The Self-Taught State

However the current plans to merge public school districts and colleges work out, the fact is that institutional education in Mississippi is stretched and stressed. There will be cuts and changes.

In one way, that can be a good thing, if it opens our eyes to different perspectives.

Institutional education is essential. As a pedagogical matter, it is the formal, organized place where we learn things from people who know. As a practical matter, it is the place that issues the ticket—the diploma, the degree—that permits passage to bigger and better.

So our focus on particulars such as testing and diplomas and degrees is well placed. But it can obscure something else essential. The ultimate point of formal education is to learn how to learn informally, to collect tools and not just knowledge. The cliche is a valuable as it is overused: give a person a fish and they eat for a day, teach a person to fish and they eat for a lifetime.

The word is autodidact, which simply means a person who is self-taught. The history of the world, our country, and our state are filled with people who took their education in their own hands, either because the formal system was unavailable, or not enough, or it failed them in some way. Socrates, Descartes, Benjamin Franklin, George Bernard Shaw, Abraham Lincoln, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Alva Edison, Frederick Douglass.

We live in a place and time when learning is at our fingertips, literally. We have good libraries, we have lots of informal learning opportunities, we have people outside the institutions with worlds to share, and, of course, we have the Internet. A friend points out, correctly, that students who think that Wikipedia pages equal complete and reliable knowledge are dangerously deluded. But people can learn to discern. It is ultimately more valuable to teach a person how to find a reliably accurate list of Presidents of the United States when they need it than to make them memorize the list (and quickly forget it) when they don’t.

In the game of institutional learning, Mississippi faces big challenges, and it appears they are bigger than ever. It is an essential game, and one that demands constant improvement.

But it is not the only game. As far as I can tell, self-teaching is viewed almost everywhere as a second-tier approach, maybe significant, but nowhere near as important as the formal route. There are two good reasons for this view. First, we don’t want anyone to get the idea that not getting that diploma or degree is in any way acceptable. Second, self-teaching is harder for everyone, the learners and those charged with teaching learners how to learn, and not just what to learn.

It may be a while before Mississippi reaches the “official” heights of institutional learning, and the current challenges make it more difficult. But with the resources we already have, Mississippi can strive to be the first and best state of self-learners and self-teachers—of all ages and lives. Some will object that we are not all Ben Franklin or Thomas Edison or Frederick Douglass. But how do we know if we don’t strive? In this case, it’s a matter of will and approach, not of budget.

From Les Paul to Charley Patton

“The long way round is the short way home.”

Les Paul died last week, to much-deserved recognition. He was one of the great innovators in modern music, both for his legendary guitar playing and his development of the solid-body electric guitar, multi-track recording, reverb, echo, etc.

Thinking about innovative pickers led me back to John Fahey, who from his young days in the 1950s to his too-soon death in 2001, combined his mastery of blues with his modernist knowledge of composers like Saint Saens to create the most beautifully unusual blues-related playing of his time. A number of guitarists, from Leo Kottke to Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, owe some of their playing to Fahey’s inspiration.

Fahey was educated as a musicologist, and his master’s thesis was about an earlier innovative musician, Mississippi’s Charley Patton (1891-1934). (I told you this would come home.)

For those who like milestones, it was just about a century ago that 19-year-old Charley Patton started writing songs, including “Pony Blues,” “Banty Rooster Blues,” “Mississippi BoWeavil,” and “Down The Dirt Road,” and was on his way to becoming the Father (or King) of the Delta Blues. Patton influenced, directly and indirectly, just about every other Delta Blues musician.

For those who don’t like their biographies in words, here’s a comic book version of Charley Patton’s life, created by comic book artist and early music fanatic R. Crumb.

Patton died in 1934 in a house near Dockery’s Plantation in Indianola, Mississippi. According to musicologist Robert Palmer, his death was not reported in the newspapers.

Crumb noted in his 1984 comic that few people had heard of Charley Patton, even though “his powerful effect on blues and rock and roll is still felt today” (and a whole lot of it played on Les Paul guitars, to bring this back round).

