There is a moment in almost every Black barbershop when the clippers slow down, somebody says something that catches the room’s attention, and suddenly everybody is in the conversation.

Politics. Crime. Family. Money. The neighborhood. The Browns. The schools. The courts.

Nobody called a meeting.

Nobody sent an agenda.

But the conversation is real.

That is exactly why The Chair is coming back.

Beginning Saturday, September 12, judicial candidates Diane Russell, Daryl T. Dennie and Fallon Radigan will begin moving through Black-owned barbershops, salons and community spaces across Greater Cleveland for something very different from the standard political campaign appearance.

No ballroom.

No long banquet program.

No candidate standing 30 feet away behind a podium.

Instead, voters will get something increasingly rare in politics: proximity.

The candidates will enter the places where Black Cleveland already gathers, listens, debates and decides what it thinks.

And this year, one of Cleveland’s most recognizable barbers will help promote the effort.

Waverly Willis Knows What the Chair Can Do

Waverly Willis, founder and executive director of The Urban Barber Association, will serve as one of the promoters of The Chair.

That matters.

Willis has spent years making the argument that a barber chair can be much more than the place where someone gets a fade.

Through the Urban Barber Association and his Urban Kutz barbershops, Willis has helped use barbershops as platforms for health education, blood-pressure screenings, prostate-cancer awareness, substance-abuse education, youth mentoring and other community outreach. He has worked with institutions including health organizations and local community partners to reach people in a setting where trust already exists. (WaverlyWillis)

The Urban Barber Association itself was built around that idea: barbershops and beauty salons can function as neighborhood institutions, connecting people to information, resources and one another. Willis has described the larger mission as using those relationships to create conversations capable of producing generational change. (The Urban Barber Association)

That makes The Chair a natural extension of work he has already been doing.

This time, however, the conversation is about the people asking voters for one of the most powerful positions in local government.

A seat on the bench.

Black Barbershops Have Never Been “Just Barbershops”

To understand why this tour matters, you have to understand what the Black barbershop and beauty salon have represented for generations.

They are among the few places where a construction worker, a lawyer, a teenager, a business owner, a retiree and an elected official can all walk through the same door and become part of the same conversation.

Historically, Black barbershops became gathering places for political discussion, Black newspapers, voter registration and community organizing. Researchers have documented their role not simply as businesses, but as civic and cultural institutions. (PubMed Central (PMC))

Beauty salons have carried a similar significance.

Research examining Black barbershops and salons has repeatedly found something government agencies, political campaigns and corporations spend enormous amounts of money trying to manufacture:

trust.

Long-term relationships between barbers, stylists and their customers have allowed these businesses to become places where people discuss health, family, community problems and issues they may not comfortably discuss somewhere else. Researchers have described them as community anchors, safe havens and places of social support. (ScienceDirect)

The Chair recognizes something simple.

If you want to understand a community, sometimes you should stop asking the community to come to you.

Go where the community already is.

Judicial Candidates Without the Protective Bubble

Judicial campaigns can be among the strangest races in politics.

The consequences are enormous.

Judges can make decisions affecting a person’s freedom, family, finances, employment and future.

Yet many voters enter the voting booth knowing less about judicial candidates than virtually anybody else on the ballot.

They may recognize a name.

They may have seen a yard sign.

They may have received a slate card.

But do they know how that person thinks?

The Chair gives voters an opportunity to find out.

Diane Russell brings more than two decades of legal experience and a personal connection to the barbershop, having worked as a barber under her father before beginning her legal career.

Daryl T. Dennie brings nearly three decades of experience across the legal system, including work as a prosecutor, public defender, sole practitioner and civil litigator.

Fallon Radigan has spent nearly 17 years as a courtroom litigator, working as both a prosecutor and criminal defense attorney.

Three candidates.

Three different professional journeys.

And one opportunity for Black voters to meet them outside the protective bubble of traditional politics.

No Podium. No Script. Just the Room.

That may be the most interesting part of The Chair.

A candidate can prepare for a debate.

A campaign can write talking points.

A consultant can polish an answer.

The barbershop is harder to choreograph.

Someone may ask about sentencing.

Someone else may ask about bail.

Another person may want to know how a candidate views fairness, discretion, rehabilitation, public safety or the treatment of people who walk into a courtroom without money or influence.

And then somebody sitting three chairs away may challenge the answer.

That is how real conversations happen.

Candidates will have an opportunity to speak, but they will also have to listen.

Voters will have an opportunity to evaluate something that cannot always be measured on a résumé:

How does this person engage with people when there is no stage separating them?

The First Stops

Saturday, September 12, 2026

Urban Kutz Barbershop
11106 Detroit Avenue, Cleveland
11:00 AM

Urban Kutz Barbershop
4491 Pearl Road, Cleveland
1:00 PM

Wednesday, September 16, 2026

The Midtown Tech Hive
6815 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland
6:00 PM

Saturday, September 19, 2026

Today’s Cut & Style
2172 North Taylor Road, Cleveland Heights
11:00 AM

Wednesday, September 23, 2026

Studio Zero — for the CREATIVES
1670 E. 40th Street, Cleveland
6:00 PM

Saturday, September 26, 2026

Diamond Cut Barbershop
5139 Superior Avenue, Cleveland
11:00 AM

Saturday, October 3, 2026

Reverence Design Team
2062 S. Taylor Road
11:30 AM

Additional stops are expected as candidate schedules become available.

Come See Them Before You Vote for Them

There is something different about seeing a candidate five feet away instead of seeing that candidate on a campaign mailer.

There is something different about hearing an answer in a barbershop where another voter can immediately ask the follow-up question.

And there is something powerful about taking democracy into spaces that have quietly helped hold Black communities together for generations.

The Chair is not asking voters to support Diane Russell, Daryl T. Dennie or Fallon Radigan because they appeared at a barbershop.

It is giving voters the opportunity to do something far more important.

Meet them.

Question them.

Listen to them.

Judge them for yourself.

The candidates are asking for a seat on the bench.

Before Election Day, Black Cleveland is offering them another seat first.

The Chair.

Before Benjamin O. Davis Jr. commanded the Tuskegee Airmen, before he became a general and before West Point placed his name on one of its barracks, he was a young Black cadet walking the halls of an institution where many of his classmates had already decided he did not belong.

Davis entered the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1932.

What followed was nearly four years of deliberate social isolation.

White cadets subjected Davis to a practice known as “silencing.” They spoke to him when military duty required it, but outside of official business, many refused to acknowledge him. He had no roommate and was largely excluded from the ordinary friendships, conversations and relationships that were part of cadet life.

The purpose was clear. The isolation was intended to make him quit.

He never did.

“It was designed to make me buckle, but I refused to buckle,” Davis later recalled.

The story is often told as a chapter in West Point history or the history of the Tuskegee Airmen. But Cleveland has a rightful place in it as well.

Cleveland Helped Shape Him

Davis was born in Washington, D.C., in 1912, the son of Benjamin O. Davis Sr., who would later become the first Black general in the U.S. Army.

Because of his father’s military assignments, the family moved several times. In the 1920s, they came to Cleveland, where the younger Davis spent important years of his childhood and adolescence.

He attended Cleveland’s Central High School and graduated in 1929. He later attended Western Reserve University before eventually entering West Point.

That makes Davis more than a distant national figure with a passing connection to the city. Cleveland was part of his development before the military knew his name and before history understood what he would become.

At West Point, Davis entered an environment already known for its extraordinary academic and military demands. Cadets trained together, studied together, ate together and relied heavily on one another.

Davis was expected to meet those same standards while being deliberately denied much of the camaraderie available to everyone else.

The isolation continued year after year.

It is an important distinction because Davis had not violated the academy’s honor code or committed an offense deserving punishment. His presence itself was the issue for those who believed a Black man did not belong there.

He had technically been admitted into the institution.

That did not mean the institution had fully accepted him.

He Graduated Anyway

In 1936, Davis graduated from West Point, becoming only the fourth Black graduate in the academy’s history and the first in nearly half a century.

He also finished in the upper portion of his class.

His achievement exposed the failure of the campaign against him. Four years of isolation had not pushed him out. It had not prevented him from meeting the academy’s standards. It had not stopped him from becoming an officer.

The next barrier appeared almost immediately.

Davis wanted to become a military aviator, but the Army did not have a place for Black officers in its aviation units. He was instead assigned to the all-Black 24th Infantry Regiment.

Once again, his qualifications were not the issue.

Race was.

That changed as the United States slowly moved toward creating a program to train Black military pilots. Davis was selected for pilot training at Tuskegee, Alabama, and earned his wings in 1942.

He would soon become one of the most important figures in the history of Black military aviation.

From West Point Isolation to Combat Command

Davis commanded the 99th Fighter Squadron, the first operational Black military flying unit in the United States armed forces.

He later commanded the 332nd Fighter Group, remembered today as the legendary Red Tails.

The Tuskegee Airmen were fighting more than an overseas war. Their performance was being watched by military officials who still questioned whether Black pilots possessed the intelligence, discipline and ability required for combat aviation.

Davis understood the larger stakes.

When criticism threatened the future of the Black aviation program, he defended his pilots and challenged claims that they were incapable of performing at the required level.

Their combat record ultimately became part of the evidence that helped discredit longstanding arguments supporting military segregation.

There was also an unmistakable irony.

Only a few years earlier, cadets at West Point had refused to speak to Davis.

Now American pilots were depending on men under his command to protect bombers flying dangerous missions over Europe.

The Black cadet they had attempted to isolate had become a combat commander.

Rising Through the Air Force

Davis continued serving after World War II and remained in uniform when the U.S. Air Force became a separate military branch.

His career continued to break barriers.

In 1954, he became the first Black general officer in the United States Air Force. He eventually retired in 1970 as a lieutenant general after decades of military service.

Nearly three decades later, President Bill Clinton promoted the retired Davis to four-star general in 1998.

The rank placed him among the most senior military officers in American history.

His relationship with Cleveland also continued.

After leaving active military service, Davis briefly served as Cleveland’s public safety director under Mayor Carl B. Stokes, another historic Black figure whose rise helped reshape the city’s political landscape.

For Cleveland, Davis therefore represents something unusual. The city appears in both the early and later chapters of his public life.

West Point Eventually Put His Name on the Building

Perhaps no part of Davis’s story captures its historical reversal better than what happened decades after he graduated.

In 2015, West Point announced that a new cadet barracks would be named Davis Barracks in his honor.

The symbolism was difficult to miss.

A Black cadet who had once lived without a roommate because other cadets refused to live with him would now have generations of West Point cadets living in a building bearing his name.

The classmates who attempted to make him invisible are largely unknown today.

Benjamin O. Davis Jr. is not.

His life became part of the history of West Point, the United States Air Force, the Tuskegee Airmen and the broader struggle of Black Americans to force institutions to live up to the principles they claimed to represent.

Cleveland belongs in that story too.

Before the general’s stars, before the Red Tails and before West Point placed his name on a barracks, there was a young Benjamin Davis attending school in Cleveland and preparing for a future few people around him could have imagined.

West Point gave him four years of silence.

History gave Benjamin O. Davis Jr. the last word.

DigitalC was questioned when Cleveland bet on its ambitious broadband model. Less than three years later, the Cleveland-based nonprofit is collecting national awards, exporting its model to Detroit and putting the city in the middle of a national conversation about affordable internet.

CLEVELAND — There is something particularly satisfying about watching a Cleveland organization win on a national stage.

It becomes even more meaningful when that organization was told, in one form or another, that what it was attempting might not work.

This August in Houston, DigitalC walked into the 2026 Broadband Communities Summit nominated for three awards and walked away recognized with three of the broadband industry’s national honors.

DigitalC was named Broadband Provider of the Year.

It won the Customer Experience Award.

And DigitalC Chief Executive Officer Joshua Edmonds received the Broadband Visionary Award, recognizing leadership that is helping change the direction of the broadband industry. (GlobeNewswire)

That is an impressive night for any internet service provider.

It is especially impressive for a nonprofit headquartered at Cleveland’s MidTown Tech Hive on Euclid Avenue that, just a few years ago, was standing before Cleveland City Council trying to convince elected officials that it could actually do what it was promising.

Today, the conversation is very different.

The organization Cleveland was debating is now being recognized nationally.

And the model being developed in Cleveland is beginning to travel.

Three awards, one Cleveland organization

The Broadband Communities Awards have been part of the industry’s national summit since 2004. This year’s competition drew a record number of entries, according to DigitalC, with winners selected through an external judging process. Broadband Communities reported that nearly three dozen industry judges participated in selecting the 2026 honorees.

DigitalC didn’t win an obscure side category.

It won Broadband Provider of the Year, placing the Cleveland nonprofit in competition with internet providers from across the country.

The Customer Experience Award recognized something equally important: what happens after the technology is installed.

DigitalC’s model combines high-speed home internet with straightforward pricing, local customer support, installation assistance and digital-skills resources. That matters because closing the digital divide was never simply about putting equipment on poles or antennas on buildings. The question has always been whether people can afford the connection, whether they can depend on it and whether they know how to use it to improve their lives.

Then came the individual recognition.

Edmonds received the Broadband Visionary Award for his leadership in building a community-based broadband model that brings technology, affordability, customer service and neighborhood partnerships together.

For Cleveland, that recognition deserves some attention.

Edmonds represents a generation of younger executives being asked to lead institutions through problems that older systems have struggled to solve. Broadband access is one of them.

He inherited an organization with history, expectations and skeptics. He then accepted an assignment that was extraordinarily ambitious: help build an affordable broadband network capable of reaching virtually an entire major American city.

The results are becoming difficult to ignore.

Look at the numbers

DigitalC launched its current citywide Cleveland initiative in January 2024.

Since then, according to the organization, it has completed a next-generation citywide broadband network in less than 18 months.

More than 12,500 households have been connected to high-speed home internet, representing more than 31,000 residents.

More than 30,000 residents have received digital-skills training.

And what began as a Cleveland strategy has now expanded into Detroit.

Those numbers make the awards easier to understand.

This isn’t recognition based simply on a promising idea.

Something was actually built.

People were actually connected.

Residents were actually trained.

And another major American city is now investing in adapting the model.

Rocket Community Fund announced a $3.5 million investment in the Detroit Last Mile Initiative, working with DigitalC and the Detroit Housing Commission. The initiative is expected in its initial phase to support broadband access for as many as 2,400 households and 6,000 Detroit residents. It builds upon an earlier DigitalC pilot serving families in Detroit public housing. (Rocket Community Fund)

Think about what that means for Cleveland.

Cities like Cleveland are frequently encouraged to look elsewhere for models.

We study Atlanta.

We study Charlotte.

We study Washington.

We study Detroit.

We attend conferences and come home asking what Cleveland should copy.

In this case, somebody else is looking at something developed here.

Detroit is adapting a Cleveland model.

That should matter to us.

This road was not easy

It would be revisionist history to pretend everybody applauded when this started.

They didn’t.

When Mayor Justin Bibb’s administration proposed investing $20 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding into DigitalC’s citywide broadband effort in 2023, members of Cleveland City Council raised serious questions about whether the organization could scale quickly enough to deliver what it promised.

The original vision was enormous: expand affordable service throughout Cleveland and ultimately make the network available to more than 170,000 households. The proposed residential service was $18 per month. (Home | City of Cleveland Ohio)

Council temporarily paused the proposal.

DigitalC’s previous performance was questioned.

Edmonds was questioned.

The organization’s ability to grow from a relatively small provider into something capable of serving an entire city was questioned. (Signal Cleveland)

And the skepticism did not immediately disappear.

DigitalC missed its 2024 household subscription benchmark, connecting roughly 2,800 households instead of the contract goal of 3,500. Cleveland City Council consequently withheld nearly $1 million in performance funding. (Signal Cleveland)

That could have become the defining moment.

Instead, DigitalC adjusted.

And then it delivered.

For 2025, the contract required DigitalC to add 4,700 eligible household subscriptions and provide digital-adoption services to 10,000 residents.

Cleveland’s Bureau of Internal Audit verified 4,862 eligible new household subscriptions and 10,105 eligible digital-adoption records.

Both targets were exceeded.

Cleveland City Council subsequently authorized DigitalC’s full $4.35 million performance payment. (DigitalC)

That distinction matters.

The story is not that DigitalC never faced adversity.

The story is that it encountered adversity, was held accountable, adjusted and produced measurable results.

There is leadership in that, too.

Cleveland should recognize what is happening here

Sometimes a city’s proximity to its own institutions makes achievement harder to appreciate.

We see the people involved.

We know the politics.

We remember every argument.

We remember every Council hearing and every disagreement.

Then somebody hundreds of miles away looks at the exact same work and sees innovation.

That appears to be happening with DigitalC.

Broadband Communities did not give DigitalC one award in 2026.

It gave the Cleveland organization recognition for the provider itself, for the experience it gives customers, and for the vision of the CEO leading it.

And these awards did not arrive in isolation.

DigitalC previously received the Broadband Communities Community Improvement Award in 2024. In 2025, it received a Fierce Network Innovation Award for Digital Divide Impact alongside Tarana Wireless. Its low-cost internet offering has also received recognition from the National Digital Inclusion Alliance.

There is now a pattern.

Cleveland built something.

The industry noticed.

And the recognition may be moving beyond the United States. DigitalC has now been shortlisted for two 2026 World Communication Awards — the Connected Communities Award for its Canopy network and the Social Contribution Award — placing the Cleveland organization alongside telecommunications companies from around the world. Winners will be announced in London in November. (Terrapinn)

More than broadband

The importance of DigitalC’s work goes beyond internet speed.

A reliable home internet connection touches education, employment, entrepreneurship, healthcare, banking, government services and almost every other doorway into the modern economy.

For decades, conversations about Cleveland’s digital divide documented who was disconnected.

DigitalC is trying to build the infrastructure that changes that conversation.

The organization’s model also challenges the idea that residents must choose between affordability and quality.

That may ultimately be one of its most significant contributions.

As Edmonds said following the awards, DigitalC set out to solve affordability without sacrificing quality.

The broader industry is now watching to see whether that can be done at scale.

Cleveland is becoming part of that experiment — and increasingly, part of the answer.

Give Cleveland its flowers

There will be additional benchmarks.

There should be continued oversight.

There will undoubtedly be more questions.

That is what happens when public dollars, ambitious goals and major infrastructure projects intersect.

But accountability should work both ways.

When organizations miss, we should say they missed.

When they correct course, we should acknowledge the correction.

