An Appeal for Racial Collaboration
Jacksonville leaders & activists:
It's time to rise up and work together
In my last blog, I appealed to leaders of Jacksonville organizations involved in the work of racial justice and racial healing to form a citywide coalition that will foster a spirit of collaboration and create a comprehensive campaign for racial equity across our city.
My purpose in this new blog is twofold:
1) To offer some personal reflections on the challenges of collaboration.
2) To suggest specific strategies for creating such a consortium.
For friends in other cities around the country: This appeal is for you, too; the opportunity to elevate the work of racial reconciliation through collaboration exists in most cities.
A Deeply Personal Pursuit
The search for racial equity is deeply personal. Many of us have been involved in this effort throughout our lives. For me, it began in 1951. I was 14 and joined the NAACP Youth Council in Boston to protest school desegregation. Involvement in many demonstrations and protests followed, including a jailing, a beating during a civil rights demonstration and involvement in violent protests in Boston as we worked with youth to prevent rioting following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther king, Jr., in 1968.
In Mound Bayou, MS I was protected by armed guards while organizing Black sharecroppers to join a Black-owned farmers’ cooperative formed by the Delta Ministry.
Even during my years in journalism — with The Boston Globe and The New York Times — I continued to push racial issues forward. I resigned from The Times in 1978 after joining a group of fellow Black journalists in a class action suit challenging The Times's discriminatory news coverage, and its hiring and promotion policies. As Editor of two Black newspapers — The New York Amsterdam News and The Bay State Banner in Boston, racial issues were at the forefront of our reporting.
The photo at the top of this post is from a Black Power Rally in Roxbury, Boston's Black community, on June 26, 1967. I’m there in dark glasses, standing to the left, part of a coalition called the Black United Front which had invited Stokely Carmichael to speak. He had just been released from jail in Atlanta where he was arrested during civil rights demonstrations. He was working to upgrade racial issues and help our nation move to equal rights for all.
Dedicated Jacksonville Activists
Many dedicated people in Jacksonville have similar histories of lifetime involvement in civil rights and racial justice --- too many to name in this brief space. I’ve had the privilege of getting to know many during my 24 years living and working here.
Your work over the years is an apt example of Maya Angelous's words in her poem "Still I Rise":
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.
Courageous activists and advocates in Jacksonville have dedicated their lives to continuously rising, often without recognition, in times when powerful political and social forces in Jacksonville were aligned against them.
A painful acknowledgement
It's painful for me, therefore, to see that my work and your work over these many years has produced successes that are so frail today that we face a return to the post-Reconstruction era. Voting rights, political empowerment and social progress could be wiped out if we are not careful.
Various studies make this clear: There has been limited collective progress in racial equity the last 60 years. (See my prior blog: “The Illusion of Racial Progress.”) In some areas --- such as desegregation of the nation's public schools — as a country and as individual states we have retrogressed.
Our opportunity, now, is to honor the history of struggle by giving it new form, organization, order and coherence. I strongly believe that will happen in Jacksonville when we bring together all of those involved in leading this growing movement for racial reconciliation to lead a citywide coalition.
34 Separate Initiatives Currently Underway
My last blog listed 20 separate organizations currently running programs designed to address racial inequities and foster racial reconciliation in Jacksonville. Since that blog, I have identified 14 more.
While each may well be of value in its own right, they currently operate in silos. At best we are losing natural synergies that collaboration produces. At worst, these programs compete for resources, visibility and leadership to the detriment of the overall effort and results. They create a chaotic misalignment of energy and resources.
A citywide alliance has the potential to greatly expand public engagement, welcome thousands of new people into the dialogue, develop synergies across programs, increase resources and develop a critical mass of citizens motivated by a shared commitment to racial equity. It has the potential of generating a new spiritually-based process dedicated to a higher purpose.
The Flower of Life
The form I suggested for this collaboration is The Flower of Life --- a figure, out of Sacred Geometry, with qualities and structure that serves ideally as a metaphor for a citywide collaboration.
This structure is portrayed by this model:
Through this form, each of the separate organizations is represented by a circle interconnected at the dark dots. Under this model, organizations maintain their individual identities, boundaries, leadership, goals and programmatic focus. They are, however, integrally connected, creating a well-coordinated citywide campaign, sharing ideas, plans, resources and energy.
Gaze at this Flower image. This model differs from a traditional hierarchical form. It embodies power equity and shared responsibility.
