Toledo Takes Dollar Stores to Church

The Rev. Dr. Donald Perryman was born and raised into the Black church in Toledo, Ohio. Since 1997, he has served as the Senior Pastor at The Center of Hope Community Baptist Church, in the central city, where he has led a religious, social, and political movement to empower his community.  Toledo’s Dorr Street was once home to a thriving Black community rich in art, music, culture, and small businesses. But after decades of disinvestment, mass incarceration, and industrialization, neighborhoods in Toledo, like Dorr Street, were stripped of their wealth. In 2015, Dollar General saw this as an opportunity to move in. But Dr. Perryman knew that chain dollar stores preyed on struggling communities. As he says, “they’re a cancer on vulnerable urban neighborhoods,” and he was unwilling to let Toledo be their next victim. He banded together with neighborhood groups, government officials, and allies to implement a moratorium to prevent dollar store construction. The moratorium expired without the city notifying Dr. Perryman, and now the fight has started all over again.  Dr. Perryman is not deterred. His work in the church has grounded him in the long-term nature of the fight for justice. “I don’t know how long it’ll take,” he says, “but we plan to win.”  In the second half of the episode, Kennedy Smith, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, weaves Dr. Perryman’s story into the broader fight against dollar stores raging across the country. Kennedy talks about the disconnect between what communities say they want and what planning commissions and city councils are actually doing. She details how dollar stores create food deserts, attract crime, extract wealth from local communities, and endanger workers. Dollar chain stores are threatening the very fabric that makes a community.  Finally, Kennedy explains that Dr. Perryman’s work and movement-building at the local level is critical to ending dollar store proliferation, but these local leaders need help. Not only do state and federal officials need to reinvigorate our antitrust laws to prohibit dollar stores from using predatory tactics to crush independent retailers, she explains, but they “need to have the political courage to enforce them.”  For additional resources see: https://ilsr.org/building-local-power/