Community organizing downstate: conflicts and coalitions

This is the eighth article in our series on community organizing in Illinois, made possible by a grant from the Woods Charitable Fund, Inc. For details on other articles in the series, please turn to page 25.

Community organizations have put down roots in the last 15 years in the state's economically troubled farmlands and mid-sized cities. Working out of many traditions, groups representing minorities and low- and middle-income people now wield some power downstate. Increasingly, they're coming forward with demands for basic services, representation and environmental protection in their communities. Their agendas include better health care, lower utility rates, safe and adequate groundwater, help for family farms and civil rights. Intense about their independence and far from agreement on whether or not to back political party candidates, downstate groups are nevertheless joining coalitions to increase their clout with the General Assembly and Congress. And although these groups get advice and support from the Chicago organizing network, they're quick to point out that downstate has a style of its own. Their stories illustrate how organizing plays in places like Champaign, Pembroke, Herrin and Springfield.

In Champaign-Urbana physicians and hospital administrators appear to have eliminated medical expenses that senior citizens elsewhere pay out of their pockets. Hospitals in the Twin Cities also provide a substantial portion of free care for poor people who lack Medicaid or other insurance. Taking a lot of the credit for these accomplishments is an organization called the Champaign County Health Care Consumers. Its organizer, spokesman and director is Michael Doyle, 34, of Urbana. He lives with his wife and three small

Carolers from the Champaign County Health Care Consumers in December 1985 urging the Carle Clinic to take Medicaid patients from outside of the county. Demonstrator/carolers include, from left, Jim Duffett, then head of the Danville Area Community Services Council; Mike Doyle, director of the Champaign County Community Services Council; and Diane Miesenhelter, John Lee Johnson and Keith Ervin. Photo courtesy Champaign County Health Care Consumers

sons in a modest but pleasant home a few blocks from Carle, Mercy and Burnham hospitals — institutions he has freqently butted heads with.

As a Chicago teenager in the 1960s, Doyle heard stories about organizing from his stepfather, a former Jesuit, who worked with Saul Alinsky in The Woodlawn Organization. "I had that orientation back then, growing up," Doyle says. But his first involvement was in the anti-war movement. When that ended in 1975, he came to Champaign-Urbana planning to enter law school and make straight A's. Instead he attended a workshop on low-income health care and caught the organizing fever.

In 1977, while a student in urban planning at the University of Illinois, Doyle helped found Champaign County Health Care Consumers. That same year he attended a training session for organizers held by Heather Booth, founder of the Midwest Academy in Chicago. He was impressed with Booth and her ally, Robert Creamer, founder of the Illinois Public Action Council (IPAC). (See box on page 21.) Doyle's group became an IPAC affiliate in 1978.

Creamer and Doyle both say that until 1980, the Champaign County group was somewhat of an IPAC maverick. Its focus was medical care for the elderly and the poor, while IPAC concentrated on tax relief, lower utility rates and neighborhood preservation. Then health care issues blossomed at the national and state political levels, and IPAC realized that it needed to make more use of Doyle's talents. In 1980 he was hired part time as regional organizing director to groom leaders, develop other IPAC-affiliated groups and define strategy and issues.

Doyle combines old-style, direct action organizing with new-breed, politically atuned coalition building. In Alinsky fashion, Doyle and Health Care Consumers relish embarrassing officials judged by them to have done wrong. Doyle's biggest moments come when people get the most angry, the most excited, when they see headlines saying they have won. He also revels in developing strong community leaders, even when it causes difficulties for him. In 1982 there was a power struggle over the choice of a new director and Doyle sided with the majority instead of the "old guard," many of whom had been personal friends.

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Doyle says downstate organizing is different from Chicago's, where the organizing culture is more deep-rooted. In Chicago there is a stridency that you don't find down-state." But downstate, he adds, has definite pluses: You in get the media interested much more readily; you have better access to the mayor and city council members and state lawmakers. "It takes less to get noticed and win," says Doyle.

In the late 1970s, Health Care Consumers mapped out a strategy to involve the poor, minorities and women in health care issues. One of the group's first actions involved Mercy Hospital in 1979. Health Care Consumers said the hospital was billing Medicaid patients for the difference between its Medicaid reimbursement and what it charged private patients. A meeting with hospital management was called and the press was invited. The hospital president said he had not known about the problem and later blamed computer error. Doyle says the hospital had been aware of the problem long before the meeting. In a matter of days the billing policy was changed. "It blew people out of the water. I'll never forget that Saturday afternoon," says Doyle.

