Cultures clash in Shelbyville

Somalis at Tyson chicken plant make townsfolk uneasy

By JANELL ROSS • Staff Writer • August 24, 2008

SHELBYVILLE, Tenn. — When the wind blows just the right way, the overpowering smell of the chicken business — housing, slaughtering and processing — wafts across Shelbyville's town square, past Bedford County's historic courthouse and the benches where locals sit, grab a smoke and talk about life in town.

The pungent smell is a powerful reminder of just how central the poultry industry is to this Middle Tennessee town, population 19,477. Since buying the facility in 1972, Tyson Foods Inc. has not only processed and packaged 67 million birds a year and provided 1,200 of the area's jobs. It has also reshaped Shelbyville's population.


And the talk among the locals these days is how that population has been reworked yet again as part of the new immigrant wave. During more than 50 years of operation under various owners, the plant at first hired whites, then African-Americans and later Hispanics.

But it's the newest group of workers — Muslim Somalian refugees hailing from a politically unstable and war-torn East African nation — who this month pushed the town into the national spotlight. And it brought Shelbyville's discomfort with its latest population change sharply into focus.

In Shelbyville, where residents still wave or tip their hat when passing one another on the street, Somalis say they feel welcome in the most fundamental ways. They have jobs. And they have homes where they can live in peace.

But they are hardly blending into their adopted community. Shelbyville's Somalis also are openly ridiculed and described as bad drivers, dirty, disease-ridden, arrogant and unfriendly.

The mere mention of Somalis in the local paper draws hundreds of online comments ranging from theories about communicable diseases affecting the food supply to claims about Somalian interest in implementing Muslim law in Shelbyville.

Holiday plan sparks furor
This month, news that Tyson Foods and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union agreed to drop Labor Day from its list of paid holidays and add a Muslim holiday became public. The replacement holiday, Eid al-Fitr, marks the joyful end of Ramadan, a monthlong holy period of daytime fasting, praying and charitable deeds.

When news of the holiday switch broke, it created such a public uproar that Tyson, tiny Shelbyville and some of its residents wound up the stars of various blogs, the topics of discussion on Lou Dobbs' CNN show and fodder for a New York Times labor writer.

It took only days for Tyson to ask the union to reconsider. A union vote restored Labor Day to the list of paid holidays and gave workers a flexible holiday that theoretically could be used on Eid al-Fitr. But by then, the ugliness and even local calls for a boycott of Tyson products had exploded.

One Shelbyville resident suggested on the local paper's Web site a replacement for the Statue of Liberty's famous inscription: "It should read like this: 'Take back your rested, your newly rich, your unhuddled masses, who are taking our freedom from us. The nasty, smelly, scarf clad women, with big fat pregnant bellies. Send them back, please get them out, I want my freedom back. Cause I'm locking the door and putting out my lamp. Alla take your people back.'"

It's a sentiment Imam Haji Yousuf, chairman of the Shelbyville mosque, knows is out there, but he says it's not one that dominates the way that the town's Somalis think about their lives.

"In the United States, opinions are in abundance. That's a right, the American way," Yousuf said though a translator. "With all people there are some good, some bad, some angry, some kind. We know that."

Tyson's 1,000 unionized employees include about 250 Somalis by Tyson's count. That is a fraction of the town's total Somalian population. By Yousuf's count, between 2,000 and 3,500 of Shelbyville's residents — or roughly 20 percent — are Somalian.

The tension that does exist has to be kept in perspective, said Mohamed Mohamud, who moved to Shelbyville from Ohio to work at the Tyson plant. On a day-to-day basis, Mohamud and everyone he knows are able to live and work in Shelbyville without pressing fear of physical harm — no small matter for war refugees.

"There is no place that is perfect," Mohamud said through a translator. "But everything is OK for us here. We have work. We have apartments. And we are very glad to be living in Shelbyville."

Fears and suspicions abound
Since the 1990s, small to midsize American cities like Shelbyville have become the new immigration frontier, said Daniel Cornfield, a Vanderbilt University labor sociologist. The same things driving population growth of all kinds in the South — jobs and a lower cost of living — also are attracting immigrants. In some cases, refugee relief agencies settled them in small to midsize towns for the same reasons.

These communities had not, in many cases, seen substantial immigration in 100 years or more. In smaller settings where fewer people have personal experiences with immigrants and greater concerns about economic opportunity, immigration can become the focal point of economic fears and frustrations, Cornfield said.

Today, Shelbyville's 7.1 percent unemployment rate is among the 15 highest in the state. Just over 9 percent of the area's adult residents reported holding a bachelor's degree in 2000, compared with nearly 20 percent of adults around the state and about 24 percent nationwide.

"Some Americans, native-born Americans, see newcomers as a threat or a likely impetus to push them out of the middle class," Cornfield said. "So, that anxiety often gets expressed in the form of nativism, and that is anti-immigrant sentiment that can even get expressed in violent proportions such as a mosque burning."

As it happens, a mosque was burned earlier this year in Columbia, about 40 miles from Shelbyville.

Several hundred Somalis were formally settled in Nashville by refugee relief agencies, said Abdirizak Hassan, director of the Somali Community Center in Nashville. But many of the estimated 6,000 Somalis living in Shelbyville and Nashville have simply moved there from other parts of the country, Hassan said.