And when a Cleveland-based organization wins three national awards in one year, surpasses performance targets, builds a citywide network in less than 18 months, connects tens of thousands of people, trains tens of thousands more and begins exporting its model to another major American city, Cleveland should be able to say something very simple:

This is impressive.

DigitalC deserves recognition.

So does the team that built it.

And Joshua Edmonds deserves recognition as a next-generation CEO who accepted an extraordinarily difficult assignment, endured the scrutiny that came with it and now finds himself receiving one of his industry’s national awards for visionary leadership.

For years, Cleveland was used as an example of America’s digital divide. Now it is home to what the industry refers to as America’s fastest growing community-based network, taking Cleveland from worst to first in connectivity.

Now a Cleveland organization is being studied for how to close it.

That is a very different story.

And it is one worth celebrating.

Some of the most expensive decisions I have made or witnessed in nonprofit leadership never appeared as a line item on a financial statement.

There was no invoice for waiting too long. No expense category for pursuing the wrong opportunity. No budget line for executive attention spent on something that was never going to produce a meaningful return.

But the organization paid for all of it.

Nonprofit leaders are accustomed to thinking carefully about expenses. We scrutinize budgets, negotiate contracts, compare bids and explain variances. Boards review financial statements and funders want to know how their dollars were spent. We are expected to demonstrate that resources are being used responsibly.

We should be.

But responsible stewardship requires us to think beyond what appears on the financial statements.

Some decisions consume staff capacity. Others divert leadership attention, create long-term obligations or prevent an organization from pursuing something more valuable. Those costs are harder to quantify, but they are no less real.

And sometimes the most expensive thing an organization can receive is something that costs nothing at all.

Free Is Not the Same as Affordable

Community organizations are frequently offered resources with the best of intentions.

A building is donated. A vehicle is transferred. Furniture becomes available. Someone offers space. A partner provides equipment.

On paper, it can look like an obvious win. The organization receives an asset without having to purchase it.

But acquisition cost is only one measure of cost.

A donated building may come with deferred maintenance, outdated systems, insurance costs, utilities and repairs. A donated vehicle still needs fuel, maintenance, insurance and eventually replacement. Free equipment may require technology upgrades, staff training or storage.

The gift may be generous. It may even be valuable.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the organization can afford to accept it.

I have seen enough community development projects to know that real estate is particularly good at illustrating this distinction. Owning property can create tremendous opportunity for a nonprofit. It can also create an obligation that lasts decades.

The important question isn’t simply, “What will it cost us to acquire this?”

It is also, “What will it cost us to own it?”

That second question is often much harder.

Money Isn’t the Only Resource Organizations Spend

There is another organizational resource that rarely receives the same scrutiny as cash: time.

Executive time in particular is expensive.

A CEO spending weeks pursuing a funding opportunity that is poorly aligned with the organization’s strategy is making an investment, whether anyone records it that way or not.

So is a development team completing a complicated application for a relatively small grant. So is a program director spending hours maintaining a partnership that produces little value. So is senior leadership repeatedly trying to rescue an initiative that should have ended months ago.

None of those activities necessarily generate an unusual expense on the financial statements.

They still have a cost.

Every hour spent pursuing one opportunity is an hour unavailable for another. Every meeting has an opportunity cost. Every new initiative competes with something already underway.

This is where nonprofit management becomes more complicated than simply staying within budget.

An organization can be financially responsible on paper while still deploying its people and attention poorly.

The Wrong Money Can Be Expensive Too

Funding itself can carry hidden costs.

A grant award is usually celebrated, and understandably so. But the size of an award tells you very little about its actual value to the organization.

What does it require the organization to deliver?

Does the funding cover the true cost of delivering it?

Does it require additional staff?

Is there a match?

How complicated is the reporting?

Does the organization have to spend money before receiving reimbursement?

What happens when the funding ends?

And perhaps most importantly, does the opportunity move the organization toward where it has already decided to go?

An organization can win a grant and still lose strategically.

That happens when funding creates a program the organization never intended to operate, requires capacity it doesn’t have or pulls leadership away from higher-value priorities.

Revenue is not automatically good revenue.

Sometimes saying no to money is an act of stewardship.

Waiting Has a Cost

Then there are the costs created by decisions we don’t make.

A facility problem is postponed because the repair is expensive. Several years later, the repair becomes a replacement.

Leadership knows a revenue source is going away but delays developing alternatives.

A struggling program continues because closing it would be difficult.

A position remains vacant because the organization wants to save money, while higher-paid senior staff absorb the work.

A technology investment is deferred year after year while employees continue performing manually what could have been automated.

In each case, doing nothing can feel financially conservative.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes it is simply moving the expense into the future, where it becomes larger.

One of the hardest responsibilities of leadership is recognizing when protecting today’s budget is creating tomorrow’s problem.

Opportunity Cost Belongs in the Strategy Conversation

The nonprofit sector has become increasingly sophisticated about measuring impact. We ask what changed, how many people were served and whether programs produced the outcomes we intended.

I think we need to become equally sophisticated about understanding what our choices prevent us from doing.

That is ultimately what opportunity cost is about.

When we choose one investment, we are choosing not to make another.

When we pursue one partnership, we are allocating capacity that cannot be used somewhere else.

When we accept one funding opportunity, we may be committing the organization to work that will shape staffing and programming for years.

When we hold onto an asset, we are also choosing not to deploy the resources tied up in maintaining it differently.

These aren’t merely financial decisions. They are strategic decisions with financial consequences.

And yet many organizations evaluate them separately.

The finance committee looks at the numbers. Program staff evaluate services. Development pursues funding. Facilities manages buildings. Leadership manages partnerships.

Each decision may make sense within its own lane.

The real question is what happens when you look at all of them together.

That is where some of the most important conversations begin.

What Is Your Organization Paying For That You Cannot See?

This is a question I find increasingly useful in my work with organizations.

Not simply: Where are you spending too much money?

That’s usually the easier question.

The harder questions are about what doesn’t immediately appear on a financial statement.

Where is leadership attention being consumed?

Which assets are requiring more resources than anticipated?

Which programs continue primarily because they have always existed?

Which funding sources create more organizational burden than their dollar value suggests?

Which decisions are being postponed because addressing them today feels expensive?

And which opportunities aren’t being pursued because organizational capacity is tied up somewhere else?

The answers are rarely contained in a single spreadsheet.

They require looking at the organization as a whole — its money, people, assets, commitments, partnerships and priorities — and understanding how they interact.

That is part of the work we do at CEO 360.

Because sometimes an organization doesn’t need another cost-cutting exercise.

It needs a clearer understanding of what its current decisions are actually costing.

The financial statements can tell you where the money went.

They cannot always tell you what the organization gave up along the way.

And that may be the more expensive number.

With more than two decades of experience in community development, real estate strategy, and organizational leadership, Joy Johnson brings a seasoned, solutions-focused voice to the field. She is committed to helping communities and institutions avoid systemic pitfalls and build models that truly work. To reach Joy, call (216) 238-2415.

More than a century ago, Ali was building an international Black media network, connecting Africa, the Caribbean and Black America—and helping shape the thinking of a young Marcus Garvey.

Before Marcus Garvey built one of the largest Black political movements of the twentieth century, before millions of Black people across the world knew his name, and before Garveyism became an international force, Garvey was a young Jamaican still developing his understanding of race, empire, economics and Black power.

In London, he encountered a man who helped expand that understanding.

His name was Dusé Mohamed Ali.

Ali was a journalist, publisher, writer and Pan-African thinker who understood something more than a century ago that remains relevant today: a people who do not control the institutions that tell their story will eventually find themselves living inside someone else’s version of it.

Ali did not simply believe Black people needed better coverage.

He understood that Black people needed their own media institutions.

That distinction matters.

His influence on Marcus Garvey is important, but his larger contribution may have been demonstrating what independent Black media could become when it stopped treating the experiences of Black people as isolated events and began connecting those experiences across cities, countries and continents.

Long before the internet made a global Black conversation possible, Dusé Mohamed Ali was attempting to build one with ink, paper and a printing press.

A Newspaper at the Center of the Empire

In 1912, Ali helped launch the African Times and Orient Review in London.

The location mattered.

London was not simply another European city. It was the political, economic and administrative center of the British Empire. Decisions made there affected millions of people throughout Africa, the Caribbean, India and other parts of the world.

Ali chose to publish from inside the center of that power.

The African Times and Orient Review covered events in Africa, the Caribbean, the United States, Egypt, India and other parts of the colonized world.

It created a place where African, Caribbean, Asian and other anti-colonial voices could speak to one another.

More importantly, readers could begin to see relationships between things that appeared, on the surface, to be separate.

A person in Jamaica could read about what was happening in Africa.

An African reader could learn about racial conditions in the United States.

Someone living under British rule in India could recognize similarities between the political and economic systems operating there and those operating elsewhere in the empire.

Ali was doing something that remains one of the most important responsibilities of independent media.

He was connecting dots that powerful institutions had little interest in connecting.

That was not simply journalism.

It was political education.

And British authorities noticed.

During World War I, colonial officials restricted circulation of the publication in parts of the empire because of concerns about its political influence.

Think about what that means.

The British Empire was concerned about colonized people reading information about one another.

Because information can become recognition.

Recognition can become organization.

And organization can become power.

Then Marcus Garvey Walked Into His World

Marcus Garvey arrived in London in 1912.

He already understood printing and newspapers. He had worked in the printing trade and had experience with journalism in Jamaica and Central America.

But London exposed him to something larger.

There, Garvey encountered African intellectuals, Caribbean activists, anti-colonial thinkers and people discussing race and empire on an international scale.

Dusé Mohamed Ali was part of that world.

Garvey spent time around Ali and the African Times and Orient Review. Ali became an important influence on the younger man, helping expose him to a broader Pan-African understanding of the world.

In 1913, Ali’s publication carried an article by the 26-year-old Garvey titled “The British West Indies in the Mirror of Civilization.”

The article examined the conditions facing Black people in the Caribbean and placed those conditions within a much larger conversation about race and empire.

That way of thinking would eventually become central to Garveyism.

The condition of Jamaicans could not be separated from the condition of Black Americans.

The condition of Black Americans could not be separated from Africa.

And Africa could not be understood apart from the political and economic systems that were extracting its resources and controlling its people.

A year later, Garvey returned to Jamaica and founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League.

The UNIA would eventually grow into one of the largest Black organizations the world had ever seen.

Ali did not create Marcus Garvey.

Garvey brought his own experiences, ambitions, personality and intellect to the movement he eventually built.

But Ali helped introduce him to an international framework that allowed Garvey to see Black struggle beyond the boundaries of one island, one country or one community.

And Garvey also saw something else while working in Ali’s orbit.

He saw what a newspaper could do.

Garvey Didn’t Just Build a Movement. He Built Media.

When Garvey’s movement exploded in the United States, one of its most powerful institutions was not a political office.

It was not a government agency.

It was not a university.

It was a newspaper.

The Negro World became the voice of the UNIA and one of the most influential Black publications of its generation.

It published news, history, political commentary, literature and reports from across the African diaspora.

Its pages carried the work and ideas of some of the most important Black thinkers of the period.

But what made the Negro World powerful was not simply who wrote for it.

It was the way the newspaper looked at the world.

It examined world events through Black interests.

That is different from simply having Black reporters inside an existing media structure.

The Negro World told Black people what was happening to other Black people.

It challenged the prevailing European narrative about Africa.

It documented racial violence.

It discussed Black business and economics.

It celebrated Black achievement.

It taught history.

It spread political ideas.

And it gave Black people separated by thousands of miles the sense that they were participating in the same struggle.

Eventually, the relationship between Ali and Garvey came full circle.

Ali came to the United States and became associated with Garvey’s movement. He also contributed to the Negro World.

The younger man who had once written for Ali now controlled an international media institution of his own.

That is one of the most overlooked connections in the history of Black media.

Black Media Was Never Supposed to Be Decoration

Ali’s story raises a larger question about the purpose of Black media.

Independent Black media was never supposed to exist simply so Black people could see themselves represented inside the same narratives produced elsewhere.

Representation matters.

But ownership of perspective matters more.

There is a difference between reporting that a Black neighborhood lost businesses and asking who acquired the property after those businesses disappeared.

There is a difference between reporting that government funding was cut and asking where the money went instead.

There is a difference between reporting that a Black institution is struggling and examining the banking, contracting, political and economic systems surrounding that institution.

One form of journalism tells you what happened.

The other helps you understand why it happened.

Ali’s journalism was built around the second idea.

He helped readers understand that events taking place in different countries could be symptoms of the same larger political and economic system.

That is what independent journalism can do when it is operating at its highest level.

It provides more than information.

It provides context.

And context changes how people understand power.

A people who only know what happened, but never understand why it happened, will always be vulnerable to having it happen again.

From London to Lagos

Ali’s work did not end with Marcus Garvey.

He eventually moved to Nigeria and continued publishing.

In 1933, he established The Comet in Lagos.

Once again, Ali refused to treat local events as though they existed in isolation.

The newspaper covered African politics alongside developments in Europe and the United States.

It examined fascism, colonialism, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, international politics and racial conditions abroad as matters relevant to African readers.

Ali understood that something happening thousands of miles away could eventually affect the political and economic future of people at home.

That worldview would become increasingly important as African independence movements grew.

The Comet became part of the broader intellectual environment surrounding Nigerian nationalism and the generation that would eventually challenge British colonial rule.

Consider the historical journey.

Ali publishes in London.

Marcus Garvey enters his orbit.

Garvey goes on to build the UNIA and the Negro World.

Ali later contributes to Garvey’s newspaper.

Ali then moves to West Africa and establishes another influential publication.

The journalism moves with the movement.

This was not media standing outside history and taking notes.

The media was helping create history.

There Was a Black Press Before Ali

Dusé Mohamed Ali did not invent Black journalism.

Black Americans had already built a powerful newspaper tradition.

In 1827, Samuel Cornish and John B. Russwurm launched Freedom’s Journal, the first Black-owned and operated newspaper in the United States.

Its opening editorial included a declaration that would define generations of Black journalism:

Black people had been spoken for by others for too long.

They needed to speak for themselves.

That tradition would eventually produce institutions such as the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Baltimore Afro-American, the New York Amsterdam News, Ebony, Jet, Black radio and countless local publications.

Ali’s particular contribution was different.

He helped demonstrate the possibilities of an international Black press.

He understood that what happened in Africa mattered in Harlem.

What happened in Harlem mattered in Jamaica.

What happened in London could shape life in Lagos.

And decisions made inside governments, financial institutions and colonial administrations could affect Black communities thousands of miles away.

Those communities needed media capable of seeing the entire board.

The Lesson for Black Media Today

We have more information available to us today than Dusé Mohamed Ali could possibly have imagined.

A story published in Cleveland can be read in Lagos seconds later.

A video recorded in Jamaica can circulate through London, Atlanta, Johannesburg and New York before the day is over.

We have smartphones, podcasts, streaming platforms, social media and instant communication.

Yet access to information is not the same thing as understanding.

In some ways, Ali’s challenge remains ours.

Black communities still receive politics as one story, economics as another, education as another, housing as another, development as another and international affairs as something happening somewhere far away.

But those stories often intersect.

A housing decision is also an economic story.

A banking decision can become a neighborhood-development story.

A contracting decision can become a Black-business story.

A political decision can determine who receives capital.

A decision made in Washington can change what happens in Cleveland.

A financial decision made in London or New York can affect communities in Africa.

Dusé Mohamed Ali understood that interconnectedness more than a century ago.

Marcus Garvey learned something from that worldview and eventually built a communications operation capable of reaching Black people around the world.

That should force those of us working in Black media today to ask ourselves what we believe our role actually is.

Are we simply producing content?

Are we chasing the same stories everyone else is chasing?

Are we measuring success by clicks and shares?

Or are we helping our communities understand the structures shaping their lives?

Because there is a difference between covering Black people and building informed Black people.

Ali understood the difference.

Garvey understood the difference.

And more than a century later, the question remains for Black media:

Will we simply report what happened to us—or will we explain why it happened, who benefited, how it connects to everything else and what our communities need to know before it happens again?

That may be the most important part of Dusé Mohamed Ali’s legacy.

Black leadership has more access to power than at almost any point in American history. The harder question is whether that access has strengthened our communities—or slowly changed the way some leaders see them.

Every oppressed community eventually has to confront an uncomfortable question: What happens when some of its leaders begin to benefit from the very system they were expected to challenge?

It is not a new problem.

In the New Testament, the Sadducees occupied a complicated place inside Jewish society. They were not foreigners. They were not outside agitators. They were part of the Jewish community, but many were also closely tied to the Temple establishment, the priestly class and the political order that existed under Roman occupation.

That position gave them influence. It also gave them something to protect.

That is what makes their story worth revisiting today.

The comparison is not that modern Black leaders are literally Sadducees. History does not work that neatly. The more useful question is whether a similar mindset can develop whenever leaders become deeply connected to institutions that reward access, stability and loyalty.

Black America has fought for generations to get into rooms that once excluded us.

That fight mattered.

We needed Black mayors, judges, legislators, nonprofit executives, pastors with institutional influence, corporate leaders, university administrators and people who could pick up the phone and reach decision-makers.

Representation matters. Access matters. Relationships matter.

But none of those things are the same as power.

And they are certainly not the same as progress.

A seat at the table is valuable only if something is being brought back from the table.

The danger begins when maintaining the relationship becomes more important than challenging the institution.

That is when access can become a trap.

A leader may begin with the intention of using relationships for the benefit of the community. Over time, however, the relationship itself can become valuable. The invitation matters. The appointment matters. The grant matters. The contract matters. The board seat matters. The photograph with the governor or mayor matters.

Soon, the cost of telling the truth gets higher.

That does not automatically mean corruption.

Sometimes the shift is much more subtle.

A leader may begin explaining the system to the community more often than explaining the community to the system.

People are told to be patient.

They are told change takes time.

They are told this is the best deal available.

They are told relationships must be preserved.

They are told not to embarrass partners.

Sometimes those arguments are legitimate.

But sometimes they become a language for protecting the status quo.

That is where the Sadducee comparison becomes uncomfortable.

In the Gospel of John, religious leaders became increasingly concerned about the growing influence of Jesus. Their concern was not simply theological. They worried that Rome might intervene and that they could lose their position inside the existing order.

That concern reveals something fundamental about leadership.

Once a person has a place inside power, losing that place can begin to feel like losing the mission itself.