Another victory concerned area hospitals accused of improperly figuring debt write-offs. The federal Hill-Burton law, which provided funds for new hospital facilities, required certain percentages of low-income people to be served free or at reduced fees. Health Care Consumers protested that the requirement was not being met locally. By 1982 all major area hospitals were exceeding the law's quotas.

A third triumph culminated in a 1987 consent decree signed by Carle Foundation Hospital, agreeing to accept Medicaid patients from outside the county. Doyle's group had campaigned for two years on the issue. Tactics included singing embarrassing versions of Christmas carols, passing a referendum and attracting media attention. Issues of racism and discrimination against the poor were raised. "The trick, like playing chess, is to get your opponent to respond to you," Doyle says.

The hospitals see it differently. Melanie Spain, director of public relations at Carle Foundation Hospital, acknowledges that Health Care Consumers "plays an important role," but questions its confrontational tactics and its refusal to give details on consumer complaints. She also says the membership lists of area IPAC-affiliated groups overlap considerably and questioned how much grass-roots involvement there really is. To join you simply pay $5 to an IPAC canvasser, says Spain.

Health Care Consumers is now scrutinizing physicians and dentists in group practices, such as Carle Clinic, to see if they provide access to medical and dental care for low-income people. Some health care providers do not accept Medicaid green cards as payment, Doyle says. His group is also asking whether cesarean sections are more for the convenience of doctors than for the health of mothers and babies. Another issue is whether senior citizens and others are released from hospitals too early in order to hold down medical costs.

Rebecca Strong, standing with her son Adam, points at what she says is an example of irrigation rigs responsible for drying up Pembroke Township residential wells during the drought last summer. Photo courtesy Kankakee Daily Journal

Health care also looms large in IPAC's plans. Doyle cohort James Duffett, 31, who spent five years organizing in Danville on union, public housing and utility issues, recently moved to Champaign to launch IPAC's statewide campaign for universal health care. Duffett says, "There's a major crisis around Medicaid statewide. To me, this is an opportunity for doing something about it."

About 90 miles north of Champaign-Urbana and 25 miles east of Kankakee, a group of black farmers has been organizing around groundwater issues. Living in a 56-square-mile area called Pembroke, these low-income families take pride in the vegetables they grow and sell. Their okra, squash, blue-hull and black-eyed peas, greens, tomatoes and watermelon are in high demand for Cajun and Creole cooking and soul food.

For the last three years, the Pembroke Area Concerned Citizens, a group of some 60 farm families, has been protesting the depletion and pollution of the wells they rely on for drinking water for themselves and, in some cases, for their livestock. Concerned Citizens, which has received advice from Chicago organizer Shel Trapp of the National Training and Information Center, has also raised questions about groundwater pollution from migrating pesticides. The danger is immediate and real. (For more on Trapp, see box on page 24.) Says local leader Rebecca Strong. "You know, we drink the water straight from the ground." Several years ago, six people died from drinking polluted water and others became ill with fever. Now some think the water may be polluted by septic wastes and pesticides, Strong says.

Strong was reared on a Pembroke farm and is one of the founders of the group. She is called "feisty" and "extremely well prepared" by staffers of state Sen. Jerome J. Joyce (D-43, Reddick), who has worked hard to solve the area's water problems. Strong wants to develop Pembroke and preserve it for coming generations, though she knows that she may be fighting a losing battle as more and more young people leave the area. Pembroke's groundwater problems began in the early 1980s, when Prudential Insurance Company acquired huge tracts of land in the Pembroke area and across the border in Indiana and began using irrigators to pump water for crops. Steve O'Neil, an organizer then working with the Family Farm Organizing Resource Center in St. Paul, Minn., was helping Indiana farmers whose well water was being depleted. He says he got the Pembroke farmers involved because their wells were drying up

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too. After a lawsuit by the Indiana farmers, Prudential stopped irrigating in Illinois and cut back in Indiana, but O'Neil says some Pembroke farmers think their wells are still affected by Indiana irrigation. Meanwhile, in Illinois other farmers with fairly large land holdings use irrigators, and it is not just Pembroke farmers who are losing their well water because of it, says O'Neil. During the 1988 drought anyone who owned livestock or did not irrigate was in trouble. O'Neil says the irrigators pump 100,000 gallons of water per day all summer without any restrictions, day and night. Some don't pump on Sunday, however, he says.

