Last week’s panel discussion of race relations
in Springfield was well under way when Mayor Tim Davlin slipped into the
room and sat in the back row, but he was there for the best part. That was
when two of the panelists brought history home to the present. University
of Illinois at Springfield emeritus professor Larry Golden went off on the
current city administration for refusing to settle the police lawsuit. He
said that this is reminiscent of the way in which Springfield’s
establishment fought the 1970s lawsuit to desegregate the schools:
“The white community fought it tooth and nail.” The 1980s
voting-rights lawsuit to ensure proportional representation for blacks on
the City Council met a similar reaction. Those events set the tone, and Springfield is still
fighting with teeth and toenails. “There is continuing resistance on
the part of the city to deal with race relations,” Golden said.
“It’s atrocious how the city government responds to these
challenges. We deserve better.” Lately the administration has waged
its legal battle with selective leaks of dirt it has collected on one of
the suing black officers. “Stop it,” Golden demanded, his voice
rising above the usual panel-polite tone. “Knock it off! Knock off
the character assassination!” By way of objection, former Mayor Karen Hasara, the
next panelist to speak, saw the glass as half full: “I hate for us to
leave here on so many negative notes. A lot of hearts have been changed.
There have been some attempts to do good things.” The May 31 panel,
sponsored by the Citizens Club of Springfield, was the second in a
three-part series on race relations. Then it was Ald. Frank McNeil’s turn. The
current City Council’s only black member, who has long been at the
heart of the struggle for racial justice, pounded away on the theme that
too little has changed in the last 50 years. “The culture that exists
in our police department — both then and now — is
unacceptable,” he said. “The police union has been
recalcitrant. They have been part of the problem.” The police union
has battled McNeil over the powers of his citizen police-review commission
and has resisted efforts to change testing requirements for police
recruits. “If we want a diverse police department, we need a
pass/fail test,” McNeil said. “It’s about good policemen
who make good decisions, not about how high their test score was. We should
be able to go there without the union threatening us all the
time.” Panelists Willis Logan, the former Springfield Housing
Authority director, and Doris Turner, Sangamon County Board Democratic
leader, grew up in Springfield. They recalled the bad old days of
segregation in the 1950s and ’60s, when hotels and downtown
restaurants were off-limits to blacks. So was the municipal swimming pool,
except on Thursdays, and movie theaters had a special section where blacks
had to sit. But they remembered some good things, too. Though housing
discrimination forced African-Americans to live on the east side of town,
nearly all there owned their own homes, making the neighborhoods stable.
Springfield had an industrial base then, and “there were lots of
jobs,” Logan said. Turner’s father worked at the Allis-Chalmers
plant. “It was the only job he ever had,” she said. Because
black legislators from Chicago couldn’t stay in whites-only hotels,
they stayed with friends on the east side. “We ran with Charlie Chew
and Dick Newhouse and Harold Washington,” Logan recalled. “They
were our neighbors.” Barnes & Noble will never quite measure up
to the African-American bookstore Turner knew as a kid. Panelists agreed
that freedom of opportunity hasn’t fully replaced that richness of
community some experienced in segregated Springfield. “We can’t
get back what I had growing up,” Logan said. The discussion closed with an impromptu, but
much-deserved, tribute to McNeil, who won election to the City Council in
1987 after being a plaintiff in the successful voting-rights suit and who
leaves office next spring after five terms. Panel moderator Kenley Wade
read a question from the audience: What improvements in race relations can
you point to? McNeil tossed off, “You’ve had to listen to Frank
McNeil for the last 18 years,” but Golden picked up the theme more
seriously and placed it in historical context. “You’re looking
at the first African-American to be elected to the City Council in the
history of Springfield,” he said. “Frank McNeil has been able
to give a voice to people who had never had a voice.”
This article appears in Jun 1-7, 2006.
