Creating the future for Black Madison

By Phil Haslanger
Collaboration Project Story Team

Once upon a time in Madison, the Black churches provided a cultural gathering space for members of the community. So did the South Madison Neighborhood Center and iconic bars and restaurants. 

Over time, those anchors of the community went away or diminished in importance to a new generation. More Black folks moved into the city. What they found were no spaces where they could get a sense of their own culture, so they traveled to Milwaukee or Chicago, sometimes never ever spending a weekend in the city where they studied or worked.

Rev. Dr. Alex Gee, pastor of Fountain of Life Covenant Church on Madison’s South Side, is now leading an effort to create what he calls a “third space” that can become a cultural hub for the city in which he grew up. Part of the conversation about that is how the array of predominantly Black congregations in the Madison area can be a part of that and the role folks at predominantly white congregations can play.

Gee will be one of the featured speakers at the Kingdom Justice Summit on Feb. 27 along with his sister, Lilada Gee, at the 10:30 a.m. session focusing on “Stories of Hope” – how Christian communities can tell these stories by what they do. 

The Center for Black Excellence and Culture is one way of building on the hope Gee and others have for the future. It has gotten funds from Dane County and the City of Madison for the early stages of its creation. It will be built on 3.5 acres of land in the 700 block of West Badger Road – just down the street from Fountain of Life. 

This used to be the site of a car wash that then became a gathering place for drug deals and other illicit activity.  Fountain of Life bought the property a decade ago and had the car wash torn down. Then the dreaming took off over what could happen on that site.

What has emerged is a $20 million plan for this cultural hub that, in Gee’s words, could focus on ”economic development, business enterprise development, leadership development, cultural celebration, teaching artists how to create and sell their work.” It could be a place that would have space for storytelling, for Justified Anger’s Black history classes, for training those Gee describes as “non-Black allies.”

And that’s one of the places folks in predominantly white congregations could make a connection. Many of them have already taken one of the Black History for a New Day classes that Gee has offered for six years, including the one going on right now. But the center could offer even more opportunities.

“We don’t need to be part of a local church’s mission budget to get the center done,” Gee explained. “We need white Christians to talk to the white church about why we in the Black community have a lack of culture, the impact of having a lack of culture, what it means to the children to have a lack of culture. We need them to think about this outside the four walls of their church.”

He wants leaders in white churches to talk to the white police officers, doctors, teachers, principals and social workers who are part of their congregations about what is happening in the Black community. To do that, they need connections to that community.

“This is not going to be built with an organizational approach,” Gee said. “This is going to be built with an attitudinal approach. Don’t try to support the work if you don’t understand what the work is.”

And then the call to action: “We need awareness. We need people to educate, donate, affiliate, understand the issues. Mobilize folks to build friendships.”

He asks of people in the white congregations,  “Will they come to the center, will they bring their children, will they take the history class?”

That’s the challenge he holds out.

In the meantime, Gee and his team are meeting with leaders in the predominantly Black churches, with Black business leaders, Black doctors, Black artists, many groups in the Black to community to help shape what the center could do. 

“It is the process of talking to Black folks and watching them dream again,” explained Gee. 

“This can be a centralized cultural space to resonate with each other, commiserate with each other, celebrate with each other, mentor each other and feel like we have a base to tag up before we run for home.”

He also is meeting with white business leaders pointing out that one of the reasons they have trouble attracting and retaining high-level Black employees is that lack of Black cultural spaces in the Madison area. “Communities with growing Black populations that have cultural third spaces don’t suffer the level of disparities that we do,” Gee noted.

At this point, the planning and fundraising for the center is getting underway. If things stay on track, construction for the 55,000 square foot building could start next year. It will be a testament to the resilience of the Black community in this nation in the 400 years since the first enslaved people were brought to Virginia from the shores of what is now Angola.

As Gee thinks about that history, about the many strands that make up the contemporary Black community, he sees the center as “a place where we bring the strength of that resilience and we promote the arts and the business community, the gathering and the storytelling, and where we share our culture with the broader community.”

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