Since we last met, the main organ of The People of Detroit has closed its doors. The Michigan Citizen was a weekly newspaper, independently owned by Charles and Teresa Kelley, who spoke truth to power for 37 years. When Mr. Kelly died, his wife Teresa and her daughter Katherine continued to publish.
Teresa was the publisher who wrote sharp analysis every week in the editorial. She chronicled Emergency Management in Benton Harbor, where the paper originated, to Highland Park, where it moved in the 90s, to Detroit, where it spent its final days. All three of these cities are majority Black and all three had been put under state control, robbed, raped and left for dead.
But dead we are not.
It takes a long time to recover from emergency management because the State takes all the resources from the people and then penalizes the city for not educating its children, for not paying its bills, despite the fact that it can't because the State took them. Because the cities are all majority Black, it's possible to hold this narrative in place. To beat, maim, rape and rob a people and then imprison or fine them because they are not carrying the burden of self determination. To impose exorbitant insurance fees and fines, then deny people insurance for having "bad credit ratings." To take away the right to hire a school superintendent, then penalize the District for failing students. To beat people down so badly that when they are finally free of emergency management, they voluntarily hire the very emergency manager that looted them to be their "CEO." Such is the case with Highland Park School Board and EM turned consultant Kevin Smith.
I raise this because Teresa Kelly, now 80 years old is a resident of Highland Park and is a member of the HP school board. So i know the situation there intimately because all of the seven years I was a member of Detroit School Board In Exile, Terry came to every board meeting and reported on them for the Michigan Citizen.
A former Dominican nun, she met her late husband, Charles Kelley in Chicago, where she was a teacher.
Note: This post was written two years ago. Since that time, Teresa Kelley resigned from the Highland Park School Board due to frustration over the state of HP and the fact that the board voted to make the Emergency Manager their CEO, a result of years of being under State control leading to Stockholm Syndrome.
I have since filed to run for Detroit Public School Board - although it's a shadow district called Detroit Public Schools Community District and is now at large instead of district voting. It will be a challenge to get elected, but the current board voted UNANIMOUSLY to send the children back in, face to face in the height of a pandemic that hit Detroit harder than anywhere in the world.
Stay tuned.
