It looks like an ad for Benetton: four braided, bunned, curled ethnic facsimiles of the Statue of Liberty standing around the real thing, in all her standard European beauty.
But it’s not one of those take-a-second-look spots for chic Italian-designer sportswear. It’s Lowell Thompson and Rev. Derek Simons’ latest pitch to sell racial harmony in a way that Americans can buy into.
Thompson and Simons knew they were on to something when they test-marketed the poster to members of the Illinois Ethnic Coalition, a 25-year-old non-profit group that forges ties between racial and ethnic groups.
“You can’t do that. You can’t mess with the Statue of Liberty,” said one member. “She’s a national icon, she stands for everybody!”
Thompson and Simons got what they wanted: a reaction.
The two hatch their appeals to consumer instincts not from a Madison Avenue suite, but out of a second-floor loft in an old bicycle factory in Chicago’s River North neighborhood, where they operate their non-profit Partnership Against Racism. Together they have developed TV commercials, T-shirts, billboards, posters and “The Race Question,” a half-hour radio show about racial understanding that airs at 7 a.m. Sundays on WLIT-FM 93.9.
Thompson, 47, a veteran adman who spent his teen years in the Robert Taylor Homes, founded Partnership Against Racism in 1991 as a communications agency dedicated to “unselling” racism. Simons, 58, a Welsh-born Roman Catholic priest and former pastor of St. Anselm’s Parish, signed on two years ago as a creative partner.
The link behind their unusual partnership is Tom DeMint, to whom Thompson reported 20 years ago when both men worked in advertising for J. Walter Thompson. DeMint had since left the agency to work for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, where two years ago he ran into Simons and instantly thought of putting the two together.
Although both are roughly 5-foot-8 with a tendency to mustaches, horn-rimmed glasses and graying hair, Simons and Thompson are the Oscar and Felix of race relations.
Listeners who tune in to their show get the picture right away.
“Good morning Chicago, I’m Father Derek Simons, and I’m white,” says Simons.
“Good morning, I’m Lowell Thompson, and I’m black,” says Thompson.
That’s the least of their differences.
During a 25-year career working as one of the few blacks in advertising, Thompson transformed himself from an adman into a self-described “race man” who dedicates his talents to the betterment of the black community. He believes the way to change attitudes about race is to sell society’s agenda-setters on the idea that racial harmony is “hip, cool, something you gotta have, like a pair of Nikes.”
Simons believes in the media, too, but doesn’t think attitudes will change until parents change and teach the right values in the home.
Their difference in emphasis leads to creative tension, not shouting matches. In fact, they want their show to be an “alternative to the highly emotional shoot-from-the-lip style of radio program that tends to exaggerate people’s differences,” Thompson said.
One of the most contentious exchanges during a show came when Thompson explained that Partnership Against Racism “tries to teach the society at large, because we believe it is the societal leaders, the politicians, the Ted Koppels, the Peter Jenningses, the people who set the agenda –“
“Now Lowell,” cut in Simons.
“Derek, let me finish,” shot back Thompson.
Finally Simons got in his say about the home being the place where children will be taught the values that will guide a lifetime.
It’s not a call-in show, so it has a low-key tone in which guests–including Gail Schechter of the Interfaith Housing Center of the Northern Suburbs; Tony Sacre, a Cuban-Irish American storyteller; and Judy Wise, Chicago director of Facing History and Ourselves–quietly explain their own work in race relations.
But Simons is quick to say the program is not an “I’m OK, you’re OK technicolor lovefest.”
Electronic melting pot
According to Jeryl Levin, executive director of the Illinois Ethnic Coalition, and another recent guest on the show, “the show lets you in on all these people doing all these positive things in little pockets of Chicago. If they can show the full breadth and scope of ethnicity in Chicago, the show could really take off, because there is a hunger out there for this kind of dialogue.”
The show wasn’t even their idea. It evolved from a public-affairs program they did for WLIT in honor of Martin Luther King’s birthday. “They were a natural, and I asked them on the spot if they would consider doing a radio show together,” said Mary Anne Meyers, the station’s news director.
WLIT has a heavy listenerhip in the northwest suburbs, said Meyers, adding that the station had long wanted to do something to reach a more diverse audience.
