Jackson Free Press

Every day of the past week I've heard someone, usually a white progressive, ridicule City Councilman Kenneth I. Stokes. "He's crazy." "He's a lunatic." "He's a racist." The outspoken Ward 3 representative is disliked pretty much universally in the white community. In fact, moderates and liberals probably dislike him more than conservatives do; his brand of outrageous race-baiting gives some conservatives what they want: a reason to bash black leaders. It's counter-productive at best.

Clarion-Ledger Metro columnist Eric Stringfellow is currently Stokes' most outspoken detractor. He called Stokes in an Aug. 14 column a "once-promising leader who has gone mad," whose "political style is as dated as a rotary telephone." This missile was in response to Stokes' public comments objecting to a Council redistricting plan—one of five offered—that, he said, could lead to a Council made up of four blacks and three whites in a city that is 70 percent black.

"Ward 7 should become a black ward," Stokes said Aug. 12, adding that the black community has "always been undercounted." With the agreement of Councilmember Bo Brown, he said it's "not right" that the city's blacks would be under-represented in the plan. Instead, he prefers one that would combine the Northside districts of the two whites currently on the Council, Ben Allen and Margaret Barrett-Simon, forcing them to run against each other.

Agree with him or not, race-based gerrymandering is rampant. We're surrounded by voting districts as crooked as San Francisco's Lombard Street in their attempts to load or limit certain races of voters. But, shhh. If we don't mention race, then everyone can pretend that all this maneuvering has nothing to do with race, when in fact it often has everything to do with race, and the parties that people of certain races vote for.

Stokes doesn't play the quiet game very well. He often seems to talk without thinking, and often angrily, and he doesn't hide his disdain for the white status quo. Even when he's right, his vitriol gets him in trouble. As it should. It clearly is doing little to contribute to racial reconciliation efforts in the city. It gives too many people, black and white, the opportunity to simply point fingers and say, "See, blacks can be racist, too."

Stringfellow wants Stokes off the City Council and out of public view and, probably, out of a position to embarrass the black community. But he's choosing an equally incendiary way to communicate his disgust with Stokes. On Aug. 14, he called for a California-esque recall initiative (which state law doesn't allow) to kick Stokes off the Council because, he said, Stokes has "become incapacitated." And, he said, "Stokes needs a lobotomy and Brown needs a spine."

A lobotomy? That's inappropriate. Imagine if I snidely declared that Stringfellow, or President Bush, or even Ann Coulter needs surgery to remove their cerebral cortex. You wouldn't respect me in the morning.

Unfortunately, and distastefully, Stokes fired back that Stringfellow is a "first-class Uncle Tom," and that he should "move his ugly butt" to Ward 3 and run against him. Then on Aug. 17, Stringfellow whined back that Stokes had "raised the volume on his ineffective jawboning, even firing blanks this way." Na, na, na, na, boo, boo.

This escalating battle of grade-school insults between two prominent community members might be amusing if the stakes weren't so high. Angered by the redistricting plan, Stokes uttered Stokesisms. And Stringfellow, in turn, pumped up the volume even more by name-calling, demanding a nonsensical recall election, and making it look like two prominent members of the Jackson community can't have a civil public dialogue without falling into the gutter.

A more productive strategy would be to pause and consider why Stokes is so popular in his district. He visits, talks to and listens to his constituents. On Aug. 17, Stringfellow touched on Stokes' popularity, albeit with condescension: "Stokes is great with people in his ward, particularly those who may not have much education or sophistication." The truth is, many intelligent, educated blacks I've met like Stokes, even if they wish he would work on his delivery. "He tells it like it is," is the common refrain. "He cares about black folks." "He says things other people are afraid to say."

It seems to me that that black Jacksonians are hungry for lawmakers, and media, and citizens, who take their needs and concerns seriously. I've found no evidence of a community that wants to hate white people. But they do want to be paid attention to, much in the way frustrated and ignored blacks responded to leaders like Malcolm X in the 1960s. He scared and angered the white community, but he could look his followers in the eye and address what was on their minds. He understood the "frustration politics" that Bayard Rustin wrote about (see page 26). That is, blacks in America often feel that they have to talk, or act, outrageously to draw white attention to problems in their community. And it's too often true.

Stokes is no Malcolm X, but in a similar way he is willing to loudly address issues that others are hesitant to take on. And, I believe, his extremism is a direct reaction to the other extreme—which is prominent in the city, despite stabs at reconciliation. The lack of reasonable, informed voices create the void that the extremists fill. Even our progressives tiptoe around the racist demons in our midst. Reconciliation or the true discussion that leads to it is not possible if one does not call out the rhetoric of both extremes. White racism is a bit more subtle (though not much) than just a few years back when the Council School Foundation was encouraging the white tax base to pull out of public schools to prevent miscegenation. The phrases are just slightly more coded. Welfare queens. Whorehouses. Ghettos. Super-predators. Quotas. "Democrats" (used as a race descriptor).

And, of course, there's crime rhetoric. The metropolitan area is dotted with elected officials and affluent citizens who love to complain about crime much more than they want to devote time and resources to preventing it, or improving the conditions that incubate it. The crime-blame game was deafening over the last several months, especially in Stringfellow's frontal attacks on the police chief and mayor in his column, and by other folks who simply want to see the mayor turned out of office in a couple years.