Somalis began to arrive in Shelby ville around 2002, when news of job openings at the local Tyson facility began to spread via word of mouth, he said. They set up a mosque, a corrugated metal building across the street from VFW Post 5019. It has no markings or formal name beyond its address and a warning that the building is alarm-equipped.

So far, it has been left alone.

"Somalis, we have our culture and our religion," Yousuf said. "We have our way that certain things must be done in keeping with our traditions. But we are also grateful to live in Shelbyville, to have work, to have a place to live in peace. That is all we want. We wish no one harm."

But there were suspicions, including those of the person who called the FBI.

About a year ago, residents reported seeing Somalis taking pictures of the town's water treatment facility, bridges around Bedford County and the home of a state legislator. The FBI came to town for two days, asking questions but ultimately making no arrests, Sheriff Randall Boyce said.

"I guess by them being Muslim, maybe there was some concern," Boyce said. "And with how ugly things got after the stuff about the holiday come out, I think there are just a lot of people around that aren't too happy that they're here. Folks just don't trust them."

The FBI does not generally confirm or deny that it has opened or closed an investigation or responded to a citizen report, said Stacy Bohanan, a Chattanooga-based FBI spokeswoman.

"I can say that we are aware of the Somalis in Shelbyville," Bohanan said.

Concepts are foreign
Most of whatever tension surrounds population change in Shelbyville hasn't involved matters of law or safety. Instead, there have been quieter, more difficult issues to discuss, things that have to do with culture and hygiene.

Elaine Weaver, director of the Bedford County Adult Education Program, said the town's first Somalis didn't understand the concepts of appointments or waiting in line.

"To be honest with you, they were quite aggressive and quite argumentative," she said. "But I want to tell you that every cultural difference can be changed though education, and that's what I really think we've done."

When they first arrived and wanted classes to learn English, Somalis routinely refused to come back for placement testing, pounding on the counter and demanding instant classes. Others refused to shake hands, threw payment for goods on the counter instead of handing it to the clerk or tried to bargain in stores where the prices are clearly marked.

"I think there was and maybe is a lot we didn't understand about them in the beginning and a lot that they didn't understand about how we do things," Weaver said.

It is true that many Somalis — by virtue of their upbringing and religion — will not shake the hand of someone of the opposite sex, said Faduma Muhammed, a Somali who doesn't shake hands with men.

"I'm sure there are things that American women are taught, taught in their childhood, they shouldn't do," Muhammed said. "Can you imagine going out and doing those things tomorrow?"

Hygiene questions arise
Then, there is the delicate matter of personal hygiene. Some native Shelbyville residents have heard horrible things that Somalis vehemently deny.

On Aug. 9, Gary Ashley wrote publicly on a newspaper Web site what he and some of his friends have talked about privately for some time.

"The Somolians don't use toilet paper…They use their hand and then wash it without soap," he wrote.

Except for some time in Nashville, Ashley has lived in Shelbyville most of his adult life. He thinks friends and neighbors would describe him as the "most liberal nut on Earth," a Protestant, a man who believes in getting along with everyone.

But he said he keeps hearing things that make him uncomfortable with the growing Somalian presence in town. There was talk of men using the sinks as urinals, then pouring glasses of water over their private parts for cleansing. There was also the talk of a Somalian aversion to toilet tissue.

"I feel sorry for anybody who works there because it is really a rough job … that's why they need immigrant workers because they are going to tough it out regardless," Ashley said. "But this is America, and I think that they have got to adapt our ways, certainly some hygiene."

Tyson employees contacted for this story say they witnessed similar activities at sinks.

"They even posted guards in the bathrooms at one point," said Randy Moore, a former Tyson worker who said he was fired about two weeks ago. "They put them in there to make sure everybody was washing their hands."

It's a claim Tyson and Somalis both deny — and both insist cleanliness is central to their cultures.

"We do not 'post' guards in our restrooms," company spokesman Gary Mickelson wrote in an e-mail. "As part of our good manufacturing practices and company policy, our plants have hand wash sinks just inside entrances to the production floor (not restrooms, which are prohibited by policy from opening onto the production floor). Workers are required to wash their hands immediately after they enter the production area and before returning to their work station.

"This practice, which is not unique to Shelbyville, is sometimes audited by our quality assurance and management staff to make sure the hand washing is being done properly and as required."

Rugiya Bule, a Somali who has lived in Nashville for several years and often spent time in Shelbyville visiting family, said personal habits are private matters.

"But the fundamental idea is, it's not accurate," she said. "We are very, very clean. … We have to wash our hands, otherwise we would be sick."

The Somalian community's hope is that these sorts of ideas, with time, fade away. They tend to push away examples of prejudice and point to small victories.

"There have been some problems, but that is to be expected when you go to a town as small as Shelbyville and you come with another culture, another language," Yousuf said. "But Shelbyville, the schools in particular have been very good to Somalis. The teachers, the school district, they have given our children a lot of help, a chance to succeed. So, you see, we have already been welcomed. And we believe, we hope, that the other things will improve with time."

Still, Gary Ashley says, he won't be consuming any Tyson products.

Contact Janell Ross at 615-726-5982 or jross1@tennessean.com.
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