2005-11-21 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

473 appointed school board; that future is in this council's hands. Let us send the strong message that we welcome the input of al! members of our community in direct governance of the City schools. This message, that this Council values and seeks to ensure fair representation and diversity on the elected school board, can best be conveyed by City Council's clear and unanimous agreement tonight that our intent is to move forward with a more fair and representative system of elections, that is, a mixed ward and at large system, for school board elections. And further, let us agree tonight, that this policy message should be put in writing and sent as an addendum to the at large pre- clearance request that already was sent to the United States Department of Justice earlier today. Thank you for your indulgence." The following comments by Ms. Hamilton were entered verbatim into the minutes. "Mr. Mayor, I'd like to ask you for your indulgence as well. I want to congratulate the citizens for coming forward tonight with their very thoughtful and very serious comments about the decisions that are ahead of us tonight. It really does my heart good to see that you have been thinking about this. You've offered me so many ideas that my head is virtually swimming. But, I do want to say that I came here today in a very very serious flame of mind because I had spent the day responding to e-mails that were not at all thoughtful, that were in large part fearful. Some of them were panic stricken. And so I am going to have to do something that I hoped that I would never have to do on Council and that is, I'm going to have to step on some toes and speak my truth as I sit in this chair. Now that the elected School Board has passed, I was not one who supported it, I saw many potential problems with it, but now that it has passed I can also see that there is tremendous positive potential with this new tool, particularly for us as black people in the City of Charlottesville to carve out new leadership, new representation, a new mode of having a voice. But my fear, my one over-mastering fear about the referendum was that passing it would politicize the process even more than the process had been politicized last year by the debate over the fate of the Superintendent. And the referendum is not even two weeks old yet and we have the spectacle before us of a Councilor kicking off his re-election campaign by trying to use this referendum and the debate over how we are to move forward to create a community panic. I have in my possession a letter circulated by e-mail earlier today. It is a letter that uses a very selective reading of the facts that Council has been wrestling with, to defame specific members of Council and to frighten the public into thinking that their rights are being violated and that their voices are being stifled. I did not receive this letter from the person who authored it because apparently he was more interested in using the politics of fear to manipulate you, the public. This is like the last straw for me. For the year that I have been on Council I have listened. I have allowed members of the public and a certain member of Council to distort and misrepresent all sorts of things: the history of desegregation, my politics, my actions, my words, the people to whom I speak, and I have not defended myself because I really do believe that people come to Council meetings to be listened to. And while they may sometimes be mistaken in their facts, they are never mistaken in their feelings, and I have always tried to honor those feelings, but enough is enough. It's time for me to set the record straight from my point of view. First of all, let's just talk about the sort of general, you know, atmosphere of politics, the history of politics and the history of political desegregation. The esteemed gentleman from the other end of the table is perfectly correct when he tells you that the Democratic Party of 1954 previously was pro-segregation and sometimes violently anti-black. Democrats gave the world Jim Crow, massive resistance, Strom Thurmond, George Wallace, the Dixie-crats. But the Councilors leaves out the end of the story. The fact that African-Americans, using a positive vision of a just and beloved community, transformed the Democratic Party from within. Our efforts and our votes, our organization, our efforts on our own behalf, led the Democrats to champion the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, integration in the schools, with the result that Democrats like Strom Thurmond decided to beat feet to the Republican Party, where people of like mind find comfort and shelter even today. Wasn't it just last year that Trent Lott lost his Senate Majority Leader job for saying that America would be a better place if Strom had won re-election as a Dixie-crat in 19487 And didn't the President's mother just earn the condemnation of anyone with a conscience when she said the Katrina victims in the Astrodome were doing very well off the catastrophe. Now, I want to be extremely clear. I do not associate Republicans in Charlottesville with these