ABSTRACT
As the 1991 Ontario Symposium was convening in Waterloo, Ontario, the city of Dubuque, Iowa, was receiving considerable media attention in the United States for a controversial experiment in intergroup relations. A city of 58,000 in the heart of America's Midwest, Dubuque had a tiny racial minority of 331 Black residents scattered among its neighborhoods. In that environment, a White resident could go for years without even seeing a Black, and issues of prejudice and racism were viewed as remote problems afflicting the Deep South or large urban centers but not Dubuque. That was until a cross burning in 1989 ignited a Black family's garage and shattered the city's complacence.
