Before Jerome Greer was invited to relocate from St. Louis and take a job as principal of Irving elementary school in Dubuque, Iowa, the personnel director issued a word of caution: no one in the city had the faintest idea how to cut his hair. "This is a white person's town," says Greer, who took the job last July but still gets his hair cut in St. Louis. "On my first day at school, a kid asked me whether I was Bill Cosby."
Haircuts are the least of Greer's problems as Dubuque wrestles with a plan to force the town out of its time warp by aggressively recruiting minorities. During the 1940s and 1950s police advised blacks who stepped off the train to move on to the next town. Though the city's racist past is not unusual, its state of preservation is remarkable. "I was refused housing, insurance, you name it," says Ruby Sutton, an African American who moved to Dubuque from Chicago in 1962 when her husband was transferred by the railroads. "At least down South they were brutally honest. Here they just lie to you if you're black."
Dubuque can be brutal as well. Following a series of cross burnings in 1989, a small group of liberals concluded that "Dubuque has the image of a closed, intolerant, and even racist community." They set up the Task Force for Constructive Integration, hammered out a nine-page plan for a sweeping re- education of the citizenry and asked the city to recruit 100 minority families by 1995. Though the plan has yet to be officially enacted, the city council endorsed it by a 6-to-1 vote last May. Dubuque hasn't been the same since. "The plan is perceived by blue-collar workers as a personal threat to their jobs," says Bob Wahlert, president of F D L Foods and a supporter of the scheme. Twelve cross burnings since July suggest that darker emotions are also involved.
Nestled along the Mississippi River near where the borders of Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin converge, Dubuque is an unlikely candidate for social engineering. Of 58,000 residents, fewer than 1,000 are minorities, only one- third of them black. The city, says Mayor James Brady, "missed the 1960s. People can go all their lives without seeing a black person." That suits ; local white supremacists like Bill McDermott just fine. Says he: "Why should our town be destroyed by black riots and crime?"
Most residents consider McDermott an embarrassment. Desperate to stop the bad publicity, the city has enrolled department heads in racial-sensitivity courses, while billboards plastered across the town inquire, WHY DO WE HATE? Girl Scouts and businesses have distributed 10,000 multicolored ribbons in support of racial harmony, while 300 businesses have published an ad in the Telegraph Herald defending the plan's principles.
After Alice Scott, a black newcomer from Milwaukee, had a cross burned on her lawn and a brick thrown through her window five weeks ago, dozens of residents, including schoolchildren, came by to express their support. "I cried when I saw all those cards and letters," says Scott, 32, who has found a job in a sandwich shop. "This town has some good people, and I'm gonna stay." Adds Charles Azebeokhai, the black head of the city's human rights office: "The only difference between Dubuque and cities like New York and Chicago is that we've got the guts to do something about racism."