When I looked at the optic in The St. Louis American of black elected officials, ministers and community leaders standing strong in support of ousted black Ferguson-Florissant Superintendent Art McCoy Jr., I thought of Sherman George, who as St. Louis’ first and only black fire chief was unceremoniously dumped by the mayor not that long ago.
I thought also of that childhood rhyme “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again,” and wondered if this would be the outcome now with McCoy as it was with George.
The political backdrop is similar in that two beloved pillars of the black community were suddenly removed from their positions of authority by the white folks holding power over them, and the black community was appalled and emotionally outraged.
In both cases, despite rational and moral pleas, as well political and activist threats from the established black leadership, the white leadership held its position – denying and deflecting any suggestion that race is at issue. And thus it put the black community to the test: whose power shall prevail?
When those nicely dressed elected officials, ministers and community leaders have exercised to the fullest all the immense power at their disposal, including rallying the community, then will those powerful elements be enough to cause the will of the black community to prevail and have McCoy reinstated? When it was not enough to put Sherman George back on the wall?
What may make the McCoy matter potentially different, though, is something unbelievable profound The American reported: “about 30 students at Cross Keys Middle School staged a sit-in for three class periods to support McCoy.”
We so often forget about the difference student power makes, at all levels. Martin Luther King Jr. was in the wilderness of his life between 1956 and 1960 – soul searching and searching around the globe for the answer to how and where next to take the Civil Rights Movement following the success of the Montgomery/Rosa Parks bus boycott – when out of nowhere, on February 1, 1960, four black students showed him the way by boldly staging a sit-in demonstration at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, N.C.
Those four students literally ignited the Civil Rights Movement. Back in the Motherland, Mandela might still be in jail if the students at Soweto had not taken it to the streets.
Those 30 students at Cross Keys Middle are the key to McCoy being reinstated and the dignity of the black community being felt and recognized. If the black leadership would deploy its resources into turning those 30 students into 3,000 students staging a sit-in in the Ferguson-Florissant School District, then they would be on the course to replicating the controversial tactic used by King when the Civil Rights Movement was on its knees in Birmingham in 1963: engaging the children in the battle.
If those black leaders would teach those 30 children that the only reason that King was able to give that magnificent speech in August 1963 was because in April and May of that year thousands of children just like them went to jail in “Bombingham” and across the South, then McCoy would get his job back and the community’s might would be shown.
