Kenosha Achievement Center (KAC) is an organization that has served the city of Kenosha for over fifties years. It boasts of empowering children, teens, and adults by providing services to help all achieve a meaningful life. It's motto is, "Empowering People of All Abilities."
I had spent more than thirty years in academia as a professor of English and Cultural Theory and a little more than forty writing for various newsprint publications. When I was asked, however, to serve on the board of Women and Children's Horizon, with more than sixty percent of its clients then Black women and children, I said yes. In the early late 1960s and early 1970s, I was a member of Operation Breadbasket's Youth Division. I would have wanted to serve breakfast or to read to the children in the community as a member of the Black Panthers, if not for parents who, didn't like the idea of a Baptist organization, yet wouldn't permit a daughter who was a member of the Panthers.
Twenty-two years ago, without altering my Marxist stands, I joined with a group of Black women from the community to assist them in the organization of a NAACP branch. I hadn't heard of KAC then.
The day I interviewed to volunteer there, I wasn't surprised to observe one Black American on the staff and absence of Blacks at the administrative level. Unfortunately, a Jim-Crow-like atmosphere in Kenosha is the normal: Too many residents accept this situation as the natural order of human life, without any correction foreseeable in the future.
For several months in 2019, I agreed to worked as a senior volunteer at KAC.
I knew very little about the people who came to call KAC a home away from home or those who lived in group homes. I occasionally took note of someone on the autism spectrum or someone with Down Syndrome. But like most Americans, unless I had a student on the autism spectrum, I looked and then tried not to stare. Now you see and now you don't. A kind of dance of the eyes that builds walls. At KAC, however, I saw the people the minute I entered the massive building site. I looked right into their faces and smiled back at the smiles, recognizing, in most, an attempt to genuinely connection with another human being.
And this despite entering a space where the administration failed to correct the profound exclusion of people of color on it's staff. Decades ago, hadn't Dylan said that the times they are a changing?
I worked with the Day Service Program. Clients able to work in the garden, complete with Painted Lady butterflies enjoying the lush foliage, became skilled in planting and landscaping. Others worked with tools, becoming a part of KAC's partnership with local businesses. Others, still, worked in the cafeteria, providing lunch not just for members of the Day Service Program, but also for the Meals on Wheels program.
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