Dixie Land

But that’s exactly what Dixie hopes to do sometime later this year. The executive director of and driving force behind Jubilee Homes and the Southwest Economic Business Resource Center plans to open a grocery store on South Avenue, filling a need for jobs, healthy food and revitalization in the largely African-American neighborhood just southwest of downtown, a community he has served for decades.

Likewise, when he worked on the presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson in 1984, Dixie wouldn’t have pictured himself standing behind newly elected Mayor Stephanie Miner on election night 2009. But there he was, delighted to have helped in the campaign of the city’s first female mayor.

Activism for Dixie has evolved from being part of the generation that integrated the Syracuse City Schools and marched against racial discrimination to building affordable housing and focusing on homegrown economic development for the South Side. Along the way he has become a political force to be reckoned with. Candidates for Congress, statewide office and City Hall all beat a path to Dixie’s door as they seek to rally minority support for their campaigns.

Walt Dixie was born in Pioneer Homes, “some of the finest public housing in the country,” he says, where 600 people live in the quadrant bordered by Townsend and Adams streets directly west of Interstate 81. He is the oldest of 12 boys born to Walter and Delores Dixie. He now heads a housing corporation that has rebuilt 90 homes, an economic development center that assists small businesses, and a political operation that has helped put Syracuse’s two most recent mayors in City Hall.

“My family were all activists,” says Dixie. “It’s been around me forever. I was in the first class of students bused into Grant School. We grew up in the People’s AME Zion Church, with Rev. Cheeks. My aunt is {community activist} Geneva Hayden. My mother and my cousins were involved in Upward Bound back in the 1970s,” he says, referring to a federally funded program that supported urban youth seeking to go to college.

The supermarket effort is stamped with the Dixie style of grass-roots organizing. Dixie has been trying to recruit 3,000 “shoppers club” members to sign up to shop at the market, which shares a neighborhood with some of Syracuse’s most dilapidated homes, yet is within walking distance of downtown and Strathmore. The neighborhood is the same area Dixie has been working to transform since graduating from Ithaca College in the late 1970s with a degree in political science. In all these years, in good times and bad, few individuals have been as persistent, as active and as relentlessly positive as the 54-year-old Dixie.

“I met Walter during the Rainbow Coalition days,” says the Rev. Larry Howard, who helped form Jubilee Homes in 1987. Howard was the longtime pastor of People’s AME Zion Church, 2306 S. Salina St., and a force in the African-American community for decades before moving to Colorado, where he now serves as pastor at a Methodist church in Colorado Springs.

Howard and other area clergy formed a not-for-profit corporation called Time of Jubilee, and began building homes in the neighborhood. The group later became Jubilee Homes, and has built or renovated nearly 90 houses. Jubilee, with offices at 901 Tallman St., also sponsors Youth Build, a project to train young people in the construction trades while they complete their General Equivalency Diplomas (GEDs).

The man with a plan: Dixie walks past the site of many houses built by Time of Jubilee; another Jubilee project is Youth Build, which gives teens (below) training in the construction trades while preparing them for a GED. MICHAEL DAVIS PHOTOS

Howard was one of a number of clergy, black and white, who have served as mentors to Dixie over the course of his career. Dixie doesn’t talk much about his faith, but his passion for change has a distinctly gospel cadence.

“He was a young lad out of college, didn’t wear suits and ties, an impatient man with a lot of energy,” recalls Howard. “We worked with him. I tried to share with him what I had picked up in the 1960s working with people like Julian Bond, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Harry Belafonte. He listened. With his energy, he’s been able to do many things.”

Live Wire

“Energetic” is a word everybody uses to describe Dixie. His staff at the Southwest Business Resource Center, 500 W. Onondaga St., knows who is on the other end of the line when the phone rings at 5 a.m. Dixie is a perpetual motion machine, moving through his day spewing ideas, offering commentary and solving problems.

Dixie can’t sit still. Literally. Put him in a chair and within minutes he starts to swivel and look around, and his knees start to pump up and down. There is no such thing as an interruption for the man whose days begin early, and who says he has no hobbies, no pastimes, no interests outside his community work. He’s one of those people that makes you wonder how he managed in the days before cell phones.

