Despite pockets of success, the East Side of Springfield
continues to suffer from crime, substandard housing, poor infrastructure and
a lack of money. Decent sidewalks are hard to come by, fly dumping persists,
and nearly every street has boarded-up houses and commercial buildings.
Change doesn’t come easy. Ask the seven eastside Democratic precinct committee candidates known as East Side Pride. They’re trying to transform their neighborhoods and solve these big problems and many others. They also want to shake up Springfield’s party-centered power structures, which they claim are holding progress back. It’s hard to tell which will be the more difficult task.
The slate is up against an old guard that includes the Sangamon County Democratic Party, its Minority Caucus, and the caucus leader, Cecil Turner — all of whom aren’t about to give up hard-earned territory to a group of wide-eyed, grass-roots activists. Their strong voting base on the East Side is an important cog in local and statewide politics. Turner and his loyalists proudly help elect candidates, dole out patronage jobs, and keep their constituents happy, all while remaining quietly behind the scene.
But not everybody is happy.
No one could anticipate the tragic eastside shooting two years ago that left one person dead and a bunch of people impatient with the hoops and protocols of Springfield politics.
Sunday, June 16, 2002, was Father’s Day and the second day of Springfield’s 9th annual Juneteenth celebration, a festival that marks the end of slavery. The family-friendly affair at Cox Park, on Dr. Martin Luther King Drive, included games, food and music. Several organizations and government agencies set up booths to hand out information about their services.
Roy Williams was there as a representative of Juneteenth’s sponsor, One in a Million, Inc., a get-out-the-vote organization that grew out of the Million Man March in Washington, D.C. He remembers a young man named Ray Banks playing basketball and hanging out with his friends at Cox Park. Later that night, and well after the celebration ended, 19-year-old Banks got into a scuffle several blocks away and was shot in the head and killed.
Banks was a stand-out football player at Southeast High School and was days away from entering the Army, says Mike Williams, Roy’s brother. Mike had gone to school with Banks’s father and had become the boy’s mentor and friend.
“I remember screaming at Ray on the sidelines,” Mike Williams says. “Then we started talking regularly — first about football, about wins and losses. Then we started talking about dedicating himself to win a scholarship, go to college.” Eventually, Banks opened up about an increasingly heated feud between him and another young man who had gotten involved with a gang, a feud that boiled over that June evening.
When Banks was murdered, Mike Williams was still at Cox Park, cleaning up with a group of people. He didn’t think much about the police sirens — the sounds are a part of city life. But on his way home he passed the crime scene near 17th and Jackson, just a few blocks from the park. He got out to see what was going on.
People approached Williams and said, “They shot Ray.” “Ray who?” he asked. “Ray Banks. He’s dead.” Williams went numb. He got back into his car and drove home. He told his wife, Stephanie, and then went into his bedroom, closed the door, and cried.
At the funeral, Mike Williams sat next to Ward 2 Alderman Frank McNeil. Bank’s alleged murderer, Leonardo White, was a member of an upstart gang called the Outlaws, which had been at the center of numerous fights during the past year. White had a sister, Emerald, who had been charged a year earlier in an unrelated murder of a mother of six — over a dispute about a cell phone. In hushed tones, McNeil told Williams that something had to change, someone had to figure out how to end the violence. A small group of people met at McNeil’s house to brainstorm. The group grew larger and moved to the Boys and Girls Club. Then it moved to Union Baptist Church on East Monroe. Unity for Our Community was born. Mike Williams became its leader. About a month after Bank’s murder, another young man was killed in a drive-by shooting on the East Side. Those who started shooting first were in a car driven by Williams’s nephew Lamar Crawford.
Unity’s goals are broad and ambitious. It set out to reform schools, combat gang violence and push for minority hiring at City Hall. The group attracted attention across the city, from Democrats, Republicans and progressives who embraced its reform agenda.
As Unity began to raise awareness of various issues affecting Springfield, it realized it needed help from elected officials. For the top guns to get involved, Mike Williams knew that Unity needed participation from eastside precinct captains who pass concerns, requests, and complaints up the chain of command of their respective parties.
