Puttin’ Out the Bone

It’s the green road to freedom. It’s the one that leads to the mother lode of power. Ownership, self-sufficiency and inheritance travel on this road. Call it the economic highway, and once the mainstream of African Americans starts to roll on it, the bell of freedom might finally ring in this country. The political paradigm shift might actually happen.

Some say that road’s been there all along. Others say intimidating check points and roadblocks intentionally slow travel. Some say power, especially economic power, will never be handed over willingly. But Jim Clingman says never mind all that. It’s time.

So he dreamed up a school for Cincinnati — the first one in America — where inner-city high school kids could learn to meet the wants and needs of their neighbors with products and services.

To see the African-American community as a market place for African-American entrepreneurs is uniquely American. But for a variety of reasons, young African-American men and women haven’t been quick to take advantage of it.

So in the wake of the April 2001 disturbances, Clingman — well known in Cincinnati for preaching economic activism in the black community — asked the Cincinnati Public Schools to start a magnet high school that mixed solid, college-preparatory academics with hands-on entrepreneurship. This week his dream lives with the opening of the Entrepreneur High School.

Located temporarily in the Jacobs Center, another Cincinnati public school, it will soon have its own building in Over-the-Rhine. Early on, Clingman enlisted the help of the national Gates Foundation, Cincinnati’s Union and Guardian Savings banks and a diverse board of advisors. Then an entrepreneur named John Morris was hired as principal, and he gathered a team of experienced teachers, many with life experiences as capitalists.

Recruiting students has been slow. I mean, how many inner-city kids would dare to believe the school’s promise: That they’ll not only prepare you to go to college if that’s your goal, but also teach you how to make money right now — right in school. Maybe even during the school day. Money that you can take home.

Say what? A high school where I can learn to think up products and services that my research tells me people would pay money for? Where my teachers would show me how to write a plan to maximize my chances of making a profit? Where business people from Cincinnati, maybe even from around the country, would come and teach me a spirit of risk-taking, even let me hang with them during some of their days as they work a deal or develop a product? And where my friends and I could team up to create a business at school and make money that we could take home to our families?

You for real, Clingman?

Yeah, that’s his dream, and it will challenge the Cincinnati Board of Education to rethink some existing rules about kids personally profiting on school grounds. But if — like the racehorse wanting its rein — this idea gets its freedom, the Entrepreneur High School could become one of the district’s most popular magnet schools and a model for working class and poor communities around the country.

Don’t think inner city kids start off totally ignorant of business. Sadly, some of them become successful dope dealers, expert in the dynamics of free enterprise. Sadly, that has been one of the few products they think of moving. But for years Clingman has been saying that everything from clothing, food products, car repair and personal services represent millions of dollars of commerce that could be happening within the African-American neighborhoods and served up by African-American business men and women.

Of course, this new school is racially integrated. Of course, the activities will be conducted without regard for race. But let’s not be stupid. Cincinnati’s unrest was greatly an explosion of financial hopelessness in the African-American community. Clingman’s dream says those same frustrated young people can be helped by black and white men and women entrepreneurs traveling that green road to a better place.

Years ago I worked on the Bois Forte Ojibwa reservation in Northern Minnesota as a VISTA Volunteer. It was the mid-60s, at a place with virtually no commercial resources. Unemployment was almost 100 percent. Dirt roads led to flimsy shacks.

I recently went back to visit and found new infrastructure and neighborhoods that looked like working-class suburbs. The independent variable? Their gambling casino, a product of clever Native American legal work that across the country took advantage of tribes’ status as sovereign nations.

Finally young Native Americans had huge, complicated and proud business ventures to draw them back home to work. There were no government handouts, no paternalistic directives. There were just bright minds with college degrees figuring out how to meet an entertainment need and create wealth and jobs in the process. You know, like Donald Trump does every day.

Early on, Native Americans across America hired non-native consultants from Atlantic City or Las Vegas to teach them the casino business. As time has passed, many have replaced those contracted managers and consultants with their own people.

Jim Clingman simply shares the vision of the Ojibwa, the Oneida and the Cherokee. He sees the humanity in passing something on — in this case, capitalist expertise. But he also sees the freedom that only comes from owning something, running something, being proud of something.

If this school’s idea spreads, if large numbers of young people begin to see that knowledge and skills equal more power than they’ve ever known, if they and their families begin to have a few things that come from their own ingenuity, then that green road to freedom will become pretty busy.

This article appears in Aug 28 – Sep 3, 2002.