Civic Catalyst Newsletter
Fall 1998

Sifting through Perceptions, Seeking the Truth

By Jim Perez
The Chicago Reporter

From the beginning, I knew my year at The Chicago Reporter would be spent doing a civic journalism project on Wrightwood, a neighborhood on the city's Southwest Side that was experiencing racial change.

In many ways this was one of the most difficult assignments a reporter can tackle. It required covering a story that seeps and oozes over many years, instead of one that happens in a shorter time frame. It challenged me to write a story that didn't have a clear-cut news peg.

Luckily, I had been introduced to civic journalism while working on my master's degree in journalism. And I had been introduced to Wrightwood from my work as a G.A. reporter at the Southwest News-Herald, a community paper that covered the neighborhood.

I headed a group that included two other reporters, a research assistant and a few interns.

Why focus on Wrightwood? For one thing, it's one of the few Chicago neighborhoods that has slowly changed from a predominantly white community into one that is now about half black and half white. And this happened despite a history of leading the city in hate crimes.

Since 1991, Chicago police have recorded 45 bias crimes in the area - 41 of them between whites and blacks. But incidents have slowed in recent years to only 11 since 1995 through 1998.

Wrightwood sprang up during the 1940's and 1950's around St. Thomas More Catholic church - affectionately called "Tommy More" by its parishioners. "Tommy More" is still the center of the community.

We kicked off the project with a March meeting in the church basement.

But recruiting a representative cross-section of residents was a challenge. First we asked community leaders for names of residents who were involved in the community, but who avoided notoriety.

I invited Tony Philbin, long-time president of the Wrightwood Improvement Association, to help us recruit people. He volunteered to get people to the meeting and to arrange a time and place for it.

To address some concerns that Philbin might stack a meeting with residents who would parrot his views, I also asked the News-Herald for names of people who would help me get the story behind the story in Wrightwood.

And I solicited names from supporters of a slate of candidates who opposed Philbin in the last election, which was hotly contested and had some racial overtones.

We invited 20 residents; about 30 people showed up. They were a fair cross-section of the community. The group was evenly divided between black and white - few Hispanics live in Wrightwood.

The meeting itself gave us huge insights into the dynamics of the community. For one thing, residents divided themselves in the room itself, with blacks sitting on one side, whites on the other.

During the meeting, the participants talked about their shared sense of community. They discussed their reasons for moving in, saying they had found the house "they just had to have," or they wanted to raise their children in a diverse neighborhood, such as Wrightwood.

In conversations afterwards, however, blacks and whites revealed very different perceptions of their community.

Some blacks talked about a "take it or leave it" attitude of the dominant community organization that made some feel unwelcome. They said they had trouble getting their children into the association's after-school and summer programs.

In some instances, the different perceptions created reporting opportunities for The Reporter.

For example, some residents worried that drug dealing or prostitution were why some of the local beauty shops, which had a black clientele, kept late hours on the weekends.

In interviewing the shops' managers, Ilearned that they stayed open because the elaborate braids and weaves they did on their customers' hair took a long time. If their customers came in after work, the shops stayed open to accommodate them.

Reporting on Wrightwood required sifting though gossip, misperceptions, suspicions and comments of residents badmouthing others.

In April, we wrote a 3,000-word article, telling the story of change in the neighborhood, being careful to report only what we could verify from interviews and from databases. In many ways, the conflicting perceptions of residents guided our journalism.

But while I felt confident about our reporting, the community didn't always like what we published.

Unlike many reporters, I got to hear these complaints in person - at a community meeting we held in July to hear what residents had to say about the article and issues it raised.

Residents were upset at my reporting about a five-year-old murder in the community. I used the anecdote because the shooting was seen by many white residents as not just a terrible crime, but as a racial crime. Two black teens tried to rob two long-time white residents. The two seniors fought back. One was shot and killed. Even some blacks commented on how the murder immediately triggered whites to put up for-sale signs.

Residents, however, complained that by revisiting a five-year-old murder, I was practicing "yellow journalism" and looking for a sensational news peg for the story.

Also attacked was the census tract we used for analysis in the story. We chose our boundaries, which did not align exactly with the neighborhood, because they came as close as possible to the geographic boundaries and allowed us to use official data for analysis.

Community leaders said that tract excluded parts of Wrightwood, including a three-block strip that was predominantly commercial. It contained about 700 residents, evenly distributed between black and white. They felt that by excluding this strip, we ignored a large number of white residents, which would have changed the racial composition of the neighborhood. We knew that the 700 residents were about half black, half white, and would have balanced each other in our analysis.

I came away feeling that civic journalism is a mixed bag. As a reporting tool, it helped us learn about the community in new and useful ways.

But it also raised the level of expectations among some residents, who mistook our commitment to spend time in their community with a belief that we would not call it the way we saw it.

Despite the problems, I feel I learned some valuable lessons and came away with some valuable tools, which I have used on other reporting projects.

Perez is the 1998 McCormick Tribune Foundation Fellow in Urban Journalism with The Chicago Reporter.