As I’ve said before, Mississippi has been real slow catching up to its own priceless heritage in this area, but the ongoing Mississippi Blues Trail did dedicate its very first marker to Charley Patton as the “Father of the Mississippi Delta Blues”.

Mississippi’s Muslim Museum

If you want to win an easy bet, here it is. Tell a friend that there is one museum in America dedicated to educating the public about Islamic history and culture and the contributions of Muslims to world civilization. Bet him that he can’t guess which state it is located in. Go ahead, give him five or even ten guesses. Then collect.

The International Museum of Muslim Cultures is located in Jackson, Mississippi.

The goals of the Museum are to educate the public about Islamic history and civilization and to help provide educational tools for teaching global consciousness, historical literacy, and multicultural appreciation. IMMC seeks to continue to grow as a cultural tourism destination and serve the community as an educational and research center as well as a repository for Islamic objects having cultural, artistic, aesthetic, and historical significance. Additionally, IMMC seeks to facilitate multicultural and interfaith understanding; reduce cultural, religious, and racial bigotry; and advance Mississippi and America’s cultural, religious, and civic discussions to provide a better atmosphere for working together for the common good.

In early July, IMMC held a major conference to celebrate its 8th Anniversary, Islam at a Crossroads in America:

This conference and national dialogue comes on the heels of President Barack Obama’s European tour and strategic visit to Turkey, where he extended a friendly hand of partnership to the Muslim world. Thus, the conference begins the dialogue of addressing this “partnership with America” among the Muslim American leadership. The conference theme, “Islam at a Crossroads in America”, begins addressing the challenges that Muslims in America face and how they can utilize their way of life and faith as a vehicle to positively influence and contribute to the American story.

The conference’s emphasis is on how Muslims can become more fully engaged within America, among its many cultural and faith communities. The goal of the conference is to explore how and where our challenges as Muslims intersect concerns of the American society as a whole. The conference themes include broadly that of Islamic leadership, its diversity, and finding unity and a leadership model in America equipped to forge this partnership with America; civil rights and civic responsibility; the Latino Renaissance; the Timbuktu Roundtable: A conversation about the historical role of Islamic African leadership in Africa’s development and its prospects for African Americans today; Youth’s Islam: Hip-Hop, Spirituality and the Arts; Islamic Banking and the Economic Crisis; Healthy Family and Marriage Relationships; and Interfaith Dialogue: the Global Call for Peace.

The conference included professionals, academics and leaders from across the country, along with video messages from the Presidents of Libya and Mali.

Just as revelatory was this from a Jackson State University press release about the conference :

The conference serves as a venue for IMMC and Jackson State University, which is an official sponsor, to advance its a plan for an institute of Islamic thought to be established on JSU’s campus. Such an institute would be the first in the history of an HBCU.

A one-of-a-kind national Muslim museum. An institute of Islamic thought, first in the state, first among the many outstanding Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and one of the few in the South. In Mississippi.

Whether or not many Americans are yet engaged in an open and constructive way with it, Islam is one of the biggest social and cultural phenomena of the early 21st century. And it’s only going to get bigger. Mississippi is on the cutting edge, and we should appreciate, support and encourage that.

Prom Night In Mississippi

Last night I stumbled across the HBO premiere of the documentary Prom Night In Mississippi. Stumbled, because this airing didn’t seem to get much media attention across the state, though there were stories in past months about its being made and about festival screenings, including at Sundance.

If you missed it, as I almost did, you missed an honest, entertaining and ultimately hopeful and heartwarming vision of contemporary Mississippi.

The film is about the high school in Charleston, a small Delta city. Though the school has been integrated for decades, there had always been separate black and white proms. The actor Morgan Freeman, who lives in Charleston, offered in 1997 to pay for an integrated prom. He was turned down. He offered again in 2008, and the school board accepted. Canadian filmmaker Paul Saltzman followed students, teachers and parents in the lead-up to that prom.

