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This evening's guests are five members of the 2017
Toledo City Council: the then Mayor, Paula Hicks Hudson,
Yvonne Harper, Tyrone Riley, Cecelia Adams, PhD, and Larry
Sykes. The only person absent is Theresa Gabriel whose
whereabouts cannot be determined.
Thank you all for coming out for tonight's topic which
is: The Urban Negro Politician: Promising or Clueless?
As background information for our viewers and for
those here in the studio, as you may recall, back in the
year of 2016 and 2017, The City of Toledo had a black mayor
and five minority council persons. An unprecedented
collection of potential political and economical power.
Matter of fact, you were dubbed, "The Super Six."
But, as we saw, that power dissipated when one council
person, Theresa Gabriel resigned her council seat and took a
job with the Board of Elections.
Several articles critical of the mayor and the five
minority council members for not being more aggressive in
generating policies that would benefit the black community
and to keep black youths in Toledo were published in the
black news weeklies called The Toledo Journal and The
Sojourner’s Truth.
However, in spite of the trenchant articles and the
offering of 11 suggestions which were provided to the mayor
and the black city council persons on which they could
produce some immediate positive results or outcomes, nothing
was accomplished or even undertaken on those suggestions to
empower the black community.
So, my questions to the former mayor and the five
council persons are: What happened? Why didn't your group
which was dubbed, 'The Super Six', take up the challenge
thrown down at your feet and run with it?
Mayor:
Mr. Quarters, thanks for the invitation to speak on this
long-lasting issue which simply seems not to go away. Yes, I
read the several articles about our apparent apathy and I
read the suggestions provided to us by the writer but the
political reality is that we were just to worried about what
The Blade would say if we did in fact meet together and plot
to do things that could have been regarded as being biased
towards the black community, so we sat on our hands and did
nothing.
Convener: Mayor, are you stating that in the year 2016-17,
that your group could not have withstood media scrutiny if
you engaged in a pattern of political power that sought to
uplift a certain section of the Toledo community and thus
would have, in turn, benefited the entire city? That sounds
ludicrous!
Cecelia Adams:
To be honest, we had several other pressing issues in our
In-box and we simply did not have the time to convene in
secret and issue a manifesto that would have benefited our
minority community.
Tyrone Riley:
Plus, we wanted to make sure that we kept our council seats
and if we went out on a limb, we could face being "primaried"
by a new candidate and thus wind up losing our council seats
and a nice monthly check to boot!
Larry Sykes:
Hey! Who made the author of those biting articles our
conscience? We are all adults and we did what we thought was
right and I am not apologizing for our conduct. Some may
call it lame, but it is what it was...politics.
Yvonne Harper:
Yes, we could have and should have done more but quite
frankly
we were not equipped to deal with such issues and especially
as part time council members. I agree with the intent of the
articles but come on...what did we know about collective
urban economic development?
Those 11 suggestions were great but to fit all of that
on our plates would have been too much. We are just council
persons in Toledo! What did we know about similar happenings
in other cities?
Convener: Wow! It sounds like you all were not equipped to
take on the urban problems of Toledo and especially so when
it came to aggressively tackling the economic concerns of
the Toledo inner city.
So, my question to all of you: Why did you want elected
office in the first place if you were not willing to take
the heat and fight the good fight of faith and do some
intense planning to help out the, "least of these?"
Long silence......
Mayor:
Yeah, looking back at that time, we did have a super
majority on city council and we could have at least met to
figure out if we could advance such an agenda but we did not
because we were not in one accord and each person apparently
had their own agenda about what to do and how to do it. We
did not form a consensus about what needed to be done.
Cecelia Adams:
Speaking only for myself, I did not know the leanings of the
other members on City Council in regards to raising funds to
sponsor the suggestion of an Office For External Affairs
which could have been our cover for such an approach.
Looking back now, I guess we could have been more
proactive but we were in Toledo and not in a Columbus or a
Cleveland or an Oakland and we simply did not have the
finesse to know and how to do such progressive things.
Sorry.
Tyrone Riley:
I guess none of us wanted to be the pioneer because as you
know, it is the pioneer that gets all of the arrows in the
back! We just did not gel as a group and we did not count
the costs to do such things for community improvement as the
list suggested.
Yes, looking back, we lost a golden opportunity to make
a solid impact in people lives and enrich the city, but we
fumbled the ball and did not get it into the end zone!
Yvonne Harper:
My concern was what if the community did not support us and
we go out there with this plan and it falls on deaf
ears...how does that make us look?
Plus, I do not know if we could have gotten certain
community leaders on board with us since, as you know in
Toledo, everyone seemingly has their own turf and they are
not willing to have others step into it!
Larry Sykes:
(beginning to slightly sob into his hands). Yes! It could
have been done and should have been done! We were able to do
it but we failed! We failed ourselves and our community
because we did not want to take political risks and get cut
off at the knees.
We did not have the courage of our convictions and now
it is too late. Toledo will never have such an unusual
alignment of political power as we did then! Oh, what a
loss!
Convener: Well, thank you all panel for your honesty and
insight into that situation that you faced about 10 years
ago. It still goes to show you that opportunity, political
or otherwise, waits for no one and you all had the chance to
make a profound impact in Toledo but alas, you all chose the
road of least resistance and for that, people lives who
could have benefited from your vision and courage, got the
short end of the stick!
That chance may never come again!
Contact: Lafe Tolliver at
tolliver@juno.com
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