Fear of a Black Campus

The words “Fire Jack” appeared on the marquee of the century-old theater here this past spring, casting as a community event the dismissal of Western Illinois University’s first African American president.

Jack Thomas was closing in on his eighth year as the university’s leader when the town turned on him. The Forum, as the onetime theater, now a bar, is known, sits just north of the courthouse in the heart of downtown. Its marquee is a prominent canvas, and when the words “Fire Jack” and “Support WIU” showed up on it in bold, black letters, everyone stopped to look.

Soon, “Fire Jack” signs popped up on neighborhood lawns and in storefront windows. Then, Thomas quit.

People were upset with the president for good reason. By the time he resigned, Western had become a shadow of the university that existed a decade earlier. Enrollment was down by 35 percent. More than 100 people had lost their jobs. Academic majors were closing. Dorms had been mothballed or demolished.

In a town where the university and the economy are closely entwined, signs of Western’s deterioration can be seen in the boarded-up businesses and vacant rental homes that fan out from the campus. Some of that can be chalked up to state budget cuts and legislative dysfunction, but many people in Macomb gradually came to hold Thomas responsible for their hardships.

However bad things might have seemed, the racial optics of this episode were unmistakable. The campaign to remove the president pitted Macomb’s mostly white business community against one of the town’s most prominent black residents, offering a tableau of “us vs. them.” On one side were longtime residents, declaring their dissatisfaction with the direction of the town’s most important institution. On the other were African Americans and left-leaning whites who saw in the campaign a reassertion of old Macomb’s dominance — lashing out at the interloper.

For some students and professors, Thomas symbolized deeper changes within a nearly 90-percent white town that draws most of its diversity from the university. Over the course of the past decade, Western’s student body has gone from being about 13-percent nonwhite to 34 percent. Not everyone is happy about that.

Resistance can be seen in the emails of a Western Illinois trustee, who worried about the “ethnicity” of the university. It shows up, too, in the advice a guidance counselor, who cautioned the university about all of the “inner-city” kids in town. It’s evident within 450 pages of emails and other documents, which were provided to The Chronicle through a public-records request, and it crops up in conversations with more than 50 people who have lived and worked for years or decades in Macomb.

All of it, though, was just beneath the surface until Thomas got run out of town.

“This guy was squeaky clean, and they wanted to get him,” says John (J.Q.) Adams, an emeritus professor of educational psychology, who is black. “They wanted to get him.”

Macomb is about 75 miles southwest of Peoria. Drive another 40 miles or so, and you’ll hit the Mississippi River. The town is home to roughly 17,500 people, but it seems to be getting smaller by the day.

Two days a week, farmers gather in the downtown square to sell honey and vegetables. Family farms, which for generations raised corn, wheat, and livestock, once provided a decent living for a lot of people. But many of those farms have been gobbled up and transformed into huge operations that span hundreds or thousands of acres, driving farmers out of the area. A lot of the surrounding counties hit their peak population more than a century ago.

Up the road from the square, there’s a new craft brewery called Forgottonia, a name that some residents have used to describe the region, where people feel perpetually passed over by state and federal investment.

The population of the rural Midwest is dwindling, leaving fewer and fewer high-school graduates for Western Illinois to recruit. That means reaching into the cities, convincing young people in Chicago that it’s worth a three-and-a-half-hour train ride or a drive along two-lane roads through farm country to get an education here.

The cards would have been stacked against any president at Western, but Thomas had his own specific challenges. After he ascended from the provost slot to president, in 2011, he found that people had trouble accepting him in the post. If Thomas wore Western Illinois gear on a trip, he wrote in a book on university leadership, people often presumed that he was an athletic coach or a recruiter.

“For some people, the stereotype of a university president is a silver-haired white male,” wrote Thomas, who declined to be interviewed for this article.

Thomas, who is 58, began to regularly wear a suit and tie in his 20s, when he was an English instructor, so he wouldn’t be mistaken for a student. He was known to admonish young men on the campus for wearing their pants below their waist. Ironically, Thomas’s formality was part of what alienated him from some people in Macomb, who came to describe him as aloof and elitist.

By 2015, he had bigger problems. A state-budget impasse compounded Western’s worsening enrollment prospects. Thomas was forced to publicly dispel rumors that the university might close its doors, fearing that even fewer students would enroll with such uncertainty in the air.