Those are not the same thing.

Black America should be mature enough to examine that distinction.

We should be willing to ask whether some of our institutions have become more invested in being recognized by power than in forcing power to produce better outcomes.

We should ask whether access has become the measure of success.

We should ask whether some organizations have become so financially dependent on foundations, corporations, government agencies or political parties that confronting those institutions has become almost impossible.

We should ask whether leadership has become too comfortable.

Those questions are not attacks.

They are accountability.

And accountability becomes especially important when the gap between representation and outcomes remains wide.

Black faces can be present in government while Black businesses still struggle to win contracts.

Black executives can sit on influential boards while Black neighborhoods remain undercapitalized.

Black nonprofit leaders can administer major programs while families remain unable to build wealth.

Black political organizations can celebrate access while ownership, income and economic mobility remain stubbornly unequal.

At some point, we have to stop confusing visibility with victory.

Representation is important. But representation without measurable change can become symbolism with a salary attached to it.

The question is not whether Black leaders should work with institutions.

Of course they should.

The question is whether they still have the freedom to challenge those institutions when necessary.

Martin Luther King Jr. had access to presidents. He met with political leaders. He worked with major institutions and national organizations.

But access did not silence him.

When he believed the federal government was wrong, he said so.

When economic injustice demanded confrontation, he confronted it.

When war contradicted his moral convictions, he publicly challenged the government despite warnings that doing so could damage his standing.

King understood the difference between access and surrender.

That distinction deserves more attention today.

Leadership cannot simply mean being close enough to power to receive the phone call.

Leadership also has to mean being willing to make the phone call uncomfortable.

That is where the real test begins.

If a corporation funds your organization but harms the community, can you say so?

If a political party gives you access but repeatedly ignores Black economic interests, can you challenge it publicly?

If an elected official is your friend but supports policies that damage the neighborhood, can you oppose those policies?

If a foundation supports your work but refuses to fund the kinds of structural changes your community actually needs, can you say that?

If the answer is always no, then eventually we have to ask what the relationship is really producing.

This is not only about politicians.

Pastors should ask these questions.

Nonprofit executives should ask them.

Business leaders should ask them.

Consultants should ask them.

Civil-rights organizations should ask them.

Media leaders should ask them.

Anyone who claims to represent people should be willing to examine whether their relationships have begun to influence their judgment.

And perhaps the most difficult part of this conversation is that the question should not begin with someone else.

It should begin with us.

Have I become more concerned with protecting my access than protecting my people?

Do I define success by the number of powerful people who know my name, or by whether conditions improved for the people I say I serve?

Do I speak differently behind closed doors than I do publicly?

Have I become reluctant to challenge institutions because I enjoy being welcomed by them?

Would I risk a relationship if the interests of my community required it?

Those are not comfortable questions.

They are not supposed to be.

Leadership without self-examination eventually becomes performance.

The Sadducees offer a warning because they remind us that someone can belong to an oppressed community and still become deeply invested in an arrangement that preserves their own position.

That does not make every person with influence compromised.

It simply means influence comes with temptation.

The temptation to belong.

The temptation to remain invited.

The temptation to preserve the relationship.

The temptation to mistake proximity to power for power itself.

Black America fought too hard to enter these rooms to allow the rooms to redefine why we entered them.

We should have people everywhere decisions are being made.

But those people must never forget who sent them there.

The ultimate measure of leadership is not the access we acquire.

It is what happens to the people because we had it.

The Sadducee mindset is easiest to see in someone else. Leadership begins when we are willing to look for it in ourselves.

From Greenwood and Wilmington to Seneca Village, Detroit’s Black Bottom and Winston Willis’s Cleveland empire, American racism did not always arrive carrying a torch. Sometimes it arrived carrying a redevelopment plan, a court order and a smile.

America has two very different ways of destroying a community.

One is impossible to miss.

There are mobs. Guns. Flames. Bodies in the street. Businesses reduced to ashes.

The other can happen without a single window being broken.

There are condemnation notices. Building inspections. Foreclosures. Zoning decisions. Highway plans. Court orders. Eminent domain proceedings. Redevelopment authorities. Property valuations. Tax bills.

One looks like violence.

The other looks like paperwork.

But when the smoke clears — or the paperwork is finally signed — the result can be remarkably similar: Black people lose land, businesses, institutions and the ability to pass wealth from one generation to the next.

That distinction matters because much of America’s understanding of attacks on Black economic power begins and ends with what happened in the South and border states.

We know about the fires.

We talk much less about the fine print.

When Black Success Could Be Burned

Wilmington, North Carolina, was not simply the scene of racial violence in 1898. Before the massacre and coup, Wilmington had a thriving Black middle class, Black professionals, business owners and Black elected officials participating in a biracial political coalition.

White supremacists responded by overthrowing the elected government.

The office of the Black-owned Daily Record was burned. Black residents were killed. Elected officials were forced from office. Black leaders and business owners fled.

The coup shattered Black political and economic power in Wilmington for generations.

Then there was Greenwood.

By 1921, Tulsa’s Greenwood District had become one of the most prosperous Black communities in America. Its concentration of Black doctors, entrepreneurs, hotels, restaurants, churches, theaters and other businesses earned it the name “Black Wall Street.”

Then came May 31 and June 1.

An armed white mob descended on Greenwood. More than 1,100 homes were burned along with businesses, churches, a hospital, a school and a library. As many as 300 people may have been killed, and thousands were left homeless.

That story is finally becoming part of the American consciousness.

But there is another part of the Greenwood story that receives considerably less attention.

Black Wall Street came back.

Greenwood residents rebuilt despite attempts to use new zoning and building restrictions to prevent them from doing so. By the 1930s and 1940s, the community was again thriving.

Then another weapon arrived.

Highways.

Beginning decades after the massacre, highway construction and urban renewal cut through rebuilt Greenwood. Smithsonian has described this as Black Wall Street’s “second destruction.” This time there was no white mob carrying kerosene. Government plans and transportation policy did much of the work.

Greenwood may therefore be one of the clearest examples of both systems operating against Black wealth.

First came the mob.

Then came the map.

Seneca Village: Before There Was Central Park

Long before Greenwood, free Black New Yorkers were building something remarkable in Manhattan.

Beginning in 1825, Black families began purchasing property in an area that eventually became known as Seneca Village.

By 1855, approximately 225 people lived there, roughly two-thirds of them Black. The community contained homes, three churches and a school. More than half of its Black households owned property — an extraordinary rate of Black landownership for nineteenth-century New York.

Property ownership carried another enormous benefit. Under New York law at the time, Black men who met a property qualification could vote.

Then New York City decided to build Central Park.

The government used eminent domain.

By 1857, Seneca Village was gone.

Its houses were removed. Its residents dispersed. The community eventually disappeared so thoroughly from New York’s historical memory that scholars had to reconstruct its existence more than a century later.

There is an important historical distinction here.

Researchers working with the Central Park Conservancy say there is no evidence that officials selected the Central Park site specifically for the purpose of destroying Seneca Village. Research also suggests property owners were generally compensated at market values comparable with other owners whose land was taken.

That matters.

History should not be turned into conspiracy simply because conspiracy makes a better story.

But something else matters too.

A legally authorized action still eliminated one of Manhattan’s most significant communities of Black property owners.

Intent and impact are not the same question.

A check for the assessed value of a house does not recreate a community. It does not replace the church next door, the customer base down the street, the political power associated with concentrated landownership or the future appreciation of property that might otherwise remain inside a family for generations.

There does not have to be a burning cross for Black wealth to disappear.

Sometimes the government can take the land legally.

Detroit: When “Progress” Came Through the Neighborhood

Detroit tells the story even more clearly.

Black Bottom and the neighboring commercial district known as Paradise Valley became centers of Black life during the Great Migration.

By 1942, more than 300 Black-owned businesses were operating in Black Bottom and Paradise Valley — including restaurants, barber shops, beauty salons, hotels, doctors’ offices and drugstores.

Black Detroiters had already been restricted in where they could live through discriminatory housing practices and restrictive covenants.

Then the areas where Black residents had been concentrated were labeled for redevelopment.

The Housing Act of 1949 and Highway Act of 1956 provided the governmental machinery and money.

Buildings came down.

The Chrysler Freeway and what became I-375 went through the area. Lafayette Park rose on part of the former Black Bottom.

The Michigan Department of Transportation today explicitly acknowledges that I-375 was constructed as part of a larger urban-renewal project that cleared the redlined Black Bottom and Paradise Valley neighborhoods and created a historic environmental-justice harm.

No mob had to burn 300 businesses.

The bulldozers were authorized.

The money was appropriated.

The plans were approved.

And the neighborhood disappeared.

James Baldwin understood exactly what was happening.

In 1963, he reduced an entire era of American public policy to five devastating words:

“Urban renewal means Negro removal.”

Baldwin understood something about Northern racism that remains important today.

Moving north did not necessarily mean escaping Jim Crow. Writing about Harlem, Baldwin observed that Black Americans who migrated north did not simply escape the system; they encountered what he described as another “not-less-deadly variety.”

The signs changed.

The mechanisms changed.

The consequences did not always change with them.

Winston Willis and the Miracle on East 105th Street

Cleveland has its own version of this history.

His name is Winston Willis.

Willis founded the Jazz Temple in Cleveland in the early 1960s. It became one of the city’s great jazz venues, hosting musicians including Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Cannonball Adderley and Herbie Hancock.

It also attracted interracial audiences.

After threats and violence, the Jazz Temple was bombed and ultimately closed.

Willis did not disappear.

He got bigger.

Around East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue, Willis acquired commercial real estate and built an extraordinary collection of businesses through University Circle Properties Development.

There were restaurants.

Movie theaters.

Retail shops.

Entertainment venues.

A food market.

A money exchange.

Clubs.

Studios.

Adult-oriented businesses were part of the portfolio, but they were hardly the entire portfolio.

At its height, Willis controlled roughly 28 businesses and employed hundreds of people. A 1973 Cleveland Press story called what he had created the “Miracle on E. 105th Street.”

And he had built it in one of the most strategically valuable areas in Cleveland — between powerful medical, educational and cultural institutions with their own visions for University Circle.

By the 1960s and 1970s, municipal officials and University Circle institutions were looking toward redevelopment of the East 105th and Euclid area.

Willis was sitting in the middle of it.

Then came years of lawsuits, inspections, tax disputes, criminal proceedings, foreclosures and battles with the city.

Cleveland Historical, a public-history project based at Cleveland State University, describes Willis as having been locked in legal battles with the city throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s. It reports that after city investigations, Willis was imprisoned, his property was confiscated and nearly all of his properties were ultimately demolished as redevelopment moved forward and the William O. Walker Center was constructed.

Willis and members of his family have made a much stronger allegation: that city officials and powerful institutions deliberately used the legal system to destroy his business empire and take his land.

Those allegations should be described as allegations, not settled judicial findings.

Willis pursued litigation alleging that defendants conspired to deprive him of property without due process. Federal courts dismissed later claims, and a Sixth Circuit decision in 1990 held that his renewed challenge to a foreclosure was barred because the underlying foreclosure dispute had already been adjudicated.

That legal history is important.

But so is the physical history.

A Black man controlled a remarkable concentration of businesses and valuable commercial real estate at one of Cleveland’s most important intersections.

He fought powerful public and private institutions over that land.

And eventually, his business district disappeared.

Today, almost nothing about driving through University Circle tells a visitor that a Black entrepreneur once controlled an empire there.

That raises a question worth asking even without accepting every allegation Willis made:

If Black economic power disappears through foreclosure, litigation, condemnation or redevelopment rather than fire, is the economic destruction somehow less real?

Why Dr. King Was Shaken by Chicago

This is also why Martin Luther King Jr.’s experience in Chicago deserves far more attention.

King had marched through Birmingham.

He had confronted Bull Connor.

He had seen police dogs.

He had seen fire hoses.

He had marched from Selma.

He had watched Southern authorities jail, beat and terrorize demonstrators.

Then he went north.

The Chicago Freedom Movement increasingly focused on housing discrimination — particularly the systems that kept Black families from renting or purchasing homes in white neighborhoods.

Activists tested real estate offices. Black prospective tenants and buyers were routinely denied opportunities that were available to whites.

Then King and other demonstrators marched into white neighborhoods.

On August 5, 1966, during a march near Marquette Park, King was struck in the head by a rock.

Bricks and bottles flew.

The crowd screamed racial slurs.

Some demonstrators encountered Nazi symbols and chants of “white power.”

King was stunned.

His actual words are more powerful than the version that is sometimes repeated today:

“I have never seen, even in Mississippi and Alabama, mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I’ve seen in Chicago.”

King did not literally say Chicago was worse in every respect than Birmingham, Selma, Memphis or every Southern city in which he had worked.

What he said was specific.

The hostility of the mobs shocked a man who had already confronted some of the most notorious white supremacists in the South.

Why?

Partly because Chicago disrupted the comforting American idea that racism was a Southern disease.

In Birmingham, segregation announced itself.

There were laws.

Signs.

Sheriffs.

Governors standing in schoolhouse doors.

Chicago could describe segregation differently.

Property values.

Neighborhood character.

Private housing choices.

Real estate practices.

Local control.

King had moved from confronting a system that frequently said “No Negroes allowed” to confronting one capable of producing many of the same results without putting those words on a sign.

That can be harder to fight.

The enemy is easier to identify when he is standing in the doorway.

It is harder when he is sitting across the table telling you that he agrees with equality — but this particular development, this particular neighborhood, this particular loan, this particular property or this particular moment simply will not work.

Malcolm X Warned About the Smile

Malcolm X had his own metaphor for this distinction.

The wolf and the fox.

Malcolm argued that the conservative racial opponent was often like a wolf: you could see the teeth and recognize the threat.

But he described the white liberal as a fox.

The teeth were still there.

The difference was the smile.

“The white liberals are foxes,” Malcolm said, describing people who could show their teeth while appearing to smile. He warned that this version of political power could be more dangerous precisely because Black people might trust it.

Malcolm’s warning should not be lazily converted into a 2026 Democratic-versus-Republican talking point.

His argument was larger than a party label.

It was about power.

He was warning Black America against confusing friendly language with aligned interests.

A wolf tells you he opposes you.

A fox tells you he supports you while maneuvering you somewhere else.

Put Malcolm beside Baldwin and the history becomes difficult to ignore.

A city can call displacement urban renewal.

A bank can call exclusion risk management.

A developer can call displacement revitalization.

A government can call taking land eminent domain.

A real estate industry can call segregation market preference.

An institution can call expansion economic development.

None of those phrases tells you who ultimately lost the property.

America Taught Us to Look for the Fire

None of this means racism was gentle in the North.

It was not.

Northern cities had bombings, riots, restrictive covenants, police brutality and white mobs of their own.

Nor does it mean every redevelopment project involving a Black neighborhood was conceived as a racist conspiracy.

History is more complicated than that.

But the geographic distinction still teaches us something.

Where naked white supremacy could operate openly, Black advancement could be confronted with violence.

Where overt racial violence became politically unacceptable, institutions possessed other tools.

Law.

Finance.

Real estate.

Planning.

Regulation.

Taxation.

Infrastructure.

And courts.

A fire can destroy a business overnight.

A freeway can destroy its customer base forever.

A mob can steal what is inside a building.

A foreclosure can change who owns the land underneath it.

A riot can scatter a community.

Eminent domain can do the same thing with signatures.

That is why the history of Black economic destruction cannot stop with Tulsa.

We should ask what happened after Greenwood rebuilt.

We should ask what existed before Central Park.

We should ask what stood where I-375 stands in Detroit.

Cleveland should ask what existed at East 105th and Euclid before the institutions surrounding that intersection became what they are today.

And every city should learn to ask a few uncomfortable questions whenever an old Black neighborhood disappears in the name of something new:

Who owned the land before redevelopment?

Who decided its value?

Who received compensation?

Who was able to relocate?

Who lost customers?

Who received the redevelopment contracts?

Who received the new property?

Whose assets appreciated afterward?

And whose children inherited nothing?

Those questions do not require conspiracy theories.

They require deeds, court files, planning documents, tax records and maps.

For generations, Black history taught us to look for the smoke.

Maybe it is time we learned to read the paperwork.

“Fail fast.”

“Take risks.”

“Experiment.”

“Fail forward.”

These phrases have become part of the language of entrepreneurship and innovation. We tell leaders not to fear failure because every unsuccessful attempt provides information that makes the next attempt better.

There is truth in that advice.

But there is also a privilege embedded in it that we rarely acknowledge.

Failure is only a learning opportunity when you have enough capacity to survive the lesson.

For many nonprofits and community-based organizations, failure is expensive. There may not be another round of investment coming. There may not be enough unrestricted cash to cover a program that underperforms. There may not be sufficient operating reserves to absorb an unexpected building repair, delayed reimbursement or funding decision that does not go the organization’s way.

When the margin for error is that small, failing forward starts to look like a luxury.

The Difference Is Runway

Consider two organizations testing a new program.

Both invest staff time and money. Both discover after six months that the original model isn’t working.

The first organization has adequate operating reserves, diverse revenue sources and reliable financial reporting. Leadership reviews the results, identifies what went wrong, adjusts the model and tries again.

The second organization is operating with little unrestricted cash and depends heavily on a handful of funding sources. The same unsuccessful pilot creates a budget gap. Staff positions may be affected. Other programs may have to subsidize the loss. Leadership spends the next several months trying to replace the money.

The experiment was the same.

The consequences were not.

We sometimes attribute that difference to leadership when the real difference is capitalization.

The first organization had room to learn.

The second had to be right.

Undercapitalization Changes How Organizations Lead

This matters because chronic undercapitalization does more than create financial problems. It influences organizational behavior.

When every dollar is already committed, leaders become understandably cautious. They continue programs longer than they should because replacing the revenue attached to them feels impossible. They hesitate to invest in technology, talent or new approaches because the return isn’t guaranteed. They pursue restricted funding because it is available, even when it isn’t perfectly aligned with the organization’s strategy.

Eventually, scarcity can become embedded in decision-making.

That is particularly concerning in community development and nonprofit work because these organizations are often being asked to solve problems that require experimentation.

Neighborhood conditions change. Funding environments change. Community needs change. Technology changes. Government priorities change.

Organizations need the ability to respond.

Yet we often expect community-based organizations to innovate while funding them in ways that leave almost no room for experimentation.

Those two expectations are incompatible.

Capital Is Not Just About Growth

When we talk about capital, the conversation often centers on expansion.

