Dubuque, Iowa was once known as one of the whitest and most racist places in the country due to a spate of hate crimes in the 1990s. Leading up to the Iowa Caucus, here’s how the town is trying to change its image.
revived old fears and brought new calls for racial unity and dialogue. The culprits were never caught. Last year, racist graffiti was found at least three times at public parks.The city was forced to revamp its policies in 2013 for awarding low-income housing vouchers after the federal government announced that it had violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act by “restricting the ability of African Americans to obtain vouchers and relocate to Dubuque.
But Allen, 54, believes Dubuque has a lot of work yet to do, starting with helping whites and blacks have more constructive conversations about race. Despite the greater number of African Americans, deep divisions are reflected in the way whites and blacks see the city’s racial issues.Many African Americans wonder how that can be true in a town that was a hotbed for the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and that was once branded “the Selma of the North” by the Des Moines Register, the state’s largest newspaper.
“It’s almost like we’re going backward,” says Sutton, 57, a nurse and former City Council member. “We’re not too far away from it all being turned around again.” The letter showed that more frank discussion was needed to figure out why Dubuque can still be a hostile place for racial minorities, says conference organizer Miquel Jackson, a 31-year-old African American who moved to Dubuque to attend college 13 years ago and who now sits on the commission.
Hunter, 49, is director of the city’s Multicultural Family Center, one of the few places where young people of color feel comfortable hanging out. Most whites live above the flats in more solidly middle-class neighborhoods, on a wooded bluff dotted with Victorian mansions that overlook the bridges crossing into neighboring Illinois and Wisconsin.Stately Victorian homes on a bluff in Dubuque.A long-standing stereotype that blacks, especially transplants from bigger cities, are prone to commit crime is a common belief here.
Last fall at Soul Food Sunday, a meet-and-greet at the county fairgrounds with Southern fried chicken and African American line-dance lessons, white and black residents briefly came together in a way that earlier activists had envisioned but never quite realized. Neither man can say why he felt compelled to come back to a city that had caused the family so much grief — and still does.
He mostly holed up in his basement because he feared that the verbal abuse directed at him might escalate to a physical attack.
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