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Black/Brown Unity Coalition: Fighting Racism Together
By Fletcher Word
Sojourner’s Truth Editor
Over the years, community
members of various minority groups make numerous efforts to
organize and to address concerns that plague the members of
those groups. Several issues generally prevent success in
these endeavors.
All too often, the groups
are organized by well-intentioned individuals who are so
busy in their everyday lives, they have not enough time to
fight the good fight in their part time. In their haste,
they have not fully structured their organizations. In
addition, the goals established by such groups tend to be
more numerous than can be effectively handled by such busy
folks – there are so many issues facing minority communities
that it is difficult to limit the scope.
Now comes the Black/Brown
Unity Coalition, an organization of leaders from the local
African-American and Latino communities united in their
efforts to fight racism and the ugly effects of decades of
neglect of inner-city communities. In order to avoid
missteps, the Black/Brown Coalition has moved in an entirely
different direction from that of previous groups with
similar goals.
First, the Black/Brown
Coalition has limited its focus to three activities –
protecting families from lead paint, increasing safety by
installing better street lights (LED lighting) and community
organizing.
Second, the Black/Brown
Coalition has raised funds in order to hire an executive
director who can work on these issues without being
constrained by a lack of time in which to do so.
Third, the Black/Brown
Coalition has developed a structure – adopted bylaws,
appointed a steering committee comprised of representatives
from interested other organizations, elected officers,
raised funds and filed with the state.
The Black/Brown Unity
Coalition is a group that has been in an embryonic stage for
months. The principal leaders of the group are two men who
have been pillars of the Toledo community for decades –
Bishop Robert Culp, pastor of First Church of Christ for
more than 50 years, and Baldemar Velasquez, founder and
president of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) for
the past five decades.
Should the group prove to
be successful in its endeavors, says Velaquez, the key to
that success will be “to make sure we have a governing
institution, to create a governing institution and run the
organization that way.”
Velasquez, who has been
part of many such community organizing efforts over the past
five decades, recalls a time back in 1968 when he was first
starting his work with FLOC and he received an invitation to
join the Poor People’s Campaign, in the wake of Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr’s assassination. The problem, he says, is
that the Campaign suffered from a lack of structure and
ultimately failed to achieve its goals.
“We have to learn from the
movements of the past,” he says. A very structured number of
organizations drove the Civil rights Movement, he noted,
such as CORE, SNCC, SCLC. Once some of the critical
legislative goals such as the Civil Rights Act and the
Voting Rights Act were passed, those organizations lost
their purpose for existence and their effectiveness faded
away and, thus, future goals were sacrificed.
The Black Brown Unity
Coalition is sponsored by the Toledo Community Coalition,
FLOC, FLOC Homies, Latins United, the Black Trade Unionists,
the NAACP Toledo Branch. Advocates for Basic Legal Equality,
Inc (ABLE) will serve as the fiscal agent and two members
from each of the sponsoring group, plus three other
community members will serve on the board of what will
become a non-profit corporation with 501©(3) status.
The first community forum
was held in October 2018 and the leadership is cheered by
the apparent success of its first community effort – the
creation and implementation of a Code of Conduct with the
Toledo Police Department and the Lucas County Sheriff’s
Department that happened more than a year and a half ago.
Now, the Coalition is
ready to proceed, sufficiently organized and prepared to
seek solutions to the two issues on its agenda – the damage
of lead paint in housing and the safety issues of
insufficient lighting in city neighborhoods.
That preparedness should
enhance, says Velasquez, “our ability to mobilize the
community. I have high expectations.”
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