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 of Dane County was established with the spirit of the old BPSA in mind, but with a long-term policy advocacy approach. BPSADC has three major areas in which it is working: political action and elections, education and environmental justice.
The education thrust had its genesis in BPSADC’s Summit on Education.
“When we had the first Summit on Education, we had an ad hoc committee on education, which I chaired,” said Kirbie Mack, BPSADC’s vice-president. “It’s not my strength and I knew we needed someone who was well-grounded and understood the ins and out of educational administration. And Rev. Hart directed me to Dr. McGregory and said, ‘Let’s go with Dr. Richard McGregory.’ Rev. Hart actually recruited him to come on board because we needed a strong leader there.”
McGregory had worked for MMSD as the chief of staff for former Superintendent Carlton Jenkins and currently teaches at Madison College. They set about creating the FACE Framework, a collective community product one could say.
“Parents told us at the first summit — I was on the other side of the table with the district — that they felt the district didn’t really see them,” McGregory said. “And so coming into it, I said, ‘Well as we work, what can we do to really value those remarks from parents and families to really encourage the school district — which is the largest educator of Black students in the county — to really see the parents. So then we developed the FACE Framework based on the second summit and the feedback we had on the FACE Framework, which is Studying for Success. Gloria Ladson-Billings instructed us not to have a deficit model, but more of an asset-based model.”
And then, BPSADC began to interface with the MMSD Board of Education.
“Beginning in February, we began doing one of the sections per month of the FACE Framework,” McGregory said. “On Monday night as we updated the framework, we talked to the board during their public comment to talk about how we had expanded to the FACES Framework and also to ask the school board and the administration, ‘We’ve been talking about this since the last school year, do you endorse this? Are you going to do some of the things that we have put in the framework? Are you going to focus on those things so we can really move forward? We want to know if there are really shared interests so we can do a better job educating Black students.’”
The bottom line for BPSADC is what is MMSD doing specifically to improve the academic performance of Black students who are typically on the bottom rung of the performance scale.
“We did meet with the superintendent and we did have some discussion,” McGregory said. “One of the things that the superintendent talked about was that there are other groups that want resources and attention. I think that was a fair response. But if you look at the data on every measure, Black students are at the bottom. And I just can’t see how you can have almost 20 percent of your student population performing at that type of level and not have more desire to make a change. In fact, when you look at Black students and Latino students, you are getting closer to 50 percent of the population with just those two populations alone. Just mathematically, you can’t do as well overall if those two student populations aren’t performing well.”
One of the basic things that BPSADC wants to do is keep the school district accountable. What is the district doing to better the performance of Black students and how do we know it is effective?
“There is a Goal Three in the framework, ‘African American children and youth will succeed in school,’” McGregory said. “If this is really one of our top three goals, are we really putting the resources, coordinated efforts and things behind it? Or are we just saying that we are doing a universal strategy and then magically students who historically have not had the same level of success are just going to get it now? Those are the questions we ask.”
Mack has taken the lead on BPSADC’s environmental justice initiative. Environmental justice wasn’t really viewed as a civil rights issue until Title VI came into play in the late 1990s to include considerations of environmental justice when making decisions about transportation services. Interest was building locally on the impact of energy pricing on low and moderate income families, many of which were families of color.
“BPSA was approached by the Urban League and asked to look into this issue, if this was something that we would be interested in undertaking,” Mack recalled. “It had to do with Alliant Energy and Madison Gas and Electric. Each year, they go before the PSC. They propose rate increases and other initiatives that they want to undertake. In the last go-around in 2023, they asked for double-digit increases. This is the first time that any Black organization has gone before the PSC to speak on behalf of low-income and moderate-income people about the issue of affordability, rate increases and arrears programs for people when they can’t pay the bills.”
BPSA found out about the Percentage of Increase Payment where low and moderate income families pay a certain percentage of their income towards utilities, effectively putting a cap on their energy costs.
“We argued that it was a hardship for low-income and moderate-income people to keep up with utilities, with mortgages going up, with medicine and with school supplies for kids while the rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” Mack as intervenor for BPSA argued before the PSC. “We hired an attorney and an expert witness. The expert witness did an analysis and we found that low and moderate income areas all around the city should pay six percent of their gross income for utilities. We found that in certain communities, up to 25, 30 and 32 percent is what low and moderate income families were paying. They will never get any relief off of that. Meanwhile, milk is going up. Eggs were going up. The mortgage and medications were going up. And the utility companies were asking for more and more money from the PSC.”
Their arguments caqught the attention of the PSC.
“They said, ‘Wait a minute, this makes sense,’” Mack said. “’We want you to study it more.’ They created what they call dockets. They did one on affordability and a separate docket on arrearage programs. They said, ‘We want you to try and look for programs that are really going to help people with this challenge of resources to help pay for utilities.’ And some people were getting their utilities cut off. You have children in the home. What are you going to do when the refrigerator goes down and the lights go out at night? We’ve been saying that we need to come up with some better programs to help people.”
Mack is working with UW-Madison’s Kyla Williams to gather more data on the experiences families have had with rising utility costs.
“We have developed the questions that we are going to ask community members to get their first-hand experiences in working with Alliant and MGE,” Mack said. “We will primarily focus on MGE because MGE primarily services Madison. We are going to put what we find in front of the PSC.”
The issues that BPSADC is working on will not be resolved tomorrow. It will take a sustained initiative of advocacy to make the change the group feels is needed.
“I think we will be doing more of the same,” Rev. David Hart, BPSADC’s president said. “I think we have to continue to be strategic. We will always be an organization that looks to train, recruit, find and support Black candidates and Black elected officials. We have to make sure that our politicians are addressing the issues of concern in our community. And so, we will continue to be very selective about the issues that we undertake for advocacy and continue to do that. I see us just continue to keep a steady hand on not being involved in every single issue. We aren’t attempting to be the NAACP. We have carved out a niche that works for us and we will continue to be on the side of this community and Black folks.”
While pop-up advocacy has its place in the field of civil rights, it is the prolonged, continuous attention to issues and their solution that results in systemic change for the betterment of the Black community in Dane County. Blacks for Political and Social Action of Dane County is making sure that the issues do not fade away from the public’s attention.