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Gail Simpson lives in a two-story house in the
Stratford Place subdivision with her 21-year-old daughter, Morgan, and
their pet Chihuahua, Spike. She has an administrative job at a state
government agency and divides her spare time among two different churches,
a service-oriented sorority, and her true passion — golf. It’s
a comfortable existence for a 53-year-old divorcée, but
there’s one luxury she cannot afford: as the new City Council member
representing Ward 2, Simpson simply can’t keep quiet. Unlike the other six rookie aldermen sworn in 10
weeks ago, Simpson doesn’t have the option of retreating into the
woodwork to learn by watching during her on-the-job training. As the lone
African-American council member, first black female alderman, and the
successor to Frank McNeil — whose 1984 voting-rights lawsuit led to
the creation of Springfield’s aldermanic form of government —
she carries a powerful symbolic burden whether she wants to or not. As
representative of the ward with the highest crime rate and lowest income,
she’s accountable to the city’s neediest constituency. She can’t even pretend to be reticent or
inarticulate: Long before Simpson ever considered running for City Council,
she made a memorable appearance in the chamber as the president of the
local alumnae chapter of the historically black Delta Sigma Theta sorority.
As she accepted a proclamation designating March 4, 2004, Delta Day, she
turned to Mayor Tim Davlin, asked permission to speak, and proceeded to
give him a tongue-lashing for his handling of numerous racial issues. “When we look back on the election and try to
characterize what has happened, words like ‘duped,’
‘betrayed,’ and ‘taken for granted’ come to
mind,” she told Davlin. “We are here tonight because we are fed
up and want more than lip service. We want satisfaction, and we want to see
a positive change.”
Now that she has an official seat on the horseshoe
(term limits prevented McNeil from seeking reelection), Simpson has
continued to challenge the status quo, questioning the lack of
city-sponsored garbage collection and promising to vote against
Davlin’s pick for chief of the Springfield Police Department, Ralph
Caldwell. She’s also made news outside the council
chambers: In May, she wasphysically assaulted in front of the police
station by a mentally ill homeless man — an event that helped spur
city officials to establish a locker system for the homeless. This month
she found herself in the center of a brouhaha concerning SPD’s
Taser-aided arrest of a fleeing motorist inside the Abundant Faith
Christian Center — a controversy that earned Simpson first runner-up
on a local AM-radio talk show’s “Butthead of the Week”
election. Here’s the thing about Simpson, though: She
didn’t care whether she won the Butthead award. She listened to the
radio show for a few minutes, then clicked it off, apparently without
regard for the heated opinions of anonymous critics out in Springfield
radioland. “I’ve always been one that spoke out.
It’s very difficult for me to sit back and just watch stuff happen.
That’s why I ran [for City Council],” she says.
S impson isn’t wired like a politician.
Politicians tend to omit, disguise, or spin any unpleasant facts that
don’t fit their public personas. Simpson, on the other hand, seems
compelled to point out the hickeys on her personal history. She makes one
exception, calling her mother a “domestic engineer” instead of
a maid. The second of five children born to that
“domestic engineer” and a peripatetic dad, Simpson grew up in
Chicago. She was still in grade school when her mom relocated the family
from a predominantly black North Side neighborhood into a South Side home
surrounded by nice white families who soon moved away. She attended Catholic schools through ninth grade,
when she decided that she didn’t like the all-girls environment of
her parochial high school. “Of course, it’s the worst mistake I
made,” she says. “I probably could have gotten a much better,
much more disciplined education had I stayed at Longwood Academy, but
hey.” She graduated from Calumet High School instead. Simpson got more serious about her education during
her freshman year at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. She happened
to get a peek at her student file, where she found a note from her
high-school guidance counselor recommending that Simpson aim for vocational
or technical training. “Now, that didn’t have anything to do
with my grades, because I was a pretty good student. I think it was
probably the norm in Chicago city schools in terms of what counselors felt
certain youth could accomplish. It was a motivator,” she says. She refers to it as “the first time I ever
realized that I needed to look at the world through something other than
rose-colored glasses.”
She earned both bachelor’s and master’s
degrees from SIU in administration of justice, or law enforcement, and
briefly considered applying to the Illinois State Police. Instead, she
entered law school at Saint Louis University, where she lasted just one
year. She was distracted by a sudden onslaught of phone calls from her
aging mother, who — dealing with added stress in her life —
began to lean heavily on both her oldest daughter and her oldest companion,
Mogen David wine.
