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Staff photo by R. David Duncan III Danny McCain, who has been with the Lynchburg Juvenile Detention Center for 29 years, has been a community activist during much of that time, but moved to the fore with his recent work heading up the Concerned Citizens for Fairness and Equality, which asked the state to investigate the Lynchburg Public Schools. |
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By Darrell Laurant The News & Advance Like everyone else, Danny McCain asks a lot of questions. What makes him a “community activist,” instead of just an ordinary citizen, is that he also tries to find answers. He’s been doing that for a long time, starting with his first job as a recreation director in the Chicago area during the 1960s. “When I got there,” McCain recalls now, “I saw that all the basketball goals in this one neighborhood were damaged, the nets gone and the rims bent. My question was why? “Then I noticed this field where kids played, and there were all this horseshoe stakes out there that the kids could fall over. Nobody used them for pitching horseshoes any more, but there they were, just waiting to hurt somebody. My question was, why?” He fixed those problems himself, he said — and these days, McCain is asking more questions in Lynchburg, his hometown. Most recently, he emerged as one of the main players in the group Concerned Citizens for Fairness and Equality, which asked the Virginia Department of Education to investigate the Lynchburg Public Schools for evidence of racial discrimination. “He’s a very intense young man,” said Harry Smith, a Lynchburg School Board member and McCain’s first cousin. “Danny sees a need, and he wants it corrected now. But even though I don’t always agree with everything he says, he has awakened us to the fact that, real or fancied, there are people who think there is a lot of discrimination.” And, Smith adds, “I would hope we’re still good buddies.” Most activists attack “the system” from the outside in, but Danny McCain is very much in the middle of that system. He has worked at the Lynchburg Detention Center for almost 30 years, and his wife Carolyn is a teacher at Sandusky Middle School. Daughter Danette has worked for the city schools, Randolph-Macon Woman’s College and the Hunton YMCA (his other daughter Candace, who like Danette graduated from Wake Forest University, is going for her MBA at Clark University in Atlanta). |
Danny McCain
Who influenced you?
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At the same time, however,
there is a family history of going against the grain. Dabney
McCain, Danny’s brother, is president of the College Hill
Neighborhood Association and leader of the opposition to a proposed
Bus Stop restaurant on Fifth Street. Danette has spoken up on
several community issues, and one of her uncles was once state
president of the Illinois NAACP. Danny lives in Bedford Hills now, but his heart — and many of his volunteer activities — are still downtown, in the section of Lynchburg where he was raised. He is president of the Elks social club, president of the Lynchburg Voter’s League and active in the local chapter of the NAACP. He has also spent years coaching youth athletics and involving himself in “mentoring” programs. “He’s really concerned about young people,” said Lynchburg City Council member Ed Barksdale, who represents Ward II, “and I think his job has a lot to do with that.” “Sometimes when I’m out somewhere with my Dad, we’ll run into somebody he had at the Detention Home,” Danette McCain said. “If they’re staying out of trouble, they’re always quick to tell him. And he’ll always ask them what they’re doing, where they’re working, what their plans are for their future. He always wants everybody to have a plan.” Growing up in Lynchburg, however, it took Danny McCain awhile to find his own plan. “I’m from a single parent family, the baby of five,” he recalled, “and I had a rough time coming up. I was born with a speech defect, had trouble in schools, and received a lot of suspensions and detentions. “I remember having the feeling that nobody ever wanted to listen to me. I was always wrong. Nobody ever wanted to hear my side of the story.” So McCain threw himself into sports, playing linebacker for a strong Dunbar High School football team. After graduation, he spent one year in college, then entered the military. Upon completing his service hitch, McCain moved to Chicago, where he had relatives. “I always missed Lynchburg, though,” he said. “Lynchburg was home. There was a lot of stuff happening in Chicago when I was up there. I got to know Fred Hampton, who was the leader of the Black Panthers there, and I was up there when the police shot him. I was tempted to get into that stuff, but I just couldn’t.” A year after marrying Carolyn, whom he met while visiting his parents, McCain was back in Central Virginia. Now, at the Detention Home, he deals with “everything from murders down through truancy cases. A lot of it has to do with home life and education. In some instances, kids are out selling drugs to make money for their families. Some of them read on the second and third grade level.” The Concerned Citizens group was formed last year after former E.C. Glass football coach Bo Henson accused principal Susan Morrison of saying there needed to be “more whites on the football field and in the stands.” Morrison denied making the remark, but the controversy proved a trigger to detonate decades of other complaints in the black community. These concerns included a perceived lack of minority teachers, what seemed to be a disproportionate numbers of suspensions of black students and too few black students in advance courses. The state education department released a report earlier this month saying it found no evidence of racial or gender discrimination. “I’m not satisfied with that report,” McCain said. “The state people talked to our group for maybe a half hour, and as far as I know they didn’t interview any of the kids who had been having problems. The good thing, though, is that I’ve heard from some parents that the attitude of the school system has changed.” To McCain, the people he sees at the Detention Home is a reminder of how society has gone awry. “Many of our parents are uneducated, and they don’t care,” he pointed out. “Our kids need structure. At the same time, I don’t understand suspending them for something minor and putting them back out on the streets. They want that.” McCain thinks the people living in Lynchburg’s inner city are often marginalized by city schools and city government. “It’s like when they were going to put all these athletic fields in a sports complex out in the suburbs,” he said. “What would that mean to all the poor kids in the city who didn’t have a way to get out there? Somebody just wasn’t thinking.” Perhaps because his own schooling was such a struggle, McCain is almost obsessed with the value of education. “My wife and I started a program through the Elks and the Deltas (another social and charitable club),” he said, “where we have a banquet and gave awards to the top black students in the city. It wasn’t just academics and sports, but other things, everything from a handicapped kid hanging in there to finish school to someone who was good in dance or drama. Self-esteem is really lacking these days.” Danette McCain remembers coming home from a teaching job at Dearington Elementary several years ago and relating how one of the children there said what she wanted for Christmas was “some food in the refrigerator.” “Before I knew it, my Dad had started this program to take Christmas dinners to the kids, and hand out toys,” she said. “He’s really soft-hearted, when you get to know him. We used to go fishing out at Monacan Park, and he always made us throw the fish we caught back.” That assessment of McCain might come as a surprise to some residents of the Detention Home, where he serves as second in charge to director Tom Currier. “I’m tough on them,” he said, “and I push them. But whatever they’ve done, I always make it a point to listen to their side of things.” Ed Barksdale credits McCain — in his position as Voter’s League president — of talking him into running for City Council. But McCain resists following in Barksdale’s footsteps. “I believe he thinks being in politics would tie his hands,” said Danette. “He likes being able to stand up, speak his mind and move on.” |