It behooves us as a country to celebrate Black History and the birth and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., all year long. NAPA is given many plaudits for highlighting Black History Month.

It is important that there be a Black History Month celebration because it gives our country and our institutions cause to recognize and celebrate the fact that Black citizens are distinct contributors and participants in our country’s founding objectives: To form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

How can we work to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace? We must first remember that the U.S.A. is a capitalist country - there are owners and there are workers, there are producers and there are distributors, there are administrators and there are laborers. There is a hierarchy of equity and inclusion. “Compatible” and “Competitive” are competing values in our workplaces. What is our goal?

A significant desire of the Black History Month celebration is reversal of the belief by many in our society that socialism is not valued. Actually, most of the objectives in the United States Constitution Preamble are socialist in nature, not economic.

A rejection of social issues is bad for our country. An example:

• The Mississippi Department of Education has planned a hearing on “Proposed Changes to the Mississippi College and Career Readiness Standards for Social Studies,” or “How We Teach It”. Among the proposals is one that removes the names of civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, James Meredith and Fannie Lou Hamer, organization like the Ku Klux Klan, and terms like Black Codes and Jim Crow laws from the social study courses narratives. Interested parties must register to speak at least three days before the hearing, which runs from 9:00 a.m. to noon, in the auditorium at the Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Museum, in north Jackson, far from the Department of Education Building in downtown Jackson.*

*(Mac Gordon article in ClarionLedger newspaper, Jackson, MS, January 16, 2022, p3D)

I am a former city manager and a former university professor. The Black individual that has influenced my specific area of work as city manager of Cincinnati, Ohio, is Nathaniel R. Jones, Senior Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit (pictured right). Judge Jones was previously the General Counsel of the NAACP, and Assistant General Counsel of the Kerner Commission. As president of the Conference of Minority Public Administrators (COMPA) in 1983, I invited Judge Jones, a Carter appointee, to participate in a debate with Clarence Thomas, a Reagan appointee, as Head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Thomas was previously Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights in the Reagan administration.

The debate issues were “The value of the EEOC and should it be abolished, and mandatory busing for integration should not occur." Jones won the debate hands down because he dealt with issues of citizenship, education and progression of Blacks in an EEOC capitalist environment.