The Great Black Hope?

Even to a secular observer, the moment is inspirational, more practical than pious, and closer to home than to  the heavens.

Reverend Michael O’Connell is rector of the Basilica of Saint Mary and pastor of the North Side’s 450-family Church of the Ascension. “Don’s the best thing that’s happened to the North Side in a long time,” O’Connell says. “He obviously cares deeply for people. He understands the biggest issue is safety. But more than anybody I know, Don has been able to bring people into the North Side and get them engaged—with their personal time as well as their connections in the broader community and financial assistance. A lot of that adds up to programming for kids. That’s desperately needed, especially when the money stopped flowing from the federal government.”

Samuels has made something of a cottage industry out of racial outreach. Four years ago, Samuels, Kevin Reich, and southwest Minneapolis activist Michelle Martin created the Peace Foundation, which—in addition to sponsoring the monthly Saturday bus trips—stages North Side “Peace Games,” street-level barbecues, art crawls, block parties, and “Peace Balls” that draw prominent and proletarian Twin Citians for volunteerism and fun. (Samuels stepped down as president when his opponent and some community members complained that corporate donations to the foundation could be considered favors for the council member. Don’s wife, Sondra, now has the title.)

Since being elected to the council Samuels has also formed a private business, the Institute for Authentic Dialogue, which is led by his wife and local author Jon Odell. So far, Don says, the trio has consulted with a dozen corporations whose executives “call and say, ‘I’m having problems keeping black people or people of color at my company, and I don’t know what’s going on.’ And basically our feeling is he knows what’s going on, but just can’t deal with it. We didn’t want to fuss around trying to transform employees while the bosses are so uncomfortable with race. So we go in with these executives, top management folks, and we demonstrate the conversation. Between Jon and me, we both demonstrate a raw conversation on race.”

Odell is well suited to the task, Samuels adds. “Jon is a Southerner who grew up on the other side of the civil rights movement. He’s the first white guy who told me he grew up racist. All of my white friends look at me like ‘Where are all the racists? Nobody in my family is one. I’ve never met one. Aren’t those people evil?’ ”—giggle—“And so when you meet a white guy who can tell you [he’s racist], you want to hug him! Together, we encourage the executives to mine their memories and their attitudes and come up with the questions and statements they have been suppressing for years. And we create a safe space for them to do that.”

Politics has no safe space, and as an elected official, Samuels’s “authentic dialogue” has alienated blacks who say he cannot speak for them. During his 2005 council race, Samuels told a community forum that his Jamaican slave ancestors “got a leg up” working in the “big house” rather than the fields because they saw the masters’ families doing homework, reading books, and taking piano lessons. He said that he and Sondra wanted their Jordan neighborhood home to provide big house–style enrichment for neighborhood children. The inelegant plantation metaphor and artless noblesse oblige led to opponent Natalie Johnson Lee’s campaign slogan, which decorated T-shirts and literature: U can’t LEAD the people if you don’t LOVE the people. The symbolism dogs Samuels.