Don Samuels Has Poignantly Sustained Violence in North Minneapolis

Don Samuels has been a conundrum on the political scene in Minneapolis for two decades. 

 

A Jamaican immigrant who came to the United States as a young man, Samuels enjoyed a successful business career in New York before moving with great intentionality into a violence-ridden and economically impoverished area of North Minneapolis.  He was inspired by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and wanted to help promote activity that could help accomplish the unfulfilled goals of that tumultuous era.

 

Samuels has coordinated various community actions with the objectives of advancing economic and social development as a long-term-solution to North Side violence.  To confront violent episodes in real time, Samuels holds vigils and issues statements calling for cessation of such incidents.   He served on the Minneapolis City Council, ran unsuccessfully for mayor as an education advocate, and then gained a seat on the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education.   In the meantime, wife Sondra Samuels launched the Northside Achievement Zone to work with Nellie Stone Johnson K-8 and other schools that Don and Sondra had judged unfit for attendance by their own children.   

 

In February 2007, in response to abysmal student achievement levels at MPS North High School as recorded on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs), Samuels angrily proclaimed that the school should be burned to the ground.  But aside from his vigils and community efforts, Samuels found that his position on the city council offered limited scope for acting to improve public education;  as Betsy Hodges found, having made the same sort of claims as an education change advocate, his capacity to effect change from the mayoral perch would have also been constrained in the extreme.

 

Here we come upon the conundrum of the Don Samuels tenure on the Minneapolis political scene.  African American leaders of longer presence in North Minneapolis have never trusted Samuels’s motives and have derided his effectiveness.  Despite his high profile as a purported education advocate, his lackluster performance on the MPS Board of Education substantially confirms the doubts of those North Side leaders.  I am a bit more charitable in my assessment of Samuels’s good intentions;  poignantly, however, he has failed in the role that would have given him a chance to move proclamation to action.

 

In the aftermath of his victory as an at-large member of the MPS school board in 2014, Samuels at last had a chance to work for those changes in public education to which he had long given voice.  But he has done little except make dramatic, bombastic statements and occasionally absurd remarks.  Samuels has a history of advocacy for charter schools and was elated when the board voted unanimously to designate four MPS sites as “Community Partnership Schools,” which have the kind of freedom to innovate in exchange for accountability that is the putative modus operandi for charter schools.  After the vote, Samuels declared that “We are on the cusp of greatness.”  But achievement levels at those and other MPS schools have been abysmal and flat for the entirety of Samuels’s time on the board.

 

Samuels does not ask the kind of courageous, penetrating questions of MPS decision-makers concerning student achievement that distinguished the tenure of board member Tracine Asberry;  the latter posed discerning questions with such persistence and sense of urgency as to draw ire from the powerful Minneapolis Federation fo Teachers (MFT)/ Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) cohort that led the campaign contributing to Asberry’s narrow defeat in November 2016.  Despite the fact that Samuels is the only current member of the MPS Board of Education that is not backed by the MFT/ DFL, he has been no more effective in promoting change than have the other eight board members (Rebecca Gagnon, Nelson Inz, Bob Walser, Ira Jourdain, Jenny Arneson, Siad Ali, Kim Ellison, and KerryJo Felder).

 

Midway through his current four-year term, Samuels accepted a $90,000 per year position with MicroGrants that has distracted him from the task of education change, which he had long proclaimed as a driving concern.  And now Samuels has declared that he will not run again for a school board seat in November 2018.

 

Samuels’s ineffectiveness and timidity as a member of the MPS Board of Education constitute a severe indictment of his sincerity as a proponent of education change and as an opponent of violence.  With a sophisticated meditation on the conflation of national image as a repository for individual freedom with the right to bear arms, he aligns himself (“Years of identity bias on gun policy.  But maybe now…,” Star Tribune, February 21, 2018) with students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (where the recent attacks causing 17 deaths occurred) and others in the noble call for gun control.

 

But like so many legislative and congressional measures intended to address the economic and social problems of the United States, gun control measures are of symbolic importance but do little to address the history of violence uncovered during the movements of the 1960s that Samuels says so inspired him.

 

We must confront with a sweeping national discussion the violent history of a nation that perpetrated at least 4,500 lynchings during 1878-1965.  We must do this by addressing the poverty and degradation on the reservations into which we herded Native Americans, some of whom departed for the urban core to which we relegated African Americas by invoking restricted housing covenants.  The poorest of the poor were left behind in challenged communities living at the urban core as white and black middle class flight ironically followed desegregation judicial mandates and fair housing laws from the mid-1950s through the 1960s.

 

The remedy that goes to the root of the crimes of violence that have pervaded the past and continue rife in the present of these less than United States is excellent K-12 education, imparted to young people of all demographic descriptors, so as to send them forth in peaceful commitment to the common good as culturally enriched, civically prepared, and professionally satisfied citizens.

 

Don Samuels, despite his declared intentions, has done nothing to promote the needed changes in K-12 education.

 

As we conclude Black History Month in this February of 2018, all of those willing to confront the racist and violent history of the United States should vow to do what Samuels has not.