If you’re a Mississippian, it comes as no surprise to see that there are grown-ups around the state—not just in the Delta—who still carry some old-fashioned racial attitudes. But before you think that maybe we shouldn’t be airing this in front on the whole country, consider what we learn from this film, and what non-Mississippians might learn too.

We learn that at this point in our social history, all racial attitudes are not the same. There’s the father of a white girl in love with a black classmate. The relationship between the young couple is simply as genuine, sweet and loving as any you could find or hope for. So you would expect that the father, who admits his strict opposition, would be the villain, reflexively dismissed as a racist. Except that in Saltzman’s hands, as we get to know the father, we see how complex his feelings are, especially with his final admission that he will accept whatever happens, because he wants his daughter to be happy.

Mostly, what we learn from the students of Charleston High School is that putting our faith and hope in this generation is a good bet—not just in Mississippi, but everywhere. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t still racial problems in our high schools—not just in Mississippi, but everywhere—but that lots of these kids take their role as the new generation seriously. They are caring, they are discerning, they get what is wrong with the ways of some parents, and they are determined to change things. They are empowered, as only people that age can be, because they know that literally, the future belongs to them.

So let your friends outside the state see Prom Night in Mississippi. Yeah, they may focus on the negative, but as you already know, some of them are going to think the worst anyway. As for the rest of us, watching this excellent documentary is nothing but uplifting.

Prom Night in Mississippi continues on the HBO schedule, will be available for the next month on HBO on Demand, and is available on DVD.

The Delta: It Hurts Us Too

When things go wrong,
Go wrong with you,
It hurts me too.

It Hurts Me Too
Written by Tampa Red
Performed and made famous by Mississippi’s Elmore James

When things go wrong with the Delta, it hurts us too, all over Mississippi. The good news is that sometimes, things go right, or at least seem to be going in the right direction.

Bill Minor writes about the release of the final report of the Delta Revitalization Task Force :

At least a few civic-minded Mississippians are determined to reverse the state’s 18-county Delta region from being perpetually branded as the “poor who will always be with us.”

Where other attempts have failed over the past five decades, an ambitious, broad new long-range plan to lift the Delta out of its persistent poverty — without government carrying the load — has emerged after three years from a commission headed by respected black leader Robert Clark.

Best known as the first African-American elected to the Legislature 70 years after Reconstruction, Clark, now as a retired lawmaker from Holmes County, is devoting his life to improving the quality of life in his long down-trodden region.

His legislatively-created commission has produced what it has called “The Delta Strategic Compact” which essentially addresses economic and cultural problems inherent in the Delta. But importantly, it provides a four-tier framework behind which resources of all the public and private entities working in the region can be harnessed….

Until the economy of Delta — with its 425,000 people — begins to move faster, “we’ll never get the state moving at a good rate,” says Pete Walley, director of the state’s Bureau for Long Range Economic Development planning. Walley gave major assistance to the task force in its three-year study….

The four goals set forth by Clark’s task force call for doubling post-secondary education among adults, connecting the unemployed and under-employed to career pathways; promoting wellness practices and making the Delta into a center for creative arts.

Clark is hoping the task force can be kept alive by both financial help from the Legislature, philanthropic organizations and federal grants. Is this finally the spark the Delta has long needed? Walley and Clark certainly hope so.

The Mississippi Press Association helped distribute 75,000 copies of the report as inserts in newspapers around the Delta. It is available for download, and it is just as important that it be distributed everywhere and read by everyone in the state.

Then there’s this Associated Press story today:

Mississippi Delta roads benefiting from stimulus
By Sheila Byrd

JACKSON — The federal stimulus package has helped keep some contractors in business, and will give towns in the Mississippi Delta a public service they’ve gone without for decades: paved streets.

Vice President Joe Biden recently applauded Mississippi for obligating more than 86 percent of its stimulus highway funding, nearly $215 million, by a June 29 deadline.

The construction projects will occur throughout the state, but many say the work is especially needed in the Delta, where inadequate infrastructure has contributed to its distinction as one of the poorest regions in the country.

