Race and the Slay/George Dispute
Filed Tuesday, September 11, 2007 at 12:00 PM
Post-Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan writes:
If the confrontation plays all the way out, George will lose his job. That will not be good, and I say that not just because I like George. Firing him would be racially divisive. A lot of people in the black community see the dispute as a matter of respect. George is the chief. Where’s the respect?
There has not been much in the tone of the mayor’s rhetoric. It’s almost as if the mayor thinks history started yesterday. I mean, come on, this is about race. George came through the ranks when the association was pretty much a white guys’ club. Nothing unusual about that. My dad was a union electrician in Chicago and I remember when his union was that way. Those fellows felt that they were protecting what was theirs.
I remember the business agent talking to my father. “If your son wants to get into the union, he’s not going to have to wait in line behind any blacks,” he said, although he used another word for blacks. It’s a word we don’t use any more. Times have changed, and thank goodness for that.
But it’s easier for white guys like me or the mayor to say that times have changed.
Click here to read his insightful column.
Kristen Hinman writes on the Riverfront Times blog:
Bryson, who has worked in Mayor Francis Slay’s office for just shy of seven years and has a background in social work, brings an additional new perspective to the director’s office –- that of an African-American. “One of the reasons the mayor chose me is so that we can work on race relations,†says Bryson.
Race has long been said to be a factor in the tenuous relationship between George and city hall. “If you talk to clergymen on the north side,†points out Bryson, “they will suggest that part of the problem in the past between the public-safety director and the fire chief may have been race.â€
Bryson says he and George already have “a good working relationship†from having made the rounds at various public boards and commissions over the past few years.
As the new public-safety director puts it: “My race will not be an ace in my pocket. It will be a different way of looking at things.â€
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