Race and the Dutch
One of the suspects arrested last week in the 1979 murder of Janet Chandler in my hometown of Holland, Michigan, was a black man named James C. Nelson. Thanks to some archival sleuthing by the Charleston Gazette in West Virginia, we now know that Nelson served a long sentence for the kidnapping and assault of a woman in Ohio that took place four years after the crime for which he now faces murder charges in Michigan. Nelson and several of the accused were Wackenhut security guards brought in from outside to patrol a strike at the Chemtron plant in Holland in January 1979.
The racial and sexual aspects of the Chandler murder--she is alleged to have had a brief affair with him, he was the only black among the six people arrested--are doubtless causing shock waves in still-very-Dutch Holland. When I was growing up there (1953-75), Holland was one of the whitest cities around. That has changed somewhat now, but when I was at Holland High School we had exactly one black kid in the school and a couple of Asians. There were a couple of dozen Mexican-American kids, whose parents had arrived in the 1950s to work at the fruit and vegetable farms outside Holland, found factory jobs and stayed. That may be an over-simplification, but not by much.
I never knew a black person well until I enrolled at Hope College in Holland, which was a world of its own. I always got along well with the Mexicans, as did most in Holland (some may have a different opinion, but this is mine). They brought welcome cultural and religious diversity to our very white and blond and Protestant town, and finally some ethnic food worthy of the name. You have to understand that in Holland then, pizzerias were a recent innovation. Calvinism ruled the palate as well as the soul.
Janet Chandler, who was 23 at the time of her murder, was an adult and perfectly free to date whomever she chose. There was nothing wrong in what she did. But anyone trying to understand the dynamics of this case should know how radical a course she was following given the local culture, which was only just beginning to change. Sympathy for her parents will be tinged with disapproval of her by some. In many ways, murder cases, and especially murder trials, are the morality plays of our day.