“Whenever we were meeting with state or government agencies they’d always ask, ‘Where are your elected officials?’ ” he says. Though the organization seemed to draw broad support, it wasn’t doing a good job enlisting the officials they really needed, the ones from their own neighborhoods.
That had to change.
The Williams brothers decided to recruit their own candidates to run for precinct. Then they went a step further.
East Side Pride is an offspring of Unity, says Mike Williams, who became one of the candidates on the slate along with Roy, who is also running for Sangamon County Board and is one of U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama’s downstate campaign coordinators.
East Side Pride candidates — all frequent Unity for Our Community attendees — figured the best way to make sure local officials came to Unity meetings was to become the elected officials.
Roy and Mike Williams head East Side Pride, which includes two more Williamses — their uncle Allen Williams, a former Democratic precinct captain and Sangamon County Board member, and their mother-in-law Linda Douglas-Williams, a former candidate for city council. The other three are Amy O’Connell, Pamela Bolden and Leonard Shanklin.
Initially, East Side Pride attempted to recruit up to 16 candidates but it had a hard time finding more than seven, partially because most Democratic precinct captains on the East Side are loyal to Cecil Turner, the Sangamon County Democrat’s vice chair and committeeman for formidable precinct 119. Turner’s wife, Doris, is also heavily involved in politics. She’s a member of the Sangamon County Board, an appointed committeewoman of a precinct adjacent to her husband’s and president of Central Illinois Democratic Women.
The contrasts between the two factions are clear. The Williamses and East Side Pride present themselves as outsiders, insurgents, critics of the status quo; the Turners and their allies are the status quo. For Cecil Turner, an administrator for Secretary of State Jesse White, politics makes the world go round. It is the means and the end. Those who try to serve the greater good by working outside of the party’s establishment are troublemakers. Turner and his Minority Caucus might represent the old guard — but it is a reliable old guard.
Before the February 2003 primary election, when it was not at all clear who would become Springfield’s next mayor, candidate Tim Davlin paid Turner a visit. Davlin — the Democrats’ choice in the five-man “nonpartisan” race — wasn’t alone. Todd Renfrow and Patrick “Tim” Timoney were with him. Timoney is current chair of the Sangamon County Democrats. Renfrow, Timoney’s predecessor, was a major Davlin supporter and a former candidate for mayor. He now heads City Water, Light & Power.
Davlin wanted Turner’s endorsement: Turner’s 119th precinct is one of the most reliable and heavily-weighted Democratic precincts in town, if not central Illinois. The 119th isn’t a kingmaker, but its votes, once promised, are guaranteed. In November 2000, more than 70 percent of the precinct’s voters went to the polls — slightly lower than the county average that year but above average for the nation (and very good for the East Side). Among those who voted for president, more than 93 percent chose Al Gore.
Turner told the men that he’d back Davlin, but only if he made it past the primary to the runoff. Until then, his man was Mike Houston, a former, two-term Springfield mayor — and a Republican. On the surface, Turner’s support for Houston seemed bizarre. Why would Turner, a high-ranking member of the county Democrats, endorse a Republican staging a comeback? It made perfect sense to Turner.
“I owed Houston,” Turner tells Illinois Times. Back in the 1980s, Houston had given him a prominent fair housing job within his administration.
On Feb. 25, 2003, Turner came through for the former mayor. In his precinct Houston received more than twice as many votes as retired News Channel 20 anchor Don Hickman, the runner-up in the 119th. Davlin received one less vote than Hickman but came in second place overall in the city, which meant he would go up in the general election against the number one winner in the primary, Tony Libri, the Republican’s candidate of choice. By the time the general election rolled around in April, when Houston was out of the picture and Davlin had Turner’s support, the 119th came out seven to one for Davlin. Turner’s precinct and those in lock-step with it are credited for Davlin’s victory.
Turner says the Minority Caucus’s endorsement of U.S. Senate candidate Blair Hull is a similar act of political loyalty. During the last statewide elections in 2002, Hull, a multi-millionaire, gave a lot of money to Democratic candidates. His financial dedication to the cause is the main reason Turner gives for his endorsement.
