Economic gaps persist for Blacks | News

When Astria Campbell works as a substitute teacher at inner-city schools in District 186, she often asks her middle and high school students what they want to be when they grow up. The most common answer is to work in the same low-wage jobs as their parents.

Campbell, 42, who grew up in a working-class family in the Chicago area and has lived in Springfield for the past 21 years, isn’t surprised when she gets that response because of the despair and lack of economic movement the children see in their families and neighborhoods.

“This is all that they see,” she said.

Campbell, whose husband, Jerry Brown Sr., 45, earns slightly more than the $15-per-hour minimum wage working full time as head of maintenance for a fast-food restaurant, said she aspires for her family to someday enter the middle class.

Campbell is a full-time student at University of Illinois Springfield and plans to graduate in spring 2026 with a bachelor’s degree in education so she can teach middle school social science and special education in District 186.

She and her husband want their four sons, ranging in age from 4 to 18, to face fewer economic hardships.

“I’m hoping I can be a role model for them and in the neighborhood,” Campbell said. “My hopes are that we’ll be able to build generational wealth. … I’m hoping that once I get through with school that this will create a better way for me and my family, and we’ll just be able to go as far as the world can take us.”

The trends Campbell hopes to buck have been hard to alter for Black people in the Springfield area, where Black people make up 12%, or about 24,700, of the county’s population of 195,200 and almost 20%, or 22,500, of Springfield’s population of 113,700.

Black residents are concentrated in neighborhoods on the city of Springfield’s east and north sides, where they make up between one-third and three-fourths of residents in some Census tracts. Those neighborhoods have some of Sangamon County’s highest poverty rates – between 30% and 50%.

The Springfield area’s status among the top third most segregated U.S. metropolitan areas between Blacks and whites helps to fuel economic gaps that have persisted for decades here and across the nation, experts say.

Those trends, and the fact that the Springfield area posts some of the nation’s biggest racial disparities, were highlighted in a January 2019 Governing magazine investigative series, “Segregated in the Heartland.”

Illinois Times revisited the U.S. Census Bureau data upon which the Governing series was based and compared it to the most recent statistics. IT found that economic gaps between Blacks and whites in the Springfield area have remained about the same and, in some instances, have gotten worse.

It’s unclear exactly why. Some observers attributed the negative changes to the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. But Springfield also lost ground to other similar size or larger areas in downstate Illinois and the Chicago area.

The comparisons are drawn from 2023 American Community Survey (ACS) results that are based on data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau from 2019 through 2023, and 2017 ACS results that were based on surveys conducted from 2013 through 2017.

The Illinois Times and Governing stories used five-year ACS data because of the lower margins of error associated with the five-year collection periods than from ACS data covering one-year or three-year periods.

Poverty

In 2023, the Springfield metro area posted the highest Black poverty rate in Illinois – 40.3% – and the fourth-highest Black poverty rate among more than 240 other metro areas in the United States with 10,000 or more Black residents. Springfield’s metro area includes all of Sangamon and Menard counties.

In 2017, Springfield metro’s Black poverty rate was 40.8% – the highest in the state, and the 11th highest in the country. The Black poverty rate dropped by less than one percentage point in Springfield between 2017 and 2023. It dropped by larger amounts in the Bloomington, Champaign, Chicago, Peoria, Rockford and Kankakee metro areas, as well as statewide and nationwide.

The gap between Black and white poverty rates in the Springfield area actually increased by one-third. In 2017, the Black rate was 3.7 times higher than the white rate, but it was 4.8 times higher in 2023 because the white poverty rate dropped from 11% in 2017 to 8.28% in 2023.

Median household income

The gap between median annual income for Black households ($33,112) and white households ($80,191) in the Springfield metro area was the second-largest in the country in 2023 for areas with 5,000 or more Black households. Black median household income in the Springfield area was almost 59% lower than median household income for whites.

Springfield’s gap was exceeded only by the gap between Black and white household income in the Bloomington metro area.

In 2017, Springfield was No. 1 in the nation when it came to the racial gap in median household income. At that time, black median household income in Springfield was 58% lower than for white households.

