Ted Quant
Ted Quant
Background
Ted Quant ran the Twomey Center for Peace Through Justice in New Orleans.
Quant says he was taught by his parents that to “whom much is given, much is expected.” He was fortunate in that his parents practiced what they preached. His father was a Pullman porter with a degree in theology and the Quant home was always open to boarders, whether family or friends, who lived there while attending nearby Howard University in Washington, D.C. During this time, conversations usually focused on the ongoing civil rights movement as history was being formed by events such as the lynching of Emmett Till in Miss., school desegregation in Little Rock, Ark., and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The consensus was that if you were a black man living in America at that time your duty was to fight for justice, for your rights, and for the rights of every member of every group.
When the Quant family moved to Riverside, Calif., and while attending Notre Dame High School, Ted met the priest who set the standard by which Quant measures his life. “Have you proved your existence today?” the priest would ask him. Quant characterizes the answer to that question as a conscious decision to do something that will make a difference in the world, something that gives meaning to the purpose of life.
His work at the Twomey Center is helping to change the world by enhancing the lives of thousands of New Orleanians. Quant is most passionate about teaching conflict resolution methods to children in area schools. But he is equally enthusiastic about teaching those same methods to adults in their work environment. What Quant likes to see when he has completed a training program, which takes three to five years, is confidence in skills learned to manage anger, leading to a decrease in violence and a sense of empathy for others. He wants to see children on the playground include the one who is left out of the game as well as adults uncomfortable enough with racist comments to be able to say ‘hey wait, that’s just not right.’ We give people skills and courage, I think, to act, to interrupt prejudice and we show them how to do it and to not be a bystander around injustice.”
The Twomey Center’s Resolving Conflict Creatively Program has trained students and teachers in 120 area schools and is currently involved at Woodson Junior High, Myrtle Banks Elementary, Laurel Elementary, Gust Elementary, New Orleans Free School, Langston Hughes, and St. Mark’s Street Academy, and this year the center will take the program into high schools. In addition, Quant was instrumental in designing the Conflict Resolution Program now used by the New Orleans Police Academy, implementing the curriculum, and training the instructors and the field training officers.
The center also has presented diversity and anti-racist programs to corporations, such as Chevron, Dupont, AT&T, and to nonprofit organizations, such as United Way Agencies. Quant and his trainers have conducted workshops for government agencies, such as the U.S. Postal Service, USDA, and the Department of Transportation. Recently (1998) a workshop was held for Mayor Marc Morial’s top management team.
Quant strongly feels that when programs which teach people how to resolve their differences about racism, sexism, and similar issues are in place long enough, attitudes will begin to change. People will not have to be hurt and die needlessly and the cycle of violence and prejudice will be broken.
The Twomey Center is rededicating itself to the late Father Twomey’s ideal of peace through justice, as it celebrates it’s 50th anniversary and is working hard in promoting programs such as Bread for the World, the ECOnomics Institute, Blueprint for Social Justice (which will be honoring the 50th anniversary of the United Nations declaration on human rights), Urban Partners, the Twomey Print Shop, and the Resolving Conflict Creatively Program.
There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that Quant is slowing down. He is particularly concerned about the low-paid workers in the New Orleans tourist industry who have little control over the availability of employment and even less over the low wage offered to them. Thousands of people work full or part time providing the services that make millions in profits for the hotels and convention centers, while they, the workers, live in poverty,” Quant said. “To carry out our responsibilities, we will be supporting the organization drive of the workers going on in our city. We will use our institutions of education and consciousness raising to do this. We have reestablished our labor school and will begin new classes in March. Our Blueprint for Social Justice has published articles questioning and criticizing unjust economic structures and calling for action such as support for a constitutional amendment that ‘Every person shall have the right to a job and to receive a living wage for their work.’”
Catholic social teaching holds that all economic life should be shaped by moral principles. Economic choices and institutions must be judged by how well they protect the life and dignity of the human person. “This is the demand of our faith and the legacy we inherited from Fr. Twomey.”[1]
Christic connection
Local groups in New Orleans planned to make the Christic Institute message heard during the Republican National Convention in summer 1988. "There are many things in the planning stage--including major demonstrations--and certainly the Iran-Contra drug connection will be an important part of the issues raised," says Ted Quant of the Institute of Human Relations at Loyola University in New Orleans. Quant was particularly concerned about the Christic Institute's evidence that the Secret Team and the CIA have been involved in drug running to benefit the Contras.
There's been a tremendous drug problem, particularly among the young people in our community," says Quant. "Then we learn through Christic that a tremendous amount of the drugs in our community were actually flown in by the CIA. That means our kids are being used as cannon fodder for the Administration policy of trying to overthrow another country that is trying to establish a decent life for its children as well."