Of the seven precincts East Side Pride is after, two are empty; Doris Turner is only campaigning to keep her county board seat and another incumbent is not running for personal reasons. The other five are held by other members of the Turner’s Minority Caucus: Carolyn Toney, Beverly Meek, Faith Logan, and Alphonso McKamey. Roy Williams, who’s challenging Cecil Turner for precinct committeeman, is also challenging Doris Turner for the county board.
You don’t start something new in Springfield when politics are involved and not ruffle some feathers. While East Side Pride members lament the lack of support among incumbent precinct captains for Unity for Our Community, Minority Caucus members criticize their East Side Pride opponents for failing to join their efforts.
In truth, Unity, very early on, began to distance itself from the caucus, if only because its goals went beyond those of the Democratic Party. One of East Side Pride’s candidates, Amy O’Connell, is actually from a precinct that’s much more Northend and Republican than East Side and Democratic. Having her on the slate, she says, is a way for Unity to demonstrate its goal of building bridges in Springfield.
City Hall, at least publicly, is remaining neutral about the East Side Pride races. “The mayor says he doesn’t comment on those kinds of issues,” according to Ernie Slottag, Davlin’s communications director.
However, even the mayor hasn’t been able to stay on the sidelines. Whatever riffs there might have been at the start came to a head last year when Alderman McNeil helped Mike Williams land a plum $51,000-a-year job as an assistant water works operator for CWLP. It was an obvious political favor and a significant pay hike for Williams, whose previous job was checking energy efficiency levels in homes for the county. Williams is upfront about the appointment and considers it a gift. “Frank McNeil got me the job with the blessing of Tim Davlin,” he says.
Cecil Turner took the arrangement as a slap in the face. Turner takes pride in landing patronage jobs for people he’s even helped to defeat in elections. Williams’ patronage score “leapfrogged” the Minority Caucus’s rightful place as East Side’s power broker.
“You have to pay your dues,” says Turner, who, upon finding out about Williams’s new gig, made a few phone calls to Democratic leaders in town to complain. He learned that others throughout the Sangamon County Democratic Party were also upset by Williams’ new job. “There were people in the [party] who worked their butt off for Davlin. We had unemployed people who were knocking on doors for this administration.”
Williams was suddenly being accused of using his high Unity-for-Our-Community profile as a platform for political ambition. Rumors floated that he was planning to run for alderman of Ward 2 when Frank McNeil’s term ends in a few years; because of term limits, McNeil won’t be allowed to run again. Williams denies any plan to run for McNeil’s seat and says even running for precinct committeeman wasn’t his idea — his brother Roy and his uncle Allen talked him into it. His eyes nearly begin to water at the suggestion that he’s exploiting Unity, which he started because of a friend’s murder, for personal gain.
“Win, lose, or draw, I’m still black and there’s still a community to change,” Williams says. “I want to find a new direction.”
If finding a new direction is East Side Pride’s goal, they picked a peculiar name for their slate. It happens to be one of the campaign slogans McNeil uses in Ward 2.
McNeil’s been accused of orchestrating the East Side Pride slate and taking Mike Williams under his wing, allegedly to secretly undermine Turner with whom McNeil is on cool terms. While his public stance has been neutral, the long-time alderman is also coy about his involvement.
McNeil was present at a January East Side Pride fundraiser at Mac’s Lounge on East Cook. “I’m not here,” he said to a reporter at the event. “I didn’t come here for political purposes, but to see friends I haven’t seen in months.” McNeil says he doesn’t own the phrase “East Side Pride.” Any group is free to use it, he says.
McNeil also says he feels thrown into the middle of a fight. “I have no intent to create discord into the community,” he said at Mac’s Lounge. “But sometimes discord is good.”
Political discord is an inevitable part of a healthy democracy, and the tussle on the East Side might be the best thing for it. However, each side in this precinct battle has often accused the other of merely thirsting after power. Whether or not that’s true, many of those on each side have gone through too much for this to be about prestige and, well, pride.
