NYADP Hires a Legend

January 11, 2010 at 9:00 pm by David Kaczynski

One night about a year ago, I returned home from a meeting of the Albany Community Coalition to Prevent Violence. My first meeting with the group left me excited about the group’s purpose and sense of direction. This was not just another here-today, gone-tomorrow community group ready to point fingers and cast blame yet unable to sustain a plan of action. I left with the distinct impression that these folks were serious, not likely to be deterred by the seemingly intractable problem its members had come together to address: the high rate of street violence in Albany.

I was especially impressed by the group’s leader – a politician, no less – who sat with about a dozen of us in a shabby church basement in one of Albany’s poorest neighborhoods. I told my wife Linda: “I think this gal means business. She knows how to lead. She has a strong personality but there’s no sense of ego about her. She’s 100% focused on the mission, meaning this group has a chance to accomplish something.”

“What’s her name?” Linda asked.

“Barbara Smith.”

“You don’t mean THE Barbara Smith?!” Linda exclaimed.

“The Common Council member? Yeah, that’s her.”

“No, I mean Barbara Smith, the feminist writer – icon of black women’s literature. I used her anthology in my feminism class. Do you think it could be the same person?”

My wife, a professor of philosophy at Union College, is the smart one in our family.

“Well, I don’t know,” I said. (As a former English major I hated to admit that the name of a well-known feminist writer didn’t ring a bell with me. I was afraid Linda would throw an old Bob Dylan line in my face, “You don’t read women authors, do you?”)

Instead, I walked over to my computer and googled Barbara Smith. It didn’t take me long to discover that Barbara Smith, the internationally renowned scholar, was the same Barbara Smith I’d spent the evening with in a dimly-lit basement in Arbor Hill, trying to keep the blood from flowing on Albany’s streets. Wow, I thought. She didn’t have to be there. She could be holding forth at Harvard or Stanford, or some other fancy place.

When it comes to preventing violence, we all have a role to play. The police can’t do it all on their own. They say it takes a village to raise a child. But some people take the village idea more seriously than others. Suddenly, Barbara Smith became my paradigm of a responsible person.

A couple of months ago, I pitched the idea of hiring Barbara to NYADP’s organizing director, Colleen, a bright young woman studying for her Ph.D. in sociology.

“Surely, you don’t mean THE Barbara Smith?”

“Of course I do,” I said smugly.