Mary Langenfeld
Alex Gee: “Our goal is that people take responsibility.”
News of the coronavirus is getting worse, but on March 9 there is no talk yet of event cancellations or restricted gatherings in Madison. Almost 300 people have come together for an evening meeting at Fountain of Life church on Madison’s south side. “You come out in the snow, you come out in the rain, you come out even though much of the world is in chaos,” says the Rev. Alex Gee. “At the end of each course we sit back and vote for our favorite cohort and I’m voting for you, cohort five. Don’t get close to me, but I love you.”
When the laughter subsides, Gee turns to tonight’s topic, the civil rights movement in Wisconsin. A slide behind Gee appears on the screen with the following decree: “No part of these premises shall ever be owned or occupied by any person of the Ethiopian race.” The sentence is from a 1931 covenant that banned African Americans from living in Madison’s Nakoma neighborhood on the near-west side. Shorewood Hills, another west-side neighborhood, had a similar law.
Although these restrictions are now illegal, “some of the neighborhoods [in Madison] that still deal with integration go back to these clauses,” Gee tells the audience. “What practices do we employ that still convey these messages?” This history is important to know, Gee adds. “We have blinders on that this doesn’t happen in Madison but it does,” he says. “Unless we understand how we got here we can’t move ahead.”
And that is one of the goals of the nine-week Justified Anger history series, presented by the Nehemiah Center for Urban Leadership Development.
“We take a look at United States history with a special lens on black history for the sake of mobilizing non-blacks into allyship,” says Gee, who founded Nehemiah in 1992 and who created the history series with his colleague, Dr. Karen Reece, in collaboration with UW-Madison faculty. “[I thought] if we could use an academic approach that was devoid of emotion, we could at least have an awakening among folks who consider themselves woke.”
Alexander Shashko, a lecturer in UW-Madison’s Department of Afro-American Studies, follows Gee at the March meeting, delivering a 60-minute talk focusing on Milwaukee and Madison in the mid-1900s. Citing segregationist practices like redlining and “blockbusting,” in which real estate agents would scare white property owners into selling their houses at low prices by convincing them that racial minorities would soon be moving into their neighborhoods, the lecture gives context to why Wisconsin now ranks as one of the worst states in the country in terms of racial disparities.
With a sell-out crowd each year and a long waiting list, participants in the Justified Anger course come as individuals or as part of a group; professions represented include school staff, city employees, realtors and people from the restaurant industry. “Our goal is that people take responsibility….Don’t talk about diversity and then move farther and farther to the suburbs,” says Gee. So far Gee is pleased with the results. “To watch its impact on policy, discussions, philanthropy, has been powerful,” he says.
When Gee wrote his “Justified Anger” essay for the Capital Times in December 2013, he says it was meant to be his “swan song” to the city of Madison. But the series has given him new hope. “To consistently see hundreds of non-black people show up in January and February for nine weeks to learn about history in order to rethink their place in the world has overwhelmed my heart,” says Gee. “It has recommitted me to a community that I could have easily written off.”
Number of people enrolled in this year’s course: 282
Total number of participants to date: over 1,000
Number of volunteers who help run discussion groups: over 40
Percentage of participants who identify as white: 90
Percentage of participants with a master’s degree or higher: 50
Some of the groups participating in this year’s cohort: UnityPoint Meriter physical therapists, city of Madison clerk’s office, Short Stack Eatery, Shabazz High School, YWCA Madison, Verona Area School District, Madison Police Department, UW-Madison Police Department