Personal tragedies are one thing that many on both sides share. Cecil’s son Cecil Jr., from an earlier marriage, died in 1992 when a shotgun on a dresser accidentally discharged. Mike and Roy Williams’ nephew, Lamar — who had been involved in the drive-by shooting just a month after Ray Banks died — was killed last year when his older brother Larry was holding a gun that accidentally went off. They both were trying to confront a couple of people they were accusing of breaking into Lamar’s car. Faith Logan is well known for her litany of stories about shootings and neighborhood turmoil. Linda Douglas-Williams, an East Side Pride candidate running for precinct 79, ran for City Council a few years ago because of a shooting that took place near her home. Mike Williams, a former crack addict and check forger, spent a few months in prison in the mid-1990s, became a Christian, has been drug-free for nearly a decade and says he has a new lease on life. Cecil Turner spent 11 months in prison in the 1970s for a crime he says he didn’t commit, stealing government tax refunds and veterans checks. He says he spent his time behind bars thinking of all the people who crossed him. “Then I vowed to write them out of my life,” he says.
“I never thought I’d be running against people in my own party,” says Roy Williams. “But we on the East Side cannot afford to follow the status quo. Life has got to get better.” He said years of neglect on the East Side threaten to turn the area into another East St. Louis.
Roy Williams said this as he walked door to door on a chilly Wednesday night in mid-January. He also drove around the precinct, in his late 1980s Mercedes that has logged more than 120,000 miles, pointing out dilapidated homes and boarded up commercial buildings. He’s knocked on just about every door in the 119th precinct at least once, looking for potential supporters and checking off names on his voter registration list. If Roy Williams is going to defeat Cecil Turner, he needs votes from an untapped pool, those who might never have heard of his opponent, which isn’t going to be easy. That night, many of the people Williams was after were younger men and women just out of high school.
A registered voter list is given to political candidates for free and documents precinct residents, whether they’re registered to vote, how often they’ve voted in the past few elections, and which party’s primary they’ve participated in. According to state law the list is supposed to be updated regularly at the county level. The precinct committee captains are also supposed to keep tabs of it. But the 119th’s list is outdated, showing families living in houses that have already changed tenants two or three times over. At some addresses, three or four families are listed, even though only one lives there. The Turners have eight registered voters listed in their small house at 2100 East Lawrence. Of course, they all still actively vote in the precinct.
An updated list is like gold to a political candidate, a way to quickly target dependable voters. For Williams, his outdated list merely reflects his claim that new leadership is needed. His opponents argue that their neighborhoods have a high percentage of transient residents who might move several times a year. Keeping an up-to-date list is a noteworthy goal, they say, but impossible.
“The African-American vote is the sleeping giant in this country,” says Roy Williams. He wants residents of the East Side to come out voting “like they never have before.” Influenced by the time he spent in Chicago’s South Side as an intern for the Black Legislative Caucus, he envisions not only a unified, progressive precinct-based organization, but precinct block captains, active neighborhood associations and youth groups. He wants the East Side to aggressively pursue investors and grant money, attract businesses and create jobs.
But who doesn’t want this?
The Rev. Silas Johnson of Calvary Baptist Church, and president of the Springfield Ministerial Alliance, credits both sides, but for different reasons. “I think Unity for Our Community is a very good group. They’ve pulled the community together, across political lines and not just on the East Side,” Johnson says. “They’ve got support from all the groups. Ministerial Alliance is a part of it and the NAACP is a part of it.
“I’ve also worked very closely with Doris Turner and am a supporter of Cecil Turner,” he says. “He’s gotten several jobs for people and goes to bat for his precinct committeemen. He’s very effective.
“There’s nothing wrong with healthy competition. But when the race is over, the East Side needs to talk the same talk, be unified and in conversation. What affects one person affects us all.”
It was fitting, earlier this week, when the mayor announced plans for a new community center on the East Side. The initiative began with U.S. Senator Dick Durbin’s office communicating with the Ministerial Alliance, a group of involved east side pastors. Doris Turner and Mike Williams — two political rivals — have been involved at different stages of the proposed project.
But below the surface, way, way beyond the politics, there’s a deep need for a better life on the East Side. It surfaced quietly at Mac’s Lounge, as a waitress was cleaning up after East Side Pride’s fundraiser. She picked an East Side Pride survey up from the table and read one of the questions out loud: “Please choose the three most important problems in your neighborhood.”
“I can think of two,” she said. “I’ve got two jobs and no damn money!” Who was listening?
This article appears in Jan 29 – Feb 4, 2004.