“Our streets are terrible,” said Webb Mayor Mary Tucker Croft, whose town of less than 600 is located in Tallahatchie County.

Croft said her streets haven’t been resurfaced in about 30 or 40 years. She said previous efforts to draw federal funding were stymied by a match requirement the town was unable to meet. A resurfacing project will soon be completed after the county got additional funding from the stimulus….

The country and the state have recently reached a dramatic crisis, so objecting to the stimulus package as a matter of principle may have seemed an appropriate, if temporary, luxury. But the Delta has been in critical condition for decades. If the Delta doesn’t get better, the state doesn’t get better. And if a historic economic disaster delivers treatment for a small piece of that complex recovery (like paved roads), that’s something to appreciate.

The full name of the Delta Revitalization Task Force report is A Time of Reckoning: Testing the Will for Change in the Mississippi Delta. They say that where there’s a will there’s a way. Let’s see if the people of Mississippi can pass the test and find that way.

Bubbas and Bubbettes

In a previous post I started talking about the contest for the First Congressional District Republican nomination, which is already getting some attention. In Who’s A Bubba and Who’s Not, I quoted a report about what one strategist said:

“You don’t have to just be a Bubba to get elected,” the strategist said. “Roger Wicker’s not a Bubba. The problem was Greg Davis was the opposite of that.”

I went on to try and figure out what this might mean and how it might or might not fit this election. The conclusion was that there are Bubbas, non-Bubbas, and what I called anti-Bubbas.

Only later did I realize that I completely neglected the buzz that Angela McGlowan, lobbyist and Fox News political analyst, might also be interested in this seat.

This is where it gets complicated making this Bubba-talk fit the circumstances. Yes, there may Bubbettes. I know this because of a fascinating book called Wimmin, Wimps & Wallflowers: An Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Gender and Sexual Orientation Bias in the United States by Philip H. Herbst:

A less frequently heard female version, Bubbette, means a white female version of the same ilk as a Bubba, although the –ette ending suggests that when men talk politics, they still view women as little versions of men.

Whatever else happens in this race, if Angela McGlowan is in the mix, the strategists may have to start working on their labels and boxes. As a successful black professional, Angela McGlowan may be a lot of things, but a Bubba or even a Bubbette she definitely ain’t.

Eudora University?

There are more significant stories in Mississippi than the renaming of Mississippi University for Women, but not many that have become more fun. This is partly because we love naming people, pets, places and things (baby naming books are some of the most popular of all), and partly because we love stories with lots of twists and turns (see South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford).

Nothing so dramatic as Mark Sanford’s incredible journey here, but still interesting. This morning we learn that after seven months President Claudia Limbert has narrowed the choices to either Reneau University or Waverley University. The idea of Welty University fell away in the face of Welty family resistance.

An objection and a constructive suggestion.

The objection is that most people will almost certainly misspell these names because they are uncommon variants of more common spellings. Remember that many people will hear the name long before they see it or write it. Don’t take my word for it because I am a language freak; just ask any of the language scholars at MUW. Or just ask Microsoft Word or Google.

Reneau (named for 19th Century education advocate Sally Reneau) – Google is always my first stop to check out variant spellings. The most common way of spelling the name pronounced “Reneau” is Renault—as in the car, as in Captain Louis Renault in the movie Casablanca, etc. Google finds 98,200,000 instances of the spelling “Renault” on the Web. For “Reneau” the number is 255,000. And while I believe the speller in Microsoft Word is only a half-brained tool, it does recognize the spelling “Renault”, while it considers “Reneau” a misspelling.

Waverley (named for a Walter Scott novel) – Google finds 9,730,000 instances of the spelling “Waverly” and 6,900,000 for “Waverley”. But a closer look reveals that the spelling of Waverly/Waverley is a chronic issue on both sides of the Atlantic (Google the terms “Waverley spelling” to find out more). It appears that train stations, streets, etc., that have chosen the Walter Scott variant invariably find themselves in the middle of a controversy.

