Letter to the Editor / Everyone Matters – “Speaking Truth to Power”

By Virginia Burgohy Irving

To:  The City of Key West

We, the members of the Frederick Douglass School Black Educators’ Memorial Project “speak truth” to the following:

First, A PROMISE NOT KEPT, a 5-year promise by the current District Vi commissioner to help our group secure the Band Room for a  historical museum and cultural center.  The Band Room is the last hope for people of color to honor their history and heritage and to feel a sense of sacred space.  The Band Room belongs to the people who lived in and attended school in its walls.  It belongs to them because, except for the gym, there is nothing left in Bahama Village that evokes memory of their education in a segregated school.   

THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE ARE OWED THE BAND ROOM.  They have lost the 6.6 acres due them, not rightfully.  Please use part of the 6.6 acres to build a brand-new health clinic for CHI.  Give to the indigenous people their  BELOVED Band Room for their place to tell their story, to show their history, and through them, give hope to the few remaining indigenous people of color who, if not for their ancestors, there would not be a Bahama Village.

Second, Frederick Douglass School was BULLDOZED  in the mid-1970s without respect for the indigenous community’s permission because the school superintendent at that time, allegedly, did not want to bus white children into Bahama Village.

Third, ART WAS PLACED on the gym – A PUBLIC PLACE AND SACRED SPACE – without the permission of the indigenous people and without their input, ART THAT DOES NOT SPEAK TO WHO THEY ARE and art that  does not honor their history, their heritage, and, most of all, does not pay tribute to the sacredness of its space.

Fourth, AN EXPANSION TO THE GYM has been designed without consulting a broad spectrum of input from the people of color, including individuals within the community who have  COMMUNITY BUILDING experience and many years of practice, and the needed competences, in this area.

Fifth,  THE ELDERLY HAVE BEEN DEFACED in your gatherings/meetings, at times, with comments such as, “…and all they want is to put some old Downtrodden Black ancestors’ portraits on the walls,” quoted in a recent AIPP meeting by one of its members.  Downtrodden they are not.  They are the people who came before all of us.  They are those who gave us the Bahama Village story that no longer exists, the one that is used now as a metaphor to lure tourists and other visitors to what was once a “beautiful isle.”

Sixth, our beloved and sacred spaces in Bahama Village have been GENTRIFIED and the indigenous people are looked on as intruders into what those are new to the “neighborhood” now call  “their houses, their streets, their space.”

Finally, please stop choosing people from our community to make decisions for Bahama Village’s original people because, so far, the people you choose are not strong enough to stand up to speak the truth.  They are people chosen to make decisions that they are told to make, decisions that do not benefit, for the most part, the people of color.  Choose only those who would make decisions that would enhance well-being of people of color, as well as the poor, and the powerless.  Choose those who know that “everyone matters.”  Choose those who are courageous enough to “Speak Truth to Power.”

The Frederick Douglass School Educators’ Memorial Project, Inc.
The Steering Team, John Wilson Smith, President

This article was submitted by Dr. Virginia Burgohy Irving, Project Facilitator.

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