What has been tried in a small town

Julian Seay has experienced a number of Iowa small towns. He was raised in Keokuk, but one of his most vivid memories is in Lake City, Iowa, working on a farm with his former father-in-law. The farmer needed help building a fireplace in his home using stones directly from the farmland. It was a hog farm, and Julian can still smell the odor of manure emanating from the mud room mingling with the aroma of cinnamon sticks the farmer’s wife used in an attempt to mask it. He was atop a ladder when they came to a gap that was the unfortunate shape of a skull. “Oh,” the farmer said, “I bet we can find a n**** head rock somewhere in the yard to fill that nicely.”

Individuals make mistakes. Societies make mistakes. And what is it that we have been taught? It is fine to make mistakes, as long as we learn from them. This requires acknowledgment and discussion of issues and events. Which does not equate to blame or shame, it is simply a matter of evolving based on knowledge acquisition.

Context matters. And that is the problem – context is not allowed to be taught.

Days after the governor of Iowa tweeted “A good day to play some Jason Aldean”, Jay Stahl uncovered that the controversial song “Try That in a Small Town” was co-written with an Iowan. These two occurrences should cause us to reflect. The limited understanding and rigid views of government officials, citizens and song writers are products of an imperfect system, a system that omitted learning opportunities about racist practices and policies and has resorted to defensive and dismissive sound bites in place of thoughtful reflection on the truth.

The reasons why the song, when coupled with the video, is problematic has been discussed. It is not the intention to rehash that here. Instead, the intent is to understand what has been tried in small towns, and how we can recognize the good elements that Iowa small towns have to offer and build upon them to create more equitable and just communities. Iowa has much to celebrate. Many of us choose to live here for a reason, and some of us want to work to make it an even better place to live.

So, what has been tried in Iowa small towns?

While Iowa may not have courthouses like Maury County Courthouse with known lynchings, other incidents have occurred. The hanging of three Black conscripts occurred on July 4, 1918 at Camp Dodge, with attendance mandated for 40,000 white troops and 3,000 black troops. Some would say the 2020 murder and mutilation of Michael Williams in Grinnell is the most recent lynching in Iowa.

Kids have endured racism at sporting events in small towns. Reported hate crimes rose in 2020, and unfortunately, many incidents are simply not reported. Ask someone who has grown up in a small town, and they might have a story. “Often we had to fight truckloads of dudes from across the river who lived in smaller towns… well sundown towns actually” Julian posted on social media “as kids (we were) warned by our families not to go there or if we was there to get…out of there before dark.”

While there are no confirmed sundown towns, the work of James Loewens listed 40 cities that were potentially sundown towns in Iowa. Many of the artifacts of these towns, such as signs posting warnings to “not let the sun set on you,” have been destroyed throughout the country to “erase the dirty parts of our history that we don’t want to remember.”

The backlash to teaching accurate history was codified in Iowa when HF 802 was signed into law June 8, 2021. Since then, laws banning books that represent marginalized communities (SF496) have been signed and bills proposing defunding of diversity, equity and inclusion programs (HF 616) have been introduced. The straw perching on the proverbial camel’s back is that we have a presidential candidate courting our governor who has claimed and doubled down on saying that slavery helped Black people.

Additionally, at the state level, voting restrictions have increased in recent years, and such restrictions have historically impacted people of color. Black people in Iowa are 11 times more likely to be imprisoned than whites. Combined with numerous other policies, these structural issues are designed to keep power where it has traditionally lain, and thus continue proliferation of similar policies designed to erase history.

The farmer who offered to find an African American skull for Julian to place prominently in the fireplace did not realize the impact of what he had said until Julian walked away. Julian’s own father-in-law let him sit in the car alone with his thoughts, and never defended the father of his grandchildren, nor did he address the issue with the farmer.

“It still bothers me to this day. He just- he just kept working.”

This is also not an argument about city versus country. In fact, the violence and discriminatory practices that Black and brown people experience in our larger Iowa cities is just as harmful, and systemic discrimination needs to be addressed.

In the gaping chasm left by the government overreach into and gutting of public school curriculum have sprung other opportunities for Iowans to learn more. The Plymouth Congregational Church 1619 Project Revisited has provided continuing education beyond the book itself. Showing Up for Racial Justice has a couple of chapters in Iowa. And we need to think beyond just anti-racism and teaching about civil rights. There is a rich Black history from Africa to the diaspora that all would benefit from beyond the short month of February. We all can start by visiting and supporting the African American Museum of Iowa in Cedar Rapids.

“The Iowa I hope to see is an Iowa where people have the ability to pause and learn about one another despite the created differences” says Julian. “From there real conversations can begin and solutions will follow.”

Chris Espersen is a Gazette editorial fellow. chris.espersen@thegazette.com