December 1999

Showdown with Decatur school board

NEWS & LETTERS talked with Lorell Patterson about the recent struggle in Decatur, Ill. to reverse a school board decision to expel six Black students for two years following a fight at a September football game.

Decatur, Ill.-People from Decatur and surrounding areas like Champaign and Rockford are showing up for the students and their parents. At the rally last Sunday (Nov. 14) there were 10,000 people. The Sunday before that there were 6,000. There have been meetings every night at the Church of the Living God this week too. So many people have been involved in the rallies that the media have no choice but to report that these things are happening. Usually they try to make things like this invisible; they did that during the labor struggles here a few years ago.

At the rallies, there were retirees from Caterpillar and other union locals like the Rubberworkers, but the leadership has not come out to say "The UAW is behind you." However, the UAW retirees did show up with their banner. They came out because Jesse Jackson was a Black man marching for the Caterpillar work force on strike in 1994. Retirees remembered that.

The media has tried to make this into a race issue which can divide people. Race always has. The rallies were trying to bring to light the school board policy. In fact, you saw white parents of kids who were expelled at the rallies while the media kept playing that tape of the fight over and over. One of the white parents filed a lawsuit on her own against the school board for expelling a student.

Apparently one of the parents of one of the kids who got kicked out first went to the school board and tried to get it settled that way. The kid was actually running away from the fight. The parents couldn't get anywhere. Jesse Jackson ended up coming to Decatur when the parents went to the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition which had been formed recently in Decatur because the other organizations like the local NAACP weren't doing anything.

The media picked up the argument immediately that said Jackson came from the outside, but he was invited to Decatur because the school board would not let anything be resolved. In the past, if you were not a person who could stand up to the teachers and principal, they could simply harass you until you quit or got frustrated, got into a fight and were expelled. The teachers simply harass the kids until they don't want to be in school. The students know that the teachers are going to ride them until they quit. The result is that the people who run the schools have them set up just the way they want.

Take a look at what's going on in Decatur. What the people who run the city are saying is that "There are only a few jobs, and we are setting up things so you don't get these jobs." They segregate students into second class status. They are saying, "The future economy is going to create only so many jobs. Not only are your kids not going to compete with our kids, but we are going to tilt the playing field."

The kids of lawyers and doctors who get into fights don't get kicked out of school. At the rally on Saturday (Nov. 13), there was a bomb threat made by a kid who got a five-day suspension. Another kid brought a weapon to school; they didn't expel him but gave him a ten-day suspension. The difference between those incidents and the stadium fight was these were the children of parents who are professionals or who live in the right part of town. The issue is unjust discipline, not just Black and white.

When this started, I wanted people to know that the debate that was going on, whether kids were Black or white who were getting taken out of the schools, wasn't the right debate. Instead they should be fighting the school board for not following its own discipline policy which calls for 12 steps from warning to expulsion. The board can't have "no tolerance" for some kids and not others. The good thing about this blowup is that now the parents also know it's the law to offer alternative schooling and since the school board dug in its heels, it looks like it's in the wrong.

Leaders like Father Mangan got arrested with us during our labor struggles here and expressed the position that it was wrong to scab. Some of the other so-called ministers preferred to stay in the middle because some from their congregations were scabs. These are some of the ministers in photo opportunities with Jackson today. Once Jesse Jackson has faded into the background of the struggle in Decatur, then what? Are people ready to take on the power structure in this town on their own?

-Lorell Patterson, Staley lockout veteran

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