See the dot in the center surrounded by a central circle. This center is occupied not by a group of individual leaders who coordinate things; not by a small group in control of the process, but by relationships among the leaders characterized by trust, transparency, openness, vulnerability, empathy and caring relationships. It requires leaders to sacrifice ego needs in service of a higher purpose.
Those trusting relationships hold the components of the flower in place, like a magnetic force. Dr. Martin Luther King called that force “Love.” Leaders need to love each other, respect each other, be in it together.
During the Civil Rights Movement, we spent many hours planning and debriefing demonstrations and marches --- many intense, challenging late-night conversations. These conversations built intimate relationships and powerful connections that spread out forcefully, and lovingly, into the community .
A Sacred Process
The Flower of Life represents a sacred process in which members of a coalition place their well-being in each other’s hearts and hands. The various organizations become part of a higher calling; programs, events and projects become elevated to a spiritual endeavor --- that interconnectedness advocated by Martin Luther King in his “Beloved Community.”
A Model of Collaboration in Jacksonville
A powerful example of interagency collaboration is already budding in Jacksonville.
The logo above is that of The Population Health Consortium of Northeast Florida. Their logo is a Flower of Life. Out of many petals emerge one beautiful flower symbolizing life-giving service to the community.
The Population Health Consortium is intent on placing the needs of the community above the ego needs of individuals and narrow institutional needs of health care organizations.
Its creation was stimulated by tragic racial disparities in the 2020 COVID crisis. The suffering among Jacksonville's Black residents — much higher rates of infection and death — were so disturbing that several healthcare leaders began to discuss the need to move beyond competition and develop comprehensive strategies.
As I understand it, the group is led by Dr. Jeffrey Goldhagen of the Partnership for Child Health, Dr. Rogers Cain of the Northeast Florida Medical Society and Baptist Health, and Dr. Mobeen Rathore, Department of Pediatrics at UF Health.
Dr. Rathore Dr. Goldhagen Dr. Cain
At present the consortium includes representatives from UF Health, Baptist Health, Ascension St. Vincent’s, Wolfson’s Children's and Mayo Clinic. A number of other healthcare and professional associations are also involved, including the Partnership for Child Health, the Duval County Medical society, the Health Planning Council of Northeast Florida, Jacksonville Area Legal Aid, the Partnership to End Childhood Hunger and key individual stakeholder healthcare professionals.
This Consortium is still forming and constantly learning. Rumblings of nascent competition re-emerged with the windfall of $32 million in federal funds distributed to several of the organizations. Several key health care groups have declined to join. These issues are being worked on. And the cooperative intent and structure are in place.
The Consortium has developed its shared vision:
To provide interdisciplinary and intersectoral commitment, expertise, and resources required to address the complex challenges of optimizing population health and eliminating inequities among all people in Northeast Florida, in particular those marginalized by social, environmental, and medical determinants of health.
It has identified three key umbrella Goals;
- Reduce the impact of COVID
- Secure housing for individuals and families
- End childhood hunger
New Models for Implementation
The consortium has also come up with three models to describe their ever-widening methods of implementation:
1) A Roadmap for Health Equity
2) A Sociological plan for Community Engagement
3) A model for delivery of services.
A roadmap for progress
A model for engagement
A model for delivery of services to the community
Jacksonville: A Tier One City?
After living and working on issues of race and diversity in Jacksonville for 24 years, I’m convinced that we can only be a Tier One City when we acknowledge the gross racial disparities of our past and the largely denied and hidden racial disparities of our present.
What if millions of dollars in incentives currently being invested in new developments around the city included requirements that mitigated racial disparities? What if Shad Khan’s shipyards project and the new Riverfront Plaza included set-aside programs to insure the inclusion of Blacks in the project? What if all urban development required policies to insure that Black residents would not be priced out of their neighborhoods, but included in ways that upgrade their properties, their employment and their income.
When leaders of racial reconciliation initiatives come together to create a citywide movement, a spirit of collaboration can ripple across our city and a new multicultural consensus can emerge to focus on these issues --- empowered, coherent and inspired.
Leaders cannot take a city where they have not themselves been. To lead with integrity requires leaders of racial equity initiatives to reconcile their differences in order to foster racial reconciliation and true equity across our city.
By taking time to build trust that's based on spiritual grounding, and on emotionally mature relationships, leaders of organizations working the equity vineyard will position themselves to provide truly transformative leadership.
