The Jesse Jackson Show departed this small, troubled city last week. The media hordes left with him, the marches and rallies ended for now, and the crucible of controversy centering on the expulsion of seven high school students cooled a bit.
But the question remains: Where will Decatur, whose “Pride of the Prairie” motto belies years of simmering problems, go from here?
In pleading the case of the students kicked out for brawling at a football game, Jackson has insisted that fairness, not skin color, was the issue. In fact, a call for fairness strikes a far deeper chord here than in most communities.
That’s because Decatur is a once-proud factory town, where the phrase “us and them” has an extra angry ring and where one side blames the other for the lost jobs, the empty buildings downtown, the community’s failed dreams and the tensions that intermittently erupt like a geyser. Decatur is home to fundamental discord over race, class and, perhaps most of all, power.
Now everyone from Decatur’s most powerful citizens to its most powerless has been struggling with those issues. They are struggling over their town’s soul.
“This community has a choice about what kind of community it will be in the future,” said Dr. Jan Mandernach, vice president of the Decatur school board, which became the latest lightning rod when it initially decided to expel the students for two years. “If we are willing to look at these questions and address them honestly, we have an opportunity to move forward.
“If we choose, rather, to be confrontational,” she added, Decatur will not.
The community’s difficulties have deep roots. For many residents, they are grounded in the question of who has power and how they wield it against those who don’t.
Decatur native and waitress Rhonda Frazier was not distressed by the school board’s expulsions of the students involved in a bleacher-clearing brawl at a football game. She backs tough discipline.
What shook her, she said, hurrying among the tables at Tom’s Grill, was how much the scene of police cars guarding the schools reminded her of Decatur’s divisive labor disputes and how many residents felt under the thumb of the city’s leaders.
It was “the all-knowing, all-doing board. It was `them’ against the little people,” said Frazier, whose husband works at the local Bridgestone-Firestone plant and was one of hundreds of union members caught up in labor battles that deeply split Decatur for much of the 1990s.
Not only Bridgestone, but Caterpillar and A.E. Staley, the huge soybean processor that helps give Decatur its distinctive sweet-stinky smell, were the center of strikes and lockouts during that period.
“The reason (the school dispute) is so heated is that it is the focal point of other frustrations,” said Bob Sampson, a community activist. At the peak of the labor disputes in the mid-1990s, droves of union members signed up for Sampson’s history class at the local community college.
One of the biggest frustrations, Sampson and others say, is the lack of good-paying work in a town that saw thousands of jobs vanish in the 1980s as the community shrank by about 10,000 residents to a population of less than 84,000 in the 1990 census. By last year, the population had declined to a little less than 80,000, according to a Census Bureau estimate.
One veteran of the labor battles, Rev. Martin Mangan, a sprightly pastor whose parish school in downtown Decatur enrolls mostly African-American youngsters, said the latest dispute underscored a troubling pattern among the corporate executives and white-collar professionals who largely run the city.
“Decatur seems to deal with problems by locking people out–the A.E. Staley lockout of workers for 2 1/2 years and the Board of Education (expulsion) of students for two years,” Mangan said of the punishments, which have since been shortened to one school year. “Rather than negotiate, we deal with problems by avoiding them.”
The anger and suspicion over labor and other disputes have in some ways bled over to other institutions in town. Apparently frustrated with how the public schools have been managed, Decatur residents last year twice voted down bond referendum proposals to repair schools and get the system back on a sound financial footing. Last month the board made good on its vow to close the town’s namesake high school, Stephen Decatur, to solve the district’s financial problems. Many residents say that voters were thumbing their noses at community leaders, who are trying to attract new employers by burnishing the city’s image as a good place to raise a family.
Decatur long has been the kind of town where, as local political scientist Larry Klugman put it, people “have a hard time feeling good about the community.”
Last year the local newspaper, the Decatur Herald & Review, launched an ambitious campaign, announcing that it was time to stop bad-mouthing Decatur and time to do something positive. The newspaper has explored frustrations with the schools, race relations and jobs.
But community leaders, who cling to an upbeat view of their town, say Decatur can take care of itself. This is not a community paralyzed by its divisions, they insist. Nor is it a place, they say, run solely by a business elite.
