This story came across my news feed and caught my eye for being about the town where I grew up.
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KOMU
COLUMBIA - The city of Columbia earned a perfect score and an all-star rating for the second year in a row for the Human Rights Campaign's Municipal Equality Index.
The Human Rights Campaign is the country's largest LGBTQ civil rights organization. The MEI is a yearly, nationwide evaluation of city law and services. It rates cities on non-discrimination laws, the city as an employer, city services, law enforcement and leadership on LGTBQ equality,
"We understand that discrimination of any kind is unacceptable, so we want to make sure that people are protected here," said the city's public communications specialist Sara Humm. "I think the city of Columbia, Missouri is really making strides to really make sure everybody in our community really feels welcome even if that's not something that's happening everywhere in the country."
Columbia was one of 78 cities that earned a perfect score and one of 46 cities that earned an all-star rating, of 506 total cities scored. The all-star rating refers to cities that scored above 85 points despite being in states with no state-level protection for the LGBTQ community.
"To this date, Missouri is one of a handful of states that do not have statewide protections for LGTBQ peers, and I was not content to wait for Jeff City or the federal government to guarantee these rights," said Mayor Brian Treece. "I'm very proud of the steps Columbia has taken over the past two years to make sure that we are a city that welcomes everyone."
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I’d like to think that growing up in Columbia had a great deal to do with my social politics. I now live in the next county over in a small college town of about 3,000 and make regular trips back and forth for groceries (from the same store where I’ve shopped for 30 years), lunch with friends (at the restaurant that now occupies the same building that was the freight depot from where Granddad retired), and maybe an occasional entertainment event (I saw John Prine in the same theatre where I was a movie usher when I was 15).
My family goes back in the county to around 1818. My grandfather and his brothers moved to town and became shopkeepers and laborers and service workers after generations on the farm. Granddad was a Union teamster and delivered the freight goods that came in on the MKT (Katy) Railroad by buckboard wagon. My grandmother was a registered nurse and rode a horse to work at the Boone County Hospital. My connections run deep and my memories are bountiful enough to make a fabric of stories woven from the recalled threads of life of an old man. (A bit of cliché, I know...)
I was in elementary school when public education was segregated. I lived a few blocks away from shacks that had no plumbing and naked bulbs for lights. The area was called Cemetery Hill and was wedged in between the old cemetery and the rail line. My school was on the other side of the cemetery. The father of one of the families that integrated my school became the Director of Public Schools and the newest High School is named in his honor.
There are many of these kinds of stories that most of us can tell about progressive and liberal causes for which we have worked and continue to witness.
Columbia is home of the University of Missouri — Columbia, and two smaller colleges. (The two colleges were originally private schools for women but have since changed with an open admission to all who might want to attend.) The students and faculty of UMC were from every place imaginable. From them, I learned there was a different world outside of the tiny orbit I was travelling. It is now a small city. And a liberal blue island in a conservative sea of red.
Congratulations, Columbia.