What Price Success?
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The big changes at the South Shore Cultural Center started approximately 16 months ago with the appointment of Claire Kaplan as director. A Princeton University graduate, the 26-year-old administrator had previously been assistant to John Rogers, president of the Park District’s board of commissioners. Kaplan evidently impressed both Rogers and others at Park District headquarters. Mehrberg asked her to take on the daunting task of running the South Shore Cultural Center. “We had gotten more complaints about South Shore than anywhere else in the park system,” says Mehrberg.
But some were unhappy to see a young white person in charge of a cultural center in a community that’s predominantly black. “This is tantamount to placing a Baptist preacher in charge of a Jewish synagogue, and we know that would never happen,” says Okoro Harold Johnson, a former drama instructor and director of the center who maintains he was forced out by Kaplan. “A lot of pressure was put on me,” says Johnson. According to Kaplan, Johnson “retired.”
But Harper says he was forced to take the Studio nightclub out of the center when Kaplan decided she wanted the club to operate once a month instead of weekly, as it had for several years. Harper tried to reopen the Studio at another venue on the city’s south side but was unsuccessful. Khalidah Kali, who’d been giving adult dance classes at the center for five years, is also no longer on the schedule. Kali says she was abruptly told her place at the cultural center had been promised to someone else: “They arbitrarily forced me to leave.” She protested her treatment in a letter last November 30 to Park District honcho Claypool. Kaplan responded to Kali on December 4, in a letter outlining some problems with Kali and her classes. Among other things, Kaplan said, Kali was overcharging and had too few students in her classes. Kali says that no one from the cultural center discussed a fee problem with her, and that her class size had drops during the summer when many people prefer to be active outdoors.