The face-off between Gov. Bruce V. Rauner, a Republican, and Illinois’s Democrat-held legislature lasted two years, leaving the state with a $14.7-billion backlog on its bills, and wreaking havoc on state agencies, including universities.

By 2018, Western’s enrollment had dropped to 8,500 — a loss of 4,050 students on Thomas’s watch. That year, the faculty voted “no confidence” in his administration. Three rounds of layoffs, the most recent of which was this past March, claimed the jobs of more than 120 people, including 13 professors who were either tenured or on the tenure track. (The total layoff numbers, which originally approached 300, have fallen since June; several people were rehired and some layoffs were rescinded, according to Western officials.)

In evaluations of Thomas, professors hammered the president for what they described as his lack of vision and failures of transparency, including his participation in discussions with trustees that were found to violate the state’s open-meetings law. Criticisms of Thomas were substantive, but the conversation had a way of circling back to race. In several instances, faculty members argued that Thomas had hired unqualified black people or admitted underprepared students of color.

“It does appear that the president promotes diversity over excellence,” one critic said.

Western briefly loosened its admissions standards in 2011. That strategy, which had been recommended by a consultant, did not last long. In the years that followed, average ACT scores for incoming freshmen tended to be slightly lower than they had been in previous years. But the scores hovered within a few tenths of a point of the national average, as had been the case before the temporary change of standards.

Those students, though, weren’t of the caliber that some at Western thought the university deserved.

“We need to recruit the best,” a professor said in an evaluation of Thomas, “not take anyone who can get a loan.”

Behind the scenes, white members of the Western Illinois community talked even more bluntly about Thomas’s race, and how the influx of diverse students might be adversely affecting the university’s reputation among white families.

In 2017, as panic set in about enrollment, Steven Nelson, who was then a trustee, sent a foreboding email to the board’s then chairwoman. Nelson and Todd Lester, another trustee, thought it was a “pipe dream” to believe Western could bounce back without major changes, Nelson wrote. It was time, he said, to face some hard truths.

“In our opinion, ethnicity of our university has become an issue that no one seems to want to talk about,” wrote Nelson, a lawyer and 1970 graduate of Western who is white. “This does not mean that we are playing the race card, but we do believe that it has an impact on enrollment.”

Nelson did not expand on what “issue” the university’s diversity might present, and he declined an interview request. But the criticism has a familiar ring to it. As Western’s enrollment problems have worsened, people who have worked there say, a hypothesis has gained traction: The recruitment of more-diverse students has scared off talented white kids who might otherwise apply.

“Rural students would thrive @WIU, but many are ‘put off’ because of all the inner-city students,” a high-school guidance counselor wrote in response to a recent university survey, which asked counselors for their impressions of Western. “WIU can be great again. They need to get back to recruiting the type of students who made us successful for all of those years — rural students who can thrive in Macomb.”

In private conversations, racially loaded talk about Western’s students came up with some frequency, according to former administrators. Roslyn J. Taylor, who worked on admissions as coordinator of Western’s now-defunct St. Louis regional office, recalls a meeting in which two white colleagues said that some in the community were concerned about the presence of “a lot more black students at Western.” Taylor, who is black, said she was dumbstruck.

“Are we trying to make Western white again?” she remembers saying.

Silence followed, Taylor said.

Given changing national demographics, it is not surprising that a university like Western would have become more diverse in the past decade. But a rumor persisted in the community that those changes were all part of Thomas’s plan, according to documents and former officials.

In the fall of 2017, an anonymous letter, postmarked Louisville, Ky., was sent to two Western sororities. “Your university has been taken over by black supremacist [sic],” it said.

The letter went on to name several black administrators, saying they had been hired by Thomas “to help him carry out his black agenda.”

“White students will soon become the minority as more of the Chicago blacks come to school at Western,” the letter said. “Look up the background on these people, and you will see that your education is threatened.”

‘His black agenda’: In 2017, an anonymous letter was sent to two Western Illinois sororities, warning them that “white students will soon become the minority.” (Portions of the letter were redacted by university officials, citing a public-records exemption related to unwarranted invasions of privacy).

This spring, as back-channel discussions about getting rid of Thomas ratcheted up, his race became a point of emphasis. In a series of emails leaked to the local news media by a former trustee, who is black, one of Thomas’s critics questioned whether any of the university’s nonwhite trustees could be persuaded to fire a black president. “My fear is that the Jack predicament cannot easily be separated from race,” Larry Balsamo, an emeritus professor of history who specializes in the Civil War and Reconstruction, wrote to Jackie Thompson, who had recently been appointed to Western’s board. (Balsamo and Thompson are both white.)

