Backlash Mars Town’s Bid for Race Harmony

Spurred by a 1989 cross-burning and by a heartfelt desire to change their town’s staid, homogenous--even racist--image, Dubuque city officials embarked last year on an ambitious and unorthodox plan to encourage racial diversity by luring 100 minority families by 1995.

Far from improving the city’s image, however, the move sparked a racist backlash that has included a wave of cross-burnings, white-supremacist rallies and racial incidents.

As a result, Dubuque today is in an unusual position: It has a racial problem even though virtually the entire town is white.

The latest, though meager, manifestation of discord occurred Saturday: a white-supremacist march downtown to protest the celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.

About 50 protesters showed up in chilly, single-digit weather to take part in the march, sponsored by the Mississippi-based Nationalist Movement. About 150 counter-protesters--nearly all of them also white--came to jeer and wave signs condemning the marchers.

“I don’t like the integration plan,” said one marcher, flag-waving Ryan Beschnen, a laid-off food processing company worker. “This is not the right time for integration, at least not now. Maybe never.”

That attitude so long after the painful desegregation struggle in the South hints at what many here describe as Dubuque’s unique isolation from the rest of the nation.

“The history of Dubuque going back over a number of years has been very racist and very exclusive, saying we don’t want anybody in here,” acknowledges Police Chief John Mauss. “A lot of people would say, and I’d not disagree, that a lot of people who grew up in Dubuque have not been exposed to other cultures.”

Mayor James Brady is fond of saying that this bucolic town on the banks of the Mississippi River, “missed the ‘60s.”

It is no accident, black people here agree, that Dubuque is the whitest city in Iowa. For decades, they say, blacks were discouraged from coming here and those who came rarely wanted to stay.

Because even now only 331 blacks live in this town of 58,000, Dubuque has never--until recently--had to confront the issues that long ago divided the nation.

To the consternation of the drafters of the integration plan, the gift of hindsight is not helping the city deal with the issue any less divisively.

“Integration is inevitable,” said Phil Ruppel, chairman of the Dubuque Chamber of Commerce.

The so-called “Constructive Integration plan,” in his view, is merely designed to make that transition easier by fostering a welcoming, open atmosphere.

It is clear that those who burn crosses, paint racist graffiti and--as they did Saturday--carry Confederate flags downtown while shouting “Sieg Heil!” are a small, fringe element. Nevertheless, opposition to the integration plan--or at least to portions of it--actually has been widespread.

Ruppel contends this is mostly because people do not understand the plan. Support for the concept of improving diversity, he said, is “tremendous.”

Nevertheless, the plan is being rewritten. The new plan, to be unveiled at the end of the month, no longer will specify a goal of recruiting 20 black families to Dubuque yearly; language urging companies and unions to work together to give newly hired blacks a greater sense of job security will be changed. This is because the recruitment goal was attacked as a quota and unions criticized the job-security language as an attempt to subvert seniority rules.

However Jack Hanson, spokesman for the citizens task force that drafted the proposals, vows that the heart of the plan will remain unchanged.

Added to the rewritten document will be a program, already agreed to by the area’s three private colleges, to allow new minority school teachers to earn master’s degrees at no cost.

This was deemed important, Hanson said, because the school district currently finds it virtually impossible to recruit minorities. The district hired its first black professional only last July. He is Jerome Greer, a principal from St. Louis, who said a friend called him to warn him of the cross-burnings just as he was packing his car to drive to Dubuque. By then, he said, it was too late to change his mind.

The town has been a lonely place for him, Greer said. Students and members of his staff who have never known a black man have asked if they could touch his hair.

There was a time in the 1860s, said David Roberts, a political scientist professor at the University of Dubuque, when Dubuque had the largest black population of any city in Iowa. “Many of them worked in the river trades and in the lead mines,” said Roberts. When the jobs played out, the black families moved elsewhere.

The black population didn’t begin to grow again until the 1930s and 1940s with the birth of heavy industry here, but it fell again after World War II.

There are stories about how police officers and vigilantes conspired to keep black people out of town in the 1950s and 1960s by warning migrating blacks to keep moving.

“Black truck drivers didn’t stay (overnight) in Dubuque,” said Roberts. “If you had to stop for gas that was fine, but you kept driving.”

While many see Dubuque’s isolation from the rest of the country as social and cultural, a glance at the map makes clear its physical isolation as well: No interstate highways run through town. Dubuque is, in effect, on the way to no place else.

That, too, is by design, said Roberts.

“In the early 1970s there was resistance here to linking up to Interstate 80, upgrading the transportation system, a resistance to making Dubuque accessible to people,” he said. “Dubuque is the largest city in the nation without an interstate system, and it wasn’t by accident.”

Roberts said that the city’s aversion to change even resulted in opposition in the 1960s to the location here of a John Deere tractor plant. It might be impossible now to find anyone in town with such a view. Dubuque is hurting. In the early 1980s, John Deere, the city’s biggest employer, reduced its work force drastically. Another big employer, a packing plant, also shut down.

High unemployment is one reason for the widespread opposition to recruiting minorities. Many here fear--they feel legitimately--that newcomers would increase competition for jobs.

Proponents of the integration plan contend, though, that the blacks to be recruited would be highly qualified professionals, the kind of people who are scarce in this heavily blue-collar town.

The city has made an effort in recent years to diversify its economy. According to the Chamber of Commerce, the city has received $100 million worth of investment over the last two years. But city officials and many business people fear that the city’s reputation as an inhospitable place for blacks will make it unattractive to companies thinking of relocating.

Gov. Terry E. Branstad, who has been touting his economic development programs across the state, said Saturday in Dubuque that he fears bad publicity could tarnish the state and discourage investors.

“The negative acts of a few may have hurt in the short term,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that a few negative things sometimes overshadow the dozens of positive tings.”