[NFBMI-Talk] FW: My Post for the List Serve

Fri May 9 00:54:22 UTC 2025

I am forwarding Richard's statement to the list serve. I am doing so because the list serve is currently as broken as our affiliate is so Richard has been having trouble posting his statement. I am doing this because I am in full agreement with what Richard is saying. I think that all of our members have the right to hear what he is saying. In my own name I want to ask the following questions. 
1 Do we really want our organization to have a president who describes his rules for conducting our meetings as "rules of engagement"? Rules of engagement is a military term codifying the way one is permitted to treat the enemy.
2 When did our leaders become so afraid of us, the members, that they employ security guards to protect themselves from hearing what we think?
3 When have our leaders called the police on our members to silence us.

The answer is since Robert parsons became our state president and his completely subservient board of directors went rogue. Some time ago I publicly asked Robert Parsons to resign as NFBMI president. I am renewing that request I urge all of you who care about the NFBMI to join me in this request. Please read and consider carefully what Richard clay is saying.

Stephen Handschu
773-209-4539
stephenhandschu at gmail.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Clay <savingoursonsrc at yahoo.com> 
Sent: Thursday, May 8, 2025 7:23 PM
To: Stephen Handschu <stephenhandschu at gmail.com>
Subject: My Post for the List Serve

Greetings Michigan Affiliate. I’m writing to provide some clarity to posts that have appeared today on our list-serve. I know, President Parsons has his people out declaring that there should be no responses posted, but that’s not the way things work in the real-world folks. You don’t get to have other people do your dirty work and tell your version of a story publicly, and then say no, the other side doesn’t get to tell the people their side. 

So, following what were supposed to be the current rules of engagement in our Affiliate, yesterday, I sent Detroit’s Official Response to last Saturday’s outrageous State Board Meeting directly to all of our Affiliate Board Members and some relevant NFB Members from Detroit. I posted it nowhere publicly so that it could not be confused with an organized attack on or campaign against President Parsons. But anyone who knows him knows that he doesn’t practice self-criticism, and he can’t take any criticism from anybody. So, feeling a little bit of heat after that Board Meeting, he acted and broke the very rules of public engagement that were established to protect, him.

Today, Ms. Faye Chenault-Johnson posted a response to our Detroit Response here on this list-serve. How? I never sent her Detroit’s Response. Where did she get it from, which NFBMI Board Member? She has never responded publicly to any other crisis in this Affiliate, nor ever posted on this list-serve before, so why would she now? Well, anyone who is computer savi can read her email post and point-out the characters present that are tell-tell signs of an email that was copied from somebody else and pasted to appear as original writing. Yes, President Parsons gave her our Detroit Response, asked her to respond to it publicly, thus giving her and me permission to do so, and more than likely wrote her response, which fits more of his writing style than it does her’s. There is no chance at all that it was posted to the list serve by a mistake; just a mistake that the other side obviously now get to respond to it.

Yet all of this including the controversial Board Meeting is just more typical behavior from President Parsons and this Affiliate Board. He suspended/shut-down the Detroit Chapter supposably because our leadership didn’t sign documents the way that he told us to, we didn’t do our last Chapter election the way that he told us to, and worst of all, sometimes, we had the nerve to talk back to/debate  him. As you saw at the Board Meeting, he gets perturbed by us even asking him when does he plan to reorganize the Detroit Chapter, if at all. 

But what everyone in our Affiliate really wants to know is what is really going on overall. Flint and New Wayne County are the only NFBMI Chapters left with boots on the ground in this Affiliate. And yet President Parsons has spent the entire past year not building-up or reorganizing the currently inactive Capitol Region, Jackson, or Kalamazoo Chapters; but attacking and closing-down the biggest and fastest growing, most active, and best organized Chapter in the Affiliate. Why? He’s done so because he viewed it as his only opposition left in the state, thus worthy to him of being crushed. 

On top of that, at the Board Meeting, First Vice President Sheila Fulmore, a Black woman, is calling the undeniably racist Dearborn Police on me, a fellow Black Leader in the Federation, possibly jeopardizing people’s freedom and lives, simply to prevent Steve Handschu and myself from expressing our opinions on a controversial proposed change to our state Constitution. An issue over which any Federation Affiliate  is supposed to have some passionate debate on both sides, Sheila, with the blessing of the Affiliate’s Board, calls the police into our meeting to squash said debate because Steve and I were still talking after President Parsons banged his mighty gabble and commanded us to shut-up or leave. Yes, this is nuts!!!