How do we finance the next project?

How do we acquire the property?

How do we launch the program?

How do we hire additional staff?

Those are important questions. But capital serves another purpose that receives far less attention.

Capital creates room for recovery.

Operating reserves give leaders time to respond when something doesn’t go according to plan.

Unrestricted revenue allows an organization to redirect resources when circumstances change.

Diversified funding reduces the likelihood that the loss of a single grant becomes an organizational emergency.

Strong financial reporting helps leadership identify problems before they become crises.

A healthy pipeline gives an organization options.

Together, these things create something incredibly valuable: organizational runway.

And runway changes the questions leaders are able to ask.

Instead of asking, Can we afford for this not to work?

They can ask, What would we learn by trying?

That is a fundamentally different position from which to lead.

Who Gets Permission to Fail?

There is also an equity question embedded in the way we think about failure.

Large, well-capitalized institutions routinely invest significant amounts of money testing new ideas. Some work. Some don’t.

When an experiment doesn’t work, it may be described as innovation, research or a pilot.

Smaller community organizations rarely receive the same grace.

A failed initiative can quickly become evidence that an organization isn’t ready for additional investment. Funders may question leadership. Boards may become more conservative. Future requests may receive greater scrutiny.

In other words, the organizations closest to difficult community problems are sometimes given the least room to experiment with solutions.

That should concern anyone serious about innovation in the social sector.

If we want organizations to innovate, we have to build organizations that can survive innovation.

Capital Readiness Is Also Risk Readiness

This is one of the reasons I have become increasingly interested in capital readiness.

The goal cannot simply be helping organizations become better at pursuing the next grant.

A truly capital-ready organization understands its financial position. It knows what assets it has, what obligations are coming, where revenue is concentrated, what opportunities are in the pipeline and how much risk it can reasonably absorb.

That information creates choices.

And choices create agency.

Through our Capital Lab work, I have been thinking about capital readiness not simply as the ability to attract investment, but as the ability to use capital strategically once you have it.

That includes growth.

But it also includes experimentation, adaptation and recovery.

Sometimes the smartest use of capital is expanding a successful program.

Sometimes it is investing in infrastructure before growth.

Sometimes it is maintaining enough liquidity to withstand a disruption.

And sometimes it is giving an organization enough room to try something that might not work.

We Should Be Building Organizations That Can Learn

None of this means organizations should become comfortable with waste or make reckless decisions.

Failing forward should never mean failing without discipline.

There should be a hypothesis. There should be measurable outcomes. There should be financial guardrails. Leadership should know how much it is willing to risk before the experiment begins.

Most importantly, there should be a process for deciding when to stop.

The goal isn’t to eliminate failure.

The goal is to make failure survivable, measurable and useful.

That requires a different conversation about organizational strength.

We should absolutely ask whether organizations can deliver programs effectively.

But we should also ask:

Do they have enough unrestricted capital to respond when conditions change?

Do they have reserves?

Do they understand their cash flow?

Are their revenue sources diversified?

Can their financial systems tell leadership early when something isn’t working?

Can they absorb a reasonable loss without threatening the organization itself?

Those aren’t simply accounting questions.

They are questions about an organization’s ability to learn.

Because ultimately, the strongest organizations won’t be the ones that never make a mistake.

They will be the ones with enough information to recognize a mistake, enough discipline to change course and enough capital to keep going.

That is the real luxury of failing forward.

With more than two decades of experience in community development, real estate strategy, and organizational leadership, Joy Johnson brings a seasoned, solutions-focused voice to the field. She is committed to helping communities and institutions avoid systemic pitfalls and build models that truly work. To reach Joy, call (216) 238-2415.

Stop Waiting for Everybody Before Somebody Does Something

History’s most consequential movements rarely began with everybody. They began when enough people decided that what everyone else had learned to tolerate was no longer acceptable.

There is a phrase that can kill almost any attempt at change before it begins.

“People aren’t going to do anything.”

It sounds practical. Sometimes it even sounds wise.

Why challenge the system if everybody is not prepared to stand with you? Why confront an institution if most people will remain quiet? Why risk a relationship, a job, a contract or political access when the community itself may not immediately respond?

The problem is that history does not support the premise.

The people who changed America rarely began with the masses.

They began with enough.

David Walker Did Not Take a Poll

David Walker published Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World in 1829.

He did not wait for a national Black organization to approve his language. He did not conduct a survey to determine whether most Americans were ready for his argument. He did not soften his challenge to Thomas Jefferson because Jefferson remained one of the most revered figures in the country.

Walker saw something he believed was wrong and confronted it.

His pamphlet traveled through Black networks and into Southern states where authorities considered it dangerous. He challenged slavery, white supremacy, colonization and the intellectual assumptions used to justify Black subordination.

There were Black people who disagreed with his militancy. There were abolitionists who preferred different methods. There were people who undoubtedly thought his approach was too dangerous.

Walker wrote anyway.

That is worth remembering because modern advocacy often treats consensus as a prerequisite for courage.

It never was.

Four Students Sat Down

On February 1, 1960, four Black students from North Carolina A&T walked into the Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, purchased items elsewhere in the store and then sat at a lunch counter where Black customers were denied service.

Four.

Not four thousand.

Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain and Joseph McNeil did not wait until the entire Black population of Greensboro agreed to participate.

They sat down.

The next day, more students joined them. Then more.

The Greensboro sit-ins helped accelerate a movement that spread to cities across the South.

That is often how change works.

What eventually looks inevitable can begin looking very lonely.

The Masses Usually Arrive Later

The Montgomery Bus Boycott ultimately involved a remarkable share of Montgomery’s Black community, but it did not appear from nowhere. Years of organizing, local networks, churches, the Women’s Political Council and earlier acts of resistance had already created the foundation.

People organized. They called meetings. They printed notices. They arranged transportation. They persuaded neighbors. They endured inconvenience.

Momentum followed action.

Action did not wait for momentum.

The same lesson followed John Lewis onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Lewis and the other marchers did not know that Bloody Sunday would help awaken the nation to what was happening in Alabama. They moved before they knew what the country would do with what it saw.

That is the part of “good trouble” that becomes easy to forget once the phrase is printed on T-shirts.

Trouble becomes necessary when existing institutions have made justice impossible without disruption.

King Was Not Waiting for Universal Approval

Martin Luther King Jr. has become so universally quotable that it is easy to forget how contested his leadership actually was.

King was repeatedly told his methods were poorly timed. He was criticized for demonstrations that disrupted public order. He faced criticism from white moderates and disagreements within the broader civil-rights movement. His opposition to the Vietnam War alienated political allies. His growing focus on poverty and economic inequality pushed him into increasingly difficult territory.

He kept moving.

That does not mean King ignored strategy or public opinion. He understood both.

It means he did not confuse popularity with moral legitimacy.

Today, some people seem willing to confront injustice only after polling confirms that confrontation is safe.

That is not how the people we celebrate operated.

When the New Numbers Come Out

That history matters in Cuyahoga County right now.

The County has already commissioned research documenting substantial disparities in public contracting. Its 2020 disparity study examined fiscal years 2014 through 2018 and found extraordinary gaps between the availability of African American-owned businesses and the share of prime contracting dollars they actually received.

Another disparity study is scheduled to arrive in a very different national political environment.

President Donald Trump and Republicans have aggressively challenged DEI programs and race-conscious initiatives. Those actions can matter to what remedies local governments believe are legally available today.

But they cannot be permitted to rewrite yesterday.

Current federal anti-DEI policies cannot explain contracting disparities documented between 2014 and 2018. They cannot explain what Cuyahoga County did—or failed to do—in the years after the previous study and before the current federal policy environment existed.

That timeline matters.

When the new report is released, there may be legitimate debate over what federal policy permits going forward. But that is a different question from whether Cuyahoga County made measurable progress when today’s federal restrictions were not the explanation.

The public should insist that those questions remain separate.

The Vocabulary Can Change. The Ledger Cannot.

There is another reason the national DEI argument should not become a convenient distraction.

Even if the legal environment changes the kinds of race-conscious remedies government can use, basic accountability does not disappear.

How much money did the County spend?

Who received it?

What percentage went to Black-owned businesses?

How did utilization compare with the availability of qualified firms?

Did the gap improve after the previous disparity study?

How many bonding waivers were granted?

Were prompt-payment requirements enforced?

Which recommendations were implemented?

Which were not?

Those are not slogans.

They are procurement questions.

Government can change terminology. Courts and presidents can change the legal boundaries around particular programs. Political leaders can argue about the meaning of DEI.

None of that changes the historical ledger.

The numbers from yesterday remain the numbers from yesterday.

Do Not Let the New Report Become Another Old Report

When Cuyahoga County’s next disparity study is released, there will likely be presentations, meetings, explanations and recommendations.

That cannot be where the process ends.

The previous report should sit beside the new one.

The numbers should be compared.

Promises should be identified.

Policies should be tracked.

Officials should be asked what success will look like one year later, three years later and five years later.

And those answers should be written down.

Because reports do not create equity.

Implementation does.

If the new numbers show meaningful improvement, that progress should be acknowledged.

If they do not, the public should not accept an explanation merely because it sounds politically convenient.

Ask the simplest question:

What did you do before Trump?

Then ask the next one:

What can you legally do now?

Those are two different questions, and responsible government should be able to answer both.

Stop Waiting for the Perfect Crowd

One of the most damaging assumptions in community work is that an issue is not actionable until a large crowd appears.

That gives institutions an enormous advantage.

If officials know citizens will act only when thousands of people are mobilized, they merely have to survive the period before thousands arrive.

But accountability does not require a stadium.

A handful of business owners can organize around procurement data. A small group of citizens can attend public meetings consistently. Researchers can track awards. Journalists can publish the numbers. Clergy can ask questions publicly. Attorneys can examine whether existing policies are being followed. Business organizations can request records. Residents can ask elected officials for measurable commitments and then return six months later to ask what happened.

A movement can begin with a spreadsheet.

It can begin with a public-records request.

It can begin with five business owners sitting around a table comparing experiences.

It can begin with one person asking a question everybody else has learned not to ask.

The point is not the size of the beginning.

The point is whether anybody begins.

Civil Rights Is Not a Spectator Sport

There is another habit that has weakened civic participation.

People increasingly expect civil-rights organizations, elected officials, professional advocates or nonprofit leaders to do the work for them.

Those institutions have responsibilities.

But history did not assign civil rights exclusively to professionals.

Ordinary people were indispensable to every movement we now celebrate.

They volunteered. They contributed money. They attended meetings. They boycotted. They opened their homes. They transported people. They challenged employers. They registered voters. They voted. They organized.

Some had titles.

Most did not need one.

A community that outsources all of its advocacy eventually becomes dependent upon the people being paid to advocate.

That becomes especially dangerous when the organizations expected to challenge power depend financially upon the same institutions that need to be challenged.

Citizens have to remain capable of acting for themselves.

Courage Does Not Require Recklessness

Everybody does not have the same ability to absorb risk.

A single parent earning an hourly wage occupies a different position from a wealthy business owner. A government employee may face restrictions that an independent entrepreneur does not. A nonprofit executive dependent on grants faces pressures different from those facing a retired citizen.

Movements should recognize those differences rather than shame people for them.

But different levels of risk create different opportunities for contribution.

If you cannot speak publicly, you may be able to document.

If you cannot lead the protest, you may be able to fund the research.

If your employment prevents you from becoming the public face, you may be able to help someone else understand the system.

If you cannot attend every meeting, you can make one phone call.

If you cannot contribute money, you can contribute information.

The question is not whether everybody can do everything.

The question is whether everybody has decided they can do nothing.

Access Is Not the Same as Power

Communities can become overly impressed with access.

Being invited into the room feels like influence.

Sometimes it is.

But access and power are not the same thing.

A person can attend every meeting, sit on every committee, appear in every photograph and still be incapable of changing the outcome.

Real influence eventually has to produce something measurable.

Did the policy change?

Did the dollars move?

Did the barrier come down?

Did participation increase?

Did the institution do something differently because you were there?

If not, the invitation may be benefiting the institution more than the community.

That is another reason independent civic pressure matters.

The people inside the room need people outside the room willing to ask what happened in it.

Enough People

The phrase “you don’t need the masses” should not be misunderstood.

Mass movements can transform countries. Broad participation matters. Coalitions matter. Elections matter. Numbers matter.

But waiting for everybody is one of the surest ways to guarantee that nobody starts.

David Walker did not need everybody.

The Greensboro Four did not need everybody on February 1, 1960.

The first organizers in Montgomery did not begin with everybody.

John Lewis did not wait for everybody before crossing the bridge.

King did not wait until America agreed with him.

They moved.

Others followed.

That is the lesson.

We have spent generations teaching people about the courage of the civil-rights movement while sometimes teaching them almost nothing about how courage actually behaves.

Courage does not always begin with a microphone. It does not always begin with a march. It does not always begin with an organization.

Sometimes it begins when one person refuses to accept an explanation that no longer makes sense.

Then another person agrees.

Then another.

That is enough to start.

History rarely begins with the masses.

It begins when a few people decide that what everybody else has learned to tolerate is no longer acceptable.

REPORTING NOTE

This article is Part Three of Black Vanguard Media’s “When Civil Rights Costs Something” series. Historical references include David Walker’s Appeal, the Greensboro sit-ins, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis. The Cuyahoga County discussion builds on the County’s 2020 Disparity Study and the contracting and policy issues examined in Part Two.

For many people, the decline of neighborhood businesses appears to have happened naturally. Local pharmacies closed. National chains grew. It is often described as simple competition. The reality is more complicated.

The growth of national retailers was supported by something most neighborhood businesses never had access to: large-scale capital. Publicly traded companies could raise money through investors, borrow at favorable rates, build sophisticated distribution systems, purchase prime real estate, and expand into hundreds of communities at once. That access to capital did not guarantee success, but it made rapid expansion possible in ways that independent businesses could rarely match.

Most family-owned pharmacies and neighborhood retailers grew one location at a time, often relying on savings, local bank loans, and years of hard work. Expansion was tied directly to available cash flow. National chains operated under a different model. They could invest today based on expectations of tomorrow’s growth.

Communities welcomed much of that investment. New stores created jobs, offered longer hours, and brought recognizable brands into neighborhoods that had long sought additional retail options. In many cases, those investments met real needs.

Yet the financial advantages enjoyed by large chains also reshaped the marketplace. Companies operating thousands of stores could negotiate lower prices from suppliers, spread administrative costs across large networks, invest heavily in technology, and withstand thinner margins than many independent operators. The competitive landscape changed.

This is not an argument that success should be punished or that investment is unwelcome. Capital plays an essential role in economic development. The question is whether communities also invested in preserving local ownership while welcoming outside investment.

That distinction matters because capital influences more than buildings. It shapes who owns businesses, where profits go, and who ultimately makes decisions affecting a neighborhood. When ownership becomes concentrated outside the community, local residents often have less influence over decisions involving essential services.

The recent Walgreens closure in Cleveland’s Lee-Harvard neighborhood illustrates why this conversation matters. The issue is not simply that one company decided to close a location. The larger issue is whether the surrounding ecosystem still has the resources, relationships, and capital to replace an essential service once it is gone.

Communities that rely exclusively on outside investment can become vulnerable when corporate priorities change. Communities that combine outside investment with strong local ownership are often better positioned to adapt because they retain people, institutions, and businesses capable of responding when markets shift.

Over the past several decades, much of the conversation around economic development has focused on attracting investment. That remains important. But the next generation of community development may require asking a second question: How much locally controlled capacity is being built alongside that investment?

As Black communities continue working toward economic stability, the conversation should move beyond recruitment alone. Sustainable neighborhoods need investment, but they also need ownership, resilience, and the ability to replace essential services when circumstances change.

This series is not about looking backward with regret. It is about understanding how today’s marketplace was built so tomorrow’s decisions can strengthen the communities we hope to leave to the next generation.

In Part Four, we return to Lee-Harvard to examine what happens after capital moves on and why the loss of one essential service can ripple throughout an entire neighborhood.

Questions Worth Asking

• Who owns the businesses that provide essential services in your neighborhood?

• How much local ownership exists alongside outside investment?

• What happens when a national chain leaves and no local replacement is available?

• Should economic development include plans for replacing essential services?

Jerry J. Primm is a strategist, civic entrepreneur and leader with CEO 360, Inc., where he helps businesses, developers and community-based organizations understand complex systems, identify overlooked financial tools and build the structure needed to access capital, scale and pursue larger opportunities. His work through Capital Lab™ focuses on translating tax credits, public incentives, partnerships and capital-readiness strategies into practical intelligence leaders can use. To learn more or discuss your organization’s readiness for growth, call (216)-238-3415

There is no shortage of training available to business owners, nonprofit leaders and developers. Every week brings another webinar, conference, mastermind, boot camp, cohort or leadership experience promising clarity, growth and breakthrough results.

Some of these programs are excellent. They introduce new ideas, expose leaders to useful tools and create valuable relationships. A strong training can help people see possibilities they had not considered before.

But training and transformation are not the same thing.

Training transfers information. Transformation changes how an organization operates, makes decisions and produces results.

That difference matters because many organizations do not suffer from a lack of information. Their leaders already know they need better systems, stronger financial controls, clearer goals, improved documentation and more disciplined execution. They may have heard the same recommendations at three conferences and highlighted them in four different notebooks.

The notebook collection is growing nicely. The organization, however, may still be standing in the same place.

Information becomes valuable only when it is translated into action. A leader can attend a seminar on strategic planning and still return to an organization without a usable plan. A business owner can learn about tax credits and incentives but never determine which ones apply. A nonprofit executive can complete a fundraising course without improving the organization’s financial reporting, case for investment or readiness for larger capital.

The problem is not necessarily the quality of the training. The problem is the distance between learning and implementation.

That distance is where good intentions tend to lose momentum.

Implementation requires more than motivation. It requires decisions, ownership, timelines, accountability and the willingness to change how work is actually performed. It may require leaders to replace informal habits with documented processes, invest in technology, clarify roles, improve reporting or confront weaknesses that have been tolerated for years.

Those steps are rarely as exciting as the keynote speech. They are also where the real value is created.

A transformed organization does not simply know more. It behaves differently.

Its leadership team can explain the strategy clearly. Its financial information can support decision-making. Its staff understand who owns each responsibility. Its documents are current and accessible. Its projects are connected to measurable outcomes. Its relationships are developed intentionally rather than only when money is needed.

