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The Daily OrangeBeth Broadway: Local leader works to break down ethnic. economic barriers
By Brian Baxter
Posted: 4/10/06, 11:24 PM EST Section: Pulp
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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.
