This article was originally posted on capitalcityhues.com
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by Jonathan Gramling
Back in the late 1980s going into 1990s, there were no political action committees that represented the interests of Madison’s Black community. And there were few elected Black officials who could sit at the table and negotiate policy outcomes that were in line with the interests of the Black Community.
Blacks for Political and Social Action popped up on the scene. The late Freddie Clark, Jerry Smith Jr. and Sylvester Hines were the nucleus of BPSA. And they would hold press conferences and spoke out when issue and policy concerns arose that impacted Madison’s Black community. BPSA was a loosely-formed organization that would pop up to speak to issues without any organized movement to enact policy change.
BPSA faded away as its founders moved out of town and was nascent for many years. However, when the Madison Metropolitan School District began the process of selecting a new superintendent to replace Superintendent Jen Cheatham who resigned in 2019.
When a group of Black community leaders saw how the search and selection process were being conducted, they acted and out of that, Blacks for Political and Social Action of Dane County was formed.
“We saw so many irregularities in the process that we knew that the process was flawed,” said Kirbie Mack, vice-president of BPSADC. “Many of us including Dr. John Odom, Dr. Marcus Allen, Rev. Bering, Rev. Alex Gee, Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings, Kaleen Caire, Carola Gaines, Theresa Sanders and Ray Allen met. We went through the process with the school district. At the end, we realized how flawed it was. So five of us got together and said, ‘No, we cannot allow them to do it. We know better.’ For example, some people were asked additional questions and others weren’t. It was just a a number of different things that we had noticed along the way. One candidate had seen the questions being posed to one candidate, so the other candidate could see what those questions were and they could prep themselves. I don’t know that they had a good group. When the initial superintendent was selected, Dr. John Odom, Rev. Allen, Ray Allen, Greg Jones and I came together to do something. We started building a case to the community about how flawed this process was. We brought this back to the larger group. And we wrote a letter to the school board and sent it to the newspapers in Texas. To fast forward, he saw that and realized that this community wasn’t going to be welcoming him with open arms. We talked about his background and credentials for the position. Eventually he decided he wouldn’t proceed in the process and they reopened it.”
The group basically advocated for Dr. Carlton Jenkins to get the position and Jenkins was eventually hired to lead the Madison public schools in 2020 just as COVID-19 hit.
The group saw some of the same dynamics happening during the Madison police chief search and screen committee.
“We did was the same thing with the Madison police chief,” said Rev. David Hart, the president of BPSADC. “We had individuals, even some of his fraternity brothers who were supporting another candidate, not because they were more qualified. We found ourselves in the same position with chief of police that we found an extraordinarily qualified Black man with a Ph. D thesis. We read his thesis. We looked at his community policing models. We looked at his track record. There was just no comparison between the 2-3 people.”
It was through these experiences that BPSA of Dane County was formed.
“We became a 527 group,” Mack said. “I was the first president only because we needed to get the bank signatures and stuff. Theresa Sanders came to the meeting and said. ‘You’re going to be president. This person is going to be vice-president.’ She had it all scripted out. I said I would do it for a minute, but we needed a younger person. We needed young people from this community who are equally as qualified to lead this organization. And so we elected Rev. David Hart.”
BPSA of Dane County has a three-pronged approach to social change. They are focused — for the long haul — on political representation, education and environmental justice.
In the area of political representation, the group has become more visible in local elections.
“We’ve had trainings where candidates have come by and gotten that knowledge,” Hart said. “Another piece of what we have been able to do in the past year or two — I heard this early in the recounting of the day — when individuals come to this city who take on positions in administration in the city or other positions of influence, we have greeted them and received them into the community. We’ve made them feel like they should be here and stay here. We’ve done that with several individuals, from the chief in Monona and Madison to the superintendent.”
In addition to endorsing candidates and giving them financial support, BPSA of Dane County also gives candidates training on how to run a campaign.
“What I think is unique about it is we will do one-on-one with candidates,” Mack said. “We will assign one of our members to a candidate. Ray Allen took someone and worked with them. We’ve held trainings. We had a lot of political people come in and other folks. When someone was running for a judge position, we were all online telling him, based on our experience, what we thought he ought to do. Shelia Stubbs came in on one of the sessions. We all gave our opinion on how she should strategize for the election.”
The second area of work is in the field of education. And BPSA of Dane County recruited an educational leaders to lead that effort: Dr. Richard McGregory.
“I’m a native Wisconsinite,” McGregory said. “I grew up in Beloit. I went for my undergrad degree at Oshkosh. I did my master’s at Whitewater. And then I had a relatively long career — about 20 years — at Whitewater. I got my Ph.D. from Milwaukee while I was working at Whitewater. I went to Minnesota to be the chief of staff for Dr. Carlton Jenkins. And then I came back home when he became superintendent here in Madison during the midst of the pandemic.”
McGregory has since moved on to become a teacher at Madison College and joined the board of the Foundation for Madison Public Schools. And he added BPSA of Dane County as an organization he wanted to be involved in.
“I was really attracted to the organization at first because when you are working at a place and an advocate asks you real questions and they aren’t questions that are meant to tear you down, but are into the core of the matter, I really enjoyed it when BPSA questioned the referendum,” McGregory said. “Having been involved in referendums before, you strengthen the referendum efforts by the questions that are asked and answered. They ask some tough questions and there was push back from some of the folks in the district administration. But I thought it was a legitimate question. When BPSA said they were going to oppose the referendum, I asked if they were wrong in their perspective. You always want to get more money for the education of kids period. But were they wrong with their concerns? Let’s talk to them about there concerns rather thinking it is an oppositional thing. So when Dr. Jenkins was leaving, I knew I would be leaving the district. I was interested in connecting with BPSA because I thought more voices of Black students and parents were needed in terms of turning education around.”
BPSA of Dane County would like to partner with the Madison Metropolitan School District on creating strategies and goals that would improve the academic success of Black students in the district.
“We’re really asking the school district, if we are going to partner, let’s partner over shared interests,” McGregory said. “We’ve given what we are interested in. We’re waiting for the response. We’re hopeful. It’s a new administration. A lot of folks seem like they are talented and qualified people. But I don’t take anything for granted because we’ve seen some things. When you talk about some of the landmark types of civil rights thrusts, one of the pieces that we thought we had solved was the issue of segregation. But we have within-school segregation that goes on in the district. And we thought that the board was going to take a stand to dismantle that in December 2022. Some of the comments came back. ‘We know it’s a racist system, but let’s just do it a little bit longer.’ That doesn’t seem to be in the spirit of Madison. And it doesn’t even seem to be in the spirit of the things that the individual board members say they are about. And so, how do we get to those kinds of places given the values that are espoused and the way that we want to go as a community. I think sometimes it comes from just not monitoring what we are really doing. If you step into it and monitor it, even if it is uncomfortable, you may still go forward and make the right decisions.”
Instead of just enacting programs and initiatives and letting them “do their thing,” BPSA of Dane County would like to see the district become more metric driven and goal oriented in their programming and initiatives. For example, there was the LETRS reading training program, ‘Language Essentials for Reading and Spelling.’ Teachers were paid to participate in this training.
“We weren’t fully updated about how many teachers completed the training,” McGregory said. “It’s good training. Anecdotally, teachers said that they were growing. They were pretty much compensated for doing the training. And so the question is, ‘How many people have finished the training?’ I think it could be a great selling point for the district. It’s a nationally-recognized training. It’s just little things like that. They are spending good resources and they are making the investment. Let’s see if the investment is paying off and what tweaks we need to make so we can really get all kids reading.”