Grand Rapids African-American Community Task Force

08/23/2026

Gary, Indiana is hurting—and this deserves attention.

After a severe storm tore through Northwest Indiana, tens of thousands of residents were left without power for days. Schools closed, food spoiled, businesses lost income, and families struggled to charge phones, keep medical equipment running, and get through everyday life without electricity.

Gary has also dealt with water-service disruptions and boil-water advisories tied to water-main breaks, adding another layer of frustration for residents already dealing with damaged infrastructure.

And this matters in another way: Gary is a predominantly Black city. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 76% of Gary’s population is Black.

That means when Gary struggles with extended outages, infrastructure failures, school closures, lost wages, and basic-service disruptions, a largely Black community is carrying the consequences.

This isn’t about saying other communities don’t suffer during disasters.

It’s about making sure Gary isn’t invisible when it does.

People deserve reliable power. They deserve safe water. They deserve infrastructure that works—and they deserve to have their stories heard when it doesn’t.

If you know someone in Gary, check on them. And share this so more people understand what this community has been dealing with.

08/16/2026

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05/23/2026

The Education of Survival (DuBois v. Washington)

The Education of Survival
In the shadow of lynching, disenfranchisement, and Jim Crow, Booker T. Washington preached industry. W.E.B. Du Bois preached intellect. Their argument is not a relic—it is a mirror.

The disagreement between W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington is frequently reduced to a tidy morality play: Du Bois as the uncompromising intellectual insisting on rights and higher learning; Washington as the pragmatic builder urging work, patience, and industrial training. That shorthand is not exactly wrong, but it is incomplete in ways that matter—because what these two men were really disputing was not whether Black people deserved education, or even whether they deserved the full range of American possibility. They were arguing about what education was for under siege, and what kind of schooling could convert a people’s vulnerability into durable power.

Their conflict unfolded in a country that had retreated from Reconstruction and invested heavily in the architecture of Jim Crow—through law, violence, labor exploitation, and cultural degradation. In that context, education was not merely the pathway to individual advancement; it was a battleground over the terms of Black citizenship. Washington’s public posture, crystallized in his 1895 Atlanta Exposition Address, asked Black Southerners to “cast down your bucket where you are,” prioritize industrial and agricultural work, and seek economic security even while social and political equality remained deferred. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk and later essays like “The Talented Tenth,” argued that a people trained only for labor would be trained into subordination. He insisted on broad higher education—particularly for those who could become teachers, professionals, editors, lawyers, and organizers—because leadership and civic power were not luxuries; they were defensive necessities.

Read the full story at https://www.kolumnmagazine.com/2026/02/26/the-education-of-survival/

05/10/2026

No other GROUP in America had to survive:

-Black Codes
-Convict leasing
-Jim Crow
-Redlining
-Sundown towns
-COINTELPRO
-Assassinations of leaders
-Crack epidemic (CIA linked)
-Mass incarceration
-School segregation
-Destruction of 60+ Black towns
-GI Bill exclusion
-FHA loan denial
-Police lynchings
-Media demonization
-Land theft from Black farmers

And you still ask why we're not "equal"?