“I could not get him to go bowling,” says Howard. “I could not get him to go to the movies.” The activist does indulge one of his pleasures, says the minister: gospel music. “He won’t admit it out loud, but he really loves good gospel,” says Howard. “He will sneak off and really enjoy good gospel music.”

Dixie is at the same time a novelty and a throwback to an earlier era. He hands out jobs and favors like an old-fashioned ward heeler, and is developing a new model of community leadership for the Age of Obama. He plays a role similar to clergy, finding jobs and even homes for people in need. His business development center has been called a Chamber of Commerce for minority- and women-owned businesses.

On a recent Sunday he accompanied U.S. Senate hopeful Harold Ford, a Democrat, on a visit to Syracuse while the Tennessee native met with Miner, neighbors at the Southwest Community Center and leaders in the Hispanic community. Later in the week he escorted state Sen. David Valesky on a tour of the neighborhood. When his phone rings it is as likely to be the governor as it is a neighbor about to be evicted.

Later in the week he moved on to New York City, home to another of his mentors, the Rev. Al Sharpton. One of his many hats is serving as local head of the National Action Network, Sharpton’s social action arm. In that capacity he has led campaigns for minority hiring in the police department and other city agencies, fought housing discrimination, and rallied the community in response to racially charged events such as the Jena Six conviction and the menacing placement of a noose in the locker of a black county employee in 2008. Jena Six was a local 2006 case in which a half-dozen black teens were charged as adults with attempted murder in the beating of a white classmate.

Dixie says he has learned a great deal from Sharpton as well as other African-American leaders at the state and national level. “Bill Lynch, who was {New York City} Mayor David Dinkins’ deputy mayor, told me that when Mario Cuomo first got elected governor, we finally had a seat at the table. We were so happy to be at the table that we didn’t realize we were at the wrong table.

“We’ve had three administrations in Syracuse trying to figure out how to do economic development in our community. The beauty of this {the supermarket initiative} is that now we have hand-picked a group of people with a skill set to sit down with city officials, with bankers, with anyone. We need to not just have the discussions; we need to have the solutions.”

Dixie’s political endorsements trend heavily Democratic. He runs a local Democratic political committee, the Alliance Network, and was an Obama delegate to the 2008 Democratic Convention. He has not shied away from collaboration across party lines, however. The funding for the supermarket purchase came from negotiations with Republican Onondaga County Executive Joanie Mahoney to compensate the neighborhood for the placement of the Midland Avenue Sewage Treatment Plant. Funding for Jubilee for many years came through the office of Rep. Jim Walsh, a Republican who also helped coach Dixie and his staff through the federal grant application process.

While many successful African-Americans have left the neighborhood, Dixie lives on South Geddes Street and has no intention of leaving the city. “I need to be where there’s noise and action,” he says, answering his flip phone and slamming the door of his battered Mercury Mountaineer as he heads off to his next meeting.

Dixie discusses his plans for a South Side grocery store with Patrice Chang, supermarket initiative lead project manager.

Late last year, Dixie presided over a community meeting about the supermarket, with city director of Economic Development Dave Michel, who retired when Stephanie Miner took over City Hall.

Dixie listens to Harold Ford Jr. (below), when he came to town Jan. 31 to test the waters for a U.S. Senate bid. MICHAEL DAVIS PHOTOS

War on Poverty

Jubilee is one of a number of not-for-profits, including Home Headquarters, Housing Visions, Syracuse Model Neighborhood, to name just a few, working on this aging city’s housing stock. The uniqueness of Jubilee’s contribution is the land trust idea. The land under the homes is part of a land trust—the homeowner owns the building, but not the land, which is owned by the Jubilee Land Trust. This was seen as a hedge against gentrification in a time when city residents feared that improving the housing stock would trigger a buying flurry that would leave them unable to afford to live in their own neighborhoods.

“We’ve got to be working on the whole thing: jobs, housing, education,” says Dixie. “Poverty hasn’t decreased in our communities; in fact it’s exploding. They talk about a recession, but we’ve been in this for years.”

He links the poverty with the community’s lack of political and financial acumen. “Six-hundred people live in Pioneer Homes,” he wailed before hundreds gathered to address the Jena Six issue in 2007. “Only 31 voted in the last primary.” He is optimistic about the next generation of young leaders. “If young people in our community come to me now, I say to them, ‘understand business.’”

