VERSA CLARK
Contributing Columnist
After recently attending the celebration for Centenary Professor Dr. Andia Augustin-Billy, it became apparent what a milestone this really was just a little over three years before the college will celebrate its 200-year anniversary.
My first month at Centenary was in January 1976, and I found myself on a bus trip to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Part of the itinerary was to stop in Jackson, La., which was the last site of the college before moving to Shreveport. Needless to say, I was the only African-American on the trip, and I was assured that my feelings, emotions and thoughts were quite different from the other students. I think my good friend Pete Ermes sensed how I must have been internalizing the sights, and Lucie Thornton and others made the rest of the trip exciting.
I cite this to illustrate how unity can take place over a short and then a much longer period of time. Now I’m wondering why is unity so elusive for the city of Shreveport.
Starting with Mayor Cedric Glover, the city’s first black mayor, there was an expectation of change in the way blacks and whites interacted with each other. The Glover administration hosted a news conference in September 2013 to announce the 50th anniversary of the (local) Civil Rights Movement. The anniversary was in line with the events that took place on Sept. 22, 1963. One of the city’s most notorious days for racial intolerance, it occurred just 25 years (September 1988) before the Cedar Grove unrest that had racial overtones.
Mayor Ollie Tyler’s administration hosted a delegation from Ostrava, Czech Republic, in November 2015 that intended to establish a long-term cooperation aimed at providing mutual support for economic, social and cultural development. Not sure how that relationship enhanced the ongoing tensions and disunity of blacks and whites in the city.
Mayor Adrian Perkins’ administration recognized very early in its administration what a racial divide the city had during several heated city council meetings. The mayor assembled a commission chaired by John Radcliff. Whatever was in the commission’s task list and whatever their findings, there was no unity and no improvement in racial relations due to whatever was implemented based on those findings.
So as the city of Shreveport approaches 13 years before it celebrates its 200-year anniversary, where unity will be needed to make an attempt to complete some of the aspirations of the 2030 Master Plan, we find ourselves more divided, tenser and more distrusting than ever. For Shreveport, unity is still an elusive noun.