A speech by john a. powell
john a. powell is the executive director of the
Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State
University. He also holds the Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil
Liberties at the Moritz College of Law. This article is an edited
excerpt of a speech given at Urban Habitat’s Social Equity Caucus State
of the Region Convening on January 15, 2010.
I
grew up in Detroit, in a very large, very loving family. My family was
from the South, where my parents were sharecroppers. Which meant, for
the most part, they didn’t deal in the cash economy. They dealt in
barter. If any of you don’t know about Mississippi and sharecroppers,
it’s poorer than poor. Although, I didn’t realize we were poor until I
left to go to college at Stanford.
Growing up on the east side of Detroit, I used to hear about all these
white people but I couldn’t see very many of them. So I thought it was
a myth, until I got to Stanford. Then I started getting a perspective
of the community that I had lived in.
In my childhood neighborhood you now see a lot of vacant lots. They are
not parks or “open space.” In Detroit, about one-third of the lots—and
the houses—are vacant. Today, the average cost of a house is $6,000.
Needless to say, the tax base has completely eroded. The people who
have left are the people with resources who would help the tax base.
They’ve left behind an infrastructure built for two million people that
is serving less than a million. The school system has recently been
given the dubious honor of being the worst in the country. So, I would
say that I grew up in a place where there was declining
opportunity—where the chance of succeeding was constantly moving
further and further away.
