Keeping Hope Afloat In A ‘Sea’ Of Uncertainty!

By Betty Jean Grant

Betty Jean Grant

President Barack Obama believed a Change Will Come decades after civil rights activist Jesse Jackson encouraged black people to Keep Hope Alive. After all of these years and words of encouragement, black folks and our community have not lived by the few words in both pronouncements that inspired and boosted the 1960s’ Civil Rights Movement and later, carved the path by which a black man walked into the White House.

Who can doubt the fact that Nelson Mandela’s ascension to the presidency of South Africa may have lessened the disapproval of those who vowed never to see or support a black man-or as we now know, a black woman to sit in that President’s Chair in the White House ‘s Oval Office. Mandela’s road to the South African Presidency was helped by the fact that the 90% black population in that country was ruled by the small, remaining 10% whites South Africans who called themselves Afrikaners.

Let us fast forward to the current situation, on the eastside of Buffalo where folks, especially black folks are finding it difficult to rent an apartment, buy a house or even to ensure that they can secure a piece of land among the thousands of vacant lots dotting the city like some bizarre game of Tic Tac Toe, if they are well off enough to build a new house, from the ground up.

Many of our commu nity’s African American middle class wage earn ers have left Buffalo, not because they have given up on the city. No, the main reasons they tell me are: A lack of affordable housing; Less than adequate education in Buffalo Public Schools; Inadequate number of credible and reliable childcare providers and; Not enough job opportunities for black high school and college graduates.

It seems as if everyone loves the Buffalo Bills and that love is solid even when some of their game per formances leave a lot on the football field. Our collected love for Buffalo is steady, endearing and, it seems, permanent; even when we know that some of those who actually run this city, sometimes neglect parts or sections of the city based on the color of the residents’ skin and not the color of their money.

This writer will always keep Hope Alive. On April 4, 1968, I was just 17 miles away from the Lorraine Hotel, in Memphis, where Jesse Jackson was and where the Honorable, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., transitioned to Ances torhood. And to my president, the for ever President Barack Obama, Change will come. We black Americans must work to ensure we are on the right side of that change.