The show’s jazzy theme music sets the tone as a voice-over reels off a laundry list of ethnic groups: “Cuban-American, Chinese-American, Jewish-American, Native American, Latin American, African-American. . . . Who are we? We live together with different roots, different dreams, sometimes in harmony. What unites us? What divides us?”
Despite the show’s multicultural approach, the issue for Thompson and Simons boils down to “the black-white problem.”
It’s clear the show’s guests don’t always see things quite the same way. After talking to Cuban-Irish storyteller Tony Sacre about his work with black and Latino Clemente High School students in an afterschool drama program, Simons asked Sacre for his perspective on the black-white divide.
But Sacre said what he saw in Humboldt Park was “everybody riding the same bus,” poor people of all backgrounds trying to make it in the same neighborhood.
Despite their “Odd Couple” persona, Simons and Thompson do agree on some things, and have lived in some of the same South Side neighborhoods. Both now live in Hyde Park.
Different paths to the studio
Simons, who emigrated to the U.S. from New Zealand in the late 1960s, lives with other members of his missionary order, the Society of the Divine Word, in their Hyde Park community house. Prior to that he lived at two South Side Catholic parishes, St. Elizabeth’s and St. Anselm’s.
Simons and his sister were raised by their mother and father, a printer, in a middle-class London home. Simons was reared in the Anglican faith, but that changed after he left England for a broadcasting career in New Zealand.
While at a party he met two Marist priests and stayed up all night talking philosophy with them. He soon converted to Catholicism, eventually deciding to become a priest.
Some may question what a white man, let alone a British Catholic priest with a green card, knows about being black or ethnic in America. But Simons has not only lived in black neighborhoods for years, he also does his homework.
He knows how to target a message to an audience. It’s a skill he uses to good advantage in carrying out his more conventional duties, such as the sermon he gave recently at Holy Angels Church on the South Side, one of the few black Catholic parishes in Illinois.
As he expounded on the meaning of the Transfiguration, he invoked the wisdom of the elders of the black community.
“I ain’t what I want to be,” quoted Simons. “I ain’t what I should be. I ain’t what I can be. But thank the Lord I ain’t what I was.”
His voice rose again amid the murmurs of assent and the spontaneous “Amens,” and he moved on to quote Susan Taylor, editor in chief of Essence magazine: “We were born to be reborn.”
His ability to reach people on their own ground has led to numerous awards for Simons, who in the 1980s founded an ethnic communications company in Chicago that developed programming by and for the city’s black and Latino communities.
The partnership with a white priest has been a transition for Thompson, a self-described “sort of Baptist” who is used to operating on his own or with other blacks. “I’m still skeptical,” Thompson said of Simons. “I definitely think he wants to do something good for the world. He’s figured out a way to be a priest and still have fun doing what he wants to do.”
Thompson is the third of 11 children of a cabdriver, numbers-runner father and a homemaker mother. He scraped through high school and briefly attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on a scholarship, but dropped out to pursue a more lucrative career in advertising.
Despite holding a string of prestigious advertising jobs with top agencies, Thompson has been critical of the industry’s failure to hire and promote minorities, especially blacks. In 1993, he lobbied and picketed in front of Leo Burnett Co., the largest Chicago-based advertising agency, before finally getting some industry support for a hot line he operated to help ad agencies find talented minorities.
His wife, Bobbie Ball-Thompson, 44, a flight attendant for United Airlines, wishes he “would go back and get a regular job.” But Thompson believes he’s making a bigger contribution to the world as a “race man” who occasionally does free-lance advertising projects. He and his wife have a son, 13, and a daughter, 9. He also has a 22-year-old daughter from a previous marriage.
Thompson’s latest project is a book about America’s legacy of racism, titled “White Folks,” in which he wrote a speech for President Clinton to give on July 4, 1996.
It’s a speech offering an official U.S. government apology for slavery and racism.
“If he gives that speech it could win the election for him,” declared Thompson.
“Whites created this color-coded society, it’s not human nature to be racist,” he said. “I think it’s possible to change it. We’ve only been working at it as a country for 25 years.”
It should take, he said, only a few billion dollars in advertising and a few more years.
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Call 664-6203 for more information about Partnership Against Racism.
