On May 18th I made the long drive diagonally, across the Buckeye State. Climbing across rolling hills out of Appalachia, about an hour out of Cincinnati the terrain flattened out as I reached the great Midwestern prairie, where, if you point the car west, you can drive over a thousand miles until you reach the Rocky Mountains.
After passing through the state capitol Columbus and driving two hours on the prairie, I reached the hilly terrain of northeastern Ohio, finally dropping into Akron. Once “the Rubber Capitol of the World,” the city is showing its rust. Hardly any tires are made there anymore.[1]
I spent time with old comrades from my undergraduate days at Akron University. I was a member of the All African People’s Revolutionary Party committed to the unification of Africa under scientific socialism from 1974-80. I moved to the West Coast in 1977, not to attend graduate school, but to build the African revolution! Graduate school was just political cover for my organizing on campuses. Only one of the four folx I reunited with is still doing that radical Pan Africanist political work, but I found we were all, including myself, still committed to a vision for an Africa in which states collaborated politically and economically to uplift their countries, and where people of African descent recognize our common plight as the exploited under global capitalism.
The absolute best day of my trip to northeast Ohio was when my two sister-comrades Jinaki and Debra drove me around the city checking out old haunts and telling stories. Highlights ... Driving around I saw signs pointing to the John Brown House. I asked in curiosity, if they could possibly refer to the JOHN BROWN! The great abolitionist! Turned out that they did. So I had to go by the house. It’s a museum now but only opened on limited hours and by appointment. But there were plaques telling the story of his time in the city. John Brown and family resided in Akron from 1844-54, the years prior to him leaving for Kansas to join the battle leading to Kansas entering the Union as a “free (non-slavery) state.”
My feelings rushing forth, the sisters then asked me if I knew about the Sojourner Truth Legacy Plaza, to which I replied “what!” Who knew that Sojourner Truth gave that famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech In Akron at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in 1851. We visited the plaza and walked the grounds (see photo below!). The Ohio Legislature has forced publicly funded institutions to stop promoting DEI, and pressured libraries to remove books with a rapidity that makes you feel like you’re in Florida or Texas. Fortunately for progressives the Brown and Truth sites are funded by private sources rather than the state of Ohio: a great example of sustaining Blue spaces in a Red state.[2]
On my last day in Akron, I walked the camps of my alma mater, Akron University. I miscalculated the academic schedule. It was during summer break. So the campus was dead! I had wanted to feel the buzz of students going back and forth across campus, but it was not to be. I did schedule a meeting with Bill Lyons, a political scientist and associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. I was eager to discussed Ohio politics to figure out why the state had gone so red. Formerly a major manufacturing state, it was now a “major rust-belt state.” Lyons said that despite having a considerable infrastructure in higher education the state population, is growing slower than the national average. There is a high-tech bubble around Columbus and Ohio State University. Still, a disproportionate number of people with university degrees are leaving. Those who remain are less educated and poorly situated to prosper in the new economy.
The neoliberal establishment has been cutting back support for public higher education for several decades, and Ohio is no different. The Recession didn’t do anything to stimulate greater public spending to train the least advantaged for the new economy. Ohio went for Obama twice, the residual of the belief that in an economic crisis, a Democrat would be more inclined to support policies uplifting the working class. The Democrats did pass an economic stimulus package and the Affordable Care Act while they still controlled Congress. But the populist right embodied in the Tea Party came to the fore more quickly than the left and stopped any further social welfarist policy initiatives by returning the Congress to Republicans in 2010. They used demonization of the first Black president to fuel their populist outrage.
In March the Ohio legislature passed Senate Bill 1 (SB1), the Advance Ohio Higher Education Act. The law mandated the termination of Diversity Equity and Inclusion in curriculum and personnel practices. Ostensibly passed in defense of intellectual diversity, the law has already led to the scrubbing of any DEI language from program mission and vision statements and the titles and descriptions courses.
The university had hosted a Black Male Summit annually since 2015. Over the years the summit had garnered a national presence in the conversation regarding the unique challenges faced by Black men in a post-manufacturing economy. Implicit in its mission was the understanding that “systemic” factors visit hardships upon Black people, and Black men that are differ from the difficulties other men might experience. Senate Bill 1 placed the future of the summit in jeopardy. By this spring the event had been renamed E3 Male Summit: Empower, Elevate & Excel.
Perusing their website one finds a frank admission that the change was brought about by the current political climate, but that “embracing diversity of thought” remains central to mission of the summit.[3] It will be interesting to see if they can thread the needle between the bill’s stated goal of fostering intellectual diversity and its overall thrust cancelling attention to racial and gender identity diversity.
I picked up a copy of the student newspaper: The Buchtelite. There was a letter to the editor by a recent UA graduate lamenting the chilling effect SB1 was having on higher education in the state. Identifying herself as a proud Ohioan who had planned to go to law school somewhere in the state she concluded her letter thusly.
...our legislators ... shouldn’t be surprised when classrooms become empty and talent they took for
granted builds a future somewhere else.
Sincerely,
Abigail Stopka
Future Law Student
(Just probably not in Ohio anymore)
The Abigails of the world will most likely end up in Blue states like Washington, increasing the numbers of highly educated people here, and leaving the poorly educated in states like Ohio to be led by people who don’t believe government has a role to play in improving the life-chances of the common folx. This will only serve to make the divide between the two America’s, Red and Blue, more gaping in the years to come.
[1] Goodyear, Goodrich and Firestone tire companies all once made tires and were headquartered there. Only Goodyear’s home offices remain there today.
[2] The Sojourner Truth Legacy Plaza is supported by Akron Women’s Alliance, Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity the Dinner Party Board, the Summit County Historical Society and the Ohio Historical Society. The John Brown Home is supported by the Summit County Historical Society.
[3] “E3 Male Summit: Empower, Elevate & Excel,” University of Akron, Office of Community Engagement, Opportunity and Belonging. https://www.uakron.edu/ie/e3/