“I know certainly that some of the opposition to Jack is racist,” Balsamo continued, “but even if he were purple, he has been a near total failure here.”

In response, Thompson suggested they meet for lunch. She pledged to “restore WIU to the days we remember so well.”

Thompson, whose appointment to the board has since been rescinded by the state’s governor, did not respond to multiple interview requests. Balsamo also declined.

The emails primed the environment for a leadership battle that was assured to become about race. And then the “Fire Jack” signs went up.

One of the signs appeared to be hand-painted. Others were professionally printed, the sort that one might place on a lawn in support of a political candidate. But this didn’t feel like politics to Adams, the retired psychology professor. It was something else entirely.

“He’s not President Thomas. He’s not Dr. Thomas. He’s ‘Jack,’” Adams said. “Given my lived experience in America as a person of color, the transcription of that code is very easy: That’s ‘Hang the N.’”

Lara Dively, who owns a boutique called Nostalgia on the Square, said she had agonized over her decision to put up a sign. As a rule, she’d avoided bringing politics into her store, a Hallmark supplier that smells of scented candles. But foot traffic was down at Nostalgia, which she owns with her husband, Jon Dively. Loyal customers who were laid off by the university had moved out of town. The sign was a way of signaling to Western’s trustees, who were scheduled to meet in a few days to consider Thomas’s contract, that something had to change, Dively said.

Dively and her husband are white. She never imagined how the signs would hurt and offend people, she said.

“The whole thing was ugly,” Dively said. “The narrative became a racist issue. That wasn’t my intent. I was desperate for new leadership.”

Ken Berkley, the owner of a restaurant next door, winced when he saw his neighbors’ sign. Berkley, one of the few black business owners downtown, moved from Chicago to Macomb a couple of years ago to open Jerk Shop Go with his three daughters, all of whom have attended Western. The couple next door was friendly enough, Berkley said, but he had a bit of history with them. A while back, a drunken kid had left one of the downtown bars and vomited in front of Nostalgia. The next morning, Jon Dively told Berkley, who doesn’t serve alcohol, to clean it up. Berkley got a bucket.

“We feel like one of these restaurants should be in every college town, just not Macomb,” he said. “We are so done with this town.”

As pressure mounted for Thomas to resign, people in Macomb grew more vocal about their myriad objections. It wasn’t just jobs and students that had been lost, but some deeper notion of gentility that people saw slipping away, the email record shows.

Weeks before the signs went up, Jon Dively appealed to Western’s trustees, laying out in an email a case for Thomas’s removal. Dively, a state policeman, had grown up in Macomb, he explained, and his family line included a professor, a doctor, a dentist, and a schoolteacher. He was “100% vested” in the town, he said, and he was appalled by what he had witnessed at his son’s recent commencement ceremony. The audience was “out of control,” he said. The yelling. The cussing. The bleacher stomping. The rude interruptions. On top of that, Dively said, Thomas had quoted Kanye West, who “encourages police brutality and incites the Black Lives Movement.”

The policeman has a problem: Jon Dively, co-owner of a downtown boutique and a state policeman, complained in an email to Western Illinois trustees that Jack Thomas, the president, had quoted Kanye West in a commencement speech. West, Dively wrote, “incites the Black Lives Movement.”

Elitism. Incompetence. Kanye. There were lots of reasons people say they soured on Thomas. But the incident that infuriated many of his critics, and directly preceded the “Fire Jack” campaign, was Thomas’s decision to fire Brad Bainter.

Bainter, who is white, is a former WIU Leatherneck basketball star who went on to serve as the university’s vice president for advancement and executive officer of its foundation; his wife is director of alumni programs. Thomas cited administrative costs as the rationale for eliminating Bainter’s job. Bainter, though, had close professional relationships with some of Thomas’s opponents.

In dismissing Bainter, Thomas had disrespected a Macomb favorite son. “That was kind of the final straw, because Brad’s a local kid,” said W. Garry Johnson, an emeritus vice president for student services who worked at Western for 33 years. Firing Bainter was “the dumbest thing that could have ever happened,” Johnson said, because it alienated any remaining supporters Thomas might have had.

