A few weeks ago, the Free Press published a campaign finance report that showed one of the three black members on the Monroe City Council had been targeted as the weak link who could be used to divide and conquer the black majority on the Monroe City Council.
Ironically, most of the same donors are also working to break the black majority on the Monroe City Council.
The names of those targeted are not important, but the strategy is what gubernatorial candidate Shawn Wilson refers to as the “30 pieces of silver” syndrome.
In Monroe, the strategy works well. We have three Black members on the city council, but in reality, we only have two; the majority is broken.
African-Americans comprise 62 percent of the city’s population, and we comprise the majority of both the city council and school board.
The only way we can address crime, deteriorating neighborhoods, and poorly performing schools is to use our voting bloc to direct resources to attack our problems.
With rising crime, our city leaders have not spent one nickel to develop long- and short-term plans to address the causes of crime. Neither have they insisted that we strategically plan and promote ways to save the neighborhoods they represent.
With State studies showing African-American students, on average, are failing in all core subjects in city schools above the 75th percentile, the majority Black school board focuses on everything except searching out the root causes of the academic deficiencies and readjusting its program to solve the problem.
Going forward, Black elected officials should build coalitions in our own community through which they can gather the support of our community on pertinent issues. Coalitions with Black education groups, fraternal organizations, the NAACP, Black Chambers, SEDD, and other groups will help officials stay on track and make it harder for outside forces to break coalitions.
In turn, the coalitions should use their influence to raise the money necessary to elect their own candidates. Hungry dogs will eat scraps from any table.
Officials should make it a point to meet frequently with black influencers to receive input and engagement.
No Black public official should have thin skin or take the input they receive personally; that makes it easy for outside groups to break our majority and pit Blacks against each other.
We saw it recently when the broken majority resulted in minority leadership for the city council and school board.
Our city council and school board members have yet to schedule meetings with our leadership organizations to get input, give updates, or correct false information that may be floating around. Instead, our community has to publicly complain at city council or school board meetings, where we are often slapped with a three-minute rule, threatened with police action, or ignored.
Those outside our community have a clear strategy to “move the city forward,” but unfortunately, there is no plan on paper that includes “us” unless we abandon our own and join “them.”
It’s hard to ignore the “thirty pieces of silver” once they are laid on the table.
Yet, our community needs a strategy from our leaders: A strategy to build our neighborhoods, fight crime and violence, promote our businesses, and improve our schools.
If we are the majority and allow our leaders to be picked off with “silver” bullets, we deserve what we get.
