An important player in Charlotte’s civic evolution passed away last week. WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his "On My Mind" commentary, says she was special for how she went about changing our city.
Politics tends to draw two types of people: cleavers and magnets. Cleavers make a name for themselves by driving people apart and pitting one side against another. Magnets try to bring people together around common values and goals.
There are a lot more cleavers than magnets.
Sarah Stevenson was a magnet.
Stevenson died last week at age 97, and her obituary might have been the first time some of you had heard her name. She did her most public work back in the 1980s, when she became the first Black woman to serve on the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board. But her influence on Charlotte was deep well before then and long afterward. She was one of the rafters in this building we call home — something in the background that holds the whole thing together.
I knew her best as the leader of the Tuesday Morning Breakfast Forum, which she co-founded in the ‘70s. It started as a gathering of Black political and civic leaders, and has evolved into a must-visit for anyone wanting to hold office in Charlotte, or keep the office they hold.
If you ever had the foolish notion that the Black community was a monolith, those Tuesday mornings are a cure. Folks have it out over education and housing and poverty and everything else. But Stevenson presided over it all with a quiet strength and a giving heart.
The other day I went back and looked at a story I wrote back in 2004, when two conservative county commissioners came to the breakfast forum. Stevenson started off the meeting with a simple statement: “We’re going to be nice this morning, aren’t we?” In fact, a lot of the debate that followed was not nice. But it was nicer than it might have been without Sarah Stevenson there.
There’s always a debate, when people are passionate about any issue, as to what makes the better strategy: a blazing fireball or a low steady flame. Stevenson chose the low heat, and so she caught grief from people on all sides: those who disagreed with her ideas, and those who agreed with her ideas but disagreed with her methods.
But here is what she accomplished: She helped integrate Charlotte’s PTA council. She gave Black women their first representation on the school board. She mentored and advised generations of candidates and officeholders. And she modeled a way of being for people in public life. She made our civic discourse just a little bit kinder. Not for everyone, and not all the time, but enough to make a difference.
She was a magnet in a time of cleavers. Charlotte was lucky to have had her.
Tommy Tomlinson’s "On My Mind" column runs Mondays on WFAE and WFAE.org. It represents his opinion, not the opinion of WFAE. You can respond to this column in the comments section below. You can also email Tommy at ttomlinson@wfae.org.
