Friday, Sep 5, 2008
When Ida Crall was 13, she'd take a bus every Saturday from Hanna City to downtown Peoria for singing lessons. That was in 1955. "Now you wouldn't see that," she says. "You wouldn't put your 13-year-old girl on a bus to Peoria by herself.
"My aunt lived on Antoinette Street, and we used to walk to a movie theater downtown. Or we'd go shopping at Bergners -- they had wonderful displays in the windows at Christmas. Sometimes we'd have lunch at the counter in Walgreen's.
"The town was a-boomin'," she says. "There were a lot of jobs -- Keystone Steel & Wire, LeTourneau, Hiram Walker. The jobs weren't hard to find, so no one crossed a picket line. That changed with the last strike."
The last strike started at Caterpillar in June 1994, and it lasted for 18 months. The United Auto Workers wanted a new contract; the company wanted concessions (some would say it wanted to bust the union). Throughout the strike, Caterpillar reported record profits. The company's retooled factories could be manned by managers, secretaries and salespeople. Many UAW members became scabs. The union had lost its leverage.
"You used to be able to strike -- you can't anymore," Crall says. "Everything changed when there were no jobs. Someone told my husband, 'I would walk over your dead body for a job,' and he was a friend of ours.
"A lot of people crossed the picket lines. My cousin was one -- he had to. People lost everything, their homes were foreclosed on, they had to file bankruptcy or move to another state. What would you do?
"When the jobs started leaving, people went with them. We knew a lot of folks who stayed on and had to take jobs that were paying half as much. People started losing faith and hope -- that brings in a lot of bad things.
"I guess I'm a fatalist. They say the future jobs are at the medical centers; then you look and see those jobs are paying $8 an hour. When you have most of your people making $8 an hour, often with no benefits, no health insurance, who's going to go to the malls anymore? Now Peoria's talking about building a museum when they're laying off police. Now, I know we need art, but we also need police and fire protection."
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In a glass case on the second floor of the Peoria Public Library, the front page of a faded newspaper tells of native son Richard Pryor's return to Peoria to film his 1986 autobiographical story, "JoJo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling." For 15 years afterward, a fight was waged to name a street after Pryor, but city officials were reluctant. His mother was a prostitute, and he was raised by a grandmother who ran brothels on the South Side. Then there was the matter of Pryor himself. Noted for his angry comedy routines and inspired use of profanity, he had always painted an unflattering portrait of his hometown. In 1980, he suffered serious burns while freebasing cocaine. Nevertheless, two years ago, a section of Sheridan Road was finally named after him.
"He's probably done more for Peoria than anyone," says Millie Hall, a petite black woman in a knit cap, as she arranges items in the display case. "He did his 'JoJo Dancer' here -- that brought in money. He's given money to Bradley University. Of course, I can't condone his drug use, but now he doesn't either -- he's stuck in a wheelchair with a bad case of multiple sclerosis."
Hall is taking down an exhibit marking Black History Month. She's the curator of the Garrett Collection at Bradley University. In 1948, Romeo B. Garrett became a professor of sociology and the first African-American to receive a master's degree from Bradley. Hall was later Garrett's research assistant.
She came to Peoria from Arkansas in the late 1950s, when, she recalls, five cousins were killed after a pair of white men set their house on fire: "I think one of the guys did two years in prison. I don't think anything happened to the other guy." She moved in with an uncle who had a job at Caterpillar.
But she found segregation still existed in Peoria -- blacks were confined to certain neighborhoods and public schools -- and in the early '60s she got involved in protests for open housing and employment, organized by John Gwynn, head of the local chapter of the NAACP. Today a little more than 20 percent of the city's population is black, and Peoria has a park and a street named after Gwynn.
Hall introduces Dolores Klein, a short, elderly white woman who's busy putting up the next exhibit in the library, this one for Women's History Month. The two have been friends since meeting at an open-housing protest in the 1960s.
Klein is a former president of the local chapter of the National Organization for Women. She notes that NOW founder Betty Friedan is also from Peoria, but Friedan left town in the 1940s.
Both women consider these to be particularly trying times. Prejudice is no less harmful, though it has become less overt.
"We may have passed some laws, but just because you see blacks and women taking advantage of opportunities doesn't mean the struggle is over," says Klein. "Right now we have someone in the White House who wants to please the people who elected him. If he gets to nominate two justices to the Supreme Court, an awful lot of things will be rolled back. That's a frightening thought.
"The economy is also getting very scary, and we're fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We can't seem to get along here -- I don't know how much time we have to stay over there."
In Peoria, as in other American towns and cities, a very scary economy brings the kind of street crime often associated with economic dislocation. That's nothing new -- in the old days, Peoria was known as a wide-open river town where Al Capone and other gangsters had important business.
"We've always been considered a high-crime area for our population numbers," says Sgt. Jeff Adams, head of the Peoria Police Benevolent Association. Adams has been a Peoria policeman since 1978. The greatest change he's witnessed in that time has been the rise of street gangs, "an entire subculture that doesn't think the rules apply to them." That subculture is financed by a lucrative drug trade. Though "the drug of choice is still crack cocaine," Adams says, methamphetamine has started to make inroads. Two years ago, he didn't see that drug in Peoria, but in the last year four meth labs have been busted.
"The problem is nothing like in rural areas west of here," he explains, "but it's a bigger headache than crack. The drug causes people to be delusional, violent and paranoid. People can be up for days. Houses burst into flames, people get asphyxiated. It's just a giant pain in the butt."
It also strengthens the grip of street gangs. "The gang culture may have come from Chicago, but now we have our own gangs -- they're very well entrenched," Adams says. "There was once a newspaper article that claimed the gangs had become the town's No. 1 employer. I don't personally believe that, but that's what the paper said."
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