Restoring a Sense of Humanity

Following graduation, I spent two years as the Episcopal Church’s Volunteer for Mission in an inner-city parish in St. Louis, working to improve the lives of the families there and the educational opportunities of the school children in those families. Little did I know that my experience during those two years was to become a real beacon for me later in life. During my work in St. Louis, one of the highlights was participating in the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march. Although our busload of freedom fighters was not there at the beginning of the march, we did walk with our fellow marchers into downtown Montgomery, where I witnessed the Dixie flag flying atop the state capital. Standing at the edge of the large crowd of marchers, I became aware of a national guardsman who stood next to me, rifle cocked; at one point, he spit on my shoes.

In 1966, I became the Special Assistant to the President of Miles College, a historically black college just outside of Birmingham, Alabama. During my year and a half there, I witnessed time and time again the pernicious consequences of bigotry against African Americans in the deeply segregated southern culture of the 1960s. Although I enjoyed the President of the college introducing me as the “house honkie in the administration,” I was appalled when a black colleague and I were asked to leave the local Episcopal church on a Sunday morning, because we were not welcome there. I was harassed at gunpoint when I met another black colleague on the town square in an all-rural Alabama county; my ex-wife was kicked out of the local supermarket when she publicly criticized Governor George Wallace; and the real estate company that sold us our house was forced to close when it became known that the CEO of the agency had sold the house to two employees of Miles in an all-white neighborhood.

During the next 20 years, I focused most of my work on assessing the impact of federal support for the education of “disadvantaged children.” However, I left the education research and evaluation arena amid real doubts about the efficacy of education reform, and I found myself called back to an experience like the one I had had in St. Louis. This time, however, it was directing a service agency for those experiencing homelessness and extreme poverty in the nation’s capital. For almost three years, I was confronted by the inequities and exclusion facing the poorest members of our society, and I became committed to trying to overcome one of the great tragedies of our social, political and economic systems – the failure to provide adequate support for poverty-stricken and unhoused brothers, sisters and neighbors, many of whom are black and indigenous people of color. Over the last 45 years, we have not created enough housing for them, and we have left them to fend for themselves without adequate financial resources. They are also confronted by inadequate and inequitable health care, inadequate education, an inequitable criminal justice system, a foster care system run amuck, and a labor and employment system that provides little room for their involvement and when they can get jobs, their wages are often insufficient to pay rent, not to mention, food, clothing, medical care, childcare and transportation. Even worse, as a nation we have treated those in extreme poverty and those without homes as inferior people, undeserving of our assistance. We have created extremely negative stereotypes, laced with stigma and we have enhanced a culture that deems them unworthy. In short, we have forged a sense of humanity that totally discredits them, so unlike what our humanity has taught us about how to respond to our fellow human beings. In short, we seem to have forgotten our true humanity.

It is my firm conviction that the only way America will respond appropriately to these friends and neighbors is to begin a process of changing mindsets about them. From what we know about child development, children develop many underlying values and beliefs at an early age, and these values and beliefs are tested and reinforced in large part through experiences in school. Thus, it becomes imperative for outstanding institutions like NCCS to create and maintain a culture that honors diversity and inclusion and embraces equity across all races and economic classes.

This may all seem far removed from the hallowed halls of NCCS. But the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion was reinforced by a recent visit to the campus during a class reunion of our 1956 class. During a guided tour of the NCCS campus led by Holly Donaldson Casella ’04, the Director of Major Gifts and Alumni Affairs, I was struck by the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion, and wondered: “ How can I assist the school in its efforts to improve this critical initiative?”

In response, several of us from our class organized a fund-raising effort to support the DEI efforts at the school. Because of this effort, Holly introduced me virtually to Kojo Clarke, the Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the school, and I became aware of the substantial efforts that he and others have made and are continuing to make to diversify the student body and the faculty at the school. I applaud such efforts. I am now confident that Kojo and his colleagues will continue to make great progress in creating an even

more diverse faculty and in providing even more talented students of color an opportunity to take advantage of all the benefits that NCCS has to offer. I also hope that every effort will continue to be made to help students develop a positive and constructive attitude about others who may seem different from them, to emulate the kind of world that Dr. King tried so hard to create, a world in which the sense of humanity applies to everyone.