Most importantly, the organization becomes more capable of carrying a larger opportunity without being overwhelmed by it.

This is especially important when pursuing capital, contracts, development projects or institutional partnerships. Funders and investors are not impressed by how many workshops a leadership team has attended. They want evidence that the organization can execute.

They look for the systems behind the presentation. They examine whether financial reports are dependable, whether responsibilities are clear, whether risks have been considered and whether the organization has a credible path from opportunity to outcome.

A compelling story may open the door. Execution determines whether serious partners remain in the room.

This is why general education, while valuable, is not enough for organizations seeking meaningful growth. Leaders also need a process for applying what they learn to their specific circumstances.

A developer does not merely need to know that tax credits exist. The developer needs to understand whether the project qualifies, how the credit affects the financing structure, which partners are required, what documentation must be prepared and whether the timeline is realistic.

A growing business does not merely need advice to pursue larger contracts. It needs to determine whether its staffing, cash flow, insurance, accounting, technology and delivery systems can support the work.

A nonprofit does not merely need encouragement to diversify revenue. It needs a practical strategy that connects its mission, programs, outcomes, financial needs, stakeholder relationships and funding opportunities.

This is the difference between giving people a map and helping them build the vehicle required to make the trip.

The marketplace sometimes blurs this distinction. Inspiration is easier to package than implementation. A room can feel energized at the end of a presentation, and that energy has value. But applause is not an operating system.

Transformation is usually quieter. It happens when a leadership team agrees on priorities, repairs a reporting process, develops a credible financial model, prepares for due diligence or finally assigns responsibility for a task that has belonged to everybody and therefore belonged to nobody.

These changes may not produce dramatic social media footage. They do produce stronger organizations.

Real transformation should be visible in measurable outcomes. The organization should be able to identify what changed, why it changed and what improved as a result.

Did reporting become more accurate and timely? Did the organization become eligible for a larger opportunity? Did it reduce risk? Did it improve cash flow, strengthen compliance, create a more credible development plan or build relationships that moved a project forward?

If nothing changes after the training, the organization may have gained information without gaining capacity.

That is not always a failure. Learning can take time, and not every idea should be implemented immediately. But leaders should be honest about what they are purchasing and what they expect it to accomplish.

A workshop can introduce a concept. A mastermind can create peer support. A coach can challenge a leader’s thinking. A consultant can help diagnose problems, design systems and support execution. These roles can complement one another, but they are not interchangeable.

Organizations should evaluate support based on the outcome they actually need.

If the need is inspiration, seek inspiration. If the need is education, seek education. If the need is organizational change, make sure the engagement includes implementation, accountability and measurable deliverables.

The harder question is not, “What did we learn?”

It is, “What are we now able to do that we could not do before?”

That question moves the focus from activity to capability. It also helps organizations distinguish between programs that are interesting and support that is essential to their next stage of growth.

The strongest leaders remain willing to learn. But they also recognize that knowledge alone does not scale a company, finance a development, strengthen a nonprofit or prepare an organization for capital.

Transformation begins when knowledge is converted into structure, structure into disciplined action and disciplined action into measurable results.

Training may start the conversation. Execution is what changes the organization.

Jerry J. Primm is a strategist, civic entrepreneur and leader with CEO 360, Inc., where he helps businesses, developers and community-based organizations understand complex systems, identify overlooked financial tools and build the structure needed to access capital, scale and pursue larger opportunities. His work through Capital Lab™ focuses on translating tax credits, public incentives, partnerships and capital-readiness strategies into practical intelligence leaders can use. To learn more or discuss your organization’s readiness for growth, call (216)-238-3415

Good Trouble

David Walker, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis and Ralph Abernathy are easy to honor now. Following their example when speaking up threatens a paycheck, a relationship, a grant or a career is something else entirely.

David Walker did not write Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World because challenging America was good for his career.

There was no foundation grant waiting for him because he confronted Thomas Jefferson’s assertions about Black inferiority. There was no corporate sponsor underwriting his criticism of slavery. There was no comfortable institutional consensus protecting him when copies of his Appeal made their way into Southern states.

Walker spoke when speaking carried consequences.

That is precisely what makes his example worth remembering.

Nearly two centuries later, America has become very good at celebrating people who challenged injustice after the challenge is over.

We quote Martin Luther King Jr. We invoke John Lewis and “good trouble.” We remember Ralph Abernathy. We celebrate Rosa Parks. We teach children about abolitionists and freedom fighters.

But there is an uncomfortable question underneath all of that celebration:

Would we have followed them when following them could have cost us something?

That question matters because there is an enormous difference between admiring courage and practicing it.

Everybody Loves a Revolutionary After the Revolution

History has a way of sanitizing courageous people.

Their confrontations become inspirational quotations. Their arrests become photographs in textbooks. Their unpopular positions become commemorative speeches. Institutions that once would have considered their demands disruptive can eventually sponsor luncheons honoring their memory.

What disappears is the risk.

Martin Luther King Jr. was not universally admired while he was alive. Gallup polling from the period shows that by 1966, a majority of Americans viewed him unfavorably. He was arrested, threatened, surveilled by the federal government and ultimately assassinated.

John Lewis was beaten during the Freedom Rides and suffered a fractured skull on Bloody Sunday in Selma.

Ralph Abernathy was arrested repeatedly and saw his home and church bombed during the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

David Walker circulated an argument so threatening to the slaveholding order that Southern authorities attempted to suppress it and responded with increased restrictions on Black people and abolitionist literature.

These men were not practicing ceremonial civil rights.

They were confronting power.

And confronting power is rarely comfortable.

Civil Rights Was Never a Job Description

One of the great distortions of the modern civil-rights conversation is the assumption that advocacy belongs primarily to people who are employed to do it.

History says otherwise.

Movements have certainly required organizations, professional leadership, fundraising and infrastructure. But much of the actual work of freedom was performed by ordinary people who did not receive salaries for marching, organizing, boycotting, registering voters, housing organizers or challenging injustice.

They participated because something needed to be done.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott depended upon thousands of Black residents making daily sacrifices.

The sit-in movement was driven substantially by students.

Freedom Summer relied heavily on volunteers.

Local churches, families, teachers, business owners and ordinary citizens provided food, transportation, meeting space, money and protection.

They did not ask whether civil rights was included in their job description.

They understood citizenship differently.

There was work that belonged to the community simply because they were members of the community.

That distinction deserves to be recovered.

Being paid to administer a civil-rights organization and possessing civil-rights convictions are not the same thing.

A salary can support advocacy.

It cannot manufacture courage.

The Paycheck Problem

There is another sentence heard constantly in workplaces and communities:

“I agree with you, but I can’t say anything. I could lose my job.”

That fear is not imaginary.

People have mortgages. Children need food. Careers can be damaged. Powerful institutions can retaliate. Contracts can disappear. Relationships can change. Speaking recklessly without understanding the consequences is not necessarily courage.

But acknowledging those realities cannot end the conversation.

Because silence also has a price.

If every generation refuses to challenge injustice because challenging it might threaten employment, then the institutions providing those jobs effectively determine the boundaries of acceptable Black advocacy.

Think about what that means.

The employer becomes more powerful than the principle.

The funder becomes more powerful than the mission.

The political relationship becomes more important than the community.

The invitation to the room becomes more important than what happens inside the room.

Eventually, people become experts at describing injustice privately while remaining remarkably quiet publicly.

That is not neutrality.

Silence can preserve the conditions we claim to oppose.

Your Children Inherit What You Refuse to Confront

This is where the issue becomes generational.

When people say, “I have to protect my job because I have children,” the motivation is understandable.

But there is another responsibility to those same children.

What kind of community will they inherit?

A parent can protect today’s paycheck while leaving tomorrow’s problem untouched.

A professional can preserve a career while allowing a discriminatory system to become more deeply entrenched.

A community leader can protect institutional relationships while another generation inherits the consequences of those relationships.

That does not mean everyone must become a martyr.

It means we should stop pretending that silence is free.

Sometimes we pay for speaking.

Sometimes our children pay for our silence.

David Walker understood that distinction.

He was writing not simply about the condition of Black people in 1829, but about what Black people were willing to accept as the definition of themselves.

That was a generational question.

When Funding Begins Defining the Movement

Modern advocacy faces a complication earlier movements experienced differently: a substantial professional ecosystem now exists around social justice.

There are nonprofit organizations, foundations, corporate partnerships, government contracts, consultants, conferences and professional advocacy positions.

Much of that infrastructure does valuable work.

But infrastructure creates a danger when preserving the institution becomes more important than confronting the condition the institution was created to address.

An organization can gradually learn which subjects threaten funding.

It learns which officials should not be challenged.

It learns which corporate partners should not be embarrassed.

It learns which community grievances can be discussed safely and which ones might jeopardize relationships.

Nobody necessarily issues an order to remain silent.

The incentives can accomplish that themselves.

Soon advocacy becomes strongest where opposition is weakest.

Statements arrive after the public consensus has formed.

Courage is demonstrated on subjects where courage is no longer particularly necessary.

The language remains radical.

The behavior becomes institutional.

That is how a movement can retain the vocabulary of civil rights while losing some of its willingness to confront power.

Civil Rights Cannot Mean Only Safe Rights

There is something fundamentally contradictory about practicing civil rights only when everyone important agrees with you.

The people we celebrate did not have that luxury.

King’s opposition to the Vietnam War placed him at odds with President Lyndon Johnson and some allies within the civil-rights movement.

Lewis and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee pushed against the caution of established leaders.

Abernathy endured jail, threats and violence.

Walker challenged one of America’s most revered founding fathers and the racial assumptions of the society around him.

They did not wait for universal approval.

That is why their examples matter.

Civil rights, properly understood, means asserting the dignity, citizenship and rights of human beings precisely when those rights are being denied.

If everyone already agrees, little courage is required.

The test comes when your position costs access.

When the donor disagrees.

When your employer would prefer silence.

When political allies become uncomfortable.

When friends tell you that you are going too far.

When there is no applause yet.

That is where conviction becomes visible.

Quoting John Lewis Is Easier Than Making Good Trouble

“Good trouble” has become one of the most beloved phrases in American civic life.

But good trouble was never supposed to mean comfortable trouble.

John Lewis was talking about disrupting injustice.

Real disruption inconveniences somebody.

It challenges somebody.

It threatens an arrangement somebody benefits from.

That is why trouble becomes necessary in the first place.

If our version of “good trouble” never threatens a relationship, never challenges a powerful institution, never risks access and never creates discomfort, we should at least ask whether it is trouble at all.

The same applies to King.

It is easy to quote the dream.

It is harder to follow the man who wrote from a Birmingham jail because religious leaders told him his demonstrations were “unwise and untimely.”

King’s response to those moderate critics remains one of the great lessons of the movement: people suffering injustice are continually told to wait for a more convenient time.

History usually remembers the person who refused to wait.

It rarely erects monuments to the people who advised him to remain quiet.

Courage Does Not Require Recklessness

None of this means everyone should walk into work tomorrow and deliberately get fired.

Strategy matters.

Movements need lawyers, researchers, business owners, donors, organizers, elected officials, journalists, clergy, professionals and people working inside institutions.

Different people can take different risks.

Courage is not measured by how quickly someone can destroy his own livelihood.

The lesson is more demanding than that.

Fear of consequences cannot become a permanent excuse for surrendering one’s conscience.

Sometimes courage means speaking publicly.

Sometimes it means documenting what is happening.

Sometimes it means organizing coworkers.

Sometimes it means supporting someone else who can speak.

Sometimes it means providing money.

Sometimes it means voting differently.

Sometimes it means refusing to participate.

Sometimes it means building an alternative institution so that the community no longer depends upon the institution creating the problem.

Everyone does not have to stand in the same place.

But everybody can do something.

Stop Admiring Courage You Are Unwilling to Practice

Perhaps that is the uncomfortable lesson David Walker leaves us.

We should stop reducing courageous people to quotations.

Walker is not important because his words sound powerful almost 200 years later.

He is important because he said them when saying them was dangerous.

King is not important merely because his speeches sound beautiful today.

Lewis is not important because “good trouble” fits neatly on a T-shirt.

Abernathy is not important because his name belongs in a history book.

Their significance lies partly in the fact that they acted before history had guaranteed that history would vindicate them.

They put skin in the game.

That is the standard worth remembering.

The next great civil-rights question may not arrive with a universally recognized villain. It may involve an employer we like, a political party we support, a corporation that funds our organization, a foundation that writes our checks, a leader we consider a friend or an institution whose invitation list we enjoy being on.

That is when we will discover whether civil rights is something we believe or simply something we commemorate.

David Walker confronted Thomas Jefferson when Jefferson’s intellectual authority towered over the country.

The generations that followed confronted slavery, segregation, disenfranchisement and state-sanctioned discrimination when doing so carried enormous personal consequences.

They did not know that streets would someday bear their names.

They only knew something was wrong.

And they decided that silence would cost too much.

The question for our generation is not whether we honor their courage.

The question is whether, when our own moment comes, we are willing to practice it.

Before Cuyahoga County blames Washington, bonding, capacity or Black businesses themselves, its own disparity study deserves another look.

There is a temptation whenever racial equity becomes politically uncomfortable to change the subject.

Sometimes the subject becomes Washington. Sometimes it becomes affirmative action. Sometimes it becomes whether diversity programs have gone too far. In government contracting, the explanation often shifts to something else: minority businesses are too small, they cannot obtain bonding, they lack capacity, they do not bid, or they cannot survive the payment cycle.

Some of those barriers are real.

But Cuyahoga County commissioned a disparity study that gives the public something far more useful than talking points.

It gives us numbers.

And the numbers do not have a political party.

The County Already Documented the Problem

The 2020 Cuyahoga County Disparity Study, prepared by Griffin & Strong, examined County contracting during fiscal years 2014 through 2018.

Its findings deserve to be read slowly.

In construction prime contracting, African American-owned firms represented an estimated 14.87 percent of available firms in the relevant market. They received 0.38 percent of the dollars.

In professional services, African American firms represented an estimated 8.43 percent of availability. Their utilization was 0.02 percent.

Those are not differences that can be dismissed with a slogan.

They are the County’s own commissioned measurements of who was available to perform work and who actually received the work.

The study also reached a broader conclusion. It said earlier race- and gender-neutral remediation efforts had not eliminated the problem. Discrimination still existed.

That matters now because another disparity study is underway, and it will arrive in a very different national political environment.

Trump Cannot Change Yesterday’s Numbers

President Donald Trump and the Republican-led federal government have aggressively challenged diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Those actions matter. They can affect the legal environment in which local governments design race-conscious programs, and Cuyahoga County should be candid about any federal action that limits a remedy it otherwise would pursue.

But that cannot become a retroactive explanation.

The contracting period examined in the County’s 2020 study was 2014 through 2018.

The disparities documented there existed years before today’s federal anti-DEI campaign could be offered as the reason for them.

That distinction is critical.

A federal policy can affect what a local government believes it can do tomorrow. It cannot rewrite what that local government did yesterday.

So when the new study is released, the public should resist any attempt to collapse two separate questions into one.

The first question is: What remedies are legally available now?

The second is: What did Cuyahoga County accomplish during the years when today’s federal restrictions were not the explanation?

Both deserve answers.

This Is Not a Republican Argument

None of this requires becoming a Republican, supporting Donald Trump or opposing either one.

It requires consistency.

Cuyahoga County has long been dominated politically by Democrats. That fact should not be used to argue that Republicans would necessarily produce better outcomes. It should be used to establish something much simpler:

Political identity is not evidence of equity.

A government does not become equitable because its elected officials use the language of inclusion. A progressive reputation cannot substitute for procurement results.

Republican governments should be held accountable for policies that produce inequity. Democratic governments should be held to the same standard.

If a jurisdiction says equity is one of its values, the public has every right to examine where its money actually goes.

That is not partisan.

That is accountability.

The Bonding Explanation Deserves Scrutiny

One of the explanations frequently offered for the limited participation of minority contractors is bonding.

The argument sounds plausible. Smaller firms often face real difficulty obtaining performance and payment bonds, particularly when they have less access to capital and shorter operating histories.

But Cuyahoga County’s own policies complicate that explanation.

The disparity study states that County Code allowed performance and payment bonds to be waived on construction projects below $250,000 when no federal funds were involved and below $150,000 when federal funds were involved, provided contractors met the prequalification requirements. Risk Management also established a waiver process that included training. For non-construction projects, bonds could be waived at the discretion of the Law Department through Risk Management.

The County had recognized bonding as a barrier and created a mechanism to reduce it.

Then comes the remarkable part.

County staff told the disparity-study researchers that bonds had been waived on only one or two projects.

That should immediately change the conversation.

If bonding is routinely offered as an explanation for why Black contractors are not receiving County work, the public should ask how many of the contracts at issue actually required bonds, how many qualified for waivers, how many firms requested waivers, how many waivers were approved and why a program created to remove a recognized barrier appears to have been used so rarely.

“Bonding” cannot be the end of the explanation.

It should be the beginning of the investigation.

Most Awards Were Not Giant Contracts

The study’s own award data makes that inquiry even more important.

More than half of the awards in one threshold table—50.89 percent—were between $1,000 and $5,000.

Another 16.61 percent were between $5,000 and $10,000.

Another 22.76 percent were between $10,000 and $50,000.

By the time awards through $250,000 are included, approximately 95.69 percent of the awards represented in that table fell at or below $250,000.

That does not mean 95.69 percent automatically qualified for a bonding waiver. The waiver rules apply differently depending on the type of contract, federal funding and prequalification.

But it does destroy the usefulness of a vague explanation.

If officials say bonding is a major reason Black businesses cannot participate, then identify the contracts.

Show which ones required bonding.

Show which firms were unable to meet the requirement.

Show which contracts were eligible for a waiver.

Show how often the waiver was offered and used.

That is what measurable government looks like.

The County Also Tried to Address Slow Payment

Bonding was not the only barrier the County had already recognized.

Cash flow can kill a small business even when the business has successfully won the work.

In May 2016, the County Executive issued what the disparity study describes as a swift-pay executive order. The purpose was to ensure timely County payments to prime contractors and penalize primes that failed to pay subcontractors after receiving payment for their work.

The report says the County order essentially restated Ohio’s policy requiring primes to pay subcontractors within 10 days after receiving payment.

Ohio law adds significant teeth: according to the study, interest of 18 percent begins on the eleventh day when the payment requirement is violated, and the prompt-payment requirement cannot simply be waived away by contract.

Again, the policy sounds good.

