Learn to know one another.
Treat each other with respect.
Nurture and educate the young.
It sounds simple, but a group of Columbians from different racial, professional and religious backgrounds came together Thursday night to suggest more needs to be done if the city is to become a socially and economically vibrant community.
The Greater Columbia Community Relations Council sponsored the forum at the Eau Claire Print Building, but the sparse turnout — about 40 people were in the audience — prompted calls for an expansion of the summit to attract a wider audience.
“I think our society would be better if we celebrated our similarities,” Richland County Sheriff’s Department Deputy Chief Daniel Johnson said. Instead, he said, “our children really know us as adults to be liars,” he continued, because we have faltered in teaching the traditional values of honor, integrity and inclusion.
The recent Highway Patrol videos that revealed troopers’ questionable conduct toward stopped motorists and suspects are indicative of the failure to address problems within an organization and society, he said.
The forum, which focused on race relations and tolerance, was prompted in part because of a flier that surfaced in April during City Council elections. The flier showed City Councilman Daniel Rickenmann at a college fraternity party with a backdrop of a Confederate battle flag. The flier was distributed to black churchgoers around the city, a tactic Rickenmann decried.
State NAACP President Lonnie Randolph said some have suggested that people “just get over it” because the battle flag is part of Southern white heritage.
But he said the conclusion of the 1968 Kerner Commission — the federal National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders commissioned by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate causes of the 1967 race riots — remains true today: “It’s still separate, unequal, hostile, one black, one white.”
Poor, black children remain at a distinct disadvantage in South Carolina, said Steve Morrison, a lawyer representing rural school districts in a lawsuit over funding that has becomethe state’s longest-running legal dispute.
“We’ve lost a generation of K-12 kids while we’ve been in court,” Morrison said.
Columbia Mayor Bob Coble said the battle flag, removed from the dome in 2000 but still flying on the State House grounds, is an impediment to economic development, particularly for international companies interested in locating to South Carolina.
“It sends a signal to the world that has a harmful impact,” he said.
At Thursday’s forum, panelists related the indignities, small and large, that come from being different in the culture.
“I’ve been here 37 years, and I still have people telling me to go back where I came from,” said Roland Smallwood, a community liaison officer for the city and a native of Liberia. Once, he said, a city employee taking a smoking break called out to him that he was taking a job that belonged to a white man.
Waleed El-Ansary, a USC religious studies professor, said he has encountered only minor issues because he is Muslim in a predominantly Christian culture. But he said Muslim women, particularly those who wear the hijab, or Muslim veil, suffer more discrimination.
His wife, he said, was stopped at an intersection when a man in an adjacent car formed his hand into a gun shape and pointed his finger at her “bang, bang,” El-Ansary said.
Panelists and members of the audience lauded the benefits of learning to know people one on one. Bob Johnson extolled a race and reconciliation movement founded by several white Columbia Lutheran pastors that has brought people of different races together in both social and learning settings over the past three years.
“In doing that, you learn something about people you never learn from afar,” he said.
Cecile Holmes, a USC journalism professor, concurred.
Even in an age of instant technology, “there is no substitute for face-to-face contact,” she said.
Reach Click at (803) 771-8386.
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