Strong agrees that last summer was terrible. "We had dust storms," she says, noting that many trees that used to hold the soil have been destroyed to make room for the irrigators. Says Strong, "People were carrying water in cartons, buckets, empty bleach bottles. People were taking baths in other people's homes. That really brought us all together, because a lot of people ran out of water out here, black and white."

Solutions to the depletion problem will not come easily. The work of Concerned Citizens was crucial in passing amendments, effective in September 1987, to the 1983 Water Use Act (P. A. 85-483). These allow soil and water conservation districts to direct the Illinois State Water Survey and the Illinois Department of Agriculture to check homeowners' wells to see if they meet new depth requirements. (Many older "deep" wells do not and quickly go dry from irrigation, causing people to use shallow-water wells, which some say are contaminated and dangerous.) In addition, when wells used for domestic water supply run dry, the soil and water districts can recommend that the Department of Agriculture step in and regulate withdrawals for irrigation.

But implementing the law is stirring controversy. Strong says the rules being written by the Department of Agriculture benefit large landowners and farmers who irrigate. Sen. Joyce tends to agree with that and is trying to solve the problem, says his aide, Pat McGuckin. One option: require irrigators to replenish depleted water or to pay a tax that would be used to upgrade wells as was done in Indiana. Joyce says that he supports irrigation, "but you don't have to be a pig about it."

Department of Agriculture spokesman Mark Randal says his agency tries to balance interests in the rulemaking process. He thinks Concerned Citizens is asking irrigators to pay for replacing their outdated wells. That might not be feasible, Randal says. He notes that the problem of irrigation and shallow well water depletion is "popping up all over the country" and predicts that ways will be found to deal with it. At no time, Randal maintains, have the irrigators taken the water table below 25 feet. Farmers in other areas of the state must dig wells much deeper than that to get water for home use, he points out. Yet a February 1989 report, Groundwater Quantity Issues, by the Illinois State Water Plan Task Force, singles out the sandy-soiled Pembroke area as having unique problems for family farms and their well water supply.

In the coal-rich counties of southern Illinois another rural organization, Illinois South, fights for the family farm and watchdogs the coal industry. Last fall the effort to reduce farm foreclosures brought staff members Chris Foster and Kate Duesterberg to Springfield. They were lobbying for a farm-debt mediation bill requiring local lenders to try to negotiate new payment schedules before foreclosing. For the second year the bill passed, but once again Gov. James R. Thompson vetoed it, saying it would only create conflict between debtors and lenders. Community bankers had opposed the bill.

Foster, 40, now of Leesburg, Ind., first got in touch with Illinois South as a farmer in distress. She and her husband, Ed, and their two girls, were living near Benton on a 420-acre farm, all paid for. They grew wheat, soybeans, milo and raised hogs. In 1979, when land values were at their highest, the Fosters purchased 130 acres of adjoining farmland. Their problems began when the price of land dropped in the early 1980s after two back-to-back droughts. Turning to their creditors to reschedule their debts, they got the cold shoulder. The Federal Land Bank and the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) were the Foster's main creditors and the ones "most unwilling to work with us," says Chris.

That's when she called Illinois South's hotline to get financial advice. Staff at Illinois South helped the Fosters through an ultimately unsuccessful appeal of the FmHA decision not to restructure their debt. The Fosters, who have now lost their farm, say they are typical in that few applications to restructure debt were approved in 1986. Almost everyone their age who bought land ended up in trouble, says Chris. She says the decision to buy was a good one at the time. The land was next to the main farm and they had relatives to support. "It would have been a good move, if prices had kept right."

Besides backing family farmers, Illinois South advocates strict reclamation laws for strip-mined land and compliance with federal regulations on liability for subsidence damage. It also watchdogs corporate ownership of farmland. Avoiding confrontational tactics, Illinois South focuses on research, education and lobbying at the state and federal levels.

