Photography by Carmen Troesser
Talk about timing. In July, Dwaun Warmack moved here from Florida to take over as president of Harris-Stowe State University. Within weeks, Michael Brown had been shot. Warmack reasoned that, as the city’s historically black college, Harris-Stowe should take the lead in the racial healing that the region needed. So he got to work.
The timing of when you started was—how should I put this—interesting.
I was in Daytona Beach, Florida, which was about 18 miles from the Trayvon Martin tragedy. We were in the midst of that, so I led a lot of statewide initiatives around cultural competencies, race relations, multiculturalism… I thought that part of my life was done. This happened, and I was, like, “Wow.” I’m 12 miles from Ferguson, and 40 percent of our students are from the Ferguson-Florissant School District.
How did you respond?
It was important that as the only historically black college in the city, we take a strong stand to serve as the intellectual think tank to help the community begin to heal. We hosted numerous cross-cultural engagement activities where diversity was extremely important for me. I fundamentally believe that education has to be at the core for this transformation to happen and for this city to heal the way it needs to.
Some of the students at Harris-Stowe adopted an elementary school.
We decided to take 55 African-American males to Griffin Elementary School the day of the funeral. That was the first day back of school. If you looked at Ferguson-Florissant School District, the week before all of this tragedy happened, they were listed among the bottom 10 schools in the state. Well, how could this school afford to lose two weeks of instruction when they are in the bottom tier? So we decided to take the young men to the elementary school and walk them in. It was the most transformational experience, seeing the children and the parents cry.
What plans do you have for helping the community in the future?
I will launch a Social Justice Institute. Let’s just say a municipality’s officers are Caucasian, and they’re not really sure about some of the cultural competencies. We would be a place where they can come be trained. We have a very strong criminal justice department, so we really want to solve the shortage of African-American officers.
And you have plans for an initiative focused on black men.
We’re forming an African-American Male Institute. This will focus on strengthening the graduation rates and the retention rates of African-American males and to shift some of the false ideologies that are out there.
