By Lornet Turnbull
Special To The Medium
Every Saturday morning a few dozen African-American men and women gather in Tacoma for some free-flowing conversation: Ongoing protest at Standing Rock. A proposed liquefied natural gas plant in the Tacoma Tideflats. The presidential election.
A volunteer membership organization, the Tacoma-Pierce County Black Collective brings together office workers with former mayors, college professors and janitors — people from a range of backgrounds, exchanging ideas on a diversity of topics, particularly those that affect Black people.
The goal of the Collective isn’t to replicate the work of civic groups like the NAACP and the Urban League, but rather to enhance and complement it.
What’s more, African-Americans seeking public office in Tacoma and across Pierce County understand that the path to victory almost assuredly must pass through the Collective.
“There’s a certain mystique about this group, especially among folks here in Tacoma,” said Dorian Waller, an economic development consultant, a Tacoma Planning Commissioner and one of the Collective’s youngest members. “A lot of people refer to us as the Black Establishment.”
“Because it isn’t formally organized to do anything, people talk to each other and get things done,” Waller added. “It’s a forum where people get to know each other and work together outside the room – help mayors, city council members, school board members get elected… get laws passed.”
Out of the ashes
Started as the Concerned Black Citizens, the organization grew out of the Mother’s Day Disturbance of 1969 — a riotous confrontation between police and Hilltop residents that marked a turning point in the civil rights struggle in Tacoma.
Local clergy and community leaders, including the head of the Urban League and the NAACP, as well as James Walton, who would later become the city’s first Black city manager, appealed to the community for calm.
According to BlackPast.org, the leaders negotiated with the city to win Black representation on the police force as well as service improvements in the Hilltop, the city’s segregated Black neighborhood.
Afterward, they continued to meet, initially expanding the organization to include other people of color, before reverting to focus on the Black community.
These days, those who gather for 8:30 a.m. Saturday sessions at the Colored Women’s Club, represent a virtual Who’s Who of Tacoma’s African-American community and leadership. The meetings also draw folks from across the state.
“And you would not know what anyone of them actually does for a living unless you start talking to them,” Waller said. “And then you learn that you’d been sitting next to a millionaire the whole time.”
Finding its purpose
It might be easier to describe the Collective for what it isn’t.
There’s no attendance taken and no obligation to attend. No one takes notes or minutes. The meetings are not recorded.
“It’s a pretty big tent, the Collective is,” said Lyle Quasim, who has served as the group’s chair, what he calls its orchestrator, for the last 33 years.
“We don’t holler or shout,” Quasim added. “We could have a clergy (opposed to gay rights) on one end of the room and an eco-terrorist on another. It’s a wide stretch of folks. This is an environment where people are encouraged to be who they are.”
The son of Chicago labor activists and organizers, Quasim, 73, was himself a Black Panther Party member who in the 1990s became the first African American to head the state Department of Social and Health Service. He also served as president of Bates Technical College.
He said the Collective used to allow those from the “power structure” to attend its weekly meetings and then spend the whole time lambasting them for how the system was failing black people.
After a while members decided that if they were going to be effective advocates for the community and get the city and county to respond positively to its needs, then their approach was counter-productive.
The Collective taps its members’ considerable networks, resources and influence in the various organizations they serve or public or private offices they hold to get things done.
A few years ago, members created committees to funnel ideas and address concerns around four key issues: employment, political strategy, education and social justice.
The idea was to add structure to the free-flowing discussions within the group and utilize historical knowledge of longtime, seasoned members and the energy of younger ones.
So they named a chair and co-chair for committee, using what Quasim calls “the over and an under method. Somebody like me who is over the hill and somebody under the hill.”
Still, some millennials in Tacoma have grown frustrated with the Collective, believing there’s so much more the organization could be doing, given its members’ clout.
Last year, they created the Tacoma Action Collective, a group of young people whose stated goal is “eliminating system oppression while empowering people to build autonomous communities rooted in equity and justice.”
Investing in the future
Perhaps one of the group’s most important functions is as an incubator for young African Americans with leadership aspirations, a sort of spring board for political careers.
It was instrumental in helping four African-American candidates – all under the age of 40 – get elected in Tacoma and Pierce County in November 2015. They included a Tacoma City Councilman, a Tacoma Metro Parks commissioner and school board members in Tacoma and University Place.
“We started this by getting people coming through this group to run for office,” Quasim said. “But it didn’t start with last years’ campaign. This started 30 years ago.”
He points to Harold Moss, the city’s first African American mayor and its current mayor, Marilyn Strickland, both of whom are associated with the Collective.
“You put your money in and get 3 percent interest…and it percolates for 30 years and that $30,000 gives you a return of ($70,000),” Quasim said.
But being Black alone doesn’t guarantee an endorsement.
The group puts candidates seeking its endorsement through their paces and in the past the organization has endorsed White candidates with African-American opponents.
Quasim recalls the story of a well-liked school board candidate who was running against a Black candidate that the organization would endorse.
What he told the White candidate helps to explain the organization’s agenda as it continues to build on decades of work to get African Americans into public office.
“We have to know how to engage this process of running candidates, raising money, of operating a political campaign,” he said. “We need to get Black faces in front of the system.”
In some ways, he said, it holds Black candidates to greater account than others, because there’s more at stake, Quasim said.
“We don’t want someone not to distinguish (him or herself) in the election process or to win and then not be prepared to contribute and move the needle.”
While the group usually attracts an average of about 40 people each week, the Saturday after this year’s presidential election drew nearly twice that many, with people “itching to dissect the election.”
“What we know is we have a lot more work to do politically, from a progressive perspective,” Quasim said.
“People are imagining a lot of things that we can do. What’s important is what gets done. What are we empowered to do? We are mad now but will be mad a year from now; two years from now; four years from now?,” Quasim concluded.