When adjusted for inflation, Springfield’s Black median household income in 2023 was actually $23 lower than in 2017. In contrast, white households experienced an inflation-adjusted gain of $1,135, or 1.4%, in median household income between 2017 and 2023.

Inflation-adjusted Black median household income dropped more than $4,000 annually in Bloomington, while Peoria’s Black median household income of $34,903 amounted to a $37 annual drop from 2017.

Meanwhile, inflation-adjusted Black median household income in the Decatur area rose by more than $6,400, or 21%, between 2017 and 2023. Black household income rose by more than $5,100, or 11%, in the Chicago area, and by almost $3,300, or 8.6% in Champaign-Urbana, while remaining about the same in the Rockford area.

Unemployment

In 2023, the Springfield metro area posted the third-highest gap in the nation between the Black unemployment rate (15.3%) and the white rate (3%) in areas with 10,000 or more Black residents, and the third-highest overall Black unemployment rate.

The Decatur area reported the highest Black unemployment rate in both the state and the country (17.3%) in 2023. Statewide, Rockford (15.5%) and Springfield had the second and third-highest rates, respectively.

Springfield’s Black unemployment rate dropped 6.7% between 2017 and 2023, while the white unemployment rate dropped by about 30%.

Springfield’s gap in 2017 between the Black unemployment rate (16.4%) and the white rate (5.4%) was approximately the 20th highest in the country.

Segregation

In 2017, the Peoria area had the sixth-highest level of residential segregation of any metro area in the country. That year, the Springfield, Kankakee and Rockford areas, as well as Peoria, were among the top third most segregated metro areas when it comes to Blacks and whites. In 2023, all of those downstate areas, in addition to the Chicago area, remained among the top third most segregated areas.

“A shared vision for equity and lasting impact” U.S. Rep. Nikki Budzinski, D-Springfield, called the latest statistics “pretty eye-opening.”

Dominic Watson, president of The Springfield Project and the Springfield Black Chamber of Commerce, said the findings were “not surprising by any means” and “further validate” what Black leaders in Springfield have been saying for decades.

The Springfield Project launched CAP 1908, which focuses on minority entrepreneurial, business-related programming at its headquarters in the 1100 block of South Grand Avenue East. The organization was recently awarded $1.6 million in federal funding, and the Springfield City Council approved a $500,000 allocation from the Far East Tax Increment Financing District, to expand these services.

But Watson said more money will be needed to fund and sustain those efforts and others by other social-service organizations to reduce competition among nonprofits, reduce economic, transportation, housing, and health disparities and improve the quality of life for residents of the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods.

“There’s often sort of a scattered approach to addressing social and economic issues in our community,” he said. “There’s really no collaboration or comprehensive plan. Oftentimes, the resources are very, very scarce. … It doesn’t help us be successful in delivering services on a consistent basis.

“There needs to be more of a comprehensive plan that delivers those resources and brings all the organizations together,” Watson said. “Without a unified strategy and consistent investment, we’ll continue to fall short. That’s why The Springfield Project is working to lead a coordinated, citywide effort, one that brings together government, nonprofits and business leaders around a shared vision for equity and lasting impact.”

Marcus Johnson, president and chief executive officer of the Springfield Urban League, said the latest disparity measures were “heartbreaking” but not surprising because they reflect “decades of disinvestment” and a lack of a sustained focus by the community to address the problem.

More than 80% of the Springfield Urban League’s $12.7 million in annual revenues comes from the federal government to support Head Start and other anti-poverty programs for hundreds of children and adults.

“I don’t think the broader community understands how hard it is to move the needle,” he said. “But we have seen the needle move in individual lives.”

Teresa Haley, a community activist and former president of the Springfield NAACP branch, said increased funding from all government sources is essential.

“You have to give people an opportunity,” she said. “They feed us breadcrumbs and we’re supposed to survive.”

Proposed cuts in federal funding by the Trump administration and congressional Republicans for Head Start, Medicaid and other programs that serve low-income people are the newest concern for Johnson and other local advocates for the poor.

