Dear Editor,

It was a warm summer night in 1972; I was 24 and had just pulled our car off US Highway 27 onto a County road south of Fort Wayne. We sat there, a young couple just starting our adult lives together and stared at an orange glow in the sky over the city. We wondered if the glow came from a burning building because our town was experiencing some of the same protests and violence that occurred across the US in those days. Today I know the troubles were caused by the failure of most White Americans to allow Black Americans equal access to economic prosperity and social equality. 

That night of fire in the sky was 48 years ago. It was a night of protest in the east-central neighborhood of Fort Wayne that was capped off by the arson of a White-owned laundry.  Over the next two days, Fort Wayne Mayor Ivan Lebamoff and top aides conversed face-to-face with residents and protesters at an east-central neighborhood park to listen and begin to draft new initiatives that might prevent similar incidents. Mayor Lebamoff taught us all a master-class in executive leadership. 

Fast forward to June 2020. My news apps bring me pics of fire-lit night skies in Minneapolis and other US cities. Some government officials at the highest levels cast blame in different directions and make threats, while most state and local officials try to calm fears and reassure. This sad reality of America’s half-century-long failure to get it right is maddening to me because it took the entire length of my adult life to make almost zero progress in improving how our police can sometimes treat black Americans. 

It seems clear to me these last 400 years, when European colonists and settlers who became white Americans and then Africans who became black Americans after being bought and sold into slavery, were poisoned from the start. But why did the misuse of millions of black Americans continue another 165 years even after the abomination of slavery was ended? How did our four centuries of this racial cruelty, stupidity, fear and selfishness sustain itself? The only answer I can come up with is this. We White Americans felt free to, and continue to, allow it.

How could we be this cruel, stupid and so selfish? That is a big question to be answered by historians, but I am certain there is no simple “fix” for our history of irresponsibility, this lack of care for our fellow Americans, the Black Americans. The only way forward I see is to build a better, a truly inclusive US and that will take lifetimes of working and caring together, along with a supply of sincere moral leadership that may be in short supply right now. It will take leadership by many over decades. Not by only one and not quickly done. At least it seems so to me.

Surely, going back to the good old days is not the answer. The good old days really weren’t good for everyone. And it is not such a bad thing that some of the old rules are falling apart. Just look at what is going on. To try to turn the clock back is to walk headfirst into a pathetically wasteful failure to deliver on the promise of the America we used to believe in.

Jim Falkiner
Warsaw