Three years ago, when she put her mother into a
nursing home and watched her go through withdrawal symptoms, Simpson was
finally able to put a label on her mother’s condition. “My mom’s an alcoholic,” she says.
“At the time, I didn’t realize she was alcoholic; I just knew I
hated that she drank. It’s hard even now to say
‘alcoholic,’ but that’s what she is.”
Simpson doesn’t blame her mother’s phone
calls for her own failure to handle law school. “I didn’t make
the grades,” she says. “I had to leave.”
She moved home to Chicago and found a job with an
attorney. Every month she received a packet of job leads from SIU’s
career-placement service. One of those packets included the announcement of
a new paid internship program established by then-Gov. Jim Thompson, now
called the Dunn Fellowships. Simpson applied, was selected, and moved to
Springfield. She has been a state employee ever since and now works at the
Department of Children and Family Services, coordinating training programs
for caseworkers and others responsible for preparing foster kids to live
independently. Over the years she married and divorced twice. Her
most enduring relationships are with her two close girlfriends, her
daughter, and her faith.
T he notion of running for City Council came to her
several months after she bashed Davlin over the head with the Delta Day
proclamation. She didn’t utter the idea aloud until her friend Ted
Curtis suggested it. “I felt like he must be reading my mind!”
she says. Curtis is a Republican, Simpson a Democrat —
but the City Council is officially nonpartisan, and Ward 2 constituents are
more focused on city services than on party politics. She contacted Frank McNeil, who told her that
although he had already pledged his support to Darrell Harris, she
shouldn’t let that fact deter her ambitions.
“I said, ‘Oh, it won’t!’ ” she recalls. Harris eventually dropped out of the race, and McNeil
threw his support wholeheartedly to Simpson. He walked the ward with her,
knocking on doors in the cold, in the rain. “Frank is an awesome man,” Simpson says.
“He always has been, but now I’ve gotten to know him on a whole
different level.”
Simpson campaigned on the promise to improve
conditions ward-wide, not just for the black neighborhoods. “I
probably wouldn’t have won without white votes,” she says. But
McNeil understands — as no one else could — the unique
responsibility Simpson will carry as the lone black alderman. “It’s a very daunting position, because
you are elevated, whether you want to be or not, to be the spokesperson for
all black people,” McNeil says. “You have to be very guarded
about what you say and when you say it and who you say it to. What you say
can be taken out of context so easily.”
Simpson, McNeil says, hasn’t disappointed him.
She has spoken up for their ward, even though hundreds of critics lob
insults at her anonymously by way of AM-radio talk shows and the State Journal-Register’s
online comment board. The most frequent accusation lacks both originality
and empathy: It’s that Simpson is making racial mountains out of
molehills. On McNeil’s advice, Simpson shrugs such comments away,
excusing them as the musings of people who view life from a different
vantage point.
“It’s about perspective,” she says.
“When you talk about race and people sometimes are not getting it,
it’s because their perspective is totally different.”
She mentions the note her high-school guidance
counselor put in her file, the white homeowners who fled Chicago’s
South Side when black families like hers started to move in. These
experiences shaped her perspective. “It’s like this incident at Abundant
Faith,” she says. “It’s about perspective.”
H er role in this latest hubbub may have been
overstated by the media. Simpson says that she first learned about the
incident when Abundant Faith’s pastor, Jerry Doss, telephoned her,
upset that SPD officers had entered his church during a worship service to
arrest Robert E. Collins. Collins, 20, is the son of an AFCC member and had
attended AFCC as a child, though his pew time had tapered off in recent
years. On July 1, Collins rushed into the church at
approximately 11:40 a.m., seemingly late to the most popular of
AFCC’s three Sunday-morning services. He was dressed casually, the
way he always came to church, but this time his hair was disheveled, as
though he had planned on wearing a hat all day but removed it to enter the
house of worship. “At church, men don’t wear hats,”
says a church official who witnessed the incident but asked that his name
be withheld. Looking somewhat suspicious, Collins took a seat in a
side section of the sanctuary, about four rows from the front. The
congregation had just finished Communion, and Doss, preparing to take up
the offering, was reading a letter from a missionary who would be among the
beneficiaries of the day’s collection. As he read, says the church official, three or four
police officers and one Sangamon County sheriff’s deputy burst
through the main door, yelling, “Where is he? Where is he?”