“Practices of racial exclusion and disinvestment”

Johnson said the July 2024 fatal shooting of Sonya Massey, 32, a low-income Black woman who was dealing with mental health concerns, at the hands of a white Sangamon County sheriff’s deputy inside Massey’s modest home just outside Springfield’s southern border, once again drew attention to disparities in the community.

“It makes it harder for us to look away,” he said.

The Massey Commission, the citizen-led group formed to study and make recommendations addressing systemic racism and mistrust in police in the wake of Massey’s death, formed a workgroup that is looking at racial disparities. That discussion will be helpful, Johnson said, and he hopes it leads to “other conversations” in the community.

Ryan McCrady, president and CEO of the Springfield Sangamon Growth Alliance, said the economic development group is pushing to expand the number of jobs that pay a livable wage.

He pointed to the ongoing construction of an Amazon distribution center on Springfield’s north side and the potential development of a Frito-Lay distribution warehouse on the south side – both near Interstate 55 – as positive news for Springfield. The projects would lead to several hundred new jobs, based on estimates.

But McCrady added, “It’s going to take some time to improve the disparities. I’m disappointed that it’s continuing to go in the wrong direction … This is a big problem that’s going to benefit from a focused review.”

Steven Durlauf, an economics professor and director of the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility at the University of Chicago, was not surprised by the latest statistics on disparities.

He said he “wouldn’t read much into the fact” that Springfield’s numbers and rankings changed slightly. The main takeaway, he said, is that the disparities haven’t changed, and research shows that segregated neighborhoods are major reasons disparities exist and persist.

“By looking at pre- and post-COVID, I don’t think there are good reasons to have expected that there would be any particular improvements in the status of African Americans, either in the state of Illinois or the metros you looked at or in the United States as a whole,” Durlauf said. “And the reason I say that is the source of the disparities between Blacks and whites, I think, are associated with structural issues.”

Durlauf agreed with others that institutional racism and government policies, some of them now illegal, resulted in the millions of Black people who migrated from the rural South to industrial areas in the Midwest and Northeast being prohibited from owning, leasing or occupying homes in certain neighborhoods.

Concentrating people in neighborhoods when they already faced racism as a challenge in the job market led, in many cases, to Black children attending substandard schools and financially strapped school districts, and a lack of exposure to good role models and positive paths in life, Durlauf said.

The nonprofit Urban Institute, in an analysis of the cause of “separate and unequal neighborhoods,” says these “practices of racial exclusion and disinvestment” also left Blacks and other people of color with “inadequate services, physical and environmental blight, and high levels of crime and violence.”

The inequities, Durlauf said, “become self-reinforcing because you need people who are doing well to communicate information to the rest of their network about opportunities.”

Research has shown the most successful interventions to promote long-term economic success for individuals and reduce racial disparities include intensive early childhood education programs and increased spending on public K-12 education, Durlauf said.

He said it’s unfortunate that there’s so much skepticism that such spending hasn’t worked in the past and won’t work in the future. He faulted former President Ronald Reagan, who served from 1981 to 1989, for “creating the assumption that taxes are wasted, and so, for the last 45 years it’s been extraordinarily difficult to have a conversation about costs and benefits.”

Need resources to support students

District 186 serves a 12,800-student population that is at least 45% Black and 63% low-income. The district is doing what it can to set students up for success later in life, district Superintendent Jennifer Gill said.

“One focus that we have moved to is making sure that every student has a clear plan when they leave us of what they’re going to do in their next steps, whether it’s college, trade school, military or whatever that might be,” she said.

“That transition in life from high school to your next step might be the most, the largest determinant, of whether you’re ready to go out there in the world and get a job that’s going to pay more than just the minimum wage, which is what we want kids to have the opportunity to do,” she said.

Gill pointed to the three-year-old construction trades program at Lanphier High School as creating an easier path for students interested in union apprenticeships and the building trades.

The program is available to all District 186 students and was made possible by the building renovation program funded by the district’s share of the countywide 1% sales tax increase approved by voters in 2018, Gill said.

