Remembrance.
Julia Cheng's Speech at the 2010 Duluth Superior Area Community Foundation Annual Meeting:
Good afternoon, Community Foundation supporters and friends. Thank you Mr. Johnson and Representative Reinert for your insights on building momentum through generosity and civic engagement. On behalf of Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial's board of directors, I thank all of you for the opportunity to address so many community leaders on the issue of inclusiveness.
When ISD 709 invited my husband, Robin Washington, to speak at Duluth's high schools last February for Black History Month, I asked him, "What are you going to say?" He said, "I'm going to talk about the contributions of African Americans."
I said, "Well, I know you're not going to talk about the first black astronaut or that a black man invented the traffic light. You're obviously going a lot deeper, give me a second…I know! The greatest contribution of African Americans was the Civil Rights movement because their suffering and non-violent resistance granted them the moral authority to call us all to meet America's ideals of justice, equality and freedom."
He said, with some degree of amazement, "You do understand me." Spouses, especially husbands, you know that nothing makes a partner happier than when you read her mind. And it's healthy for your relationship.
Inclusiveness is more than tolerance and political correctness. It is celebration and embrace of differences. It is the will to question one's own perceptions in an effort to understand another's. My church declared itself last summer to be a multicultural, multiethnic anti-racist congregation. As the Dismantling Racism Team prepared to lead Sunday services earlier this month, I asked us to acknowledge the fact that Peace Church is 98% white. We're not multiethnic and multicultural. Given Duluth demographics and Peace Church's liberal theology, our congregation might never even have a critical mass of people of color, much less a majority. But until such time, the congregation has work to do right now: to prepare minds and hearts to live in diversity, to unravel and decipher the system in which we live.
People of color have striven mightily for justice since our beginnings as a nation. We have come as far as we have because we believed in the truth of our cause and because we found allies among people of conscience who might otherwise have just gone along with the system. I believe in allies. In the Anti-Racism Study Dialogue Circles allies are people who choose to uncover their role in perpetuating an unfair economic system. At Community Action Duluth, allies are partners who support our participants as they lift themselves out of poverty, and I appreciate our executive director, Angie Miller, and all my colleagues every day for the powerful joy of working there.
I have a story that I want to share. When I was little, in third grade, I was the only Asian student in a class of thirty. We sat in rows of desks facing the chalkboard and the teacher at her big wooden desk in front. One day, for some reason or another, she left the room and within minutes, I was surrounded. The entire class had ganged up on me. Have you ever been cornered on a playground or in a locker room? I don't know how, but I stood up and walked out, just as the school principal approached our open doorway. He saw me and asked, "Why are you in the hall?" What I said was, "Everyone is making fun of me." What he heard was, "Everyone is hurting me."
My principal took my hand and walked me back into the class and of course all the kids froze. He stood with me before them and said, "She is one of the best students in the school and you will not treat her like this."
I thank him to this day. He believed me, protected me and armored me for life — with an inner sense of self and with faith in the existence of heroes: people of conscience who will stand up for justice no matter how unpopular. But over the years I have also wondered: how did it affect the other 29 children in the class? What did it mean to witness his intervention?
I spoke at UMD on April 13 at an Asian Pacific Students event called "Empowered Asian American Women in the Media," one day before two freshmen on Facebook gave us quite the rarity: the entire, irrefutable real-time transcript of their racial attack on an African American student. On May 3, I joined the Asian Pacific students and many others who marched in silent protest through Duluth to a campus rally at Romano Gym.
To my sorrow, nineteen days had passed and the students were still pleading with their principal to intervene on their behalf.
Lynching never stopped with the victims it killed. The tactic was always intended to terrorize whole communities into submission. The Facebook attack didn't just hurt one student. It crystallized the unease and isolation that is academic life for many students of color on our city's campuses.
We need to do better than this, and that's why Clayton Jackson McGhie's mission to foster racial justice only began with the dedication of the Memorial in 2003.
We imagine a community that extinguishes poverty and excludes no one from achieving full potential. We imagine transcending superficial political correctness to address race and racism on much harder fronts. Economic disparities, racial gaps and generational wealth and poverty all have historic roots. Systemic racism is an uncomfortable truth.
Two and a half years ago, we decided to safeguard our scholarship with a permanent endowment, and now the Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial Scholarship Fund is established, fully capitalized, at the Community Foundation. We decided to send some messages: people of color must understand and do participate in and contribute to the civic and economic life of this community. When people of conscience ally and pool their resources with us, the results are truly spectacular.
As an organization, Clayton Jackson McGhie has had a banner year. We released our DVD, Bringing the Truth to Light: A Community Call for Racial Equity in Our Schools and held our first in-service with ISD 709 to train teachers in the use of our history curriculum. We won the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits Mission and Excellence Award for Anti-Racism Initiative. Last week we awarded our sixth annual scholarship to Duluth East graduate Fosam Buma Foncham and our third honorable mention grant to Gretel Lee, also of Duluth East.
Our mission to foster racial justice has brought Duluth an international reputation for promoting healing and reconciliation by facing history and each other. People from around the country ask how we built the memorial and what they can learn from our experience. I tell them CJMM is effective because every member of our volunteer board brings a personal network of allies into our mighty circle of support. We do not work alone. We call on all our connections and resources to achieve what we've accomplished. But we also take our own steps to self-sufficiency.
On June 9 we open the Week of Remembrance to recognize and reflect on, first, the ninetieth anniversary of the Clayton Jackson McGhie tragedy, but also the tenth anniversary of the founding of the memorial building committee that is now CJMM, Inc. On June 12, we present Older Than America, Georgina Lightning's film about the Indian boarding school experience and its continuing repercussions, at Mitchell Auditorium, with the writer-director in attendance to lead a discussion after the screening. On June 15, we gather at Minnesota Power plaza for a march along Superior Street, past the old jail and up Second Avenue East for the annual Day of Remembrance observance at the Memorial. We look forward to the arrival of freedom ship Amistad and I anticipate another chance to walk its decks as I did in Boston Harbor.
All this is happening because there are people in Duluth who believe inclusiveness is crucial to building the community we want to live in, that inclusivity, along with citizen generosity and civic engagement, drive the engines of a thriving, sustainable community. I look to all of you here today to lead in your sphere of influence — at work, at worship, at school and at home — and to find the allies you need to support your best and wisest intentions. Know that Clayton Jackson McGhie is here to support you just as the Community Foundation and so many individuals and organizations support CJM. Thank you.
— Keynote speech by CJMM, Inc. board of directors co-chair Julia Cheng at May 26, 2010 annual meeting of the Duluth Superior Area Community Foundation.
