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Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2009

YOUR SAY: Macon community full of potential

Donna Williams

Special to The Telegraph

While I look forward to Phil Dodson’s “Bootstrap Time, Part 2,” his column Thursday caused me to reflect on some of the issues he raises. While education is indisputably the key to any turnaround, any public school system will find it tough going when it experiences the wholesale loss of its middle class to private schools, a process ongoing for those same four decades that Macon experienced the loss of 30,000 residents.

As someone who moved here in 1973 from Augusta where I was teaching when schools were first integrated there, and who has spent lots of time in Columbus, I have long observed that those two similarly situated cities were and are not wholly unlike Macon, except for one crucially important difference. Each has a military base located near its county borders. As a result, neither of those fall line cities experienced the same massive white flight to private schools from public ones.

Their business, civic and government leaders recognized that keeping those bases depended in large part on maintaining a relatively stable and viable public school system.

Look no further than neighboring Houston County for additional proof of that. Contemplate, for a moment, how different the last four decades might have been had there not been a political and geographical boundary between Bibb and Houston.

While I agree with Dodson that Macon’s success or failure in the long term may well hinge on how its black community meets the challenges we all face, we should all remember that it does take a village to raise a child. During the presidential campaign last fall I walked and drove the streets of East Macon, particularly those blocks in and around Fort Hawkins, and observed what Charles Richardson and others already have written about. The overwhelming majority of those who were not gainfully employed, either in school or jobs, were black males. Most, but not all, were young. They walked the streets and they gathered in social groups. However, not once was I asked for a handout, and my fellow volunteers, mostly female and all of them residents of the city or county, were hopeful about future job prospects and educational opportunities.

We walked blighted areas and unblighted areas. There were boarded derelict homes adjacent to neat and well maintained ones. Many of the latter were heavily barred and “gated” as would be expected in areas with high crime rates. Yet the natural beauty and topography of the area provided a fresh understanding of the city’s beginnings and a recognition of its potential for a renaissance.

That potential can be realized if we face our problems and stop running from them, leaving boarded businesses, vacated shopping strips and abandoned schools in our wake. In the short term, perhaps the best way to turn back toward our city and toward our fellow citizens is to begin to reclaim its physical beauty.

For his efforts to that end, I do salute Bibb Commissioner Joe Allen. Why can’t there be some creative public, private and civic partnerships that could facilitate the process? Perhaps, even an opportunity to involve some of those unemployed young black men.

Why not put our best face forward to potential businesses and industries, while we tackle the much more complex and difficult ones of education and crime?

Donna Williams is a resident of Macon.