Now a good time to talk about suburban race relations

One of the things the Rev. Clyde Brooks does really well is get people talking.

On Thursday, Brooks, the chairman of the Illinois Commission on Diversity & Human Relations, has outgoing interim Chicago Police Superintendent John Escalante coming to Hoffman Estates to talk with suburban law enforcement professionals and anyone else who cares to listen.

On April 14, there is a Community to Community workshop at the Sisters of the Living Word in Arlington Heights.

Brooks, a former pastor, started talking about race issues in the Northwest suburbs long before there was much diversity here to speak of.

The product of a small, racially divided town in downstate Illinois, he moved up here in the 1960s when the suburbs were almost entirely white.

He worked with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and in Chicago's civil rights movement. He was at the March on Washington the day Dr. Martin Luther King talked about his dream. He was the first black person to run, unsuccessfully, for the Northwest Suburban High School District 214 school board in the 1960s.

Today, despite the dramatic population shift that makes the suburbs a melting pot of color, ethnicity, religion and personal economics, there is a sense here that race largely remains an urban issue, not a suburban one.

Escalante, who on Thursday opens Brooks' "Bridging the Divide" series, is a good first choice.

The relationship between minority residents in the suburbs and their police is as important to the suburbs as it is to the city, if only to prevent the relationship from deteriorating as badly here as it has there.

As political conversation in our current climate gets shriller and more xenophobic, there needs to be an antidote. Reasonable people, talking about what they see as problems, trying to reach solutions together. Not everything will get solved, but in talk, we can drown out the shouting.

Brooks remembers the spellbinding moment on the Washington Mall in 1963, where he stood among 300,000 others at the Lincoln Memorial, listening.

"When Dr. King spoke those words, and to see the momentum of the moment, black and white, all denominations coming together with a purpose, that stirred me and so many others," Brooks told the Daily Herald in 2013.

"It gave us hope that we were not by ourselves."

After all, isn't that the point of conversation?