But Coleman isn’t content to focus solely on responding to the flood. He has much bigger plans for Cairo. One of his main goals is to clean up the city’s overall appearance to make it more attractive for businesses. In early June, he signed paperwork authorizing the demolition of several abandoned buildings downtown, which he estimates will begin after the July 4 holiday weekend.

“When I was growing up, people wanted to come to Cairo,” he says. “This was one of the most viable points in the area. People came here to shop, they came here for medical treatment, and they came here for entertainment, so we have to do things that spur some of that on again – just simple things like cleaning the city up.”

It’s his belief that businesses won’t begin to return until Cairo is more attractive, so he’s hoping to enlist the help of local churches and community groups to clean up the city. His administration is also enforcing long-ignored city ordinances on abandoned cars and buildings while putting together a master plan for redevelopment – the first since the 1950s.

And after years of bad management in which the city’s government failed to create a budget, maintain infrastructure, keep records or hold meaningful public meetings, Coleman’s administration and that of the previous mayor have righted the ship, attempting to control the city’s finances and debt. That won’t be easy, Coleman concedes, noting that it’s costing about $22,000 each month to run the city’s pumps, and it will likely take until August to completely rid the city of unwanted water.

Coleman says he is working to not only clean up Cairo, but to renew the minds of its people.

“Until you affect those two areas, nothing can change,” he says. “It was just like a spirit of hopelessness had fallen over this immediate area…. We have to live like people and consider one another as neighbors.”

Despite the negative stigma surrounding Cairo’s racially-charged past, Coleman says the race issue has faded significantly since the days of riots and lynch mobs. The city is now 71 percent black, according to the latest census numbers, and African Americans now hold several positions of power.

“I’m the black mayor,” he says with a laugh. “The city council is predominantly black, so you can’t say it’s a major factor anymore. We’re an economically-deprived community, so that’s become a greater factor than race. We’ve moved beyond that. It’s still present, but it just doesn’t affect the community the way it did then.”

In some ways, Cairo is like many other small towns in Illinois left behind as Americans migrated to urban centers and to the West. Agriculture jobs have dried up, highways have bypassed small communities, and businesses have moved to be near the urban action. Cairo has long been touted as a great city waiting to happen, but perhaps its future holds something else. It more than likely will never again be the bustling city of yesteryear, but it has an opportunity to purposefully recast itself as a small town with potential.

“You can’t continue to say you want something different, while you continue doing the same thing,” Coleman says. “We’re all in the same boat, and we’re continuing to sink, so we have to find a way of saving ourselves from sinking any further.”

Contact Patrick Yeagle at [email protected].