Oakwood Public Safety Officers. Vice Mayor Byington thanked the visitors for their comments. Diversity is a topic that is contentious in some regards and people are very passionate about it. He recalled one of his college professors telling him that if you develop a hypothesis or some way of thinking about something, you better be sure that you have the research method to back up the conclusions that you make on that particular hypothesis. He stated that the ABLE report was mentioned a few times during the visitor comments and he hopes that people in college will learn that just making statement does not make a report. The report needs to have the facts behind it.
Mayor Duncan shared that David McCullough is an American historian and author of The Pioneers. The book tells a story of the first settlers in Ohio and the Northwest Territory in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s. This book should be required reading in public schools. When the Declaration of Independence was signed, there were slaves in all 13 colonies. In 1787, the northwest ordinance was passed by the Congress. The Northwest Ordinance in the Northwest Territory now consists of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois. It was the first document that prohibited slavery in any territory in the United States of America. It was also the first document that required free public education in the United States of America. In 2019, David McCullough talked about his book at an event in Columbus, Ohio. Governor Mike DeWine, and former Governors Ted Strickland and Bob Taft were in attendance. David McCullough was a commencement speaker at Ohio University (Ohio University was the first public university west of the Allegheny Mountains) in 2004 and closed his 2019 talk with an excerpt from the speech he gave at Ohio University in 2004. The excerpt is as important now as it was then. Mayor Duncan closed the meeting reading this excerpt:
The public meeting concluded at 9:02 p.m.