Now for the constructive suggestion: Eudora University.

I am admittedly one of those who has wanted prose instead of poetry, promoting plain vanilla names such as Mississippi University at Columbus or the like. This has not carried the day.

So my poetic suggestion is Eudora University, for three reasons.

1. Eudora is a proven, spellable brand:

Even in this age of Outlook and Google, millions of people still get their e-mail delivered through Eudora, that is, Eudora the e-mail client. It has been eclipsed for many reasons, and its development has had its ups and downs, but for some of us it is still the easiest and most capable e-mail software available.

How Eudora got its name:

Eudora was developed by Steve Dorner at the University of Illinois, where Mosaic was also eventually developed. Dorner was a computer programmer working on TCP/IP (transmission control protocol/Internet protocol) applications and servers for the computer science department on the Urbana-Champaign campus…

After growing bored with building directories, Dorner turned his attention to email. Although electronic messaging was still in its infancy, Dorner realized that an elegant email system could greatly enhance and facilitate communications among students and faculty on campus…

After working on the new email program for a year, Dorner was ready to release it for free to the Internet community at large. The working name was UIUCMail, which Dorner realized was a tongue twister. Then he remembered a short story written by Eudora Welty (1909-2001) titled “Why I Live at the P.O.” It’s a story about a woman who decides to live at the post office where she works rather than put up with her family at home any longer.

Dorner was processing so much email at the time that he felt like he lived at the post office, and his program used a “post office” protocol to fetch mail, so he saw a metaphorical connection. Since the programming and naming took place a decade ahead of the phenomenal growth of the Internet, Dorner hadn’t anticipated Eudora would eventually be used by more than 20 million people. Naming the program after a living author could have become awkward for Dorner and any future licensees. Fortunately, Ms. Welty was flattered and amused by the allusion to her and her work.

2. Eudora is a charming Southern name that sings:

As I said, baby naming books are popular and fascinating. The most interesting one I have ever seen is A is for Atticus: Baby Names from Great Books.

There you find this entry for Eudora:

Melodious Eudora has a Southern accent and an Irish twinkle. It’s a lit heroine name that is clearly such, conveys intelligence, charm and creative ability.

Melodious. Southern. Twinkle. Intelligence. Charm. Creative ability. If there’s anything else that MUW wants to express in its name, please let us know.

3. There are more Eudoras than Eudora Welty:

According to Google there are millions of instances of “Eudora” that have nothing to do with the author. The legal and public relations people would no doubt be nervous, much happier dealing with distant families from centuries ago. But Eudora is genuinely much less direct and person-specific than Welty, and a lot easier on the ear. Ms. Welty is no longer alive, so we don’t know whether she would be as “flattered and amused” as she was by the software naming. I hope that she would be.

Politics: Who’s a Bubba and Who’s Not

I was working on  something about the First Congressional District Republican nomination, and I still am. But I’m easily distracted by the really fascinating.

On June 18, John McArdle wrote in Roll Call about prospective nominees for this seat:

One Mississippi Republican strategist said that if Nunnelee were the nominee, he could count on another strong performance from DeSoto but could also perform better than Davis in Tupelo. Nunnelee also has more of a down-home, country style and would likely do better than Davis in the district’s rural counties.

“You don’t have to just be a Bubba to get elected,” the strategist said. “Roger Wicker’s not a Bubba. The problem was Greg Davis was the opposite of that.”

I’ve been trying to parse this statement as best I can.

Here’s what I think this means. You can get elected if you’re a Bubba. You can get elected if you’re not a Bubba (Roger Wicker). But you can’t get elected if you’re–how should we say it?–an anti-Bubba (Greg Davis).

All of which raises more questions than it answers.

For purposes of this strategy, what exactly is a Bubba? Is it “down home, country style”, or something else?

Is it all or nothing, or can you be a little bit Bubba, a little bit non-Bubba, kind of like Donny and Marie with country and rock ‘n roll?

