By Jason McFarley, Truth Staff
ELKHART -- If black and Hispanic residents were going to forge a bond, it would likely occur on the city's south side, in the working-class neighborhoods where Elkhart's two largest minority groups are most interspersed.
They live next door to each other here, go to school together and own businesses on the same corner.
But they largely lead separate lives, say some neighbors who pay attention to relations between the groups.
"I had always wished there would be a strong relationship between Hispanics and African Americans," said Juard Barnes, a south-side pastor and community activist who is black. "I'm not sure we have the relationship that either group is interested in right now.
"Somewhere along the line we looked at one another and didn't trust one another," he said.
Clarence Thomas suspects that attitude might be changing, particularly among children such as the ones he supervises at Tolson Center.
Most students who attend the city-run youth center are black, but Thomas estimates that Hispanics have slowly grown to comprise about 10 percent of Tolson users. He's encouraged by the friendships he has seen blossom between kids from both cultures.
"The younger kids -- the less time they've had to have ignorance put into their minds, the better they get along," said Thomas, who is black.
Hispanic children and their parents are particularly drawn to soccer and health screenings that the center offers, though Thomas thinks a level of mistrust prevents more Hispanic families from turning out.
"It'll happen over the course of some years," Thomas said of Hispanic families feeling more at ease with the center. "I think Tolson has a comfort level among black families. We just try to keep the door open and let them know this center is for everybody."
Barnes hopes such a spirit of inclusion will eventually exist throughout the community.
He wonders if in their struggles to gain ground socially and economically, perhaps blacks and Hispanics have missed chances to connect with each other.
"We may have more in common than we think, but when you talk about issues of minorities in America, black people have a strong sense of entitlement," Barnes said. "We're the ones that died in cotton fields, the wars and struggles in the '60s, and we sense that it looks like we thought it was just about to be our time and all of a sudden -- boom -- it wasn't.
"And now a huge portion of attention has been turned to another group of people who we're not sure earned that."
Both sides could stand to learn more about each other, Barnes said. He thinks cultural exchanges would help foster understanding about the challenges both races face.
"Their civil rights movement will never cost them what ours cost us, but ours paved the way for any group coming to America to have those rights," Barnes said. "I think they should know that that's what happened in America and we went through it."
For his part, Thomas, the youth center director, said there's a lot to for blacks to admire about Hispanics as well.
"Generally speaking, the thing that I appreciate about their culture is they are very familial. They do everything as a family," Thomas said.