OGDEN — Through the 1940s and 1950s, the black community in and around Ogden expanded due to job opportunities related to the railroad and Hill Air Force Base. But for many years now, the African-American portion of the state’s population has languished, hovering somewhere between 1 and 2 percent.
Why has it failed to flourish and grow?
“I have a lot of assumptions, but can’t prove what I’ve experienced,” Rev. Stanley Ellington, former president of the Ogden Branch NAACP, said by phone recently. “You’ve got a higher migration into the state versus population growth in African-Americans that are here in the community. Those are two different dynamics.”
Ellington believes many blacks born and raised in the Ogden area get educated and apply for jobs but don’t get a fair shake in the hiring process.
“There’s a special network in the state of Utah — and if you’re not part of that network, it makes it more difficult,” Ellington said.
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Ellington, a Layton resident and associate minister for the True Vine Baptist Church in Kaysville, said the U.S. Air Force brought him to Utah in 2000, and two years later he retired and proceeded to put down roots. He finished his bachelor’s degree in administrative management, earned a master’s degree in management and is now working on a doctorate in organizational leadership. At 61, he still pursues his dreams.
Ellington said he’s encouraged by discussions taking place in Salt Lake City and Ogden — two of the state’s more diverse metropolitan areas.
“Having a better understanding about different ethnic groups and their culture is important — not being so closed-minded — and that’s on both sides,” Ellington said. “Weber State University is doing a lot to have conversations about race, which helps break down those barriers. We’re making progress, but there’s much more that needs to be done.”
SYSTEMIC BIAS
According to “African Americans in Utah” written by Ronald Coleman for the online Utah History Encyclopedia, blacks in Utah have battled the same racial prejudices mirrored throughout the nation but also dealt with a long-held practice in the LDS church that prevented them from holding the priesthood.
Mormon leaders eliminated that prohibition in 1978, but racial biases still linger both in Utah and across the U.S. According to the LDS Church website, its structure and organization now encourage racial integration because God esteems all races and ethnicities equally. Its explanation of Race and the Priesthood also points out that it wasn’t until 1967 that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down laws banning interracial marriage.
“Some scholars have suggested that the discrimination against African-Americans in Utah was greatly influenced by the development of a policy which denied Mormon black males the priesthood,” Coleman wrote, describing job opportunities for blacks as generally limited, “and this influenced the decision of many young blacks to relocate outside of the state. The departure of a number of college-educated blacks eroded the potential leadership pool of blacks who were native born or raised in Utah.”
As of 2016, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that 241,328 people live in Weber County, of whom 2,610 (1.1 percent) are black, another 1,422 identified as a mix of white and black, and 196 said they were a combination of black and Native American or Alaskan Indian.
The Economic Policy Institute tracks unemployment rates by race, but Utah’s sample size for blacks was too small to register.
LEAVING UTAH BEHIND
“We’re all family-centered, so you definitely want your kids and grandkids close by,” said longtime Ogden resident Betty Sawyer, now in her third round as president of Ogden’s NAACP chapter. “It has definitely been a challenge for young black professionals staying in Utah. We do have quite a few of our families whose children went out of state to find a good job that paid good wages and was in their field.”
Sawyer, originally from Maryland, headed west with her sister more than four decades ago after graduating from college because “I’d always wanted to touch the Pacific Ocean.” After settling in Utah, she said it took her a couple of weeks to see the next black person. But she and her husband, Butch, have raised four sons, all college educated and now in their late 20s and 30s — two still live here, while the other two have moved out of state.
Story continues below photo.
BENJAMIN ZACK/Standard-Examiner
Betty Sawyer helps her granddaughter, Jaelyn Sawyer, left, and Brock James, right, read a card about prominent individuals throughout Black history at the Community Kwanzaa Celebration at Second Baptist Church in Ogden on Dec. 27, 2017. This was the 13th annual Ogden event celebrating African and African-American culture and communities.
“We enjoy the openness, cleanliness, safety that others enjoy, along with the mountains and natural beauty of the state,” Betty Sawyer said. “But on a social and cultural level, we’ve had challenges — which led us to build community in Utah because of our small numbers and how we’d been dispersed.”
Part of that challenging journey began in the Ogden City schools.
“We had to work with the school system to make sure our children were respected and treated fairly over the years. My kids were usually the only one or one of a very few in their school or classroom, so I knew we were dealing with educators who had not been working with black children and definitely not black males,” Betty Sawyer said. “We supported them and the educators as well — we were in this together.”
