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Sunshine never left East St. Louis, and he’s not about to exit now. He believes the fourth time is the charm.
Sylvester Lee, better known by his nickname “Sunshine,” has tried three times in the past to maintain a performing-arts center geared toward children and teens in East St. Louis. Each time, the centers have closed, each time for different reasons. "One burned down. One got tore down. One got sold," he says.
Lee believes the Sunshine Cultural Arts Center will be different, though. “The difference is the life we’re putting into this,” he says. "We own this one—we got stability.”
The center is located in the former Morrison School building, at 630 N. 59th Street. It was purchased from East St. Louis School District 189 for $3,000 more than four years ago. “It’s come a long way," says Lee. "When we first moved in, it had been vandalized a lot by the night walkers. God has blessed us so far.”
Buying the building was just the start. Ray Landis (pictured alongside Lee) solicited donations and wrote grant applications to fund the arts center. The music director for First Congregational Church of Webster Groves, Landis took a grant-writing class offered by the local library. In addition to donations from church members, the center received donations from the Monsanto Fund, the Emerson Charitable Trust, Cardinals Care, the Deupree Foundation, and Ameren Illinois. Tax increment financing funds from the city of East St. Louis also went toward the center.
When Landis and Lee first began working on the abandoned school, the electricity didn’t work, and there was no heating or cooling. Today, the gym has electricity and heat. Several rooms are set aside for dance studios, and there's a designated “music room." Plans call for reclaiming use of the former school building room by room, as funds and labor become available.
It’s taken four years to get the building to where it is today, and it’s taken time to get the programs started. “We started with having a safe haven for kids, where the kids could come after school,” Landis says. “Then, we started to develop rapport with the kids.”
At first, there was tutoring, homework assistance, open gym, and piano and drumming classes. The goal was to expand the programming to include more instruments; more dance classes; more music, creative writing, theater, and visual arts.
That’s where Lee comes in. In addition to being the center's executive director, he is a community organizer for the Leslie Bates Davis Neighborhood House in East St. Louis. He has a long history of working with the arts in East St. Louis, going back to his affiliation with Katherine Dunham, the legendary modern-dance theorist and performer who opened the Performing Arts Training Center for neighborhood youth in East St. Louis in 1967.
In the early '80s, when Lee was a 16-years-old at Dunham's center, it was she who gave him his nickname because of his smile. "Once, she told a friend of mine to ‘go get that boy who smiles all the time, the one I call Sunshine. When he comes in, the girls light up, and he does, too,’” Lee says. “The smile came was because there was so many beautiful women there. I couldn’t look at them and not smile."
Lee performed under Dunham’s tutelage for about 10 years. Dunham’s legend and lessons still linger at the new center. “When you said Madam Katherine’s name, it was like a credit card," he says. "Every door opened up to her. Every city opened up to her." He cites Dunham’s belief that learning dance, music and other arts had a “transferable” effect on children. “Music, song, and dance are transferable—it teaches you how to think quicker," he says. "She taught us to be a little quicker with our rhythm, our dancing, and our social life.”
Lee believes students in the dance group that he teaches today also learn valuable lessons while performing at festivals. “It teaches them to interact with people a little more, to get along with the person you’re dancing alongside, to get along with the audience you don’t know nothing about, and to get along with other ethnic groups you don’t know nothing about,” he says. “It gives them a sense of who they are. Once they identify their strengths and weaknesses, they’ll be able to present themselves better.”
Landis also sees how drumming, dancing, and music helps them. “Sometimes, you have a kid who is awkward socially, but when you get them dancing, they shine," he says. "They gain confidence.”
Currently, about 40 children and teens come to the center after school on Mondays through Wednesdays from 3 to 6 p.m. The time is typically divided into 45-minute blocks, with tutoring, education enrichment, classes in music or writing, dance classes, and free time in the gym. Besides Lee and Landis, the center has a program director, Michael Wiedman, and two education advocates, who are graduate students at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University. They serve as liaisons to area schools and assist the center's students with school-related difficulties.
With cuts in arts and music education in the district, there's a need for the instruction and experience that students can find at the center, says Landis. So far, the center is relying on its proximity to Mason Clark Middle School (about two blocks away) and Katie Harper Elementary School (about 10 blocks away). Landis believes a large van or financial support for busing would help.
The next goal, though, is to expand room by room, with each classroom individually heated. “We need community support,” says Landis, adding that the needs include funding, donations, and volunteers. Cardinals Care, for instance, dontacted digital keyboards that Landis uses to conduct piano classes; he hopes to add other instrumental instruction in the future. Lee has eight “factory sewing machines” that he hopes to use for a sewing class taught by seniors to young people.
Despite the decades of struggle in East St. Louis, Lee is not about to give up. He remembers the joy and meaning that he got from Dunham’s efforts when he was a teen, and he wants today’s children to benefit from her legacy. No matter how many empty buildings line the streets of his hometown, Lee keeps moving forward.
“I am not saying I get discouraged,” he says. “I’m getting better—you know what I mean? When I have things I can’t do, I get help. I start moving a little faster. Once I ponder over it, I do it a little different. I approach it in a different way.
“If we’re going to keep her dream and her vision alive,” Lee says of Dunham, “we’re going to do it here.”
