Nantucket's cultural clash
With more blacks, Latinos, island comes to grips with change
NANTUCKET - Hydrangeas still bloom beside cedar-shingle homes, and yachts continue to bob beyond private beaches, but this old preserve of the rich and primped is undergoing a change unlike anything it has witnessed in the centuries since English explorers established the island as a whaling port.
Evidence of the change is at El Rincon Salvadoreño, the island's first restaurant catering to Latinos, at the newly expanded Star Brazil market off the road to the airport, and at the Island Flair clothing store opened two years ago by a Jamaican couple just off Main Street.
In the Nantucket School District, where a decade ago more than 95 percent of the students were white, 25 percent of this year's nearly 1,300 students are members of a minority group and 10 percent grew up speaking another language.
And then there is the Rev. Donovan Kerr's growing New Life Ministries church, which on Sundays attracts as many as 150 congregants, nearly all of them black or Hispanic.
"We represent the other side of Nantucket," said Kerr, who founded his ministry six years ago with six congregants and recently bought land to build a church. "We represent the changes."
The declining homogeneity of Nantucket's population - town officials estimate there are about 20,000 full-time residents, more than double what the US Census Bureau documented in 2000 - has introduced new stresses to an island unaccustomed to culture clashes.
As a reflection of the tension, the Nantucket Police Department this month announced it was implementing sweeping changes after authors of a 300-page internal affairs report found that an officer used excessive force in an incident last summer involving eight black youths.
The department - which has only one minority on its roster of 77 officers - is reorganizing its command staff and requiring that officers undergo diversity training and improved training to deescalate volatile encounters.
"What's changing is the people who've come to Nantucket with the attitudes they've gotten from the city," said Deputy Chief Charles Gibson, who coauthored the report about the confrontation, which left a 13-year-old boy injured. "They're coming from other communities, where they've been discriminated against . . . they're not gaining their perceptions from Nantucket."
But minorities throughout the 48-square-mile island say the majority has sometimes chafed at their arrival and decision to stay.
Kerr, the island's only black minister, said he has experienced the gamut of racism. He tells stories such as the time he tried to rent an apartment advertised in a local paper, but was told over the phone that it had been already rented. Suspecting the landlord was put off by his Jamaican accent, he asked a Caucasian congregant to call, and he said the landlord told the congregant the apartment was available.
"Change for any person or community is never an easy process," Kerr said. "There's always a tension when it comes down to folks making the shift, accepting people for who they are. Nantucket is going through that, becoming a diverse community - and not everyone is excited."
Sharon Liburd, the mother of the 13-year-old who suffered a separated shoulder in the confrontation with police last summer, said her son and his friends are angry about the experience. The incident near the ferry docks occurred after an officer told the youths to move off the sidewalk, because they were on bicycles and allegedly blocking pedestrian traffic.
One of the boys suggested that the officer asked them to move because they were black, and after the two started arguing, the officer called for backup, prompting a response by all 16 officers on duty. The officers chased the boys, forced them on the ground and arrested two of them.
"I feel that because they were dealing with eight black children, the interaction was different than had they been white children," Liburd said.
David Harding, a former Army sergeant who has lived on the island since 2001, spent seven years working for the Steamship Authority and says he left because of a steady stream of insults from passengers and colleagues. "If I were starting over again, I wouldn't live here," said the 63-year-old African-American, who now shuttles residents and tourists around on a town bus. "It's very, very, very racist."
Town officials recognize that cultural changes are occurring but say tensions on the island have not reached the point that the Board of Selectman has to act.
Michael Kopko, chairman of the all-white board - there have been only two minorities elected in the last 20 years - attributes the friction to faster ferries and more flights, instant communications, and increased contact with the world beyond the shell-strewn shores. "We're certainly less isolated," Kopko said. "I think whatever issues we're dealing with are issues happening everywhere. We're still a country struggling with racial issues."
Some minorities who moved to the island years ago said they share the concerns of whites who have been born and raised on Nantucket.
Marcos Tejada, who a few months ago opened El Rincon Salvadoreño after working his way up from washing dishes and cooking at local restaurants over the past 16 years, is happy there's enough of a market to sustain his restaurant, which serves typical Salvadoran meals.
But with so many new people on the island from so many cultures, he worries that the differences are breeding mistrust. "The island's changing a lot. It's not like before, when people would share. Now, people are more out for their own," he said.
Assistant Town Clerk Linda MacDonald, who 18 years ago moved to Nantucket from New Zealand, sees the growing diversity nearly every day at Town Hall. The town doesn't track racial demographics, but a 2006 estimate by the US Census Bureau found that 10 percent of the island's population was black, more than 5 percent was Hispanic, and another 2 percent was either Asian or of mixed ethnicity.
In recent years, MacDonald said, she has seen more people from different backgrounds seeking marriage licenses and birth certificates. "It's now common to walk down the street and see people you don't know," she said.
Assistant Superintendent Carlos
Part of Colley's challenge has been hiring teachers to help those students who lack fluency in English. Of the district's 145 teachers, only two are minorities. "When students come from other cultures, you see a slow change in the way we need to react in the schools," Colley said, noting how his efforts to hire staff to help students learn English sparked skepticism about whether such services were needed. "This is just something they haven't seen before."
David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com. 