“We’re very good in Decatur about fixing problems,” said Julie Moore, president of the local chamber of commerce. Her point is backed by numbers showing declining unemployment in Decatur, though its jobless rate is still higher than the state average. The town’s largest employer is agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland.
Like other representatives of Decatur’s professional class, Moore vigorously defended the school board in the expulsion controversy. “They didn’t stonewall anybody,” she said.
That is not how Margaret Williams saw it as she gathered with other supporters for one of several marches through one of Decatur’s integrated working-class neighborhoods.
For Williams and many others, the dispute awakened the city’s often apathetic black community. Williams, a foster mother, looked at a line of buses arriving from Chicago and other Illinois cities as if they were reinforcements for a battle.
“Stand together, children!” she shouted. “If these kids don’t learn from this, they won’t learn nothing at all.”
Only a week or so before the Sept. 17 fistfight at an Eisenhower High School football game that sparked this controversy, a black youth had been fatally shot by a white Decatur police officer.
The shooting was ruled justified by the police, and the local chapter of Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, which was formed only last summer, ultimately accepted the conclusion. But the incident intensified resentments toward Decatur’s overwhelmingly white police and fire departments, school teaching staff and political institutions.
One exception to the rule was Jeffrey Perkins, the only board member to vote against the expulsions last month. For four years, Perkins was one of two black members of a school board that many consider another example of the intransigent establishment.
Perkins was elected in 1995, when the town also elected its first-ever Democratic mayor in a record turnout. “I was a no-name, a maverick,” Perkins said. “I was just a parent. Just a union electrician.”
His tenure didn’t last long, though. He was defeated in April by the same white school board member he had beaten four years ago; Nov. 9 was his last day as a lame-duck board member.
After he stepped down, the board voted 6-0 to re-elect Jackie Goetter as its president. For some, Goetter is a symbol of how power in Decatur is concentrated in a few hands. She is both school board president and president of the local economic development corporation.
Goetter insists, though, that the city is behind the school board. “Ninety-nine percent of the calls we’re getting are in support of the board,” she said.
However, the city’s racial split remained palpable. Hundreds of black Decatur residents showed up for Jackson’s near-nightly church rallies. But when a black city councilwoman led a march in support of the school board, about 250 people showed up and nearly all of them were white.
For the past few years, many African-Americans have complained that black students have accounted for a disproportionate share of discipline and dropout problems. More than 1,000 of the 1,700 suspensions meted out last school year involved black students, though they make up about 41 percent of the school enrollment. African-Americans account for only about 16 percent of Decatur’s population, clustered mostly in small wooden bungalows in the heart of the city.
Black teachers have also publicly complained about racist attitudes of parents and colleagues and about the lack of black faculty. African-Americans account for only 7 percent of the staff of the school district, which has largely failed in its efforts to recruit more minority teachers.
Many blacks–and some whites–feel that the community’s leaders have turned their backs on the increasingly black schools and Decatur’s black residents.
Recently, Rev. Glenn Livingston told the City Council that he had doubts about the meaning of the YWCA’s Racial Justice Award, which he received several years ago for his long-standing efforts to promote racial reconciliation. Running down a list of the black community’s complaints, Livingston said discrimination is as abundant as ever in Decatur.
Some white residents agree. Watching Jackson lead another demonstration at Eisenhower High School recently, Kenneth Crouch told of how he thought the Chicago civil rights leader’s visit gave Decatur a needed jolt.
“I think it has helped to awaken the community out of a lazy, drowsy sleep,” said Crouch, a retired civil engineer. Noting signs around the city that declare “Racism, Not in Our Town,” he said, “Decatur is contradicting itself. . . . To me (the school board’s handling of the students’ expulsion) is a clear sign of racism, though they categorically deny it.”
In fact, Mandernach, the school board vice president, insists that race was not an issue in the board’s decision to expel the black students; seven white students would have been treated the same, she contends. Still, Mandernach readily acknowledges that many residents, including those of all colors who are poor, feel ignored by the community’s decision-makers.
She recalled a conversation she had with a friend a few days ago. “If you are black, the system will not work for you,” the friend said, and she was white.
The question Decatur’s leaders and residents must ask, Mandernach said, is “what do we need to do to this institution of the school” and other institutions in town “so people don’t feel that way.”