The outcomes are what matter.

The disparity study reported that County staff still received complaints about subcontractor prompt payment. In its survey, only 6.8 percent of MBE respondents reported being paid in less than 30 days.

That raises another uncomfortable question.

If small and minority businesses are criticized for lacking sufficient working capital to survive government contracting, how aggressively did government enforce the policies designed to ensure that those businesses were paid promptly?

A business should certainly be financially prepared to perform a contract.

Government and prime contractors should be equally prepared to comply with their payment obligations.

What If They Just Aren’t Bidding?

Another familiar explanation is that minority businesses simply are not submitting bids.

The County’s study examined that question too.

Its analysis concluded that contracting disparities generally could not be explained simply by differences in how frequently minority firms submitted bids.

That does not mean every qualified Black business bids on every opportunity. Obviously they do not.

It means “they don’t bid” cannot be casually presented as a complete explanation for the disparities without evidence.

There were other warning signs.

In the study’s survey, nearly 73 percent of African American respondents said they believed an informal network impeded their ability to win County work. Less than 30 percent of non-minority male respondents expressed the same belief.

Perception is not proof that every contract was unfairly awarded.

But when such a large difference exists between the experiences reported by Black businesses and their non-minority counterparts, serious institutions investigate rather than dismiss it.

Stop Starting With What Black Businesses Lack

There is a pattern in discussions about minority contracting that deserves attention.

When Black businesses receive very little public work, the first questions frequently concern what is supposedly wrong with the businesses.

Do they have enough capacity?

Can they get bonded?

Do they understand procurement?

Do they bid?

Do they have enough capital?

Do they know how to navigate government?

Those can all be legitimate questions.

But eventually government must subject itself to the same examination.

Were opportunities structured so smaller businesses could realistically compete?

Were bonding waivers actually used?

Were subcontractors paid on time?

Were prime contractors held accountable?

Were certified businesses meaningfully connected to opportunities?

Were procurement officers measured on participation?

Were disparities improving from year to year?

Which recommendations from the previous disparity study were implemented?

Which were not?

And who was responsible?

Equity cannot mean endlessly diagnosing Black businesses while treating the procurement system as a neutral observer.

The Most Important Report May Be the One Coming Next

The forthcoming disparity study creates an opportunity.

It can become another document placed on a government website, discussed at a few meetings and gradually forgotten.

Or it can become a measuring stick.

The public should compare the new numbers directly with the previous study.

What percentage of County construction dollars is going to African American firms now?

What about professional services?

Goods?

Other services?

Architecture and engineering?

Has the gap between availability and utilization narrowed?

How many bonding waivers have been granted since the last study?

How quickly are prime contractors paying subcontractors?

How often have prompt-payment penalties been imposed?

How much County spending reaches Black-owned firms as primes rather than only as subcontractors?

Those questions do not require anyone to utter the letters D-E-I.

They are questions about public money.

The terminology can change.

The arithmetic remains.

Equity Is an Outcome, Not an Identity

This is ultimately why the national partisan argument cannot be allowed to consume the local one.

It is entirely legitimate to criticize federal policies that weaken tools designed to address discrimination.

But local leaders cannot point toward Washington so aggressively that nobody looks at Cleveland.

If Cuyahoga County believes in equity, it should welcome the measurement.

If advocacy organizations believe in economic justice, they should demand the numbers regardless of who controls County government.

If political leaders believe Black-owned businesses deserve genuine access to public opportunity, they should be able to explain what changed after the last disparity study.

And if the explanations are bonding, capacity, bidding or federal restrictions, those explanations should be tested against evidence.

That is the standard.

Not party registration.

Not rhetoric.

Not how many diversity statements were issued.

Not how progressive an institution considers itself.

Results.

The federal government may change what remedies are available tomorrow.

It cannot change the numbers from yesterday.

And before Cuyahoga County asks Black businesses to explain again why they have not received more public work, the County should first explain what its own numbers have been trying to tell us.

The math doesn’t have a political party.

Source Note

The contracting figures, bonding provisions, award thresholds, prompt-payment provisions, survey findings and policy observations discussed in this article are drawn from the Cuyahoga County, Ohio 2020 Disparity Study prepared by Griffin & Strong, P.C. The study examined County contracting during FY2014–FY2018. The article distinguishes those historical findings from the separate legal and policy environment surrounding current federal DEI initiatives.

The endorsed Democrat has spent nearly three decades representing the state, defending the accused, advocating for injured clients and building a legal practice of his own.

Judicial candidates often speak about fairness. Daryl T. Dennie has spent nearly 30 years learning what fairness requires from nearly every position inside a courtroom.

Dennie, the endorsed Democrat in the race, has served as an assistant county prosecutor, an assistant public defender, a civil litigator and a sole practitioner. That range of experience has allowed him to represent victims, defendants, injured clients and working people navigating a legal system that can often feel unfamiliar and intimidating.

It also helps explain why Dennie has made equal access to justice for all the central message of his campaign.

A judge must do more than know the law. The position requires patience, sound judgment and the ability to listen without deciding who a person is before hearing the facts. Dennie’s career has placed him on different sides of difficult cases, giving him a practical understanding of how judicial decisions affect everyone who enters the courtroom.

As a prosecutor, he argued for public safety and fair resolutions for victims of crime. As a public defender, he protected the rights of people accused of crimes and ensured that the government met its legal obligations. Through civil litigation, he fought for people seeking compensation after being harmed. As a sole practitioner, he also experienced the responsibilities of running a business, serving clients and making decisions without the safety net of a large institution.

That combination is important because judges do not serve only one side of the legal system. They must evaluate evidence, apply the law and maintain a courtroom where every person is treated with dignity.

Dennie’s understanding of that responsibility is also personal.

He has recalled appearing in court on behalf of a client and stepping forward when the case was called, only to have the judge ask whether his attorney was present. The moment stayed with him because it demonstrated how quickly assumptions can shape a person’s experience in the courtroom.

For Dennie, impartiality means resisting those assumptions.

His stated judicial philosophy emphasizes integrity, patient listening and equal access to justice. He has said that public safety is necessary, while also expressing opposition to over-policing and brutality. He supports mental-health and addiction services, affordable housing, education and workforce development, while recognizing that a judge must remain within the proper constitutional role of the court.

His campaign is not built around promises to favor one group over another. It is built around the belief that the law should be applied consistently and that every person deserves an opportunity to be heard.

That is where Dennie’s professional background separates him from the standard judicial résumé. He understands the prosecution’s responsibility to protect the public. He understands the defense attorney’s duty to protect constitutional rights. He understands the civil attorney’s responsibility to seek relief for injured clients. He also understands the pressures faced by independent attorneys and small-business owners.

Few candidates enter a judicial race having seen the legal system from so many angles.

Dennie describes himself as fair, honest and loyal. He says his leadership style is hands-on and grounded in leading by example. His campaign presents those qualities not as slogans, but as the standards he intends to bring to the bench.

Judicial elections do not always receive the public attention given to races for mayor, governor or Congress. Yet judges often have more direct contact with ordinary citizens than almost any other elected official. Their decisions can affect a person’s freedom, family, finances, employment and future.

That makes experience and temperament especially important.

Daryl T. Dennie has spent 29 years preparing for the responsibility he is now asking voters to entrust to him. His record shows that he understands both the power of the courtroom and the obligation to use that power carefully.

For voters looking for a judge who can be firm without being unfair, independent without being indifferent and experienced without losing sight of the people standing before him, Daryl T. Dennie is the clear choice.

There was a time when many Black neighborhoods did not depend on a single national chain for everyday essentials. Before the term ‘pharmacy desert’ entered the public conversation, neighborhoods like Lee-Harvard were sustained by a network of locally owned businesses that served as more than places to shop. They were part of the community itself.

The neighborhood pharmacy was often one of those anchors. The pharmacist knew families by name, recognized familiar prescriptions, and became another trusted face in the community. Alongside the pharmacy were locally owned grocery stores, hardware stores, cleaners, restaurants, barber shops, beauty salons, and other businesses that helped create a neighborhood ecosystem.

These businesses employed local residents, supported churches and youth sports, donated to community events, and kept a greater share of neighborhood dollars circulating close to home. Their owners attended local meetings, understood local challenges, and often made decisions based on relationships as much as financial statements.

That does not mean everything was perfect. Many independent businesses faced rising costs, changing consumer expectations, and increasing competition. But together they formed an economic web that gave neighborhoods options. If one business struggled, another often stepped in. The community was supported by an ecosystem rather than a single provider.

Over time, that ecosystem changed. National retailers offered convenience, expanded inventories, and recognizable brands. Communities welcomed new investment, and many of those businesses provided valuable services. Few people stopped to ask what might happen if local ownership steadily declined while dependence on larger companies steadily increased.

The change was gradual. One independent pharmacy retired. Another closed. A family-owned grocery disappeared. A neighborhood hardware store shut its doors. None of these events alone transformed a community. Together, however, they altered the local business landscape in ways that were difficult to see in real time.

The result was not simply fewer locally owned businesses. It was fewer locally rooted decision-makers. As neighborhoods became increasingly served by regional or national companies, more decisions affecting essential services were made outside the community.

Today, the announced closure of the Walgreens in Cleveland’s Lee-Harvard neighborhood has forced many residents to confront a difficult reality. The question is no longer only why a pharmacy is leaving. The deeper question is whether the neighborhood still has the local ecosystem capable of replacing what has been lost.

That question extends far beyond one community. Across the country, neighborhoods are discovering that essential services are strongest when they are supported by resilient local ecosystems rather than relying on a single provider. When one piece of that ecosystem disappears, the effects ripple outward—to families, seniors, patients, nearby businesses, and the overall health of the community.

As communities discuss what comes next for Lee-Harvard, this moment also invites reflection. Economic development is not only about attracting new investment. It is also about preserving the capacity of a neighborhood to sustain essential services over time.

This series is not intended to romanticize the past or criticize any one company. It is intended to ask a simple but important question: What must communities do to ensure they never lose the ability to care for themselves?

In Part Three, we will examine how national retail chains expanded so rapidly across America and why access to capital changed the competitive landscape for locally owned businesses.

Questions Worth Asking

• How many independently owned pharmacies remain in your community?

• What essential businesses has your neighborhood lost over the past 30 years?

• Are local businesses still part of your community’s economic ecosystem?

• What would happen if another essential service closed tomorrow?

When advocacy stops at the edge of a paycheck, grant, contract or political relationship, the question is no longer what an organization says it believes. It is what it is willing to risk for those beliefs.

BLACK VANGUARD MEDIA | WHEN CIVIL RIGHTS COSTS SOMETHING — PART ONE

Everybody loves David Walker now.

Nearly two centuries after he published Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, there is little professional danger in calling Walker courageous. Thomas Jefferson is dead. Slavery is illegal. Nobody is going to cancel a corporate contract because someone says Black people were right to resist enslavement.

History has made Walker safe.

The same thing has happened to Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Ralph Abernathy and many of the people who confronted American racism when doing so was anything but safe.

Their words appear on social media. Their photographs hang in government buildings. Their names are invoked at banquets and commemorations. “Good trouble” fits comfortably on a T-shirt. King’s words appear in corporate statements every January.

But there is a difference between celebrating courageous people and following their example.

The people we quote today often spoke when speaking could cost them something.

That is the part of the story we have become dangerously comfortable forgetting.

Courage Before the Applause

David Walker did not write his Appeal after America reached a consensus that slavery was evil. He published it in 1829.

Walker attacked slavery, challenged Thomas Jefferson’s assertions about Black inferiority, condemned the corruption of Christianity by slaveholders, rejected colonization and insisted that Black people possessed the right to resist oppression.

Southern authorities regarded the pamphlet as dangerous. Efforts were made to prevent its circulation. Walker was not operating inside an environment designed to reward his activism.

He spoke anyway.

King did not lead from the comfort of universal approval either. He was arrested. His home was bombed. He was surveilled by the federal government. By the later years of his life, his opposition to the Vietnam War and his increasing attention to economic inequality strained relationships with political allies and parts of the broader public.

John Lewis was beaten during the Freedom Rides and suffered a fractured skull on Bloody Sunday in Selma. Ralph Abernathy was arrested repeatedly. His home and church were bombed during the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

These were not ceremonial civil-rights leaders.

They confronted power when power could answer back.

That distinction matters because modern America has developed an extraordinary ability to celebrate yesterday’s dissent while becoming uncomfortable with today’s.

Civil Rights Was Never Just a Profession

The civil-rights movement had organizations, paid staff, fundraising operations and institutional leadership. Movements require infrastructure.

But civil rights was never merely a profession.

Thousands of people who made the movement possible were not being paid to participate. People boycotted buses while still needing to get to work. Students sat at lunch counters without receiving stipends. Families housed organizers. Churches provided meeting space. Business owners contributed money. Volunteers registered voters. Ordinary people marched knowing they could be arrested, fired, threatened or assaulted.

They did not first ask whether advocacy was included in their job description.

They understood that citizenship sometimes creates responsibilities for which nobody sends a paycheck.

There is nothing inherently wrong with being paid to do civil-rights work. Professional organizations need employees. Research costs money. Lawyers, organizers and policy experts deserve compensation.

The problem begins when preserving the institution becomes more important than confronting the injustice the institution was created to address.

When the Funder Becomes the Boundary

Modern advocacy operates inside an enormous ecosystem of foundations, corporations, government grants, nonprofit contracts, political relationships and institutional partnerships.

Much of that money supports valuable work.

But money also creates incentives.

An organization can learn, without anyone ever issuing an explicit command, which subjects are safe to discuss. It can learn which public officials should not be challenged too aggressively, which corporations should not be embarrassed and which institutions control access to grants, contracts, appointments and invitations.

Eventually an organization can become very sophisticated at talking about injustice without confronting the people or systems capable of changing it.

That is where an uncomfortable question has to be asked:

What happens when the institution financing your advocacy also benefits from the conditions you are supposed to challenge?

The answer is not automatically corruption. Nor does every grant compromise every recipient.

The test is simpler.

Can you still tell the truth about the funder? Can you publicly challenge the institution writing the check? Can you demand measurable results? Can you say its policies are failing when the evidence says they are failing? Can you continue the fight if the money disappears?

If the answer is no, the funding relationship may have become something more than support.

It may have become a boundary.

The Paycheck Has Become an Excuse

There is a sentence heard frequently when something is clearly wrong:

“I agree, but I can’t say anything. I could lose my job.”

That fear is real.

People have mortgages. Children need food. Health insurance matters. Careers can be damaged. Retaliation exists. Telling people to behave recklessly with their livelihoods is not leadership.

But neither is pretending silence has no consequences.

Every generation inherits conditions the previous generation either confronted or tolerated.

When someone says, “I have children, so I cannot risk my job,” that deserves understanding. But there is another question that deserves equal consideration:

What will those children inherit if nobody challenges the system?

Protecting today’s paycheck while leaving tomorrow’s inequality untouched is not necessarily protection. Sometimes it is simply transferring the bill to the next generation.

Our children can inherit our property, our businesses and our savings.

They can also inherit the problems we were too afraid to confront.

The Comfort of Performative Civil Rights

Performative civil rights is easy to recognize once we stop listening exclusively to words.

It is loudest when the position is universally accepted.

It condemns injustice safely in the distance while negotiating quietly with injustice nearby.

It celebrates historical figures who challenged power while maintaining exceptionally comfortable relationships with present-day power.

It produces statements, panels, conferences, commemorations and slogans.

But when the issue reaches a grant, a government contract, an influential employer, a political ally or a major donor, suddenly everyone becomes interested in patience, diplomacy and timing.

That does not mean diplomacy is wrong. It does not mean every disagreement requires a press conference.

It means the standard cannot be whether advocacy makes powerful people comfortable.

King addressed precisely this problem in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. Some of his most important criticism was directed toward people who claimed to agree with the goal of equality but continually objected to the timing and methods required to achieve it.

They preferred order to disruption. They wanted justice, but they wanted it later.

History has been much kinder to King than many of his contemporaries were.

That should tell us something.

Good Trouble Is Supposed to Cause Trouble

John Lewis’s phrase “good trouble” has become part of the American civic vocabulary.

But we have managed to make even trouble comfortable.

Real good trouble interferes with something. It challenges an arrangement somebody benefits from. It creates pressure where polite requests have failed. It risks relationships.

If nobody with power is ever uncomfortable, nothing important is ever threatened and every institution funding the work remains perfectly pleased with the advocacy, it is reasonable to ask how much trouble is actually occurring.

Lewis did not cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge because crossing it was institutionally approved.

People crossed because the existing institutions were failing them.

That is the difference between commemorating a movement and becoming one.

Courage Does Not Mean Recklessness

None of this requires people to deliberately get themselves fired.

Movements need strategy as much as courage.

People occupy different positions and have different levels of vulnerability. Someone may be able to speak publicly. Someone else may document what is happening. Another person may provide resources. A business owner may finance advocacy. A lawyer may challenge a policy. A researcher may expose the numbers. A clergy member may use the pulpit. An employee may quietly provide information that allows others to ask the right questions.

Everybody does not have to take the same risk.

But everybody cannot use risk as the reason nobody does anything.

There is a difference between strategy and surrender.

Strategy asks: How can I contribute effectively given my position?

Surrender says: I agree with you, but I cannot do anything.

History was not made exclusively by people who had nothing to lose.

It was made repeatedly by people who decided something else was more important.

Who Are You Willing to Challenge?

The true test of civil-rights conviction is rarely whether someone can identify injustice committed by people they already oppose.

That is easy.

The harder test comes when the institution responsible for the disparity is politically aligned with you. When the person making the decision is your friend. When the government agency funds your program. When the corporation sponsors your banquet. When the foundation pays your staff. When speaking plainly could cost access to the room.

That is when principles become measurable.

Civil rights cannot simply mean challenging the other political party, another city, another state or another administration.

Equity does not become less important because the people failing to produce it are people we like.

The standard has to survive our relationships.

The Example We Keep Quoting

David Walker did not know that people would still be discussing his Appeal almost 200 years later.

King did not know streets across America would eventually bear his name. Lewis could not have known that “good trouble” would become a celebrated national phrase. Abernathy did not endure bombings and arrests because he expected history to reward him.

They acted before history made their positions comfortable.

That may be the most important part of their example.

We should stop asking whether we admire their courage. Of course we do.

Courage is easy to admire once somebody else has already paid its price.

The better question is what happens when our moment arrives.