There’s also the question of whether the realpolitik of getting elected in Mississippi does to some degree depend on Bubbaism or its opposite.

In any case, this does give us a new dimension for our electoral analysis: Is the prospective candidate a Bubba, a non-Bubba or an anti-Bubba?

Speaking of Bubbas and politics brings to mind a great film from 1957, Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd. Lonesome Rhodes (Andy Griffith in his first movie role) is a poor and opportunistic Arkansas drifter who works his way up to become a national television star. Through his folksy and influential talk show, Lonesome Rhodes’ Cracker Barrel, he eventually tries to promote the lackluster Senator Worthington Fuller for President.

At the climax, an open microphone exposes the real Lonesome Rhodes to the world:

Lonesome Rhodes: This whole country’s just like my flock of sheep!

Marcia Jeffries: Sheep?

Lonesome Rhodes: Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers – everybody that’s got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle. They don’t know it yet, but they’re all gonna be ‘Fighters for Fuller’. They’re mine! I own ’em! They think like I do. Only they’re even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for ’em. Marcia, you just wait and see. I’m gonna be the power behind the president – and you’ll be the power behind me!

The New Era Is Now

NEMS Daily Journal editor Lloyd Gray recently wrote about the roller coaster ride that is the Toyota plant at Blue Springs. In a column headlined Waiting for a new era can be hard he advised patience in the face of real news, rumors and outright speculation about what will happen when.

Beyond this advice, his column opens the way to another discussion.

He writes in part:

Toyota, which already has invested $300 million in construction of its $1.3 billion plant at Blue Springs, will not walk away from it, contrary to the views of some skeptics. This company’s history, philosophy and long-term view of things won’t allow that to happen. But even unique companies have to adjust to severe business conditions, and moving ahead with its plans for Blue Springs at a time when product demand was taking a nosedive would have been unwise.

So putting the plant on hold is a rational , level-headed and completely understandable business decision. The problem is that for Northeast Mississippians – particularly those in the PUL counties and others nearby with announced or hoped-for suppliers – Toyota has been seen not just as a significant industrial announcement but as the advent of a new era and, even more pointedly, an affirmation of this region and its people. It represented our breakthrough to the really big leagues of economic enterprise; it proved we could compete with anybody anywhere.

This was, and is, heady stuff. And it helps explain the anxiety with which we see, hear and digest every word that comes from the mouth of a Toyota executive, every suggestion of a new plan or timetable, every hint of what is or is not to come. The stakes – not just economic, but psychological and emotional as well – are high, and it’ll be hard to rest easy until the day the plant at Blue Springs is actually turning out vehicles.

[…]

In the end, that’s all that really matters – that Toyota sees Northeast Mississippi as an important and integral part of its future, whatever is produced here and whenever it finally comes off the production line.

For something that has generated so much excitement, being patient is hard, and nothing has generated more excitement in this region in many years than Toyota. But read the history of Toyota. Patience for good things to unfold over time and a deep aversion to short-term thinking are hallmarks of the company.

Twenty-eight months, and however much more time passes before the plant opens, may seem like an eternity when you’re waiting on the realization of a region’s highest economic aspirations. But if we’re truly ushering in a new era, a little extra time before it arrives is only a small bump in the road.

It is inarguable that Toyota’s choice of Northeast Mississippi is an affirmation of the area’s unique qualities by one of the savviest and most successful industrial companies in the world. As a point of pride and civic self-confidence, and as a badge that can be displayed to any future prospects, nothing can take that away.

I might quibble with the idea that Toyota “will not walk away from it, contrary to the views of some skeptics. This company’s history, philosophy and long-term view of things won’t allow that to happen.” In the end, this may not be about skepticism or Toyota’s vision. It may end up being about business, about their expenditure of an additional billion dollars in an industry that suddenly has huge plant and worker overcapacity. This is an unprecedented economic terrain for which we have few maps. This doesn’t mean that the plant won’t be completed; it just means that more than ever, we can never say never.