The backlash was swift. Days later, the executive committee of the university’s foundation board sent a letter to Western’s trustees, calling for Thomas’s ouster and Bainter’s reinstatement. Soon after, the Alumni Council followed suit with a resolution.

As the town rose up against Thomas, state officials sounded an alarm about the racial overtones of the campaign to remove him.

In early June, Jesse H. Ruiz, deputy governor for education, warned Western’s trustees about the bigotry that was flooding his inbox. He forwarded to the board one of “many” racist emails that he had received about the president, this one accusing Thomas of admitting low-income students as part of a “social experiment of using WIU as a form of welfare.”

“Many of the free and reduced students have brought with them criminal elements and family members who ride their coat tails which has negatively effected [sic] this community,” the person wrote.

In reality, total crime in the city dropped by about 60 percent from 1991 to 2015, according to the latest federal data.

In his email to the trustees, Ruiz urged the board to “stand up to these misinformed and misguided attacks.”

“Frankly, the authors don’t even try to veil their racist assertions,” Ruiz wrote. “It is difficult to parse through any bits of legitimate points these people may have when the overriding tone is so clearly bigoted and play [sic] upon racial stereotypes.”

‘Clearly bigoted’: Jesse H. Ruiz, deputy governor for education, warned Western Illinois trustees about racist overtones in emails that he had received about President Thomas.

On the ground in Macomb, the political dynamics were stark: a president at the nadir of his power up against some of the town’s most established residents.

One of the first “Fire Jack” signs was outside the old Farm King, an expansive general store that has been in the Severs family since 1959. In a brief telephone interview with The Chronicle, Rick Severs defended the campaign.

“Something had to be done,” he said. “We couldn’t continue. There was absolutely no racial component.”

Severs grew tightlipped when asked how the campaign had come together. It had been led by “a number of folks” or “a group of very concerned citizens,” he said without elaboration.

The mystery of the campaign’s origins has fed perceptions on the campus that an old power structure, whose members are white and politically connected, still operates in Macomb.

Over the past decade, the Severses and Farm King have steered about $20,000 toward mostly Republican candidates, campaign-finance records show. They have been particularly generous to the campaigns of Rep. Norine K. Hammond, a Republican who represents Macomb in the Illinois House of Representatives. (Robin Severs, Rick Severs’s wife, is listed in records as having been a paid member of Hammond’s campaign staff.)

Hammond has defended Thompson and another trustee who was implicated in emails about removing Thomas, blasting Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, for his decision to rescind their appointments to the board.

The campaign to force Thomas out worked. In June, about a week after the signs went up, Thomas wrote to the board’s chairman that he wanted to leave as soon as possible, “based upon the present atmosphere surrounding my position as president.”

Thomas brokered a generous exit package, which includes two years of administrative leave at his presidential salary of $270,000 and the right to return as a tenured professor for even higher pay. He just had to agree not to sue the university or speak ill of Western.

This was the outcome, more or less, that a lot of people in Macomb thought they wanted. But it was difficult to see how anyone had won.

The “Fire Jack” movement was the culmination of what Ronald C. Williams, vice president for student services, who recently left Western, saw as “a calculated plan” to run off black people like himself. If that was its intention, it had succeeded. Williams, who had been at Western for 11 years by the time Thomas resigned, had already accepted a position to become associate provost for faculty at Columbus State University. But before he departed, he appeared at the board’s June meeting, when it accepted Thomas’s resignation.

Williams, who was also assistant vice president for academics, delivered to the trustees an unflinching, 15-minute monologue, prosecuting a case of racial intolerance against the town. The words on The Forum, Williams said, amounted to “a symbolic public lynching of an African American man who had a prominent position in a predominantly white community.”

Make Western “great again”? Too many “inner-city” students? “Those are charged statements,” Williams said, “and we must recognize it for what it is: hatred.”

Macomb had let slip its civil disguise, making people wonder how long the anger behind the “Fire Jack” crowd had festered. For some African Americans, the episode confirmed an assumption that black people are more tolerated than accepted in Macomb, living here by the grace of the white majority’s revocable blessing.

“They don’t want black people there,” Williams said in a recent interview. “It’s very clear.”

Thomas’s final days brought a charged feeling to the campus and the town. One night, around the time the president resigned, Janiya Haynes, a senior at Western, was walking from her apartment to her car. She noticed a group of men in a red pickup truck at a nearby intersection. They yelled a racial epithet at her, Haynes said, and warned that black people “shouldn’t be out at night.”