When the facts are uncomfortable. When the institution is powerful. When the relationship matters. When funding could be threatened. When our friends tell us to quiet down. When everybody is not with us. When there is no guarantee that history will vindicate us.

Will we still speak?

Or will another generation inherit what we were afraid to confront?

David Walker did not wait for America to agree with him. Neither did King. Neither did Lewis. Neither did Abernathy.

They understood something that cannot be reduced to a slogan:

Civil rights has never been measured by what people are willing to say when saying it is safe.

It is measured by what they are willing to stand for when standing for it costs something.

Sources & Further Reading

David Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World — Library of Congress

David Walker — National Park Service

Letter from Birmingham Jail — The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University

John Lewis — U.S. House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

Good Trouble

In 1829, a free Black abolitionist in Boston took on Thomas Jefferson’s ideas about race and forced the nation’s founding promises to answer for the reality of slavery.

BLACK VANGUARD MEDIA | HISTORY & IDEAS

A Debate Jefferson Never Lived to See

Thomas Jefferson never met David Walker. By the time Walker published his explosive Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World in Boston in 1829, Jefferson had been dead for three years.

Yet Walker made Jefferson one of the most important adversaries in his book.

The dispute was not personal. It was larger than that. Walker was confronting the authority of a founding father whose words had helped define American freedom, but whose writings on race helped give intellectual respectability to the idea of Black inferiority.

Jefferson had written the most famous sentence in the American political tradition: “all men are created equal.” He had also written, in Notes on the State of Virginia, that he suspected Black people were inferior to whites in both body and mind.

Walker saw the contradiction, and he refused to let it stand unchallenged.

More importantly, he understood the danger. Jefferson was not simply another white man expressing a prejudice. He was a former president, author of the Declaration of Independence and one of the most celebrated intellectual figures in the new republic. If Jefferson’s assumptions about Black people went unanswered, Walker believed the prestige of the man could lend prestige to the argument.

The Man Who Refused to Ask Quietly

David Walker was born free in Wilmington, North Carolina, to a free Black mother and an enslaved father. He eventually made his way to Boston, where he operated a used-clothing business and became part of the city’s growing Black activist community. He participated in the Massachusetts General Colored Association, worked with Freedom’s Journal, the nation’s first Black-owned and operated newspaper, and became known as an uncompromising opponent of slavery and colonization.

Walker was deeply religious. He was also impatient with the idea that enslaved people should wait indefinitely for their oppressors to discover a conscience.

That combination gave the Appeal its distinctive voice. It reads at different moments like a sermon, an indictment, a political manifesto and a warning.

Walker attacked slavery as a crime against humanity and Christianity. He attacked American churches that tolerated it. He rejected schemes to remove free Black Americans to Africa. He challenged Black people to pursue education and reject ideas of their own inferiority. And he insisted that enslaved people possessed the same natural right to resist tyranny that white Americans celebrated in their own Revolution.

That last point helped make the pamphlet notorious.

Copies moved into Southern ports, sometimes carried by Black sailors and concealed in clothing. Authorities responded with alarm. The mayor of Savannah contacted Boston officials about Walker. Southern governments tightened restrictions on Black literacy, assembly and the circulation of abolitionist literature.

Walker had managed to do something extraordinary: a Black writer with no elected office, army or fortune had frightened a slaveholding system with a pamphlet.

Jefferson’s Problem

Jefferson’s racial thinking presented Walker with a particularly difficult target because Jefferson’s record contained both an indictment of slavery and assumptions about Black inferiority.

In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson described slavery as morally dangerous and expressed fear that divine justice would eventually reckon with the institution. But he also speculated about racial differences and questioned Black intellectual capacity.

For Walker, the problem was not merely that Jefferson was inconsistent.

It was that Jefferson’s stature could turn speculation into inherited belief.

Walker therefore urged Black readers to study Jefferson rather than ignore him. His approach was strikingly intellectual: understand the argument, confront it and refute it.

Walker warned that if Black people did not answer Jefferson’s claims about them, those claims could harden into accepted truth.

That is what makes this confrontation so significant. Walker was not asking white intellectuals to certify Black humanity. He was insisting that Black people develop the knowledge and confidence to answer one of America’s most respected thinkers themselves.

Using Jefferson Against Jefferson

Walker’s most devastating move was to take Jefferson’s own revolutionary language seriously.

The Declaration of Independence says human beings possess rights that governments do not create and therefore cannot legitimately take away. Americans had used that principle to justify resistance against British rule.

Walker asked the obvious question that the slaveholding republic desperately wanted to avoid:

If resistance to tyranny was legitimate for white colonists, why was it illegitimate for enslaved Black people?

He repeatedly forced Americans to compare the principles they celebrated with the conditions they imposed on Black people. The Declaration became evidence for the prosecution.

This was more than an accusation of hypocrisy. Walker was making a claim about citizenship and ownership of the American idea.

The language of liberty did not belong exclusively to Jefferson. Once Americans announced those principles to the world, Walker argued from them as universal principles. Black Americans could invoke them too.

That move would echo through later Black political thought. Frederick Douglass would famously expose the contradiction between American independence and American slavery. Generations of Black leaders would demand that the country either honor its stated principles or admit that those principles had never been intended to apply universally.

Walker was making that case in 1829.

The Argument Was Also Inside Black America

Walker’s Appeal was addressed to white America, but it was not written primarily for white approval. Its title announced its audience: the “coloured citizens of the world,” and especially those in the United States.

That distinction matters.

Walker believed white supremacy operated not only through chains and laws but through ideas. A people repeatedly told they were naturally inferior could eventually be pressured to see themselves through the eyes of the society oppressing them.

Education therefore became part of liberation.

Walker wanted Black people to read, study history, understand Christianity, know American political principles and challenge the intellectual claims used against them. He did not believe Black humanity needed to be discovered by white America. He believed Black people had to reject the authority of anyone who denied it.

Not every Black leader embraced Walker’s methods or rhetoric. His willingness to defend militant resistance was controversial, including among abolitionists who favored moral persuasion and nonviolence. But the larger questions he raised—Black citizenship, intellectual independence, education, self-determination and the right to resist oppression—would remain at the center of Black political debate for generations.

Christianity in the Witness Box

Walker also placed American Christianity on trial.

For him, slavery was not merely bad public policy. It was sin.

That distinction gave the Appeal much of its intensity. Walker could not reconcile the Christianity preached by slaveholding America with the God described in Scripture. A nation that prayed on Sunday while buying and selling human beings during the week could not, in Walker’s reasoning, escape judgment simply by calling itself Christian.

Here again, he turned America’s own professed beliefs against its practices.

The country claimed Christianity. Walker asked whether its conduct was Christian.

The country claimed liberty. Walker asked whether Black people were included.

The country celebrated resistance to tyranny. Walker asked whether enslaved people possessed the same right.

The country revered Jefferson. Walker asked whether Jefferson’s ideas about Black people could survive serious examination.

Why Walker Still Matters

David Walker died in Boston in 1830, only months after issuing the third edition of the Appeal. Contemporary records attributed his death to consumption, or tuberculosis, although rumors of assassination circulated because of the enemies his writing had made.

He was still a young man.

He did not live to see Nat Turner’s rebellion, the rise of William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, Frederick Douglass’s emergence as a national figure, the Civil War, emancipation or the constitutional abolition of slavery.

But he had already identified a struggle that would survive slavery itself.

What happens when racial inequality is defended not simply by force, but by ideas?

Ending slavery could remove the legal ownership of human beings. It could not automatically erase the belief that Black people were intellectually, morally or politically inferior. Walker understood that liberation therefore required more than changing laws. It required challenging the intellectual architecture that made oppression appear reasonable.

That is why Jefferson mattered to him.

Walker was confronting one of the central contradictions in the American story: the nation’s greatest language of equality emerged from a political world that tolerated slavery, and its author himself enslaved people while speculating about Black inferiority.

Walker did not respond by abandoning the language of American freedom.

He seized it.

He took the Declaration’s promise, stripped away the racial limitation America had placed around it and demanded that the nation explain itself.

In that sense, David Walker did something remarkable.

He put Thomas Jefferson on trial without Jefferson ever entering the courtroom.

The witnesses were Jefferson’s own words.

The evidence was American slavery.

And the standard against which America was judged was the promise it had written for itself.

Sources & Further Reading

David Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/65012945/

David Walker biography. U.S. National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/people/david-walker.htm

“We Must and Shall Be Free”: David Walker Held to “Certain Truths”. U.S. National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/boaf/learn/news/walker.htm

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/03004902/

Who controlled the money? Who controlled the systems? Who had oversight? And where was the board?

In this installment of Good Trouble!, we cut through the legal noise and focus on something much harder to explain away: governance, control and accountability.

Because when an organization points the finger outward, the public still has the right to ask what was happening inside the boardroom.

Watch the video below, then read the full article for the documents, timeline and deeper examination behind the story.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE: 👇🏾

This isn’t about choosing sides.

It’s about following the record.

How BBC’s Allegations Try to Rewrite the Record

BLACK VANGUARD MEDIA | GOOD TROUBLE | PART V

When an institution loses control of the facts, it often tries to change the subject. That is what Burten, Bell, Carr Development, Inc. appears to be doing.

After BBC suspended First Class Broadcasting Corporation and Urban Voice Public Media from WOVU operations, after the dispute escalated into litigation, after BBC failed to timely respond to the lawsuit, and after BBC had to ask the court for permission to file late, BBC did not simply present a clean legal argument.

It went further. It tried to create a story.

That story attempts to place blame on Joy Johnson, Darvio Morrow, FCB, Urban Voice Public Media, and Jerry Primm. It suggests conflicts, concealment, unauthorized action, financial confusion, improper control, and damage to WOVU.

But when the allegations are placed next to the record, many of them begin to look less like facts and more like damage control.

That is why Part V matters. This article is about the counterclaim. Not as a legal pleading alone, but as a public-relations strategy.

Because BBC’s counterclaim does more than defend BBC in court. It attempts to redirect public attention away from the boardroom, away from financial oversight, away from David Roney’s role, away from Jamie Parker’s suspension of FCB, away from the missed litigation deadline, and away from the fact that many of BBC’s problems became worse after Joy Johnson was removed.

That is deflection. And the record deserves better.

The Counterclaim Is Not the Whole Truth

A counterclaim is not a verdict. It is not a finding of fact. It is not an independent investigation. It is one party’s version of events, filed after being sued.

That distinction matters because BBC’s allegations are being used to create a narrative that could damage reputations before the facts are fully tested.

Black Vanguard Media is not treating BBC’s counterclaim as truth simply because it was filed in court.

The question is not whether BBC has the right to defend itself. It does. The question is whether BBC’s defense matches the record. And on key points, the answer appears to be no.

BBC admits the original Radio Syndication, Affiliation, and Consulting Agreement existed. BBC admits the Agreement was signed by then-Executive Director Joy Johnson. BBC admits that Exhibit 1 to the complaint is a true and accurate copy of the Agreement. BBC’s dispute is largely aimed at the Amendment and the events that followed.

That matters.

Because once BBC admits the original Agreement existed, it cannot pretend FCB appeared out of nowhere.

FCB was not some stranger that wandered into WOVU. FCB had a signed agreement. FCB had a defined role.

FCB had been brought in to provide content, programming, consulting, underwriting support, and digital strategy.

The counterclaim tries to make that relationship look suspicious. The Agreement makes it look planned.

Allegation One: Joy “Gave Away” WOVU

One of BBC’s most emotionally loaded claims is the idea that Joy Johnson “gave away” WOVU. That phrase is designed to inflame. It makes the situation sound reckless, secretive, and irreversible. But the record is more complicated.

WOVU-LP is a Low Power FM station. LPFM licenses exist within an FCC-regulated framework. The Amendment did not instantly move the FCC license from BBC to someone else. It created a conditional process connected to Urban Voice Public Media’s nonprofit status and the required FCC steps.

That distinction matters. BBC wants the public to hear “gave away the station.”

The record points to something different: a disputed amendment that contemplated a future process involving UVPM and FCC-related filings after a triggering event.

Those are not the same thing.

If BBC wants to dispute whether Joy had authority to sign the Amendment, that is a legal argument.

But describing the situation as if Joy simply handed away WOVU in a back room is rhetoric. And rhetoric is not proof.

Allegation Two: The Amendment Had No Value

BBC’s counterclaim tries to suggest that the Amendment involved giving away an asset for no consideration.

That argument ignores the relationship that already existed. FCB was already providing services. Programming. Consulting. Digital strategy. Underwriting support. Operational support. Branding. Station development. Audience growth. Media infrastructure. BBC had received, and was receiving, the benefit of FCB’s work.

The public should not evaluate the Amendment as if FCB had done nothing, brought nothing, built nothing, and contributed nothing.

That is not the record.

WOVU planning documents show a structured strategy to increase audience reach across terrestrial radio, digital streaming, and podcast platforms. The goal was to make WOVU more attractive to underwriters, sponsors, and advertisers. WOVU transformation materials describe expanded digital accessibility, stronger programming identity, and measurable audience growth under FCB.

So when BBC claims no value, the public should ask: No value compared to what? No value compared to WOVU draining BBC’s resources? No value compared to the old model? No value compared to a station without a sustainable media strategy? No value compared to the growth FCB helped produce?

BBC cannot accept services, benefit from strategy, see growth, and then pretend the relationship was valueless when litigation begins.

That is not accountability. That is revision.

Allegation Three: Joy Acted Alone

BBC’s narrative depends heavily on isolating Joy Johnson.

It wants the public to see the WOVU-FCB relationship as something Joy did by herself, for herself, or outside the needs of BBC.

But the record undermines that framing. The board had asked Joy to find a way for WOVU to stop draining BBC resources. That fact changes the entire story. Joy was not inventing a problem. Joy was not creating a rogue project. Joy was not trying to unload a station without organizational purpose. She was responding to a board-recognized problem.

WOVU had mission value, but it was financially burdensome. BBC needed a sustainable model. FCB represented a professional media solution to a real operational issue.

If the board asked Joy to find a solution, then BBC cannot later use the existence of that solution as proof that Joy did something wrong.

A board cannot request relief, accept the work, and then punish the person who pursued the relief.

That is not oversight. That is scapegoating.

Allegation Four: Joy Had No Authority

BBC argues that Joy lacked authority to execute the Amendment. That is one of the central legal questions in the dispute. But the public narrative surrounding that claim deserves scrutiny.

Joy signed the original Agreement as Executive Director. BBC admits the Agreement was executed by Joy. BBC admits that the Agreement itself is real. The original Agreement contained an amendment pathway. FCB’s position is that the Amendment was written and executed pursuant to that pathway.

BBC’s argument requires the public to accept a narrow distinction: Joy had authority to sign the original Agreement, but not the later Amendment. Maybe BBC will try to make that argument legally. But the public should still ask: Did BBC clearly notify FCB before the Amendment that Joy’s authority had been revoked? Did BBC clearly notify Darvio Morrow that Joy could no longer act for BBC?

Did BBC produce a written communication to FCB before the Amendment saying Joy lacked authority?

Did BBC communicate Joy’s termination to FCB before the Amendment was executed? If not, then BBC’s accusation against Darvio becomes much weaker.

A third party cannot be accused of knowingly participating in an unauthorized transaction if the organization never told him the executive’s authority had changed.

BBC may regret what happened. But regret is not proof of deception.

Allegation Five: Darvio Knew Something BBC Had Not Communicated

BBC’s narrative implies that Darvio Morrow knew or should have known that Joy lacked authority.

BBC’s allegation depends on a fiction: That Darvio knew facts BBC had not yet communicated. That is not reasonable.

If BBC changed Joy’s status, BBC had a responsibility to communicate that clearly to outside parties relying on her executive role.

If BBC failed to do that, it cannot turn its own communication failure into Darvio’s misconduct.

That is the pattern throughout the counterclaim: BBC’s internal failures become allegations against someone else. That pattern should concern everyone reading this case.

Allegation Six: Jerry Primm Was Behind UVPM or FCB

BBC’s narrative also tries to pull Jerry Primm into the story. That is one of the clearest examples of deflection.

The record states that Urban Voice Public Media was incorporated by FCB, not Jerry Primm. It states that Jerry was not UVPM’s incorporator, founder, organizer, officer, director, statutory agent, or signatory. It also states that FCB was formed in 2009, long before Darvio Morrow even knew Jerry Primm.

That matters. Because BBC’s theory needs Jerry to be more than he was.

If Jerry had no ownership, founding, officer, director, governance, or signatory role with FCB or UVPM, then BBC’s attempt to use his name looks less like evidence and more like narrative construction.

The public should ask: What document makes Jerry an owner of FCB? What document makes Jerry an officer of UVPM? What filing makes Jerry an incorporator? What signature makes Jerry a party to the Agreement? What board action gives Jerry control? If the answer is none, then the allegation is not evidence. It is a smear.

Allegation Seven: Joy Had a Jerry-Related Conflict

BBC’s conflict theory appears to depend on two ideas. First, that Jerry Primm had a role with FCB or UVPM. Second, that Joy Johnson had a personal relationship with Jerry during the relevant period. If either claim fails, the conflict theory weakens. If both fail, the conflict theory collapses.

The record presented so far does not support BBC’s attempt to make Jerry part of FCB’s ownership or UVPM’s organization. It also does not establish that Joy had a personal relationship with Jerry during FCB’s interaction with BBC.

That matters because “conflict of interest” is a serious phrase. It should not be used casually. It should not be used to manufacture suspicion. It should not be used to damage reputations when the underlying facts do not support it. BBC may want the public to believe there was a conflict. But wanting a conflict to exist is not the same as proving one.

Allegation Eight: The Board Did Not Know About the Amendment Until February

BBC claims the board was unaware of the Amendment until February 2026. That claim deserves careful examination.

Records show that the Agreement and Amendment were sent to David Roney on November 12, 2025.

Roney was not a minor figure.

He was tied to BBC board leadership and financial oversight. He served as Board Treasurer then Board President . He later became Interim Executive Director. He was central enough to BBC’s own litigation story that BBC says the board believed he had counsel handling the lawsuit.

So if Roney had the Agreement and Amendment in November, then BBC has a governance problem. Either Roney received critical documents and failed to circulate them. Or the board failed to ensure that leadership reviewed them. Or BBC’s internal document control was inadequate. Or the February “discovery” story is incomplete. In any scenario, the issue points back to BBC’s own governance. It does not prove concealment by FCB.

BBC cannot claim something was hidden merely because its own leadership failed to manage, review, or distribute the documents it received.