The South presents "fertile ground" for "the type of paramilitary program that you see with the Iran-Contra affair," Quant says. "The South has a history of support for this sort of paramilitary behavior going back at least to the Ku Klux Klan--and the role of extra-legal terror has continued until recent times. We know for example that the Klan has often traded its white robes for paramilitary garb to allign [sic] itself with the fight against Communism."
Quant has witnessed first-hand the disastrous effects that the successful exploitation of this right-wing brand of Southern nationalism has had in the New Orleans community. "In a way the South has been treated as sort of a second-rate colony by these people--a place where they can dump these drugs to finance this war."[2]
The Board
New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice board, as of November 2017;[3]
Loyola Award
Ted Quant, social activist and director of the Twomey Center for Peace Through Justice, was the recipient of Loyola University New Orleans’ 2011 Integritas Vitae Award, the university’s highest honor. Quant will be honored at Loyola’s Benefactors Dinner on Dec. 1, at the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans.
Quant has worked for social justice in many capacities over the last 40 years. In his current work with the Twomey Center, Quant teaches and trains in cultural diversity, leadership, team building, conflict resolution, negotiations and communications to corporations, public schools, parent advocates, youth groups, government agencies and community organizations.
One of his many accomplishments includes being instrumental in developing New Orleans’ freeze plan and a drop-in center for the homeless when he co-chaired the Mayor’s Task Force on Homelessness. He also supported the development of a construction business that trained and employed homeless men and women. Quant has been co-chair of the New Orleans Public Schools Drop-out Prevention Taskforce that brought the Cities in Schools program and the Comprehensive Competencies Program to New Orleans. He also supported the effort that established the first New Orleans School-Based Health Centers.
According to those who work with him, Quant epitomizes the characteristics for which the award stands.
“Ted has a heart of gold and finds good in everyone. He brings diversity to the university as well as the Twomey Center by his work with labor, education and conflict resolution,” said Sister Jane Remson, O. Carm., director of Bread for the World Louisiana in the Twomey Center.
In addition to the above affiliations, Quant is also a founding member and chairman of the board for Operation Reach, a youth leadership program. He is a founding board member, trainer and counselor for the 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement. He helped establish the C. J. Peete Power Computer School, and he started the first peer mediation program at Peters Middle School. Together with Educators for Social Responsibility and Safe & Drug Free Schools, Quant started the first comprehensive conflict resolution program in Orleans Parish Schools.
In 1988, Quant was presented the Medgar Evers Memorial Award for Service in the Area of Human and Civil Rights by the Louisiana Chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.[4]
Supported Communist Party front
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In 1982 Ted Quant served on the National Coordinating Committee of a Communist Party USA front the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, which was led by leading Party members Angela Davis and Charlene Mitchell.
Speakers for a New America
Circa 2015 Ted Quant was part of Speakers for a New America, the speakers bureau for League of Revolutionaries for a New America.
Founding conference/Leadership
By Allen Harris CHICAGO– With tremendous enthusiasm, fighting spirit and unity, the League of Revolutionaries for a New America was established during a convention held in Chicago on April 29 and 1995.
Attending were 73 delegates and 67 observers, as well as representatives of 30 areas and the national office. They came from 22 states, the District of Columbia and the Lakota Nation.
The meeting was the second national convention of the organization founded in Chicago in April, 1993 and originally called the National Organizing Committee.
Ranging in age from 17 to 80, the participants were Native American, white, black, Latino, Asian and Arab. They were urban, suburban and rural. They were secular and Christian, Muslim, Jewish and people of other faiths.
On the National Committee are Theresa Allison, Michelle Tingling-Clemmons, Leona Smith, Willie Baptist, Ted Quant, Jerome Scott, Gloria Sandoval, Ronald Casanova, John Slaughter, Timothy Sandoval, Richard Monje, Jackie Gage, Alma Ornelas, Maria Martinez, Larry Regan, Rose Sanders, Nitza Vera and Luis Rodriguez.
Socialism
DATE: April, 6, 2016,
INTERVIEWERS: Ali Zak, Daniel Sosebee, Siena Hasson & Molly Werthan with Ted Quant.[5]
- You see, when I was 25 and joined the movement, there was a worldwide revolution going on. We were in an era of fighting imperialism. Every colored nation in the world was throwing off the yoke of some imperialist European nation. This was a motion I thought I was a part of. I was idealistic about what was going to happen. I figured we would have had socialism by the time I was forty or maybe fifty. Maybe sixty. But I feel that now, since then, we have lost. As my friend Rosanna once said to me, “You’ve got to understand the law of circumvention. It means that anything we can do, they can circumvent.” I spent all that time battling and building revolutionary organizations as well as reformist organizations, and everything we fought for has been stripped from us now. So, what did I do for those years? What did I achieve?