The Alliance Network has been instrumental in garnering minority support for the past two elected mayors of Syracuse, Matt Driscoll and Miner. Dixie endorsed Miner in the mayoral campaign of 2009 after his original favorite, former Common Council President Bea Gonzalez, dropped out for family reasons.

Miner appointed Frank Fowler, known among other things as an advocate for minority cops, to the post of chief of police. Dixie has great faith in Fowler. “He is the right person for the job. He has a tough chin and can take criticism. He wants to stand with us to save as many kids as possible. He’s got to work with District Attorney Bill Fitzpatrick, the judges and the whole justice system to keep these kids from falling off a cliff.”

A turning point for Dixie came in his first year at Ithaca College. Eloise Dowdell Curry, who served as the head of Higher Education Opportunity Program at Ithaca, recruited him to attend the nearly all-white private school. HEOP is a state program that works with colleges to encourage low-income students to pursue higher education.

“It was early on,” Dixie says. “There were not a lot of black students there. We were fighting for a place—to have our own space. It was an all-white institution, and we were working to bring in more diversity. But I didn’t feel like there was animosity with the students, not like when I was in Grant.”

Dixie was impressed when one of his professors, the historian Montana Marten, moved to Africa to be closer to the liberation struggles then sweeping the continent. He wants to impart that sense of urgency and commitment to a younger generation. “We live in a culture of ‘me’ today, not like the community sense you had back then,” he notes. He credits teachers who saw in him abilities he didn’t know he had, and worries that young people today aren’t given that same encouragement.

Dixie’s views on education don’t fit with liberal orthodoxy. “I’ve been in a room with Rev. Sharpton talking about education with Newt Gingrich, and I’m finding myself agreeing with Gingrich on a lot of things. Unions today hamper teachers. If I was a kid today, there’s no way I would go to college. Back then teachers visited the kids at home. There’s a disconnect somewhere today. Too many of our kids are not graduating.”

Sharpton has come to visit Syracuse a number of times at Dixie’s invitation, most recently in February 2009 to officially induct the local chapter into the ranks of the National Action Network.

Dixie also likes what Mayor Michael Bloomberg has done by taking control of the schools in New York City, an option that Miner is studying. “Money isn’t going to solve this problem,” Dixie believes. “Take the politics out of it. Tenure is a problem. Kids aren’t learning. If the kids are not achieving, the teacher shouldn’t get a raise.”

Likewise on a curfew for city youth. Dixie originally opposed a curfew when it was first proposed in 1994, fearing it would lead to more police profiling of minority youth. After attending more than enough funerals for young people, he stood behind Driscoll in the summer of 2002 to express his support, noting that a curfew would not affect the vast majority of young people who are doing the right thing. Still, a curfew became a racially charged issue in the Republican mayoral primary last year, when it was rejected by former Parks Commissioner Otis Jennings and embraced by eventual primary victor Steve Kimatian.

Dixie is free to talk in ways that politicians cannot, openly expressing his admiration for four-term Mayor Lee Alexander. “People talk about Bill Clinton as the first black president. Lee Alexander was the first black mayor of Syracuse. We had that a long time ago. He connected: He was one of us.”

With such a range of political involvements, the question has frequently been asked: Should Walt Dixie run for office? Last year Dixie briefly explored running for the 4th District Common Council seat held by Tom Seals. After several meetings involving hundreds of neighborhood activists, he decided that he was better off continuing to agitate from the outside, where he clearly has the ear of city officials.

When asked if Dixie should run for office, Howard does not hesitate to offer this advice. “No. He’s at his best behind the scenes, bringing parties together, negotiating things for the community to benefit. He brings a consciousness to both Democrats and Republicans that he could not do if he were operating as a colleague. He needs to be able to go to Joanie Mahoney, or Stephanie Miner, and say, ‘You are a leader in your party, and this policy is hurting our community.’ He’s that kind of person.”

Dixie chick: Walt Dixie visits his mother, Delores. He is the oldest of 12 boys born to Delores and Walter Dixie. MICHAEL DAVIS PHOTO