Kingston, Jamaica, is an urban center not unlike many in the United States—plagued by poverty, limited access to education and other capital resources, high crime and incarceration rates and a number of other characteristics that might cause many in the United States to second-guess its selection as the host site for a convening of scholars from the United States and abroad.
It was precisely those reasons that Dr. Jerlando Jackson, director of the Wisconsin Equity and Inclusion Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin and chair of the International Colloquium of Black Males in Education, said Kingston was the place colloquium leaders wanted to gather.
Jackson acknowledged that other parts of the island might seem more suitable for such an event—even skeptics questioned the selection of Kingston over other regions, like Montego Bay and Ocho Rios.
“If we can’t do Kingston,” Jackson said he told members of his team, “we don’t ever need to do another colloquium. If we can’t do Kingston, we can’t honor our mission and we’re too focused on creating a vacation-like environment for our participants.”
Amid a political climate in which the nation’s citizens are simultaneously petitioning for reparations for African descendants whose ancestors were enslaved and organizing to express outrage over a plan out of London to bring a maximum-security prison to the island—one that would house the worst offenders from the U.K., U.S., Canada and the Caribbean—and an environment in which conveners are sometimes accompanied by armored guards during travel, scholars, practitioners, students, policymakers and those with the ability to make funding decisions descended upon Kingston this week to discuss challenges facing Black males in their pursuits of education.
“We wanted to have a pretty urban opportunity to explore urban challenges and we think that Kingston provides that,” Jackson said.
“Place matters,” said Dr. James L. Moore III, director of the Todd A. Bell National Resource Center on the African American Male at Ohio State University. “Arguably, this is the most urban space that we’ve held the colloquium.” (Previous colloquiums have been held in Atlanta, London and the U.S. Virgin Islands.)