That is the difference between secrecy and dysfunction.

Allegation Nine: Darvio Refused to Communicate

BBC’s narrative tries to make Darvio look evasive.

But the email record shows ongoing communication between Darvio and BBC leadership after Joy’s removal.

David Roney asked Darvio for WOVU budget information. Darvio responded. Roney asked about funding sources. Darvio responded. Roney asked for invoices. Darvio provided them. Roney asked about how funds were received. Darvio explained what he knew and clarified that the money went into BBC accounts. That is not refusal to communicate. That is communication.

What Darvio would not do was surrender contractual rights after BBC denied the Amendment and suspended FCB’s operations.

That is different.

Once BBC took the position that the Amendment was invalid and moved to suspend FCB, the relationship was no longer business as usual. It had become a legal dispute.

A party refusing to abandon its legal position is not the same as a party refusing to communicate.

BBC blurs that line because the blur helps its narrative. The record does not.

Allegation Ten: FCB Controlled the Money

This is one of the most important false impressions in the counterclaim narrative. BBC wants the public to associate FCB with financial confusion around WOVU. But the email record directly undercuts that.

Darvio wrote that all funds raised on behalf of WOVU were deposited directly into BBC accounts. He stated that WOVU did not have a separate bank account. He stated that FCB did not have access to BBC’s accounts, books, or internal financial systems. He stated that reconciliation, tracking of disbursements, and resolution of discrepancies had to occur within BBC’s internal processes as owner of the station.

That is a devastating distinction.

Because if BBC controlled the accounts, BBC controlled the books, BBC controlled the internal systems, and BBC controlled payment processing, then BBC cannot fairly blame FCB for internal accounting confusion.

FCB was not BBC’s bank. FCB was not BBC’s treasurer. FCB was not BBC’s accounting department. FCB was not Bill.com. FCB was the media partner.

The record shows Darvio raising concerns about unpaid staff and delayed payments. It shows Darvio trying to help Roney identify funding documentation. It shows BBC leadership attempting to trace its own deposits and internal records.

That does not prove FCB withheld money. It suggests BBC had internal financial management issues. Again, the counterclaim points outward. The record points inward.

Allegation Eleven: FCB Failed to Pay Staff and Contractors

BBC’s claim that FCB failed to pay operating costs, staff, or contractors is weakened by the same basic fact:

BBC controlled the funds and payment process.

If money was deposited into BBC accounts, if BBC controlled the bank accounts, if BBC controlled its books, if BBC controlled Bill.com, and if BBC controlled disbursements, then the obligation to process payments ran through BBC’s internal systems.

The emails show Darvio complaining that invoices had not been uploaded, staff had not been paid, and payment delays were harming WOVU operations.

That matters. A person documenting unpaid staff is not hiding unpaid staff. A person asking BBC to process payments is not controlling BBC’s payment system.

A person clarifying that money sits inside BBC’s accounts is not the reason BBC’s accounts are not reconciled.

BBC’s allegation tries to make FCB responsible for a payment process FCB did not control. That is not evidence. That is blame-shifting.

Allegation Twelve: FCB Damaged WOVU’s Digital Presence

BBC alleges or implies that FCB damaged WOVU’s digital assets, distribution platforms, website, app, or related infrastructure.

But the record draws key distinctions.

FCB’s relationships with third-party platforms were FCB’s relationships. If BBC suspended FCB’s operations, BBC cannot demand indefinite access to FCB-controlled or FCB-maintained relationships as if those assets belonged automatically to BBC.

The record also shows that FCB did not create, own, manage, or control the WOVU app. It states that FCB did not own or control WOVU.org and did not list it for sale. It states that website disruption resulted from BBC failing to pay the hosting vendor.

Those are factual claims that BBC must answer with proof. Who controlled the app backend? Who controlled the domain registrar? Who controlled hosting payments? Who held credentials? Who received invoices? Who failed to pay? Those questions matter because technical confusion can be weaponized. A website going offline is not automatically sabotage.

A third-party platform relationship ending after a contract dispute is not automatically misconduct.

A station losing access to FCB-created infrastructure after suspending FCB does not prove FCB destroyed BBC property.

It may prove BBC did not understand what FCB had built and what BBC actually controlled.

Allegation Thirteen: FCB Wrongfully Retained BBC Property

BBC’s property narrative must be evaluated against the Agreement.

If the Agreement states that intellectual property created by FCB remains FCB property absent a written assignment, then BBC cannot accuse FCB of retaining property merely because FCB refuses to surrender what it created.

That distinction is important. A logo. A slogan. Brand identity. Creative materials. Digital strategy. Programming concepts. Operational materials.

Those things may have been created as part of FCB’s work. If the contract preserved FCB’s ownership unless assigned, then BBC must show a written assignment before treating everything FCB created as BBC property.

BBC cannot benefit from FCB-created identity, continue using FCB-created work, and then accuse FCB of wrongdoing for asserting rights in its own work.

That is not clean hands. That is another attempt to benefit from the relationship while attacking the partner.

Allegation Fourteen: FCB Breached First

BBC’s overall legal narrative appears to suggest that FCB breached the Agreement. But the timing matters.

According to FCB and UVPM’s complaint and default motion materials, Darvio notified BBC on February 9, 2026, that UVPM had received its IRS determination letter. The next day, BBC’s Board President ceased FCB/UVPM’s operations at the station and prevented access.

That is the break point.

If BBC had a dispute over the Amendment, it could have addressed that dispute through the contract, through counsel, through a court filing, through written notice, through board action, or through an orderly process.

Instead, BBC suspended operations. That action triggered the litigation posture. So the public should ask: Who took the first drastic step? Who ended access? Who refused to proceed? Who turned a contractual dispute into a station shutdown? Who failed to timely respond when sued? BBC wants the public to believe FCB caused the crisis. But the timeline puts the decisive rupture at BBC’s door.

Allegation Fifteen: BBC Was the Victim of Outside Forces

The overall theme of BBC’s counterclaim is that outside forces harmed BBC. Joy. Darvio. FCB. UVPM. Jerry. But that theme ignores the internal facts that keep surfacing. BBC had a board. BBC had officers. BBC had a treasurer. BBC had a board president. BBC had legal sophistication at the board-president level. BBC controlled its own accounts. BBC controlled its own books. BBC controlled its payment systems. BBC received the lawsuit.

BBC failed to timely answer. BBC claims it believed Roney had counsel handling the matter. BBC later found unopened mail. BBC removed Roney. Those are not outside forces. Those are internal governance failures.

The counterclaim functions as a fog machine. It fills the room with names, suspicions, allegations, and insinuations until the simplest truth becomes harder to see:

BBC’s crisis was governed from inside BBC.

The Parker Problem

Jamie Parker’s role makes BBC’s deflection harder to accept.

Parker was BBC’s Board President when FCB and UVPM’s station operations were suspended. She later became Interim Executive Director. Public professional materials identify her as an Ohio attorney with experience in labor and employment law, mediation, human resources, compliance-risk mitigation, policy creation, and leadership-team conflict resolution.

That matters.

Because the suspension of FCB was not made in a vacuum. The missed lawsuit response did not occur in a boardroom with no legal sophistication. The attempt to frame BBC’s late response as excusable neglect must be read against the fact that BBC had leadership with legal training.

The point is not that Parker was BBC’s lawyer.

The point is that BBC’s leadership had enough legal sophistication to know that contracts, deadlines, default motions, court service, and unopened legal mail matter.

That makes the counterclaim’s deflection even more troubling. BBC does not get to present itself as helpless and sophisticated at the same time.

The Roney Problem

David Roney’s role also undermines BBC’s counterclaim.

Roney was tied to financial oversight. He was board leadership. He became Interim Executive Director. BBC’s own filing says the board believed he had counsel handling the lawsuit. BBC’s own filing says unopened mail addressed to Roney included critical default materials. BBC’s own filing says Roney was removed as Executive Director.

Those facts are not peripheral. They are central.

BBC’s counterclaim tries to drag others into the story, but BBC’s own motion points directly back to Roney and the board’s internal handling.

If Roney had the Agreement and Amendment in November, why was the board allegedly unaware until February?

If Roney was responsible for handling legal counsel, why was no timely response filed? If mail addressed to Roney sat unopened, what does that say about BBC’s controls?

If Roney was removed as Executive Director, what were the “other issues” that led to that removal?

Those are not attacks. They are necessary questions. And they are far more relevant to BBC’s governance than insinuations about Jerry Primm.

The leadership turnover is itself part of the record. Within the first year after Joy Johnson’s departure, David Roney — the first interim executive director to succeed her — was removed from the position. BBC then moved to a second interim executive director, Jamie Parker. In less than a year, the organization went from a longtime executive director to two successive interim leaders, adding another layer to the questions about stability, governance and the board’s management of the transition.

The Counterclaim as Strategy

The counterclaim should be read as strategy. Not just legal strategy. Public strategy. Reputation strategy. Damage-control strategy.

By naming Joy Johnson, Darvio Morrow, FCB, UVPM, Jerry Primm, and others, BBC changes the emotional center of the story.

Instead of asking why BBC suspended FCB, readers are invited to wonder whether Darvio did something wrong.

Instead of asking why BBC missed the lawsuit deadline, readers are invited to focus on Joy.

Instead of asking why Roney had critical responsibilities, readers are invited to speculate about Jerry.

Instead of asking why BBC controlled the money but blamed FCB for payment issues, readers are invited to assume confusion means misconduct.

That is how deflection works. It does not need to prove every allegation. It only needs to create enough suspicion to slow down accountability. Black Vanguard Media’s job is to cut through that suspicion and return to the record.

What the Record Shows

The record shows that BBC had a WOVU problem before FCB. The record shows that Joy was asked to find a way to stop WOVU from draining BBC’s resources. The record shows that FCB was brought in under a written Agreement. The record shows that BBC admits the original Agreement existed and was signed by Joy.

The record shows that FCB provided programming, consulting, underwriting, and digital strategy.

The record shows that WOVU had a growth strategy under FCB.

The record shows that after Joy’s removal, Roney communicated with Darvio about WOVU budgets, funding, invoices, staff payments, and revenue tracking.

The record shows Darvio stated funds went directly to BBC accounts and that FCB did not control BBC’s accounts, books, or internal systems.

The record shows BBC suspended FCB/UVPM operations after UVPM’s IRS trigger event. The record shows FCB and UVPM sued. The record shows BBC failed to timely respond.

The record shows BBC blamed its late response on internal assumptions about counsel and Roney-related handling.

The record shows BBC then filed a counterclaim trying to shift attention outward. That sequence matters.

Because when the facts are placed in order, BBC’s counterclaim looks less like a search for truth and more like an effort to survive the record.

What Funders Should Ask Now

Funders, public officials, partners, and community stakeholders should not accept BBC’s counterclaim at face value.

They should ask direct questions.

What evidence proves Jerry Primm had an ownership, officer, director, incorporator, or governance role in FCB or UVPM?

What evidence proves Joy had a conflict during the relevant period? What evidence proves FCB knew Joy lacked authority before BBC informed FCB?

What evidence proves the Amendment instantly transferred the FCC license without required FCC process?

What evidence proves FCB controlled BBC’s bank accounts, books, Bill.com, or payment systems? What evidence proves FCB owned or controlled WOVU.org? What evidence proves FCB created, owned, or controlled the WOVU app? What evidence proves FCB refused ordinary communication before BBC suspended operations? What board vote authorized the February suspension? What legal analysis supported it? Why did BBC fail to answer the lawsuit on time?

Why did the board rely on Roney? Why was mail unopened? Why was Roney removed?

Why does BBC’s counterclaim spend so much energy attacking others instead of explaining its own governance failures?

Those are the questions that matter.

The False Narrative Is Collapsing

The more BBC’s allegations are tested, the more the narrative weakens. The Jerry narrative weakens because corporate roles matter. The conflict narrative weakens because facts matter. The “gave away WOVU” narrative weakens because FCC process matters. The “no consideration” narrative weakens because FCB’s services matter. The “Darvio knew” narrative weakens because the timeline matters. The “board did not know” narrative weakens because Roney’s possession of documents matters.

The “FCB controlled money” narrative weakens because BBC controlled the accounts. The “FCB failed to pay” narrative weakens because BBC controlled payments. The “FCB damaged digital assets” narrative weakens because ownership and control matter. The “BBC was simply a victim” narrative weakens because governance matters. That is why BBC’s counterclaim should not intimidate anyone. It should be examined. And once examined, it reveals the same pattern this series has exposed from the beginning:

BBC is trying to turn its governance crisis into someone else’s scandal.

The Bottom Line

BBC does not have to like the Agreement. BBC does not have to like the Amendment. BBC does not have to like FCB’s position. BBC does not have to like Darvio’s defense. BBC does not have to like Joy Johnson’s record. BBC does not have to like Jerry Primm’s involvement in defending reputations. BBC does not have to like Black Vanguard Media asking questions. But BBC does have to answer the record. And the record does not support a simple story of outside misconduct.

It supports a story of institutional deflection. A board asked for a WOVU solution. Joy pursued one. FCB delivered value. BBC later changed course. Parker suspended operations. Roney was central to internal handling. BBC missed the lawsuit deadline.

BBC then filed a counterclaim that attempted to spread blame across everyone except the people responsible for governing BBC.

That is the real damage-control strategy. And the public should see it for what it is. This is Part V. And by now, the pattern is clear: BBC’s counterclaim is not just a legal filing. It is an attempted rewrite of the truth. The record is the correction.

MAPLE HEIGHTS, Ohio — For generations, the Black church has been a place where people have carried burdens they did not necessarily take into a therapist’s office.

Grief. Fear. Financial pressure. Family problems. Trauma. Anxiety.

Sometimes those burdens were taken to the altar. Sometimes to the pastor. Sometimes they simply went unspoken.

Research has documented that Black Americans have often turned to pastors, churches, family and faith communities for emotional support, including during mental health struggles. (PubMed)

On Saturday, Aug. 15, one Maple Heights pastor is deliberately bringing those worlds together.

Rev. Dr. Terry A. Webb, LPC, NCC, CCTP, pastor of Christian Unity Baptist Church and a licensed professional counselor, will host “Finding Peace in the Storm,” a seminar designed to help people better understand anxiety while learning practical and spiritual strategies for managing it.

The seminar begins at 11 a.m. at Christian Unity Baptist Church, 16811 Broadway Avenue in Maple Heights.

The idea behind it is straightforward: faith and mental health treatment do not have to compete with one another.

They can work together.

More Than “Just Stop Worrying”

Anxiety is easy to minimize when it belongs to somebody else.

People are told to calm down. Stop thinking about it. Be strong. Pray about it. Get over it.

But persistent anxiety can affect sleep, concentration, relationships, work and everyday functioning. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that, based on 2024 National Health Interview Survey data, 12.1 percent of American adults regularly experience feelings of worry, nervousness or anxiety. (CDC)

Webb’s workshop is built around helping participants understand what anxiety actually looks like and what they can do when worry begins controlling the conversation inside their own heads.

In material he provided to Black Vanguard Media, Webb describes an approach that combines pastoral counseling with evidence-based mental health practices.

Among them is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, which teaches people to recognize distorted or catastrophic thinking and examine those thoughts rather than automatically accepting them as truth.

That is not pop psychology. The National Institute of Mental Health describes CBT as a well-studied, research-supported psychotherapy commonly used in treating generalized anxiety disorder. (National Institute of Mental Health)

Webb then adds another dimension: faith.

His approach encourages people to challenge destructive thinking while also drawing on scripture, prayer, gratitude, community and the belief that every burden does not have to be carried alone.

That distinction matters.

The message is not therapy instead of faith.

It is also not faith instead of therapy.

It is refusing to pretend those are the only two choices.

Why Doing This in a Church Matters

A 2024 study published in Psychiatric Services examined mental health in a predominantly Black community surrounding a church. Researchers found that spirituality played an important role in coping and recovery, while mental health stigma continued to affect whether people sought help. Participants also expressed a need for church-based mental health programming. (PubMed)

That makes a seminar like Webb’s particularly significant.

People who might never attend something advertised as a psychiatric presentation may walk into their own church to talk about stress.

Someone reluctant to say, “I think I need counseling,” may be willing to say, “I’ve been worrying a lot lately.”

That conversation can become a bridge.

And bridges matter because access to treatment remains uneven. SAMHSA reported that in 2023, among adults with serious mental illness, 56.4 percent of Black adults received mental health treatment compared with 74.9 percent of White adults. (SAMHSA)

The church cannot solve that disparity by itself.

But it can help make seeking help less foreign.

The Checkup Before the Breakdown

That philosophy also fits a larger conversation Black Vanguard Media and The SOLUTION have been advancing through Check Up From the Neck Up — the idea that mental wellness should receive attention before somebody reaches a crisis.

The campaign asks a deceptively simple question:

Why is it normal to check your blood pressure, teeth, eyes and cholesterol, but uncomfortable to suggest checking on your mental health?

The SOLUTION’s discussion materials are designed around normalizing those conversations and helping ordinary people become bridges to information and professional support rather than trying to become therapists themselves.

That same prevention-focused approach has appeared throughout the campaign’s work with young people: recognize signs earlier, ask better questions and stop waiting for a breakdown before deciding something deserves attention.

Webb’s seminar puts that philosophy into practice.

Participants are expected to discuss techniques for calming the mind and body, reframing negative thoughts, building healthier daily routines, using faith during difficult moments and recognizing when anxiety has become more than ordinary worry.

Webb also emphasizes sleep, physical activity, nutrition and community as parts of emotional wellness. NIMH similarly notes that adequate sleep, exercise and stress-management practices can help reduce anxiety symptoms when used alongside appropriate care. (National Institute of Mental Health)

There is something especially timely about having that conversation inside a Black church.

For too long, asking for help has sometimes been interpreted as weakness.

Perhaps a healthier definition of strength is knowing when you do not have to carry everything yourself.

And perhaps finding peace in the storm does not always mean waiting for the storm to disappear.

Sometimes it means learning how to move through it.

EVENT INFORMATION

• Finding Peace in the Storm: A Practical Guide to Managing Anxiety Through Faith

• Saturday, August 15, 2026 at 11:00 a.m.

• Christian Unity Baptist Church

• 16811 Broadway Avenue, Maple Heights, Ohio 44137

• Presenter: Rev. Dr. Terry A. Webb, LPC, NCC, CCTP

• Reservations: drterrywebb@gmail.com