He’s not the first Black person to serve on the Lake County Board of Commissioners, but Clyde Welford is one of few, having been elected to the board in the November 2022 election and the first in his family to graduate from college.

  Welford grew up in the Grand Rapids area, the youngest of six children raised by a single mother, during the push for desegregation in the schools.

  “I went to a predominantly Black elementary school, but then at the eighth grade level, I went to Ottawa Hills High School near East Grand Rapids,” he said. “I was a real minority there, because at that time, they had just started integration of the high schools.”

  Integration was met with a lot of violent reaction, he said. There was racial discord and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. “didn’t make things any better.”

  “I, myself, didn’t have anything against white people, but at the same time, I was hearing Black people voice the concern that Dr. King and others were voicing-that we were not getting a fair shake, that we were the underdogs,” Welford said.

  In the 10th grade, he quit school, got a job and went to night school.

  “My idea wasn’t to quit school, it was to get a job,” he said. ” I loved school, but I needed money. I couldn’t wash and iron the same shirt every night and wear it the next day.”

  He worked and went to night school, hoping to graduate with the rest of his class, but ended up with only half the credits he needed to graduate. He then went to school half days and continued to work, while completing his high school requirements.

  Following high school, he enrolled in a program at Grand Valley State University, where he worked and took classes earning a Bachelor of Arts in 1977 and a Bachelor of Science in 1984. He later received a master’s degree at Ferris State University and a scholarship as a writer to Michigan State University.

  “I was the first kid in my family to go to college, even though I am the youngest,” Welford said. “I was Magnum Cum Laude at Ferris and had a 3.89 (grade point average) at Michigan State, and at the same time I was a teacher while doing all of that.”

 ‘Making history every day’

  Welford spent 35 years as a teacher, 29 in the Baldwin Community Schools, and believes that honoring Black history is an important part of education.

  “If you teach history, period, you really wouldn’t need to teach Black history,” Welford said. “If they did a legitimate job of teaching American history, you would include all the demographic groups and Black History Month wouldn’t be necessary.”

  “If you talk about American history, you will see the contributions of not just African Americans, but Asians, Hispanics and any other group of people that have lived and contributed to American history,” he continued. “It (Black History Month) is important, at this stage, because there is a tendency for those to be overlooked.”

  Welford said he believes it is important for everybody to learn about themselves and other groups so that they know who they are as a people and education is the key. He believes the public education system has done a good job overall of addressing Black history, as well as other groups.

  “All the schools I have worked at or attended always included African American history,” he said. “The kids seem to enjoy it. They expect it because it is something they have been taught about every year. Schools that don’t have a large population of minorities celebrate African American history, and I think it is important to bridge that gap between different groups in America.”

  Although there is a tendency to focus on the same few individuals every year with respect to Black History Month, Welford said, there are a lot of contributions from minority groups in many different fields, including engineering, medicine, arts and sciences.

  “There are too many to list,” he said. “When I taught middle school, I had the kids stand profile and projected them. I drew it and put it on black paper. I had faces of all my kids all around the room and I told them, ‘Black History is every day, and you are making history every day.’ We are all part of Black history.”

  After serving two terms as a Village of Baldwin trustee, Welford said it was time to branch out.

  “I ran for the road commission in 2018. I lost by 170 votes county wide, but mind you, there were parts of this county where I had no need to go,” he said. “The next time, I thought, ‘I got this,’ because I went out to all those other areas, going to meetings in Pinora, Yates, Lake townships, to finish up those lose ends, I still lost, by a greater margin.

  “Lake Countuy is 88% white and there was a lot of identity politics going on, I thought,” he said. “When I would go out and talk to people, I would tell them, ‘I am not who you think I am. If you knew me, you would vote for me.”

  After losing the road commission election twice, he said, former county commissioner Betty Dermyer told him he should run for county commission, so he decided to try it and it worked out.

  He said some people wondered how a black Democrat was able to unseat a “white guy who is a Republican in a Republican stronghold,” but he believes it is a matter of the people knowing who he is.

  “When it comes down to it and they know you, they don’t see race, and I give them credit for that,” Welford said. “The people of Baldwin are saying, ‘I know Mr. Welford, and he is a good guy.’ I taught them, and they never forgot that. That is how it happened, because of who you are, not what you look like.”

‘We have to care more’

  Having been a teacher many years, Welford still has a passion for children and hopes that by being on the county board of commissioners he can move the county to provide more opportunities and activities for the youth.

  “Education is where it all starts,” he said. “There is so much we need to do, but it is going to start with the schools.”

  “When I first came here, they were graduating 50-60 seniors. Every year it has gone down. Last year, I think there were 10.

  Welford said there are a lot of reasons for the drop in graduation rates, but he believes one of the most important ones is that the students don’t feel cared about.

  “I don ‘t want to be unfair, but if you are under fire as a poor person and you don’t have all the things you need to succeed – you don’t have the nurturing – once you get behind and things get more difficult, you drop out.”  he said. “You have to throw your arms around some of those kids.”

  He shared some “eye-opening” experiences he had as a teacher that cemented those ideas for him, including taking a student home to a house with dirt floors and having several of his students introduce him to their fathers by showing him on the class computer that the fathers were incarcerated.

  “I was wondering why I was getting the kind of reception – kids looking mad all the time.” he said. ” Then they all started showing me their dads in the department of corrections. I realized that they were looking at me like I was a traitor – why am I out here and their dads are in there. They were projecting their anger at me.”

  “The solution is we have to care more.” he continued. “If we cared more, we could solve all those issues. Love those kids like your own, live in the community, don’t send your kids off to other schools. Parents have to believe we are trying to help them. You have got to interest the kids, pull them in. You have to have dedicated teachers that try to reach kids and have programs that will draw kids.”

  As a county commissioner he plans to work to get funding and interest in programs for Baldwin youth.

  “We need programs that will teach kids respect, tutorial programs and activities,” Welford said. “They need to be able to go skating, go swimming, play ping-pong, shoot pool or go to a nice library and listen to headphones. We need things here that kids can engage in without getting into trouble. We need to have federal dollars for those.

  Welford said with the American Rescue Plan Act and the Biden initiatives, a lot of the money is going to be coming into the area, and they need to try to get some of those funds to move the area forward, address the housing issue, the school issues and youth programs.