Kick Out the Sports!
by Bob Cook

Bob Cook's weekly ruminations on sports appear Mondays in Flak.

It isn't every day that a high school athletic conference realignment draws the attention and ire of two Congressmen, state legislators, a state attorney general and one of the nation's civil rights leaders. But it isn't every day a high school athletic conference realignment is symbolic of the longstanding racial issues of a major metropolitan region.

That's precisely the case with suburban Chicago's South Inter-Conference Association, which includes 33 high school athletic programs south and southwest of the city. A geographical realignment of the conference into three divisions that put the poorest, blackest schools into one division inspired Jesse Jackson to compare the new conference makeup with segregation in Little Rock, Ark., circa 1957.

And that was before a racist phone message ripping on the "poor blackies" was inadvertently left — allegedly by a school board member in one of the two white-majority divisions — on a reporter's voicemail, giving credence to the idea that race was a factor in setting boundaries. (The board member later resigned.)

Jesse Jackson didn't dredge up 1957 by accident. The number 57 comes up again here — as in Interstate 57, the current Mason-Dixon line dividing black Chicago from white Chicago.

When hundreds of thousands of blacks moved to Chicago in what became known as the Great Migration, the city of Chicago tried to keep them hemmed into certain areas of the South Side. The Dan Ryan Expressway — Interstate 90/94 — divided black Chicago from white Chicago. Through the years, however, neighborhoods "changed," as the locals so gently put it, and the Dan Ryan Expressway divide no longer applied.

But as blacks joined whites in moving to the south suburbs of Chicago, another interstate divide emerged. Now it's Interstate 57, which originates at the Dan Ryan Expressway at the south end of Chicago.

The racial and economic divide is vast. As you drive on 159th Street in Oak Forest, a city whose eastern border touches the western edge of I-57, you're in a town that's 90 percent white with a median annual income of $60,000, according to the 2000 Census. Keep driving on 159th Street over the I-57 bridge into Markham, and suddenly you're in a town that's 80 percent black with a median income of $41,000. Majority-white New Lenox is planning to build a major high-end retail shopping center surrounded by a rolling field with trees. Majority-black Harvey has had Dixie Square Mall sit vacant since 1979, surrounded by crumbling pavement with weeds the size of trees growing through the cracks.

A few years ago, when Metra, Chicago's suburban train line, proposed an all-suburban route around Chicago, the route ended at Joliet and did not cross I-57 — one local columnist derisively called it the "White Line." The board that decides where hospitals can be built in Illinois rejected plans for hospitals in the mostly white suburbs of Tinley Park and Orland Park, saying that the existing hospitals on the other side of I-57 were sufficient, and that building new facilities would reinforce the region's racial and economic divisions.

In was in this environment last December that the 19 school superintendents representing the 33 SICA high schools voted to approve a restructuring that would reduce the number of SICA divisions from five to three. Eleven schools would be put in each division based on geography: North Central, Southwest, and Southeast. The map was drawn mostly by athletic directors from white-majority schools. Plans to base divisions on enrollment — SICA schools range from 1,000 to 5,000 students — were rejected as too unwieldy.

By basing realignment on geography in one of the nation's most segregated metropolitan areas, the conference's divisions looked like this: in the North Central division, 10 out of 11 schools were majority white; in the Southwest division, nine out of 11 schools were majority white; in the Southeast division, 10 out of 11 schools were majority black. Seventy-two percent of the athletes in the North Central and Southwest divisions are white. Sixty-eight percent of the athletes in the Southeast division are black. The three superintendents that voted against the realignment all came from the Southeast division.

Jesse Jackson Jr. and Bobby Rush, two US representatives representing the region, protested the realignment. J. Kamala Buckner of the Thorntown Township schools east of I-57, one of the superintendents who voted against realignment, has argued that the new divisions deny both white and black students the opportunity to compete against each other, in effect creating a Berlin Wall with race-based boundaries. "How will students learn to interact with students of other cultures?" she asked in an op-ed piece written for the Daily Southtown. Two other superintendents from the new Southeast division also voted against the realignment. All 16 others voted for it.

Apparently, students won't. The schools in the Southwest division — representing mostly the whitest, richest schools in SICA — in February decided they will break away to form their own conference, the Southwest Suburban Conference. They argue that they need to compete against schools not only athletically, but academically (SICA includes chess teams and mathletes.) Generally, that is the reason any high school conference changes its members.

But in this case, that reasoning may not wash. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan has said she will investigate whether the SICA realignment violates the Illinois Civil Rights Act of 2003 by segregating schools based on race and economic status. It's possible the breakaway schools could be ordered back into SICA, and the realignment itself could be realigned.

It's not totally the fault of the rich, white school districts that Illinois ranks 49th out of 50 in state funding to schools, making districts almost wholly dependent on property tax revenue in a state where rich and poor, and black and white, tend to be at arms' length. Finding an affordable, integrated Chicago neighborhood that isn't integrated only because all the white people haven't left yet is next to impossible.

However, at best the minds behind the SICA realignment totally underestimated how re-segregating the conference would appear to the outside world. At worst — and by at worst, I mean the school board member from the Lincoln-Way district who left that phone message about the "poor blackies" — the realignment was intended all along to make sure the people of the new, mostly white subdivisions of the southwest Chicago suburbs never have to cross I-57 ever again. After all, in Chicago, it wouldn't be the first time an interstate highway was used to keep races apart.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.