Getting hired into jobs that matched their education and abilities also proved difficult, due to what Sawyer described as an “invisible barrier.”
“It’s easy for folks to want to hire people they know and who look like them. A lot of folks in the position to hire may have been someone’s primary teacher or in their ward … for different reasons they may hire someone they feel more comfortable with, saying ‘they’re a good fit,’” Sawyer said.
UNEQUAL TREATMENT IN SCHOOL
A May 2017 report “Misbehavior or Misdemeanor?” — written by Voices for Utah Children and edited by University of Utah’s College of Law Public Policy Clinic — described Utah’s School to Prison Pipeline — another facet of systemic bias documented in Utah and throughout the U.S. That report shared data for the 2011-2012 and 2013-2014 school years that indicated students of color were more than twice as likely to be disciplined for misbehavior as their white counterparts. And blacks were four times more likely to get suspended.
Students suspended once in the ninth grade were twice as likely to drop out of school before graduating — and five times more likely if suspended three or more times by the 10th grade.
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Data for the 2013-2014 school year showed that in the Weber School District, black students were 7.5 times more likely to receive a disciplinary action than white classmates, and in Davis, 5.9 times more likely. The Ogden School District’s rate was 3.1.
High school graduation rates for blacks in Utah rose from 61 percent in 2011 to 68 percent by 2015 — still the lowest for all measured demographics.
STEPS TOWARD INCLUSION
By email, Ogden School District spokesman Jer Bates said discipline policies are enforced equitably across all schools and grade levels — regardless of ethnicity, race or gender.
“The district utilizes a team of specialists that reviews our discipline data on a regular basis and makes system refinements,” Bates said, adding that it also maintains ongoing communication with the NAACP regarding district discipline, behavior systems and best practices.
The Weber School District formed an Equity and Inclusion committee at the start of this school year to identify issues of racism and inclusion.
“We’re hoping it will help shed light on things we’ve been seeing and steer us in the right direction,” Weber School District spokesman Lane Findlay said. “The idea is to bring in people with diverse backgrounds and all come together to do what’s in the best interest of our students.”
Last September, the Ogden Police Department launched a concerted effort to hire more minorities, offering training sessions to help candidates prepare for tests and interviews.
“The biggest problem for us is that we don’t even get members from the black community applying. It’s rare,” Ogden Police Chief Randy Watt said. “We do quite a bit of outreach and ask them to help us find candidates, but it seems difficult to make that happen.”
Of 32 applicants last fall, 17 took the test, 10 passed and seven were hired. “Three failed the background check,” Watt said, calling it the “huge separator.”
But Watt believes hiring minorities would be beneficial. “We’d gain more diversity and better interaction in some communities where they’d feel more included in our law enforcement efforts,” he said.
RELATED: Ogden police chief candidate pledges to beef up, diversify department
Ogden Mayor Mike Caldwell says hiring people of color is a priority.
“We hired a diversity coordinator, Viviana Felix” — who is Hispanic and bilingual,” Caldwell said, noting that she works closely with their Human Resource Director Shawn Choate in providing diversity training. And the city also established a nine-member Diversity Commission to gather recommendations and hear from more sectors of the community.
“We’ve made more progress in the last few years. Diversity is in Ogden’s DNA,” Caldwell said. “I feel all kinds of empathy for people who are told they won’t be a good fit. We look at qualifications only to arrange interviews, and I can’t imagine that anyone would say, based on gender or ethnic background, that someone wouldn’t be a good fit. We have zero tolerance for that, and would put it in front of legal if we found out it was happening.”
Weber County Administrative Services Director Sarah Swan said she faces the same problem as Watt in terms of very few black and minority applicants.
“We’re not getting diversity within the applicant pool,” Swan said, despite posting job openings at the Ogden-Weber Community Action Partnership, the Department of Workforce Services and Weber State University. “So our challenge is how do we attract a diverse workforce and why are we not getting those applicants.”
Since Swan hired in spring 2017, the county revamped hiring policies to eliminate direct supervision of an employee by a family member. And in an effort to combat cronyism, she also hired two human resource “generalists” who sit in on job interviews and help rank job candidates according to their qualifications.
“Studies show that managers typically hire people of similar backgrounds, so the challenge is to train them to think outside the box. A diverse workforce is healthy,” Swan said.
Contact reporter Cathy McKitrick at 801-625-4214 or cmckitrick@standard.net. Follow her on Twitter at @catmck.
