Raise the colors
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signed up and the true number was about half that. The investigation revealed a pattern of willful record tampering, including changing birthdates to keep names on rolls after boys had aged out of scouting, and continually listing a scouting unit at a church that had burned down. The inflated figures helped the council get more funding from United Way. In Springfield, Ransom has been leading racially mixed scout troops for most of the past 35 years. Now 67 years old, he is troubled by the lack of progress in minority scouting here, but chalks it up to nothing more malicious than a void of understanding between the black community and scouting officials. “It’s just a lack of exposure and a lack of commitment from the African Americans themselves,” he says. For example, he says council executives don’t understand how hard it is for lowincome families to come up with the $1,000 or so that it costs to send a scout to jamboree (Ransom has sometimes paid for their uniforms himself). Similarly, he has had to come up with money to pay for popcorn sold by his boys during the council’s annual fundraising drive, because the cash the kids collected evaporated.
“I have asked them to have the popcorn sale at some other time than right before Thanksgiving, because I don’t think I’d have as much theft,” Ransom says. A single mom running low on food stamps at month’s end might borrow her son’s popcorn money and never find a way to pay it back. “I lost a lot of kids because one parent or the other, boyfriend or whatever, stole the money. And it’s hard for a kid to say, ‘Hey, I need that money!’ when it’s somebody that’s a parent-figure in their household. So you lose the kid because they’re embarrassed,” he says. “They don’t want to come back and say, ‘My mom took the money,’ or ‘Her boyfriend smoked it up.’ They just stay away.” O’Brien, the scout executive for the Lincoln Council, says such problems aren’t unique to the black community, and that some troops avoid the problem of unscrupulous parents by setting up card tables outside of supermarkets to sell their popcorn, so that the kids don’t have to carry the cash. “There are ways to do that, and we believe that we really try to help where we can, but anybody is going to have to earn a substantial part of their way,” he says. “Sometimes it takes creativity on the part of the volunteers on how we help the kids earn their way so they can have personal pride.”
Ransom, who acknowledges that he and the council leader have sniped at each other for more than a decade, isn’t inclined to take O’Brien’s advice. “That sounds good coming from him, but he hasn’t been out here, so he can’t tell me anything. And that’s bitter and I’ll admit it,” Ransom says. “If you’re not helping me, you’re hindering me.” Yet, even O’Brien admits that the biggest challenge in the black community is one that can’t be changed — the lack of tradition. If there’s not a dad or uncle or grandfather who was in scouting, it’s more difficult to get the younger kids interested.
“In the African American community, there’s not always that tradition, so sometimes we struggle,” O’Brien says. Both men say the Frontiers’ Venture crew is thriving, and new Cub Scout packs are forming on the east side — one at Brandon Court, through the Urban League, one at Union Baptist Church.
Ransom says he will do whatever it takes to help the new groups succeed. “I want to see scouting work,” he says. “I believe in scouting or I wouldn’t have been in it this long. I know good things can come of it.”
Contact Dusty Rhodes at [email protected].
