Race, Power, Education, . . . and Football

1950 is the year the first Black student enrolled at the University of Missouri.
1950 is the year the first Black student enrolled at the University of Missouri.

“We have to do it on our own, Cindy.  You can’t help anymore.”  She said it gently, but it was pretty painful.  I’d been involved in campus civil rights advocacy since I’d arrived as a freshman in 1964, just a little bit more than a year after the March on Washington.   Now it was the fall of 1966 and we were back from summer vacation.

I was early for the first action meeting of the year and ran into my friend Cheryl on the steps.  I started to ask about plans for the year and she shook her head — then told me that the Black students on campus had decided to build from within their own community.  It was kind of “thanks but no thanks.”  I was sad, but not angry – I knew what she was saying and as much as I wanted to be part of what they were doing, I understood their desire to act independently.

That was almost 50 years ago and still students of color are forced to demand respect, rather than assume it.  This time, at least, they got it.

My sister Pittsburgher Dr. Goddess sums up: “The Movement we just witnessed was intersectional, humanist, gendered, Black-led and labor-fed. Celebrate the Vision!” 

OH – and because we should always seek the wisdom of Dave Zirin in moments like these,, take a look at  this thoughtful meditation on racial justice AND the power of student athletes.

 

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Cynthia Samuels

Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families. For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million. She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings. She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com. Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World. A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.