I felt so symbolic

We interrupt Goat Rope's regularly scheduled Moby-Dick series to celebrate a nice little victory. As noted earlier in this blog, members of Charleston WV's African American community and many white allies mobilized over the last year to add the name of Mary C. Snow, a prominent black educator, to the new West Side Elementary School.

This post from February shows what it's like when hundreds of people turn out for a school board meeting to make a stand. And this post from July celebrates the fact that community members overcame resistance and converted former opponents to support the name change.

On Tuesday night, I was back in the neighborhood and was thrilled to see that it had actually happened. A friend had previously circulated a picture, but I thought it might have been photo-shopped. Like doubting Thomas of old, I had to experience the reality for myself. And it was sweet.

Yes, it was primarily a symbolic victory. Yes, we have much bigger problems to deal with. As a general rule I prefer hard targets (as in policy wins) to symbolic victories, but it occurs to me that humans are, after all, creatures of sign and symbol. And that symbolic victories are sweet as well.

(I am reminded of the lyrics of my favorite song from the 1990s, Mr. Jones by Counting Crows: "I felt so symbolic yesterday.")

POLLS, JESUS, POLITICS AND ALL THAT are discussed in the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

THE RAW AND THE COOKED. Was cooking the trick that helped early humans develop such big brains? Maybe.

IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING what was up with former Massey CEO Don Blankenship after Frodo melted the Ring he retired from the company, click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Name change!

After a struggle that lasted several months, many community members in Charleston are celebrating a major symbolic victory. The Kanawha County Board of Education voted 4-1 yesterday to add the name Mary C. Snow to Charleston's West Side Elementary School. Snow was a prominent African American educator who was an inspiration to many black and white West Virginians.

The struggle was intense at times. Check this earlier post for a description of a community meeting in February that brought out hundreds of people. The board had earlier voted down the measure, but two members changed their previous votes.

It was an interesting campaign for several reasons. First, I was baffled by the way the board majority (like the school's faculty senate) initially dug itself into a position of opposition. One member, to wit Pete Thaw, the lone holdout, went as far as saying "I will fight this issue until hell freezes over and then fight on the ice."

To me, it would have made more sense to graciously yield, and then call on the community to increase its support for the school.

Several things contributed to turning it around. First, when further negotiations seemed fruitless, a respected member of the African American community, Linda Ealy, ran for the board in the May election. She didn't win, but ran a good shoestring campaign and garnered a significant number of votes--significant enough not to be ignored.

Second, and probably most important, the community leaders who led the effort for the change continued to engage with the school, its staff and its students and tried to be as supportive as they could. One recent example involved finding hundreds of book bags to give out to each student. Over time this kind of positive engagement seemed to wear down the opposition. Opposition to the name change from school staff evaporated while some board members re-evaluated their position.

That kind of positive approach can be hard to resist. It's hard to keep scowling at people who persist in helping you out. In that sense, this is a good example of a campaign carried out in the spirit of positive nonviolence.

A final note. Yes, it was about the name. But it was even more about respect.

NOTE. El Cabrero is about to hit the road for a while so posts will be irregular. Not that they've been like clockwork lately anyway...

Zombie fever

I think I know what it's like to become a zombie now. Well, maybe not the dying and coming back and eating people part, but the part that happens after you get bit by one. As all the zombie movies and The Walking Dead series show, then follows a period of high fever, severe body pain, and periods of chills.

That has pretty much been my reality most of this week. I can't find any zombie bites on me, but in case I do croak, somebody should probably do the head thing.

There is one thing I've learned from this experience: when one is subject to periods of extreme chills and shivering, it is probably best not to watch movies about Alpine mountain climbing. I learned that the hard way while watching the German film North Face, about an unsuccessful attempt on Eiger.

JUST ONE LINK TODAY. Metaphors matter. Consider the implications of whether we view the economy as a garden or a machine?

OK, MAYBE TWO. Congratulations to community members of Charleston' West Side, who are on the verge of winning a victory that was months in coming. It looks like the Kanawha County Board of Education is about to vote to add the name of prominent African American educator Mary C. Snow to the West Side Elementary School. Here's a post from back in February about how the community mobilized on this issue.

CONFESSION. In the last post I said I was going to try to stop trolling, i.e. parodying right wing rants on news websites. On reflection, that's probably not going to happen. It's just too much fun.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

This is what democracy looks like

Members of the Kanawha County Board of Education got an earful last night as hundreds of community members turned out for a special meeting to support adding the name of the late Mary C. Snow, a prominent Charleston African American educator, to the name of the West Side Elementary School. The meeting came about due to community mobilization led by the Tuesday Morning Group, a coalition of black and white and religious and secular community advocates for social and racial justice

I think several factors drove the big turnout, not least of which are community anger over being treated with disrespect and sadness over the disappearance of local black history. The history of the name issue goes back to 2009 when the board adopted a flawed process for naming the school. Read more here and here.

Last month, board members voted 3 to 2 to oppose adding Snow's name. The most bizarre moment last night came when board member Becky Jordon, who opposed the change, basically attacked the audience, telling them "Don't just come out here when you want to complain about a name."

She obviously didn't get the fact that it wasn't just about the name. Or the fact that many of the people pushing hardest for the addition of Snow's name are also those who work hardest to help disadvantaged children and adults in that community and to make the school succeed.

About the only people there who didn't support the name change were the board majority and school staff, who may or may not have been pressured to support keeping the current name of West Side Elementary School, which one person observed was "a location, not a name."

It was sad to see board members and educators squandering support for a community school and digging in over this rather than graciously yielding and accepting the win/win compromise of naming it Mary C. Snow West Side Elementary School--a step that even school superintendent Ron Duerring publicly supported last night

There were some great zingers last night from those who attended. One of my favorites was when a speaker contrasted Snow to other dead people who had schools named after them in the county: "I am supremely confident in that Mary Snow did a lot more for the education of Kanawha County students than George Washington, Stonewall Jackson, Andrew Jackson and Herbert Hoover combined."

Tom Rodd, a local attorney who previously clerked for state supreme court justice Larry Starcher, quoted African American state justice Franklin Cleckley on the value of changing one's mind when better information emerges. When he changed his mind in a case decision, Cleckley said "I will take refuge in an aphorism of Justice Felix Frankfurter: 'Wisdom too often never comes, and so one out not to reject it merely because it comes late.'"

I didn't speak that night since I don't live in the the county, but if I did, I would have said that there are powerful people in the country and state who don't believe in public institutions, who want to undermine public education and degrade public educators--but those people weren't the ones who showed up at the meeting. The ones who came believe strongly in public education and depend on it for the education and future of their children.

It is stupid and tragic to see such people treated with disrespect--and it's not very smart to treat your allies that way. You just might need them some day.