#fightingright

The View From The Idea Center

A Black Lives Matter sign in Cleveland’s Slavic Village neighborhood has reopened old wounds about race, white flight and community change. Staff members at University Settlement, a nonprofit community center on Broadway Avenue, painted and put up the yellow-and-black sign shortly after the death of George Floyd, the Black Minneapolis man whose death after being pinned by the knee of a white police officer triggered protests in Cleveland on May 30 and a renewed look at entrenched racism in America. Early one morning in June, “a white male drove up in a white van, angrily cut out the word ‘Black’ from our sign with a knife, crumpled the excised word into a ball and drove away,” said University Settlement’s director, Earl Pike, on Facebook. It was captured on video. 

Staff replaced the sign with a bigger one.

“And if someone defaces the newest sign, we’ll put up an even bigger one,” Pike went on to say in his Facebook post.

Someone did mar the second BLM sign. As ideastream’s Justin Glanville reports, they hoisted a larger, bolder new one into place.

The sign and its vandalism have stirred up emotions and debate in Slavic Village, which used to be, as its name says, a neighborhood of Polish, Czech and other Central European immigrants. It’s now nearly half white and half Black, with African Americans making up the majority of the population and a growing number of Hispanics across both races. Resentment and fear, it seems, are still there, bubbling right under the surface.

Pike told Justin he’s thinking of a “restorative justice” approach to the vandalism. Once the perpetrator is identified, he’d like to invite him to talk about it with others in the community. That would be as big and as bold as the new BLM sign.

Can such a conversation happen? Can we really have meaningful and restorative discussions about racism, or the upcoming presidential election or the response to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic? I’d like to think so. And there’s a safe and structured way to do it. ideastream is collaborating with StoryCorps to foster these talks through a nationwide project called One Small Step. Think about signing up. It would be your bright, bold statement against silence and simmering hostilities.