Take what can be imagined into thriving communal structures
Dayton, Ohio is one of the most uniquely American cities in all the 50 states. It represents a sobering cross section of the best and worst of the American experience. There is a rich texture to the history that resides in Dayton and the Miami Valley. Dayton is the birthplace of so much mechanical innovation, with companies like NCR and their invention of the cash register. Funk music’s seminal years were nestled in the inner city, birthing groups such as Zapp, Slave, the Ohio Players, and other groundbreaking musicians whose sound and art has buoyed several genres for the last 50 years.
Along with its more redeeming aspects, Dayton also carries an equally dense legacy regarding racism, xenophobia, classism, and housing injustice. These four horsemen of social inequity are as etched into the fabric of Dayton as being the first in flight.
Our divergent institutions — that we created, built and own — must be fully reconciled with. In recent years, local higher ed institutions have decided to grapple with this legacy head-on and promote solution-oriented research to not only address the issues, but form frameworks to remedy these issues.
The Imagining Community Symposium has quickly established itself as a regional beacon drawing in the best, brightest and most innovative academics, thought leaders and community organizers from around the country. The symposium creates a safe place for the critical and often uncomfortable dialogues to be had, bonded together with equal parts awareness, accountability, and compassion. The mixture of the three can provide the ideal birthing place for the radical charge needed to acknowledge, undo and take actionable steps towards making right the sins of generations past.
This is not the first time larger local organizations have gathered with the intent to deconstruct systemically oppressive systems. C.J McLin led a Civil Rights commission in the wake of the Dayton Uprising in 1966, with promises from local power brokers for institutional changes. Those changes have failed to materialize nearly 60 years later.
The Imagine Symposium does not project or traffic in offering a singular solution or warehousing the antidote for Dayton’s ills (and by proxy, the antidote to American issues). It does promote being part of a larger mosaic, part of a growing community of residents, activists, scholars and leaders to take what can be imagined into living, thriving communal structures harnessed securely to the best parts of the larger Dayton community.
This is a call to action for all Daytonians to be acknowledged, seen, and heard in the spaces that are our own. For Daytonians, it opens and gives access to places both structurally and metaphorically that have traditionally been off-limits or out of reach to the majority.
The Imaging Community Symposium is only the first step in a larger more encompassing exercise to bring about the beloved community Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of and living up to the lofty American ideal that El Hajj Malik Shabazz reminded our country it proclaimed to strive for.