Illinois South was founded in 1974 by David Ostendorf, a United Church of Christ minister, and his wife, Rosalind – "Roz" as she is known. They wanted to educate low- and moderate-income rural people on pocketbook issues. Another founding member was Mike Schechtman. One story has it that David and Mike came up with the idea over a cup of coffee in the student union at the University of Michigan. Schechtman followed the Ostendorfs to southern Illinois where they continued their brainstorming and organizing. "We started in our dining room," Roz recalls.

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From community organizing to progressive politics Robert Creamer is an important figure in understanding Illinois organizing networks — and their politics. The Wunderkind of coalition building, Creamer wears a business suit and talks low-key during his many Capitol news conferences. He is executive director of the Illinois Public Action Council (IPAC), a statewide organization that seeks to forge a "progressive" coalition. IPAC draws its members from labor unions, from organizations pushing for peace in Central America, from farmers and senior citizen and environmental groups and from proponents of utility reform. IPAC believes that the process of coalition building gives these "interest groups" both a stronger voice and a wider perspective on social change. Currently IPAC has 150,000 individual members and 130 organizational affiliates. Creamer was a cofounder, in 1969, of the Alinsky-styled Citizen Action Program, the alliance of Chicago neighborhood groups that successfully opposed the building of the Crosstown Expressway. But he saw shortcomings in concentrating on local issues and went on to found IPAC in 1974. During the 1970s IPAC worked with existing groups and also tried to establish community organizations around the state, a "cookie cutter" approach that didn't work well, according to organizer and IPAC staffer Mike Doyle. In 1980 Ronald Reagan's election convinced IPAC to move into electoral politics. It did so in 1982, along with many of its affiliates. Creamer says that IPAC has prospered and will soon control a political action committee rivaling any in the state. He had hoped the progressive coalition would carry Illinois for Michael Dukakis, but the state went narrowly for Bush. Creamer says that in the future IPAC's membership of Chicago and downstate independent voters could "swing" the state to the Democratic column.             Cheryl Frank

An offshoot organization is the Carbondale Farmers Market, where truck farmers sell their produce. But Illinois South's most well-known spinoff is the Southern Counties Action Movement (SCAM). Founded in 1976, SCAM serves Williamson, Jackson, Franklin and parts of Johnson and Perry counties. Duesterberg says SCAM borrows more from Alinsky than does Illinois South. A mass membership organization that doesn't shrink from stirring up a fuss, SCAM opposes large utility rate increases. It also supports better rural health care and affordable housing and wants rural development based on self-development projects, such as cooperatives, rather than tourism. Current SCAM project director is Steve Banker, 41.

According to Banker, both SCAM and Illinois South work with IPAC and with Booth's Midwest Academy in Chicago, but they used to be closer than they are now. The turning point came in 1982 when IPAC formed a political action committee and endorsed candidates, including Democrat Neil F. Hartigan, who was running for his first term as attorney general. SCAM and Illinois South refused to back Hartigan because they said he did not lend support to an elected Illinois Commerce Commission, says Banker. There was a confrontation of sorts when Hartigan told SCAM members that he already had their endorsement through IPAC. "That was the last straw," Banker says.

Explains SCAM board member Maryanne Dalzell of Carterville, "We had a serious disagreement with them [IPAC] when it comes to partisan politics." She adds, "We don't believe in supporting candidates." SCAM's membership, now about 1,500 households, is bipartisan. Partisanship could split the organization, she believes.

In addition to IPAC, Illinois South and SCAM organizers have gotten advice from Chicago organizer Trapp and also work with Springfield-based Richard R. Wood, director of Illinois Impact, a public policy program under the general auspices of the Illinois Conference of Churches. The Rev. Wood heads a growing statewide coalition of religious denominations, mostly mainstream Protestant but nonexclusionary in character, and other groups supporting low-income issues such as welfare reform. Its work includes lobbying, educating, analysis and research. Wood likes the Alinsky approach and sees a growing militancy in welfare reform organizing and other issues.

Like IPAC's Doyle, Illinois South's Roz Ostendorf sees differences in style between Chicago and downstate. She recalls telling trainers at a Midwest Academy session that their tactics would not work in rural communities. "We don't need to start with demonstrating at some official's home," Roz says she told the group. "That's not going to get you anywhere. You would be considered the kooks in the community."

