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Having a cross burned on your front lawn is usually a sign that all is not well in the neighborhood. For Beth Broadway, the event would mark the beginning of a career spent trying to prevent such incidents from happening to others.
Broadway is a director of Community-Wide Dialogues for the InterReligious Council of Central New York, a regional nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting understanding between ethnic, racial and religious groups. Broadway's work in nurturing constructive discussions about such difficult and sensitive issues has been so successful that the methods she developed along with her IRC colleagues have been adapted for use by Syracuse University.
"We've modeled our own inter-group discussion sessions after those created by the IRC," said Rebecca Reed Kantrowitz, a director of residential life at SU. "We want to get students to talk about their own experiences and who they are."
Getting people to talk is often the problem. The fire that once burned outside the suburban Chicago home where Broadway grew up has long since been extinguished, yet the smoldering embers of prejudice and hate remain. From the unrest on the streets of France and Iraq to events closer to home in Durham, N.C., or on the former HillTV, frustration and misunderstanding are still plainly evident.
"We want to change the culture here at SU," said Student Association President Wayne Horton at last Wednesday's Tearing Down the Wall Ceremony at Hendricks Chapel.
Changing the way people think is something with which Broadway is intimately familiar. Like Durham, Chicago, Paris and most other cities, Syracuse has distinct districts. From the North Side to the South Side or downtown to Fayetteville, noticeable divisions, both ethnic and economic, exist between neighborhoods.
In Syracuse it's Broadway's job to help bridge those gaps. It's a position she's held for more than a decade, one that's had its fair share of highs and lows, successes and failures.
"The key to effectively breaking down stereotypes is giving people access to one another," said Broadway, resembling a high school English teacher or local librarian with her swept-back silver-tinged brown hair and knee-length skirt. Now 53, she realized the importance of discussion at a young age.
"I guess you could say my interest in bringing people together began when I was 10 years old," she said. As a child of the 1960s raised in South Holland, Ill., a suburb just south of Chicago, Broadway grew up in an environment of extreme racial discontent.
Judge Julius Hoffman, the same judge who would later preside over the infamous Chicago Seven trial, had just ordered the integration of local schools. Broadway's mother, Ellen, had seen how a similar decision in Boston had resulted in violent protests by some white residents. She vowed to stop the same thing from happening in her neighborhood.
"As a young widow, I know it was incredibly hard on my mother to take the stand she did, struggling to build coalitions to connect families with one another," said Broadway, recalling the scorn heaped upon the family for their beliefs. Her mother's decision to serve on a local racial justice committee and support school integration earned her a great deal of resentment. It was also undeniably a reason why a universal message of hate was etched into the family's lawn.
"The cross was made of two lines of gasoline burned into the grass," she said. "It happened at dusk; my brother and I stamped it out before my mother got home."
Despite the threats, or perhaps because of them, Broadway stayed close to home for college. She received a bachelor's degree from Southern Illinois University and a master's in adult education from Northern Illinois University before beginning her professional career at the Chicago YMCA and Head Start, an early childhood development program sponsored by the federal government.
It was a decision to move to Syracuse in 1983 to take a job with Literacy Volunteers of America that enabled Broadway to find her true calling.
"I was working with people that were learning to read as adults," Broadway said. "It was extremely challenging, but I enjoyed being with racially diverse people who were working together to better their lives and communities."
Such projects gave Broadway keen insight into what needed to be done in certain neighborhoods. While there were no landmark victories in Broadway's battle against bias and ignorance, there were small triumphs that showed signs of progress.
"The North Side recently chose a Vietnamese girl to become Ms. Little Italy for the first time," said Broadway, noting that it was a direct result of a yearlong dialogue she led between Italians and Southeast Asians from the area. "Initiating dialogue between Asian and Italian leaders helped foster an environment of understanding."
If Broadway's first challenge is getting people in the same room, her second is to get them to speak constructively with one another. As SU knows all too well, meetings often designed for civilized discourse can quickly turn into venues for trading accusations.
Surprisingly, Broadway doesn't necessarily view this as a problem.
"Sometimes people need to go to an angry place in order to heal," Broadway said. "You can use that Vesuvius-type level of upset to make real progress."
Tanya Atwood-Adams, a director of spiritual care and partner of Broadway's at the IRC, agrees simply getting individuals into the same room is essential to progress.
"(Dialogue) eventually helps change people's perspectives," she said.
Perhaps the most redeeming quality of dialogue is the back-and-forth conversation it inspires, a means by which information is relayed thereby engendering understanding among others. This symbiotic sharing of ideas is exemplified by how SU gradually recognized the importance and success of the Community-Wide Dialogues begun by Broadway and the IRC in 1997.
In concert with Kantrowitz and the Office of Residence Life, Dr. James Duah-Agyeman, director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs at SU, established inter-group dialogues as both academic courses and meetings for the residence halls, things that are carefully integrated so certain individuals don't feel isolated.
Duah-Agyeman points to programs like Conversations About Race and Ethnicity as an example of a campus committed to promoting awareness and understanding by bringing small groups of students together.
"C.A.R.E. goes on for six weeks, two hours a week," he said, adding that he hoped to get more people involved.
SU programs like C.A.R.E. and the dormitory discussion sessions owe their origins to the trailblazing efforts of dedicated public servants like Broadway. The weighty social issues she deals with on a daily basis take an exhausting toll. At the same time, Broadway realizes that her efforts will be no less challenging in the future.
Since she has to plan meetings around the schedules of others, most dialogues take place outside of normal business hours. Broadway generally starts her day at around a quarter to 8 each morning and then works on various projects throughout the day. With most meetings normally planned after five, she often doesn't get home until after 9 p.m., when she can finally spend time with her husband, Phil, or visit her two grown children, Brendan and Vanessa. Every now and then she'll try and make the occasional trip back to Chicago to visit her mother Ellen, who still resides in that same house in South Holland where they once lived together.
When Broadway is tired, she need only remember her own words and the profound impact they've had on others.
"By talking and expressing our true feelings with each other, we realize that we're all not so much different as we are the same," Broadway said.
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