Chapter 14

Integration

MANY YEARS BEFORE Don Warren brokered peace at his dinner table, he entertained a proposition from an enterprising young man that would change drum corps in the Midwest.

In January 1965, Elijah Mondy, city wrestling champ at 127 pounds from Chicago Vocational High School, climbed the tall flight of stairs at 2507 N. Kedzie and swaggered into Warren’s lair. Mondy was late of the baritone line in the all-black Giles Yellow Jackets, and he’d come to Warren with a complicated request: “Make me a Cavalier.”

The Cavaliers had encountered prejudice in districts far removed from the streets of Chicago. Adolph DeGrauwe described a tour pit stop in the deep South. “They had two drinking fountains: one white and the other colored. There was a long line at the white, so I went up to the other one. There was no one in line, I remember that.”

“At a stop near Atlanta we were using both bathrooms and the sheriff said, ‘I have a jail bigger than all you guys,’” Bill Dragland remembered.

As senseless as the restrictions seemed, at home the Cavaliers stood along with every corps they knew from the tip of Boston harbor to the Florida Keys in accepting segregation as a matter of course. Warren had never fielded such a request before. Even so, what Mondy proposed was not impossible: the boys would have no problem, Warren knew, it was the adults—booster club parents and board members—who’d fight him on integration.

“I knew it was coming,” Warren said. “Anyone with common sense would know. Society was gonna change.” A show in South Milwaukee tugged at his conscience. Following Friday barnstorming, the Cavaliers walked back to their quarters clad in matching jackets, a crowd of admirers trailing. “And I was laughing and joking with the kids and so on, and I heard some kids behind me. One kid said, ‘I’m gonna join the Cavaliers. I can get into that. I can play.’ And the buddy he was with, or someone beside them, said ‘Man, you ain’t the right color for that.’ And that kinda hit me. I turned around and looked at ‘em, and they were black, and I didn’t say anything. I just kept going, but that stuck with me. I just kinda felt, why couldn’t that kid be a part of us if he wanted to be?

“I had to figure out how I was going to do this,” Warren said of integration. He asked Mondy to return in the fall, give him the season to lay groundwork. Mondy was willing to be patient. “He seemed confident that it was going to happen,” Mondy said. “And I was very impressed with him—he was very nice, and cordial, and diplomatic. He didn’t seem surprised, or like I’d caught him off-guard. It seemed like he was aware of the signs of the times. I believed him.”

Mondy had been a loyal member of the George L. Giles Yellow Jackets since 1960, and was justifiably proud of the group’s musicianship and tradition. Few African American corps marched in that era, and the Yellow Jackets were a dominant force, notching an American Legion state championship in the 1950s before the Cavaliers locked up that title. But the death of founder and director John Turner threw the organization into disarray. The staff struggled to manage the group. Mondy, competitive as they came, wasn’t ready for his corps career to end on a sour note.

He first saw the Cavaliers at 1961’s Legion state championship. “I thought all the corps were good in marching and maneuvering, but the Cavaliers were like a precision machine. I mean, it was incredible. They were in a league by themselves and superior to all the other corps. The horn line was like a symphony orchestra and the music they played was superb. You got goose pimples running up and down your spine.”

In the Cavaliers’ “slight arrogance” Mondy saw a reflection of his own healthy ego. But racial barriers, and his contentment with the Yellow Jackets, stopped him from exploring the group any further. Turner’s death changed that. “I had attended integrated elementary and high schools. I was not intimidated by racial barriers and problems if there was something I really wanted to do.”

First, Mondy had to wait for Don Warren to do his part.

After their meeting, Warren talked to his assistant, Jim Jones, quartermaster Richard “Monk” Wawrzyniak, and a few other managers. They were against any changes. “They didn’t want blacks,” Warren said. “And I knew we’d have trouble with the parents. Because of society: no corps was integrated that I could recall.”

At home, Chicago was burning with resentment and violence toward outsiders claiming neighborhoods passed from Italians to Poles to Slavs before them. Chicagoans pummeled Martin Luther King and his followers with rocks during a procession in the 1960s. There were marches, raids, riots, and all the tension boiling over for the nation to witness at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

“These neighborhoods were changing with great pain and suffering,” Cavalier Ken Nolan remembered. “They were burned out and there were fights. Charlie Ferrera with the Royal Airs—when he’d come home he’d park right in front of the house and wrap a chain around his hand to make sure he’d get to his house in one piece. All this racial change that was supposed to be happening in the city, it wasn’t happening. It wasn’t very pleasant.”

Warren intended to win the argument when it came to his corps. He encouraged Mondy to recruit friends to join, figuring a group would be harder to turn down than an individual. “‘I don’t know why he can’t join the corps,’” Warren blasted his managers. “‘He’s got balls. He’s not a girl. Let him come in and join!’ I knew I’d have no trouble with the boys.”

Drum corps taught the Cavaliers tolerance. Even if their own ranks were all-white, they’d competed against and admired the performances of black groups. Their shared vocation meant a shared respect. When the ignorance and meanness of the world-at-large threatened to seep in, corps folks circled the wagons and stood up for their own.

Adolph DeGrauwe attended a vocational high school in 1950s Chicago struggling with integration. Sometimes fights erupted. “I had a Cavalier jacket on, thank goodness, because a couple guys from Giles were there, and they got me out, and then they had the fight.”

Bill Dragland remembered a 1950s show in Michigan City where carloads of local toughs circled the parking lot, leering at the Giles kids. “We said, ‘We’re not leaving until they leave.’ We stayed in the parking lot. A lot of us were standing out there. We stood there and then they left. Giles got on their buses. They left, and then we left.”

The Yellow Jackets returned the favor when Cavaliers bravado irked corps on the short end of the tally in Streator, Illinois. The corps beat the Vanguard by 10 points, and some wise guy grabbed a Kotex from the women’s restroom and nailed it above the Vanguard dressing room with the legend “beat by 10.3” scrawled above. As the Cavaliers marched a final time around the field and approached the gate, drum major Bruce Tietgen warned his charges not to start a fight, “but if anybody touches a Cavalier, it’s lights out.” As the Cavaliers exited, Giles lined up next to them, clapping, blocking any ruckus before it could get started.

Among the ranks what really mattered was, Can he make us better? Can he play? “They had to meet the same kind of standards, and they would toe the mark,” Larry McCormick said. “And if they could play the horn and did the work, they were accepted.”

Mondy returned in September 1965, as promised. And Warren took Mondy to his audition, where he was assigned second baritone. Mondy was introduced to the rest of the corps at Wednesday rehearsals as their newest member. He credited bass horn Will Love as first to personally welcome him. “I was all by myself, the only black in the room, and they made me feel loved, and they made me feel welcome,” Mondy said. “They were nice—it looked like they were prepared for it, so whatever (Don) did, he prepared them for it. Sal seemed happy about it. I think he wanted some black guys in the horn line. ‘I always admired black musicians,’ is what he said.”