In the state's capital city, the issue was equal representation for minorities and the testing grounds were the courts, city council meetings and the streets. Springfield was the scene of a key voting rights case that transformed its government and its politics. The lawsuit was given final form by a group of Springfield attorneys, as some grass-roots figures claimed they were not given a big enough voice in the legal strategy. Local black politician Frank McNeil, now alderman of the 2nd Ward on the city's east side, spearheaded the lawsuit. The lead attorneys in the voting rights victory were James and Donald Craven, a father and son team from Springfield. The outcome was a January 1987 federal court ruling that Springfield's at-large elections of city commissioners had denied representation to its black citizens. As a result of that ruling, McNeil and Ald. Allan Woodson of the 10th Ward on the far southwest side became the first blacks to be elected to city office in Springfield. At the same time Dewayne Readus, a nonviolent black militant who heads a small but vocal tenants' rights group, began an ongoing debate on the efficacy of the settlement.

In Springfield, the consensus seems to be that the new aldermanic system of electing one representative from each ward has inspired broader participation in city government by all groups. At-large elections favored the city's affluent and professional southwest side at the expense of both whites and blacks living in the northern and eastern sections of town.

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Shel Trapp: 'Blessed be the fighters' Shel Trapp of Chicago, a man who makes many trips downstate and nationally as a consultant and community organizer, tried for seven years to combine his activism with being a Methodist minister. He quit when a pastor told him: "You know, Shel, you keep doing things like that, and you'll never get a suburban church." He tells of one impatient community group that employed the style of Saul Alinsky, the man whose name is synonymous with community organizing. They hammered a dead rat to a Chicago alderman's door to dramatize demands to rid the neighborhood of the rodents. "I don't think anybody can say today they are in organizing and not in some shape or form trace their roots to Alinsky," he says. Trapp helps people form "power organizations." The people must decide what the issues are, says Trappo, never the organizer. A bald, leprechaunish man, Trapp, 53, has been organizing since 1966 and is now staff director for the National Training and Information Center in Chicago. Trapp says that until about 1974, organizing was mostly "a big-city phenomenon, turf-based." Then, he says, something happened; he's not sure why. Community organizing as he knows it hit the small towns, "another unique change since Alinsky." That change makes it possible to build Chicago-downstate alliances. Trapp says: "Obviously we would like to see organizing develop wherever people are interested in doing it. You've got to have some presence downstate and some kind of support if you are going to get significant legislation passed. I think the passage of the whole 12 percent plan [Illinois Residential Assistance Payment Program that allows people who meet income guidelines to pay only 12 percent of their income on utility bills in winter months] occurred, particularly, because we were able to get support from Southern Counties Action Movement and other groups in Southern Illinois."       Sheryl Frank

Speaking of his own ward, which is home to many of Springfield's black citizens, McNeil says, "The east side community is now becoming very political. It is looking at issues and it is responding." He feels that's a positive change for an area that has been given a bad name. "In Springfield, when you cross 11th Street, whether you are black or white, you are condemned because you live on the east side. The connotation, the east side, has within it a negativism. You're living in the war zone."

McNeil, 39, from High Point, N.C., started working his precincts in 1980-81 when he ran for the Sangamon County Board. He won. Recalling his entry into politics, McNeil says: "I began what I considered a quest for the low-income, east side residents to be heard on matters of concern to the east side community." He got some support, "but it was like cutting a new path because no one had been as aggressive and upfront as I had been."

That new path was opened by winning the suit, according to former state appellate judge James Craven, the senior member of the Craven team. He believes that civil rights law rather than direct action organizing will be the key to empowering minorities and low-income people in coming years. Direct action organizing, Craven says, is not always effective in fighting entrenched racism. He believes the process of reform is changing: "It has graduated now into a sophisticated use of the legal process, using the Civil Rights Act of the 1960s and amendments to the Voting Rights Act in 1982. Blacks and Hispanics have become sophisticated."

Alinsky, says Craven, convinced the truly disadvantaged that they could do something about their lives. Now the truly disadvantaged are, and should be, turning to the courts, he says. The Craven law office has become something of a national clearinghouse for voting rights cases. Illinois rulings have required Peoria and Danville to change their form of government. Still pending are suits challenging at-large elections in Chicago Heights and in Cook County judicial races.

