Anyone who reads the back of their cereal boxes would know of Battle Creek, Michigan.
It was the original headquarters of the Kellogg Company and its competitor Post, and cereal manufacturing jobs, propelled by innovations like WK Kellogg’s six-hour work day, created a middle class in the town just as auto-manufacturing did in and around Detroit in the first half of the 20th century.
What happened to those auto jobs also happened to cereal.
Battle Creek is one of the infamous blue-to-red “pivot” cities that voted for Barack Obama twice, and then Donald Trump. In 2016, Battle Creek’s Calhoun county went to Trump with 53% of the vote, who won Michigan by 10,704 votes out of nearly 5 million cast.
Trump returned the favor by visiting Battle Creek for a rally last December (on the night he was impeached), filling up the Kellogg Arena.
Michael McCullough, former editor of the Battle Creek Enquirer, imagines Trump chose Battle Creek for the “same reason he chooses a lot of rust belt cities and towns. There are a lot of folks who feel betrayed by our public institutions and our government.”
McCullough, who describes himself as an independent, feels “that so much of [the] polarization in our country is tied directly to the de-prioritization of the development of small towns and small cities”.
“We just have a really growing segment of our population [for whom] no one is standing up for their interests,” he says, arguing that the Democratic party is no longer the party of the working class.
Still, the county’s enthusiasm for the Republican ticket may be declining. Clinton lost Calhoun by 12.5 percentage points – two years later, the Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, lost the county by just 2.5%, or 1,227 votes. For Michigan at large, most polls show Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden with a substantial lead over Trump, with less than four months to go until the November election.
There are other factors coming into play as well: anxiety about declining manufacturing jobs and Trump’s trade deals, statewide vote-by-mail, and, of course, a cataclysmic global pandemic.
Over the past decade, Battle Creek’s recovery from the 2008-09 financial crash has lagged behind the nation’s. It was one of 104 metro areas that had fewer jobs in 2019 than it did before the Great Recession, according to a Brookings Institution analysis.
Jim Robey, the director of regional economic planning services at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in nearby Kalamazoo says that “productivity enhancements” by companies – the same output with fewer workers – are important to consider.
Yet Brookings’ estimation of a net loss of 2,200 jobs in small Calhoun County, population roughly 134,000, is a lot of jobs.
And Battle Creek is also one of only seven regions in Michigan that never fully recovered from the Great Recession that has also suffered from an above-average unemployment rate during the Covid-19 recession, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In May, the region had a preliminary unemployment rate of 22%.
In 2019, the poverty rate in Battle Creek was 22.3%, higher than the state average of 14.2%, and approximately 45% of people in Calhoun county cannot regularly afford basic needs, according to data from the Michigan Association of United Ways.
“While we don’t know exactly the percentage increase with the pandemic, we know that it’s grown,” says Chris Sargent, executive director of the United Way of the Battle Creek and Kalamazoo Regions, pointing out that a local food bank is distributing three times as much food as it did before the crisis.
Before the pandemic hit, there was growth to be excited about in the city, says Jeremy Andrews, a community organizer and small business owner, citing new businesses downtown and new real estate. While he says the momentum “is not dead by any means”, Battle Creek pre-pandemic “felt like for the first time in a long time that things were happening”.
The city announced in May that it was facing a $4.9 million budget shortfall for fiscal year 2021 and furloughed nearly 100 city employees. Hundreds of low-income jobs have been lost.
As elsewhere, people are out of work and having trouble paying their bills. The county averaged 4.5 evictions a day before the pandemic, and Michigan’s eviction moratorium is set to expire on 15 July.
The community, ever resilient, has responded with mutual aid projects, food deliveries, and new groups and partnerships to coordinate help.
It is clear that the pandemic has broken open some truths about inequality, especially racial inequality. Black residents of Calhoun county made up 16.9% of coronavirus cases as of 13 July, though they make up 11% of the county’s population.
And Asian residents make up 14.3%, though they are just 3% of the county population (the city has a significant Burmese community).
Damon Brown, the founder of the non-profit Reintegration to Support and Empower (Rise), has directed much of his efforts to getting needed resources in the hands of community members. Rise is distributing healthy food and hygiene and cleaning products to community members every Friday between 3pm and 5pm.
“We have not made it to 4pm yet,” due to the demand, says Brown.
Rise is joined by numerous partnerships, including the United Way, in its community pandemic response. Brown points out that predominantly white organizations are working with predominantly Black ones, which he would not have anticipated before the pandemic.
As Michigan continues to open, it is likely these services will continue to be needed. “We expect that the real impact of the pandemic will just now start to be realized – the economic impact,” says LE Johnson, chief diversity officer at the Southwestern Michigan Urban League. “When the stimulus checks run out, when the food assistance ends, then we’ll see the surge in need for supports.”
Battle Creek has also seen recent protests against police brutality.
The racist history of Calhoun county is evident in its name. John C Calhoun from South Carolina, a slaveowner and former president Andrew Jackson’s vice-president, is the county’s namesake.
Some activists in Battle Creek are campaigning to change the name of Calhoun county to Truth county, after Sojourner Truth, the famous Black abolitionist and women’s rights activist who lived in Battle Creek for 26 years before her death.
In mid-June, the large Sojourner Truth statue in downtown Battle Creek was adorned with flowers and surrounded by candles and protest signs, remnants of the public tribute to George Floyd.
The city views revitalizing downtown as the catalyst for reinvigorating the rest of town. John Hart, development manager with Battle Creek’s small business development team, says small businesses are the “lifeblood” of any city.
“You can attract large corporations,” he says, “but ultimately when you’re talking about quality of life, that comes from the community itself and the grassroots organizations that exist.”
Hart and his team have worked hard to help insulate small businesses from the effects of the pandemic. Their loan and mortgage assistance program assisted 48 small businesses – out of 49 applicants – in four city districts.
A particularly innovative project is an online platform for local restaurants to sell takeout and delivery. Eatsbc.com was created to help restaurants transition their businesses while dine-in options were closed – and avoid the costly fees that are inherent to companies like Grubhub and DoorDash. Now that restaurants are slowly opening, Eatsbc.com will still be a permanent resource for local restaurants and residents. It’s new, community-focused ideas like this that should help spur the city’s revival.
Battle Creek, he says, “is making a comeback”, but in his opinion the city “is not investing into the people of Battle Creek”.
He says there are funding disparities in addition to economic disparities affecting some communities, like the low-income and predominantly African American community of Washington Heights. Indeed, pre-recession, 45% of Black children in Battle Creek lived in poverty, and, echoing national disparities, the Black unemployment rate was twice the rate of the white unemployment rate.
“That’s a great depression for that particular community,” says Brown.
The election may seem distant given the current crises. And the politics surrounding that December Trump rally may have changed entirely because of a disastrous federal response to the pandemic. There’s still a lot of time between now and election day.
“I don’t think people are thinking about the election at all,” Andrews, the organizer and small business owner, says. He thinks it’s both odd and scary, “but I think it’s kind of awesome too. It’s great that we’re not flooded with that.”
This article is published in partnership with the award-winning not-for-profit publication Capital and Main, as part of a year-long series on inequality in the US, ahead of the 2020 election