A vigil held in downtown Peoria Sunday centered on dissolving the social boundaries that segregate the community.
Human rights groups organized the peaceful rally in Liberty Park in response to last week’s shootings in Baton Rouge, St. Paul and Dallas.
Marcus Fogliano, president of Peoria Proud, helped organize the event.
Fogliano praised the Peoria Police Department but says especially given Peoria’s segregation, the city is just as likely as anywhere else.
“Peoria’s also on the edge. It takes one incident like it has happened around the country,” Fogliano said. “If we’re having these conversations before it happens, hopefully it will never happen.”
Fogliano opened yesterday’s vigil encouraging attendees to talk with a stranger of another race for 10 minutes.
The forced interaction was awkward for some -- but not for Commanda Jones. She says that’s due in part to growing up in a biracial household and raising her daughter, who identifies as Asian and black.
“So I mean I’m always around, a mix race, my family is a mixed race," Jones said. "I never had that problem of trying to get along with different races. And that all starts at a very young age.”
Jones was speaking with a man, in his fifties, wearing plaid and khakis:
“I’m Rick Fox..Not the Famous Rick Fox..[giggles]”
Fox says this sort of interaction would have been awkward for him 20 years ago -- when he was living in a homogenous, rural town in Iowa. But he says, since living in Peoria, he’s opened up more.
“My boss is African American, and I’ve had a chance to work with folks and deal more closely, where I didn’t in the past,” Fox said.
Fox and Jones both say this is part of the problem in cities across the country -- a lack of understanding and on a basic level, interaction:
“A lot of people just don’t feel comfortable stepping out, it’s very sort of segregated," Fox said.
"Especially if they live in their own and that’s just not part of their norm,” Jones said.
About 100 people “stepped out” to attend Sunday’s vigil. Tionna Jackson, a psych major at Illinois Wesleyan, quietly observed the crowd from the side.
“There’s just so much hatred going around, and then like, shooting the police, made everyone up in arms, and they started calling Black Lives Matter a hate group, so it just brought a lot of negative attention,” Jackson said.
She says the shootings last week left her feeling hopeless.
“It was really upsetting, and kind of disappointing that we’re not in a better place, as a country,” Jackson said.
But Jackson says she’s hopeful that peaceful protests and gatherings like these will continue to bring awareness and keep people talking.
2010 Census Data shows Peoria ranks 23rd in the nation for metro areas with high dissimilarities between whites and blacks. The ranking is calculated by measuring population density and exposure between racial and ethnic groups.