Scholar uncovers town's heroic legacy

By: Sarah KarpSundiata Keita Cha-Jua’s first book tells a bitter story with a theme that also runs through his own life. “America’s First Black Town” (University of Illinois Press, 2000) is about a place filled with ambition and pride, but held back and depressed by racism.

The town, Brooklyn, was founded by ex-slaves, some escaped and some freed, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, near East St. Louis. It was a proud community where events in black history were celebrated as official city holidays.

Yet, like Robbins and Ford Heights—two historically black towns just south of Chicago—it never attracted or was able to build any industry that allowed it to be self-sufficient. Residents were forced to travel to other, predominantly white towns for work. From Brooklyn, they went to East St. Louis. From Robbins and Ford Heights, residents traveled to Harvey and Chicago Heights.

As the white towns gained black residents, and their steel mills and factories tanked, whites fled, leaving entire regions segregated and mired in poverty.

The history and current struggles of Brooklyn and other black towns leave Cha-Jua weary. He sees white people in Chicago and St. Louis moving to far-flung suburbs that he calls “x-burbs,” and he can only give one explanation: racism.

Cha-Jua, the director of the Afro-American Studies and Research Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, concludes: “Integration is dead in America, and I don’t say it as someone who is anti-integration.”

Why did you decide to become a college professor?
In seventh grade, I was in a homeroom that was considered one of the better homerooms academically. But there were only four African American students, four out of 30. And [our teacher] was an aggressive racist. He took great pride in doing things to anger us.

This guy had us do this genealogy assignment and made as the standard for an A that you had to trace your [family to] before the Civil War. None of the four of us could do that. But what made it worse was that you also had to give the origin and definition of your last name. So a black student finishes his little report. Then [the teacher] said, ‘You didn’t identify for us the origin of the name.’ The student said, ‘Well, it is German.’ So [the teacher] said, ‘Rodney, are you German? How do you think you came about a German last name?’

Ultimately what kind of crystallized it for me is that there were always these rumors about a person who had been lynched in Decatur. And we were debating a campaign to rename a park. People were throwing out various names such as Malcolm X, and someone suggested, ‘Why don’t we name it after this person, [Samuel J. Bush], who was lynched [in 1883]?’ So that set a number of us out to get material on this person. I wound up publishing three articles.

I started off coming out of a factory town where you get married young. You do everything fast. So I went to community college one year. Then I came back, got married and got a job in a factory. I was actually a tire builder there. At that time, Decatur had its own community college, so I kept taking classes, and ultimately figured out I didn’t want to build tires the rest of my life.

Tell me a little a bit about Brooklyn.
Now, Brooklyn really does have an heroic legacy. You are talking about 1829, 1830. A group of 11 families, some free. The [slaves] flee to St. Louis by crossing the Mississippi River in the winter of 1830, and they go to Illinois. They are on land that has not been purchased. This is federal land. So they are out there, kind of like a maroon community. The census doesn’t even record these people, but we know through other means that they are there.

Five white men who were abolitionists were seeking to build a town where a railroad could run from coal mines in Belleville, Ill. They are out to abolish slavery, but they are also out to make a buck, and this looks like the perfect place. The railroad, however, chose not to go to Brooklyn. Instead, it moves to the place that will eventually evolve into East St. Louis, but right now is populated by pirates and people who rob folks along the river. The [railroad company] wound up choosing the thugs.

So what we begin to see is that white capitalists consistently bypass Brooklyn. There is this problem of underdevelopment from the beginning.

How are people doing there today?
Shortly after World War II, you begin to see things move from East St. Louis—a decline of industry in that area, and in many ways it is one of the first areas in the nation to see this decline. By the time you get to the 1960s, that region is really suffering.

Early on, there was this struggle around vice, and, like East St. Louis, Brooklyn becomes this place for the spillover of the vice industry. It began to characterize the town. It is deeply impoverished. When the State of Illinois did this list of the 10 worst school districts, Brooklyn was one or two.

However, people are deeply involved in the civic life of the community. You have local organizations trying to find ways to return it to the vision the founders had of it.

What does the future hold for places like Brooklyn?
I don’t think these [all-black towns] can survive as [individual] municipalities. If they were to move to create some larger political entity where they could attract a wider range of African Americans, there would be a possibility of them thriving.

This phenomenon of hyper-segregation is only accelerating, and that tells us that black people being in separate municipal space will be with us for a long, long time.