The city's police critics don't often tell fellow citizens how they are going to help prevent their children from becoming criminals. Instead they call for a war on the "wild tigers" that can't be rehabilitated as Councilman Ben Allen called them at a March 28 Metro Jackson SafeCity Watch town-hall meeting in North Jackson. This was a throwback to since-debunked conservative "super-predator" theory about black boys, popular in the early 1990s. Allen's comment, which was outrageous, drew no public criticism, other than from this publication. Where was Mr. Stringfellow's outrage then?

I'm all for telling leaders when they need to tone down their rhetoric, and Stokes needs to tone the hell down. So does Stringfellow, Allen and other people who wield megaphones in the community. Jackson is still in the middle of a very precarious reconciliation experiment here: Can we come together as a multi-racial community to solve our problems and to sink or swim together? Can we work together to save our public schools, to prevent crime, to lessen poverty, to mentor young people? Or, do we continue spewing venom at each other, hoping to sell a few extra newspapers and build our own little political fiefdoms?

The silly name-calling needs to stop. All of it.

Donna Ladd is editor-in-chief of the Jackson Free Press.

More columns about Stokes

http://www.clarionledger.com/news/0308/17/lronnie.html

http://www.mississippilink.com/pv/pageview.pl?section=hotstories&newsfile=n200308213.txt

http://www.mississippilink.com/pv/pageview.pl?section=hotstories&newsfile=n200308212.txt

Special Clarion-Ledger list of anti-Stokes letters:

http://www.clarionledger.com/news/editorial/#letters

Long, but interesting oral history about White Citizens Council and Council School Foundation (which, it seems, was active in the city as recently as 1990):

http://anna.lib.usm.edu/%7Espcol/crda/oh/ohsimmonswp.html

Myth of the teenager super-predator

http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/maryland/Maryland-02.htm

http://www.salon.com/may97/news/news970513.html

http://www.nyu.edu/pages/lawreview/75/1/bazelon.html

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/1999/9906.twohey.littleton.html

http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/programs/cfcc/pdffiles/V3Snyder.pdf

http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/ojjdp/178993.pdf

Previous Comments

ID

68424

Comment

Thanks for this one, Donna. It's wonderful to finally read something sensible and not quite so hysterical on the subject of Kenneth Stokes. Not living in Jackson, I don't know that much about him, other than what I read in the Clarion Ledger, but even so, the C/L seems to have a vendetta going. They've devoted an extraordinary amount of paper and web space to this one man. I do have a friend from Stokes' district, who absolutely loves the man, and for exactly the reasons you enumerated - that he says what others are afraid to say and that he talks to and listens to his constituents. It rather surprised me to hear that his voters like him so much, after all the pages and pages I'd read in the C/L, so I'm glad to see a straightforward and down- to-earth opinion in the media. I'm also glad to see someone address the way the racial "doublespeak" going on in this state (does Amy Tuck really think we don't understand what all this "flag" talk is about and does Haley Barbour really think we buy his disclaimers about how he was "just" complimenting Head Start?). It was interesting to me to read what one of the icons of the "Southron" movement (those guys who think the south REALLY will - and should - secede again) had to say about it. Michael Andrew Grissom, author of "The Last Rebel Yell", "Southern by the Grace of God" and other similar books, says that people in the neoconfederate movement have made the mistake of ". . . denying the factor of race. Every attack made upon the South and its icons has been made on the basis of race. Everything we hold dear is said to be racially offensive. When we refuse to respond in defense of our race, we discard our best weapon. . . . Prefacing our public remarks with, "Now, this has nothing to do with race," has neutralized many an attempt to save a flag, retain a holiday, or claim the right to have a Confederate flag on our lunch boxes. Blacks would never have gained the rule over us by saying, "Now, this has nothing to do with race.". . . We employ far too much euphemistic language in our circles, the result of which is utter confusion to those who would follow. Our people have proven themselves incapable of reading between the lines. They need clear, precisely articulated instructions. " Come to think of it - if this doublespeak fools even the white people that racists (like Grissom) are talking to, maybe we're further along than I realized.

Author

C.W. Roberson

Date

2003-08-22T16:27:49-06:00

ID

68425

Comment

JFP I aprreciate reading "Gentlemen tone It Down." Thank you for giving us more to read in Jackson than "he said...she said.." Kenneth Stokes, might be loud, and ridiculous to some. I don't mind, I just wish he and other leaders would get loud for more reasons than drawing the attention of Whites to the problems in our community. Why would he want to do that? Whatever problems exist , Whites already know about them (as the same problems exist in their own communities, going unpublicized) or they are a part of the problem, ghettoizing neighborhoods, by white flighting, (but renting slum property.) I'm more concerned with Kenneth Stokes getting loud and obnoxious about what matters; summer work programs, to help prevent criminalizing our youth, sex education to stem the tide of teen parents, and substandard living conditions for the poor and elderly. Can he get rude, loud, and embarassing about those kinds of issues?

Author

Diana Barnes

Date

2003-08-24T17:34:55-06:00