People pointed to Collins, and the officers rushed
toward him. “Everybody stood up, some moved out of the way, and it
was, like, ‘What in the world is happening?’ ” the
official says. Doss, still at the microphone, immediately began
speaking to the officers, saying, “We will not interfere with your
doing your job, but please make as little commotion as necessary and please
do not use excessive force,” modulating his words in an effort to
maintain calm, the official says.
The police used a Taser to stun Collins, then
handcuffed him and removed him through a side door. Doss asked the
congregation to remember that no one was without sin and to pray for
Collins.
“The pastor just did his best to maintain peace
within the sanctuary, but some people got up and walked out. Some were
emotionally upset,” the church official says.
Doss — who is out of town this week and
unavailable for comment — was also upset by the incident. By the time
the church service ended, the law enforcement officers were gone and Doss
had sketchy details of why Collins had been arrested. That night he sought
help from Simpson, whose ward includes the church. “He called me because I’m the alderman
and he had a concern. He called me because he had not heard from anybody on
the police department, and I volunteered to bring them together — the
[police] chief and Doss — to have a dialogue,” she says.
B elieving that the problem could be solved by getting
the two men to talk to each other, Simpson called Caldwell and arranged a
meeting for the next morning. She was somewhat surprised when each man
showed up with a posse — Doss with a contingent of clergy, Caldwell
with a group of law-enforcement officers. Simpson says that she was even
more surprised when she learned that Doss had invited the media to a
postmeeting press conference.
As the pastor and the police chief answered
reporters’ questions, Simpson found a back exit and left unnoticed. “I did not need to be on Front Street. I was
acting as a conduit between the police department and Rev. Doss,” she
says.
At the press conference, Doss speculated that such an
incident would have been handled in a more respectful, less disruptive
manner if it had occurred in a “west-side Catholic church.”
“That’s my opinion — my
opinion,” Doss said, adding that his opinion was colored by his
involvement with African-American police officers who have complained of
discrimination and by his own life experiences. “I have some strong
feelings about it, and I’m not saying they’re all accurate, but
I have strong opinions about it,” he said. However, Doss also told reporters that Simpson
arranged the meeting and that she had attended a worship service at
Abundant Faith that same day. When Doss’ comments were connected to
Simpson’s disapproval of Caldwell, she says, an inaccurate picture
was formed. “Not one time did I inject racism into this. I
don’t think I ever said anything about the west side. At all times,
my concern was for the safety of the individuals in the church,” she
says. Of course, the officers undoubtedly shared that same
concern — but didn’t know Collins in the way Doss and the other
church members did. In fact, another African-American church official told Illinois Times that the
incident was less a racial incident than a culture clash: a clash between
the viewpoint of law enforcement officers, doing their best to catch the
bad guy, and the congregants of a church founded on the idea of welcoming
sinners of all stripes. Again, Simpson points to her favorite concept:
perspective. “It bothers me that people who have never had a
negative encounter with the police are so quick to jump to the defense of
the police and not take a moment to walk in other people’s
shoes,” she says. “You would think that people could look at
Rev. Doss and realize that this was a very emotional situation for him and
have some compassion for that.”
Instead, she says, she has received letters calling
her racist, a letter saying that she shouldn’t be an alderman, and a
call on her cell phone from a man whose number was withheld, saying that he
wishes that the church had been shot up. Simpson has also become fodder for
WMAY (970 AM) talk-show host Pamela Furr, who has called the alderwoman
“bizarre.”
Simpson lets these arrows bounce off her. “I am
not bothered by the criticism,” she says. She says she would prefer not to find herself in the
spotlight, her name in the newspaper, her face on the television.
“I’d like to be quiet,” she says, “and just press
my [voting] button when called for.” She promises that the kinder,
gentler Simpson will appear just as soon as city services are evenly
distributed, the police department has won the trust of her ward, and
everything’s hunky-dory in Springfield. Until then, Simpson says, she’ll speak her mind:
“Sitting back and watching stuff happen — I’m not
comfortable with that.”
Contact Dusty Rhodes at drhodes@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Jul 5-11, 2007.
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