NFB Members from Detroit are not the only one’s who have been trying to figure out what is going wrong with our Affiliate? Many of you have heard all the talk. The loudest most consistent rumor out there has been that President Parsons is just using the NFB as a stepping-stone to get a job as Director of Leader Dogs, the Bureau of Services for Blind Persons, or the Greater Detroit Agency for the Blind and Visually Impaired; and once he gets that dream job, he’ll leave and then we can all go back to doing the Affiliate’s work the functional way. Well, y’all keep hoping and pushing that line. 

My experiences tell me that what is really going on is that President Parsons and our remaining Affiliate Board Members are working to consolidate power and transform the Michigan Affiliate into a cult dedicated to “Supreme Leader” President Parsons. In this new Affiliate, if you agree with him, you are applauded, rewarded, and celebrated if you do it often. If you disagree with him, you are targeted for bad treatment and shunned. Disagree often and you get set-up to be kicked out of the NFB altogether by Affiliate Leadership. They’re working on kicking people out right now, and you could tell from the Board Meeting that NFB Lifer Steve Handschu and myself were already first up to bat. 

But when you get so deep into your cult that you put my life in jeopardy literally over nothing, that’s where I draw the line. Enough is enough. Somebody has to stand-up, tell the truth, and make it clear to those who are confused and caught in the middle about what they are witnessing. I absolutely love the NFB and have participated in it off and on all of my adult life without any problems at all. Yet not for President Parsons, or anyone else, will I join or bow down to the wishes of a cult or a cult leader. Nor will I allow want-to-be cult leaders to casually violate my civil rights without feeling the pressure of a serious response. I’ve included the above-mentioned Detroit’s Official Response immediately below. Let us find points around which to unite our divided Affiliate so that we can get back to our legitimate work of building the federation.

Richard Clay

Greetings President Parsons and remaining Michigan Affiliate Board Members. Three dozen plus outraged NFB Members At Large from Detroit have demanded that I respond swiftly on our behalf to the Board Meeting that you conducted this past Saturday. In every facet, the meeting was a travesty, your behavior was disgraceful, and the contempt that you showed for anyone present who dared to disagree with you on any issue at all was shamefully palpable. You turned what many people view as a prestigious meeting of blind leaders into a total joke.

President Parsons, you cheer-lead the comments of all of your supporters, and simultaneously shut-down the comments of any decenters, in most cases, before we finished or even made them at all. You casually dismissed the one question that I asked the whole day, the primary question for Detroiters, a simple one; do you plan to reorganize the Detroit Chapter by the time that the next state convention takes place. You belabored discussions of minor issues and reorganized the agenda purposefully so that the most important issue of the day, a proposed change to our Michigan Constitution of all things, would be discussed and voted upon well after 4 PM, the time that you knew most members from the Detroit area would be picked-up by their Paratransit vehicles and be half-way home. This is at a meeting that you clearly publicized as running from 1-4 PM. What a tremendous display of leadership.

Quite understandably, the few Detroiters left in the room appealed to you and the Board to table the discussion. But you weren’t about to table what you had so carefully planned and implemented, were you? If engineering such a vote wasn’t cowardly enough, you allowed several people to speak verbosely to your side of the proposal and lie on other members in the process. Yet you let just one member, Steve Handschu, begin to express an opposing view of the proposal, and cut him off abruptly as he tried to defend his character against the lies told about him by your supporter Mike Powell. Then you quickly called for the vote. When we objected, you sicked a security guard on Steve Handschu and myself, and then the Dearborn Police. 

There is no prior history of any police ever being called-in to settle any disputes in a Michigan Affiliate Board Meeting. Yet you all foolishly interjected one of the country’s documented, most racist law enforcement agency’s into our meeting because Steve or I wouldn’t stop talking the exact second that President Parsons told us to, even though not one threat was made, and the meeting moved on with no problems. Once again Board Members, you are creating the absolute worst kind of history possible. And so obvious to us all, you planned it all; the extremely delayed vote, the brief argument in the meeting, and the intimidating security/police intervention. Unfortunately for you, we weren’t intimidated by your tactics before Saturday, and we’re even less so today.

