East St. Louis struggles to keep its college and its hopes alive
EAST ST. LOUIS, Ill.
This slowly decaying, city, once called
“America’s Soweto,” is so impoverished that it lost its city hall six
years ago in a court judgement to a creditor.
Since then, the city government, local public schools, public
housing authority, and community college in this Mississippi River
bottom town of 40,000 all have been seized by the state. Yet residents,
98 percent of whom are Black and more than half of whom qualify for
welfare, appear determined not to lose the one institution they believe
could help their blighted city: Metropolitan Community College.
“East of anywhere often evokes the other side of the tracks,”
author Jonathan Kozol wrote of the city in 1991. “But for a first-time
visitor, … East St. Louis might suggest another world.”
He describes it in his book, Savage Inequalities, as a city “full
of bars and liquor stores and lots of ads for cigarettes that feature
pictures of Black people.
“Assemble all the worst things in America — gambling, liquor,
cigarettes and toxic fumes, sewage, waste disposal, prostitution — put
it all together. Then you dump it on Black people.”
Some elected officials here have filed a lawsuit that they hope
will prevent the Illinois Community College Board from closing the
beleaguered 400-student college by year’s end. Such a closure would be
unprecedented, national experts say. Only two community colleges have
been forcibly shut down in recent memory — one in Baltimore, and the
other, Metropolitan’s predecessor fight here in East St. Louis. In both
cases, the colleges swiftly reopened under new names and new
administrations, says Dr. Joshua L. Smith, director of New York
University’s urban community college leadership program.