Most of all, we come to the question of a “new era.” One point of the column, if I read it right, is that the Toyota plant marks such a new era.

In a sense I am not sure the Toyota plant is a new era, and I am not sure it should be.

To understand what I mean, let’s go back to George McLean, the legendary publisher of the Daily Journal and engineer of the Tupelo Miracle. Much of what Tupelo and Northeast Mississippi are today can be traced back to his vision, creativity and persistence.

Others are more expert on McLean and the history of Tupelo than I am, so I risk seeming presumptuous. But a big part of what he accomplished stems from his being a fountain of ideas, some of them (to use a phrase he might have liked) outside the box. He believed that by communicating those ideas and by working as many of those ideas as possible, you would sometimes hit, sometimes miss, but always be taking one more step on a path to growth, prosperity, and progress. One hit was never enough, one miss was never an obstacle. There was always another idea, and another one after that.

That was the miracle, that was the era of George McLean: an era of vision and ideas. North Mississippi Medical Center is a wonder, the largest non-metropolitan hospital complex in the country. George McLean didn’t bring this NMMC to Tupelo. He brought an idea, he planted a ten-bed hospital during the Depression, and he watched it grow.

There’s nothing in the world wrong with a Toyota plant that can bring thousands of jobs and new economic activity. But it is now clear that may not be for years. Is it patience we need as that new era seems deferred? Or do we need to redefine what that new era is?

For all the good it has done and will do, the Toyota experience may have had an unintended consequence. Maybe, just maybe, a certain complacency set in, as we watched and waited for the big ship to come in. As we waited for the new era to begin.

My guess is that George McLean wouldn’t be waiting for that big ship to dock and he wouldn’t be patient. He came to one of the poorest places in the country during one of the worst economic crises we have ever faced. He couldn’t afford to be complacent or patient. At any moment, even the best idea and the brightest prospect might fail. The only thing for sure was the next idea, and the next one after that.

We don’t have to wait for the new era. With or without Toyota, if we have the vision and the ideas, the new era is now.

Minority Hiring: A Third Rail

There is as far as I know no subway system in Mississippi. But there are lots of third rails, where just stepping on one of them might fry you with hundreds of volts of TVA electricity. Minority hiring is one of these.

In this morning’s NEMS Daily Journal, Emily Le Coz writes about the current state of minority hiring by the City of Tupelo:

When the new mayor and City Council take office next month, they’ll inherit a work force of nearly 500 municipal employees.

And like their predecessors, elected officials likely will face pressure to make the work force as racially diverse as the city’s own resident population.

As it stands, that effort hasn’t panned out – at least, not since the early 1990s.

To date, the city employs 479 full-time workers, of whom 90 are minorities. That’s 18.7 percent.

It’s a slight increase from last spring when the municipality had a precise 18 percent minority representation in its ranks. But it’s well below Tupelo’s overall minority population of 30 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Although the city doesn’t have a defined target for minority employment numbers, it does try to hire as many as possible, said Contanna Purnell, assistant human resources manager.

Le Coz goes on to detail the historic and current minority employment in city departments, along with an assortment of other numbers. She talks with managers and officials, including outgoing mayor Ed Neely and incoming mayor Jack Reed, Jr. Overall, there is a general aspiration to improve.

But without a defined target, which the city says it doesn’t have, the bigger question is: improve to what?

That question is the third rail of the third rail.

Joe Jackson (the British singer, not the disgraced baseball player) said, “You can’t get what you want, till you know what you want.”

The problem is that sometimes talking about the objectives is much harder and more controversial than talking about how to get there and whether you’ve gotten there.

Does the city mean to generally aim (though not target) for a profile that matches some or all demographics, not just race, but gender and otherwise? Is that profile match meant to be a floor, a ceiling, or both? And so on.

These are questions, not answers. Until those questions get discussed more openly and fully, in the end it may all be just good intentions and a bunch of changing numbers.

And if these discussions ever do open up, officials might learn that the tingling they feel isn’t a deadly third rail at all, but a positive charge toward a better and more open future.