The district’s efforts to make career paths easier and more efficient for students to navigate also include the health professions academy at Southeast High School, Project SEARCH work program at Memorial Health for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and collaboration with Capital Area Career Center, she said.

With an annual budget of about $282 million, the district tries to meet the many academic, financial and mental health needs of its students and could use more money, Gill said.

“I can do things when I have the right amount of resources to support students, and I can do good things when there’s fewer strings and districts can be creative with the money,” she said.

District 186 students benefited from about $40 million in federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding designed to improve instruction and address learning loss associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, she said.

“The ESSER funding made it feel for the first time in my career that I had the right amount of money, or maybe even a little too much,” Gill said. The additional funding ended in fall 2024, and the loss “hasn’t felt very good,” she said.

The state’s “evidence-based funding formula,” adopted in 2017, resulted in about $1 million per year in additional state funding for the district, Gill said.

But the district, with an annual budget of $282 million, gets about 40% of its money from state and federal sources. The rest comes from local sources – including about $130 million from property taxes.

Gill said the district is hamstrung by its dependence on property taxes, a relatively static revenue stream. It’s unlikely voters would approve a property tax increase for instruction, so pushing to get one passed would be a waste of time, she said.

The district also faces an unusual challenge among urban districts in Illinois.

Because of all the state-owned buildings and state association headquarters in the capital city, and because Springfield is home to two large, regional nonprofit hospitals, 40% of properties in District 186 are exempt from property taxes. The share of property that’s tax-exempt is more than double the average in most urban school districts, Gill said.

Springfield Ward 7 Ald. Brad Carlson said he wants the city to investigate ways that the state could reimburse local taxing bodies for the lost revenue associated with state-owned property through “payments in lieu of taxes,” or PILOT, in an arrangement similar to what city-owned City Water, Light & Power contributes each year to the city budget.

At least nine states – including Kentucky, Michigan and Minnesota – make payments in lieu of taxes for state-owned property, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

State Rep. Mike Coffey, R-Springfield, in February introduced House Bill 3209, which would create a $100 million pilot program to award municipalities that apply for reimbursement for revenue loss associated with tax-exempt state properties.

It’s unclear whether the legislation, which hasn’t received any hearings or votes in the Democratic-controlled General Assembly, would benefit school districts. Coffey said he was hoping for the bill to generate more state funds for downtown Springfield development.

“A fight every step of the way”

Springfield Mayor Misty Buscher said moving people to higher-paying jobs and increasing homeownership are top priorities of her administration.

“This was clearly something on my mind as I ran for office because our poverty rates are higher in our city than they are in the state and higher than the national average,” she said. “On May 5, I will have been the mayor two years, but it is something that we’ve been trying to focus on in this administration. It is a problem that took a long time to create, and it’s not going to be wiped away in one year.”

City officials said they are working with trade unions to attract more minority applicants for apprenticeships. Expertise in the building trades is “a great way to own your own business and be your own boss,” said Ethan Posey, the city’s director of community relations.

Aaron Gurnsey, business manager of Plumbers, Steamfitters and HVRAC Techs Local 137 and president of the Central Illinois Building and Construction Trades Council, said the Lanphier program will help trade unions attract more minority workers to join union apprenticeship programs.

Unionized construction workers can earn between $65,000 and $120,000 per year, and that pay is separate from the cost of health insurance, Gurnsey said. Premiums for health benefits typically are covered 100% by employers, he said.

Many trade unions acknowledge their history of being less than welcoming toward minorities, and they are trying to change, he said.

“It was an old white boys’ country club,” Gurnsey said. “We are changing the culture here. … It’s really amped up over the past five years, which is a good thing.”

The city also is trying to increase the number of Black people on the city’s workforce, Posey said.

Buscher and city purchasing agent J. Michael Lesko said they are working to upgrade computer systems, and potentially propose an ordinance for City Council approval, to promote the hiring of more Black workers on city-funded building projects and more easily track how many minorities get jobs through those contracts.