So today we stand in unison in denouncing the actions of this Board that have outright crossed the line. In my personal opinion, this Board has totally gone rogue in an attempt to establish a cult around President Robert Parsons. Those of us from Detroit are proud members of the NFB. Yet we do not wish to join a Parsons Cult where one cannot exist or even speak in a meeting without fear of being arrested if he/she believes differently from the dictator/president. You have violated our rights as NFB Members in several serious and egregious ways that drive us to respond in an equally serious and coordinated fashion. To uphold the protection, comfort, and rights of our members, we shall respond.

Therefore, we, the vast majority of NFB Members from Detroit feel that you, the Board, have intentionally and unreasonably made it impossible for us to participate fairly in our own Michigan Affiliate, and thereby forced us to make the following changes. We are hereby pulling-back our participation in the Michigan Affiliate to a bare minimum. I.E. both of our Affiliate Board Members are resigning, we are sharply reducing our participation in affiliate sponsored activities to those that we deem as mandatory, we are refocusing on engaging in initiatives sponsored by Nationals, and we are no longer waiting for the affiliate to address the great leadership void that currently exists in Detroit. We, good-standing NFB Members, unappreciated and unduly repressed by our Affiliate’s Leadership, have formed a new collective of friends to advocate for and conduct enrichment activities on behalf of the blind community in and around Detroit. We will work with each other through this collective until the Detroit Chapter of the NFB is effectively reorganized or reinstated.

Oh, we know, we know, y’all are immediately about to promote a lie about us and say that we are somehow imitating the Detroit Chapter, or mis-representing the NFB’s name somehow. But we won’t; we never have, and we never will. NFB or Detroit Chapter won’t be anywhere in our name, signatures, or official communications, or on any activities that we do. We acknowledge clearly and up-front that we are not a NFB Chapter. You can however, bet your last dollar that we will be recruiting lots of new members into the NFB, and promoting NFB’s true life-changing philosophy in all that we do; not your dictatorship-style cultism. 

When we do see you all at future Affiliate events, we hope that you will have matured and learned to conduct yourselves in a more fare, professional, and less dangerous manner. Most importantly, we hope that your childish security/law enforcement games never backfire on you and get anybody on either side hurt, or worse. Trust me, after your most recent disgusting display, we won’t be holding our breaths waiting for any improvement. We must in closing thank you all and your petty, biased practices for one giant fact. Your constant attacks have unwittingly forged us into a faster growing, stronger, more united, more determined unit than we otherwise ever would have been. 

Oops, I almost forgot. President Parsons, guess who the members of the new collective have chosen to lead us forward? I’ll let my signature line tell that story. Let us continue onward without pause to build the Federation.

President, Detroit Advocates of the Blind Richard Clay

P.S.

President Parsons and remaining Affiliate Board Members, please know that for the sake of transparency, and for their own and our protection, we are instructing NFB AT Large Members from Detroit who attend Affiliate sponsored events from here on out to record said events in full, paying special attention to the following:
•	How differently your supporters are treated and spoken to in said meetings compared to your decenters;
•	Who, and how many people are acknowledged and not acknowledged during the discussion of motions on the floor; And,
•	Discussion, debate, or argument flashpoints that lead to meeting ejections and/or security/law enforcement interventions, carefully documenting who starts them, who escalates them, and who, if anyone, crosses any lines.

This afternoon, we spoke with a current civil rights complaints officer. Said officer confirmed that continually calling the police on people for frivolous reasons, such as to prevent them from reasonably debating motions put on the floor in a civic meeting is indeed a civil rights violation. Therefore, I am hereby officially requesting that all of you on the Affiliate Board please find your ethics and refrain from violating our civil rights simply because we disagree with you on certain NFB related issues. If you continue in any way to violate the civil rights of any of our members or leaders, I promise you we will file appropriate civil rights complaints, and then follow-up with appropriate legal actions against all responsible Affiliate Board Members. Please understand that we are not afraid of you, we will not be intimidated by you or your immoral Gestapo tactics, and we absolutely will not tolerate any further violations of our civil rights from anybody on your Board. NFB Meetings are public meetings, and we have just as much a right to be and participate in them as you do. Thank you in advance for your cooperation with this request. All hands in as we go build the Federation			.

President, Detroit Advocates of the Blind Richard Clay