REFLECTIONS/Jonathan Gramling
Brother Wayne & Be Woke!
It is still hard to fathom that Wayne Strong died on June 20th at the youthful age of 62. It was appropriate that Wayne died on the first celebration of Juneteenth Day as a national holiday. Wayne served for many years on the Juneteenth Day committee, often helping out with security when he was a member of the Madison Police Department, but like so many community things that Wayne did, he stayed on providing service in the community long after he left the police department.
It’s hard to believe that Wayne has passed even now. We sat down to talk at Juneteenth in Penn Park on June 18th — there are so many people who have said ‘But I just saw Wayne at Juneteenth.’ We talked about writing and I encouraged him to sign up for another year on the Wisconsin State Journal editorial advisory board because I felt he could have a greater impact the second time around after he had learned the ropes. Wayne approached me about 1-2 years ago about Pastor Karla Garcia writing a column for The Hues. And while there was communication back and forth, the deal was never sealed. I told Wayne it would be nice to have a regular spiritual voice in The Hues hoping that he would broach the subject with Rev. Garcia again.
When I sent a note of condolence to Terri, Wayne’s wife, she responded that after our talk, Wayne was thinking about writing for The Hues once more. I would have so welcomed that and felt sad at the lost possibility.
Wayne’s and my paths crossed many times during the 25 years that I knew him through various capacities. Wayne always had a pretty cheerful disposition. Now he could scowl when talking about issues and problems facing the community, but it was never in a personal way. Wayne was always glad to see people and enjoyed their presence.
Back in 2020 as COVID-19 began to sweep through the community in March, I was the treasurer for Wayne’s last campaign for the MMSD School Board. If my recollection is correct, Wayne did experience some health difficulty that led him to suspend his campaign before resuming it. The issues impacting the education of African American and other students of color and finding solutions to the problems and barriers that they faced was important to Wayne. And I can’t help but feel that he remained in the race so that it would be contested and his opponent would have to speak to these issues. And so he hung in there, perhaps even knowing that he wouldn’t win.
I will miss Wayne’s presence and spirit in our community. While we weren’t running buddies, I feel that we were bound together in the same spirit of community service. And we could pick up the conversation whether it was one week or one year since we had seen each other. Wayne, may you rest in peace in the presence of the Lord. There have been too many Brothers dying lately.
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Speaking of Juneteenth Day and the Fourth of July, I can’t help but feel that history is repeating itself much to the detriment of our country. The time is 1877 and the Compromise of 1877 has been enacted whereby Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was named President of the United States in a disputed election in exchange for federal troops removed from many states of the former Confederacy. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan led the way for violence against African Americans exercising their Constitutional Rights and being elected to office throughout the South. Laws were put in place enacting poll taxes and citizenship tests that were designed to disenfranchise African American voters. The U.S. Supreme Court decided Plessy vs. Ferguson which led to America’s apartheid — or Jim Crow — era and Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Rail Road made corporations peopled. The freedom of African Americans was stripped away and they were forced into second-class citizenship, a status that would last for the next 60-70 years.
And now we can fast forward to the present. White Supremacists were appalled when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 and immediately began to blame it on election fraud, especially by African Americans and other people of color.
In 2010, in its Citizens United decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that corporations could spend unlimited amounts of money on U.S. elections because as “people,” they had the right to free speech. In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, allowing states to enact restrictive voting measures — a la the citizenship test — to limit African American voting.
There has been a rise in the membership of White Supremacy groups and increased violence, much of which has been directed against African Americans, Latinos and other people of color.
In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned 50 years of precedence when it overturned Roe vs. Wade, which had given women control over their own bodies and health. With the removal of this precedence — the Supreme Court ruled that “privacy” is not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution — other rights such as access to contraceptives, same sex marriage, interracial marriage voting rights and other rights based on privacy and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment may be on the Supreme Court chopping block, taking our society back to the 1950s and before.
People need to be woke and active to stem this conservative resurgence that will put everyone in their place. Elections matter and the time to act is NOW!