Amy Rasing, the city’s director of planning and economic development, said the city received a $400,000 “ReCompete” grant from the federal government in 2023. The grant is paying for planning to revitalize Springfield’s poorest neighborhoods and expand successful training programs such as Lincoln Land Community College’s Workforce Equity Initiative and Highway Construction Careers Training Program.

Amy Rasing, the city’s director of planning and economic development, said the city received a $453,320 “ReCompete” grant from the federal government in February 2023 to develop a plan to “close the prime-age employment gap” for Springfield census tracts most affected by poverty and unemployment.

Springfield’s ReCompete coordinator, Keyria Rodgers, said a series of community meetings, along with interviews and surveys of local agencies and groups have taken place over the past year.

“A professional consulting agency is working with us to analyze the data to create an action plan and policy briefs to inform next steps,” Rodgers said. “The work is ongoing, and our outcome action plan is due when the grant expires in January 2026.”

Rasing said: “We are seeing notable indicators of what initiatives and programs could most benefit from implementation funding, such as the potential expansion of specialized workforce development training programs, job creation, minority small business development and supporting and creating solutions to address the barriers such as childcare services, housing and transportation.”

Rasing said it’s unclear whether the Trump administration would continue to fund the program and allow the city to apply for a multimillion-dollar ReCompete implementation grant.

Regardless, she said, “The work we are doing will provide valuable information the city needs, and we can seek additional funding and strategies to put the plans into action.”

Ward 2 Ald. Shawn Gregory, whose ward includes large sections of the east side, said he has been gratified to see Black-owned businesses benefit from part of the city’s share of cannabis sales tax revenue and other city programs.

But he said he wants to see a more cooperative and trusting attitude from his fellow City Council members and city officials in funding initiatives that promote youth programs and business assistance for Blacks.

“It has been a fight every step of the way,” Gregory said.

And he has called upon the Growth Alliance to focus more of its efforts on the east and north sides of Springfield.

Gregory spearheaded an amendment to a city ordinance that recently passed the City Council unanimously and requires $50,000 of the city’s annual $250,000 contribution to the Growth Alliance to be spent on a proposed new council within the alliance to prioritize and promote “inclusive economic growth and development in historically underserved areas of Springfield.”

The Growth Alliance’s board is considering whether to accept the amended funding agreement.

Gregory also has called for more diversity on the alliance’s board. Two of the alliance’s 28 board members are Black; the rest are white.

“Many of our systems and policies within the government have to be closely examined and changed, just like what we do here at City Council,” Gregory said. “I think it is important for governmental bodies like the city of Springfield to make sure that we are breaking any barriers that we see from the historical system of racism that we all know about and that we all talk about.

“There’s a lot of good, positive energy in our community, and we need to meet that energy within city government,” he said.

Budzinski, the Springfield-based member of Congress, said she was proud to push for former President Joe Biden’s designation of one-and-a-half acres of land in Springfield for a future National Monument site commemorating the 1908 Race Riot, and for federal money to complete railroad relocation that she said will help connect disadvantaged neighborhoods to the rest of the city.

Budzinski said economic disparities faced by Black people show that present-day Springfield remains linked to the 1908 Race riot in which Black people were killed and Black-owned homes and businesses were burned to the ground by white people.

“The remnants of that are still reverberating through the community today,” she said.

Illinois Times reporter Logan Bricker contributed to this story. Dean Olsen is a senior staff writer with Illinois Times. He can be reached at [email protected] or 217-836-1068.

This article is part of the Healing Illinois 2025 Reporting Project, “Healing Through Narrative Change: Untold Stories,” made possible by a grant from Healing Illinois, an initiative of the Illinois Department of Human Services and the Field Foundation of Illinois that seeks to advance racial healing through storytelling and community collaborations.

After a recent central Illinois case that gained national media attention, prompting almost-daily protests, this project sought to engage diverse rural communities with information that brings neighbors together and moves us forward.

Managed by Press Forward Springfield, this project enlisted three central Illinois media outlets to produce impactful news coverage on the disparities and tensions within and among the region’s diverse communities while maintaining editorial independence.