Editor’s note: Voices is a weekly column that provides a platform for Central New Yorkers to comment about the issues of the day. If you’d like to submit a column, email Larry Dietrich at [email protected].
It’s Black History Month, and among the proclamations and public displays of African-American awareness there’s a crisis in the black community of Syracuse. We have more African-Americans in elective office than ever, and yet our most precious institutions have died or are on life support.
Dunbar Center, the original “settlement house,” was host to generations of inner-city residents providing community-based programming, advocacy for minority adoption and safe recreation for a neighborhood full of children. As African-American families migrated to Syracuse, the first stop was Dunbar Center. As a settlement house, Dunbar should have been on the front lines welcoming African immigrants to Syracuse, just as the organization opened its doors welcoming the influx of blacks coming to Syracuse drawn here by plentiful factory jobs.
There are very few African-Americans over 40 who don’t have a Dunbar experience. Now its doors have been abruptly shut, perhaps closed forever. Leaders of other organizations have talked about “taking over” Dunbar’s facility, but no one has talked about our local community and support for Dunbar’s core mission and how to keep the organization viable.
There are those who wax nostalgically about the former president, Merriette Pollard, and how she was able to bring in money and support unmatched since her departure. Now, there’s whining about needing someone from “another place” to come in and run the now-closed facility.
For those living within the South Side’s “food desert,” it came as a shock when the much ballyhooed Southside Food Coop shuttered its doors without notice. The board of directors apparently failed in their stewardship of the needed store, offering inner-city residents fresh fruit and vegetables, among other products. We’ve heard their cries for help.
How is it that as a community we can’t operate a simple store in the heart of the black community? How is it that a family can come here from another country, open a store with a Coca-Cola cooler, a lottery machine and a steady supply of blunts and individually sold cigarettes called “loosies”? Somebody’s making money in the most challenged real estate in Syracuse. I’ve heard muttered excuses such as, “They give foreigners free money, and they don’t have to pay taxes.”
Black History Month?
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African-Americans remain invisible in Central New York.