In the Springfield suit, one of the first in the North under the 1982 amendments, the plaintiffs had to show that discrimination was the result, but not necessarily the intent, of the commission form of government. The plaintiffs, among them McNeil, said they represented the disenfranchised members of the community. The suit was finally settled with two compromises: Only one alderman instead of two is elected from each ward, and the commissioners have been allowed to stay on the council as nonvoting directors for a period of three years. The Cravens maintain that the compromises, made in consultation with community groups and the plaintiffs, were justified and that the costs of dragging the case out made no sense.

During the 18 months the Springfield suit was going on, Readus, who heads the Hay Homes Tenants' Rights Association, led marches and staged demonstrations. A lifelong east side resident, he bitterly opposed the compromise. Readus and his associate, Michael Townsend, a Sangamon State University professor of social work, see it as just one more betrayal of low-income and minority people by members of the white power structure, abetted, they say, by middle-class blacks with a vested interest in cutting political deals. For over a year Readus, who is visually impaired, has been broadcasting his views, using language many find offensive, along with his favorite rap music, to listeners in the immediate vicinity over a low-watt FM station that he operates from his apartment without a license from the Federal Communications Commission.

McNeil says he has problems with people like Readus who preach ideology, just as he has problems with "Buppies," black urban professionals who are interested only in their own personal advancement. He says neither stance does justice to the civil rights struggle. "Those born after 1960 have no sense of what we had to do," says McNeil, who remembers the segregated schools and sit-ins in his hometown. "We tore down the doors for them to advance in the 1980s."

James Craven is also critical of Readus: "Dewayne Readus is a spokesman for a very small group in the black community. I'm not sure they want solutions. You can never ascertain what his gripe is, but this is part of the system. He proves the black community is no more monolitic than the white community."

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But Donald Craven is more positive. He says Readus and his supporters spotlighted the lawsuit for months with their demonstrations. "Dewayne's not a thorn in my side," says Donald Craven. "I think that picketing and other events had a good effect." He believes that Readus forces some people to look at problems they'd rather ignore. Among these are safe bus transportation for school children at Hay Homes, day care for mothers living in the project, tenants' rights and allegations of police misconduct.

In 1987 after Gerald Clemons, a mentally ill black man, died after being subdued by the police, the Springfield NAACP and other organizations, including Readus's, demanded an investigation. The police were later exonerated by a grand jury. In that instance there was a sense on the east side that the situation had been mishandled and many residents joined Readus's demonstration and signed his petitions. " It was wild," Readus remembers, not because he was leading a big demonstration but because people who had been afraid to speak out were doing so.

Readus claims many blacks support his John Hay Homes Tenants' Rights Association, though they do not do so vocally because of fear. That is flatly rejected by McNeil: "Dewayne is on his own crusade. He's Don Quixote himself who lost sight of the goal to change the form of government. Compromise is necessary to govern."

This spring there were allegations in Springfield of police mishandling of situations involving black citizens. The responses of McNeil and Readus contrasted sharply. As of May 3, Ald. McNeil had introduced an ordinance to create a police-community relations commission to investigate allegations of police misconduct. He was hoping for, but not counting on, police support and said he was getting phone calls from people outside of his ward offering to serve on the commission.

Meanwhile, Readus, who had been denouncing the Springfield police as "death squads," was cited by the Federal Communications Commission on April 6 for operating the FM station without a license. On April 17 he committed civil disobedience by broadcasting illegally. He was not arrested, but faced possible action by the FCC.

Confrontation and negotiation. Dissent and electoral clout. As Springfield's and other downstate stories show, the tensions between these opposites are great and the balance is delicate. All are needed to accomplish democratic social change. Low-income people want to translate court orders, legislation and regulations into tangible results: jobs, education, training, day care, decent housing. During the 1970s and 1980s, problems proliferated downstate, forcing frustrated people into action. Their stories were carried in local papers from Rock Island to Danville and from Rockford to Cairo — but there is no cumulative, statewide sense of what these stories add up to. That's for the future to sort out.

Cheryl Frank is a reporter for Lee Enterprises Inc. in its Statehouse bureau in Springfield.

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