“Anger is a secondary
emotion. The first emotion is hurt. Our kids are angry, but initially they are
hurt. They’re in excruciating pain; they have nothing to look up to, nothing to
look forward to.”
Those words came from one of the many speakers at a
December 7 community forum, attended by about 60, mostly African-American, area
residents. And both anger and hurt were in evidence, as speakers talked about
conditions in Rochester’s inner-city neighborhoods.
Frustration with police, local media, and a lack of jobs
was at the center of the two-hour dialogue about what it will take to help the
city’s impoverished neighborhoods move forward.
The keynote event of the meeting — the one that
attracted the television cameras — was City Councilmember Adam McFadden’s
explanation of his confrontation with city police and a local bar owner late
one October night. The incident catapulted McFadden into the headlines. But television
crews and reporters were barred from his address at last week’s forum. Their
coverage, some at the meeting said, would have been like throwing gasoline on a
fire.
News outlets, some at the forum said, had rushed to print
and broadcast a few heated words exchanged between McFadden and the bar owner,
but they had shown a distinct lack of curiosity about why McFadden confronted
the police in the first place. That kind of question, they said, would be an
obvious one for members of a community whose relationship with police has often
been one of mistrust.
But trust hasn’t always been a hallmark of
African-Americans’ relationship with the local media, either. On her way out
the door, one woman related a story of how she’d taken a white friend to a
similar meeting in the past and asked her to read the daily paper’s coverage of
it the next morning. Afterward, her friend agreed: The pair might have attended
a completely different meeting for all the similarity between the report and
their experience the night before.
Many of those at the forum complained that corporate
media have little real interest in the long-term health of their communities
and neighborhoods.
Media weren’t the only outside institution whose ties to
the community were questioned at the forum. Several people mentioned state
troopers and sheriff’s deputies occasionally brought in to help city police
operate roadblocks in crime-ridden (and overwhelmingly poor and minority)
neighborhoods. One man spoke of watching upstanding members of his community
being stopped and hassled in their cars, while known drug-dealers passed by on
foot or bike, even waving to the police at times.
This man — and others at the forum — questioned whether
outside police feel deeply obligated to protect and serve an inner-city
neighborhood.
But it would be a mistake to conclude that the meeting was nothing more than a racial
gripe session. Race was just one of the concerns discussed.
Economic justice was another. One after another,
residents spoke of how jobs have fled the inner city over the past several
decades. One man told of an innovative program borrowed from Boston and recently launched here. When the program
advertised job opportunities for 10 high school-age kids, more than 300
applied. The will to work and to improve the state of inner-city neighborhoods
is clearly present, the man said; it’s the opportunity that’s lacking.
Residents bemoaned the demise of locally-owned
mom-and-pop stores that once anchored the economy of their neighborhoods and
provided meaningful employment for their youth.
Despite the pain and anger at the forum, however, there was a consensus that
positive steps can come from those feelings.
There was also a sense of urgency. Poor inner-city
residents can’t afford to re-fight the battles of the civil rights era in this
generation, one of the meeting’s organizers said; they have to move forward.
But how? It was obvious, that organizer said, that there
was plenty of enthusiasm, energy, and will in the room that night. The
challenge, he said, is to figure out how to direct it.
Organizers are planning another meeting for December 26;
they want to use the power of the emotions at the December 7 forum as a force
for positive change, they said.
This article appears in Dec 15-21, 2004.