As a young black woman in Macomb, Haynes had experienced what she describes as troubling, but mostly benign, forms of racism. She remembers, for example, a customer at the office where she works telling her, “I have a grandson your color.”

That night in the parking lot felt different.

“That situation kind of scared me,” she said. “It did.”

Stories like that are leaking out now. In September, dozens of people, most of them white, gathered for a workshop on non-violent communication. Led by Adams, the emeritus psychology professor, the sessions were designed to help people identify their shared human needs — things like safety, respect, and dignity — to help understand one another.

Participants sat in a circle with a map of Macomb at its center. What did they see? Thinking back on all that had transpired, a white woman said she felt sick to her stomach. She wondered aloud if “we’ve broken something that is maybe unfixable.”

When it came time for Verneata D. Jones to speak, people came to attention. At 66 years old, her gravelly voice cuts across a room.

“Our children are leaving this community,” Jones said.

Jones grew up in nearby Galesburg, and in her youth she marched in civil-rights demonstrations alongside other African Americans. But things haven’t changed all that much since then, she thinks. She moved to Macomb in the early 1990s and worked for 23 years at the NTN-Bower manufacturing plant, which is one of the largest employers in the area, outside of the university.

“I don’t have an ounce of hate,” Jones told the group. “We’ve got to help one another.”

After the session ended, Jones rocked her 2-month-old grandson, Terrell. She wondered why the town was still wrestling with whether what happened here was an act of racial aggression.

“They say racism doesn’t exist,” Jones said. “It doesn’t exist because you don’t experience it.”

With Thomas out, Western Illinois is looking more like it once did.

The board has elevated Martin Abraham, who is white, from provost to interim president. Among his 15 direct reports, the only one who is African American is the interim director for equal opportunity and access. The town has no black police officers.

Within his first few weeks, Abraham restored Bainter’s status as a university employee, allowing him office space on the campus to continue his work as the foundation’s top executive. His relationships with donors, Abraham said, are crucial to the university.

Those who participated in the sign campaign “need to recognize what they did was offensive,” Abraham said, but Macomb is such a small community that the university will need to continue to work with those merchants and donors.

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WIU Interim President Martin Abraham

In September, the university held its annual town-and-gown celebration at The Forum, whose marquee had called for Thomas’s firing.

Speaking to the group, Abraham got choked up describing what he has recently heard from students, who feel “unwelcome, confused and scared.” “We need to change that,” he said. “And that change needs to start here tonight.”

Even after the two-year budget impasse, which took such a toll on Macomb, local politics haven’t changed much. Governor Rauner lost his re-election bid last November, but he won a plurality of the vote in McDonough County, where the university is located.

Lots of white people here still talk about Thomas as an outsider, a man more known than knowable. He shied away from Macomb’s downtown social scene and was seldom spotted outside of official functions. He is an ordained pastor, but he chose to build a spiritual community well beyond Macomb’s borders.

Most Sunday mornings, Thomas would drive 70 miles to Quincy, Ill., cutting through cornfields toward the First Baptist Church. Since his resignation, he hasn’t been seen much among the church’s mostly black congregation. But his presence could be felt there on a recent Sunday, as Thomas’s friends reflected on how he had been cast out of Macomb.

Today’s sermon comes from Ephesians 6:10-18.

“Put on the whole armor of God,” the passage begins, “that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the Devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

The Rev. Orville B. Jones Jr. seizes on this piece of Scripture, walking with a bit of a strut from behind a small organ to the pulpit. “Fasten your belts,” Jones tells a nodding congregation, as he lays out a strategy for waging war with the Devil himself.

“There ought to be something about how you carry yourself, as a Christian, that identifies you with being on the Lord’s side,” Jones says. “There ought to be something about how you handle yourself in the face of adversity — oh, I’m saying something to you today.”

To wear the armor of God, Jones continues, is to stare down adversity with grace and purpose, never giving way to anger.

“We have to do like Jack Thomas did when he was getting ready to resign,” says Jones, hollering now. “Even in that moment, when he could have attacked all of those folks for messing with him, he took a high road.”

First Baptist traces its founding to 1865, a year that brought with it the end of the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

More than a century and a half later, Jones prayed with a black college president who was under siege in his own community. Those prayers are private, the pastor says. But what’s clear is that Thomas came here Sunday after Sunday, seeking something he struggled to find in Macomb: a sanctuary.