Linda, 1962 Tilton graduate, with her 8th grade teacher, Miss Kelleher.
On August 1, 1959, four years before the first black family moved onto our block, a house deeper into West Garfield Park than blacks had lived prior was sold to an African American family—on Jackson Boulevard, a couple blocks south and west of our home.17
Before the black family moved in, a mob of more than one thousand outraged whites, some throwing stones and bricks, gathered outside the building. The Chicago Police Department dispatched hundreds of officers to the scene, arresting more than two dozen people. For several weeks, police kept a visible presence in the area, an unusually robust response to white intimidation of blacks integrating a Chicago neighborhood.
I don’t recall any discussion about what would have been big news in our community, probably because we had been traveling on a five-week family car trip to the southern and western United States.
One year later, the 1960 census showed that the percentage of African Americans in West Garfield Park had jumped from just about .25 percent in 1950 to 16 percent.18 In 1960, most blacks lived south of Madison Street, which evolved into a de facto Mason-Dixon line: blacks to the south, whites to the north.
Children would breach the border.
A crisis had been fomenting in black neighborhood schools. The burgeoning population trapped in Chicago’s black segregated neighborhoods had created dilapidated buildings, damaged community infrastructure, and strained local schools to the snapping point. In February of 1961, “Willing Willie,” the pseudonym of a columnist for the Garfieldian, our local West Side newspaper, visited an eighteen-unit apartment building just a few blocks south and east of us. “At the building, Willing Willie observed ‘an amazing number of children hopping around in the mud.’”19 Willing Willie estimated forty to fifty families were living there instead of the expected eighteen. The columnist probably used the technique of counting the multiple name tags on the mailboxes for each apartment, as was highlighted in another Garfieldian article.20
The abundance of children in black neighborhoods so jammed local schools that pupils often sat two to a desk, sharing the limited number of outdated textbooks; gymnasiums and closets were transformed into classrooms. Unable to accommodate hundreds of extra children, many black neighborhood schools started split-shifts; pupils went to school either morning or afternoon, leaving many unattended for hours while their parents worked.
Just before I entered eighth grade at Tilton Elementary in 1961, CPS had built two new schools in our community to alleviate the pressure of an exploding student population in West Garfield Park. In the fall of 1961, I watched the two co-presidents of my eighth-grade class smiling broadly as each held up a shovelful of gray dirt. Cameras snapped, documenting the ground-breaking for Marconi School, six blocks northwest of us. Hefferan, two blocks south of Madison, opened in September of the same year, but by December of 1961, Hefferan already held double the students for which it had been built.21
Other school boundary changes profoundly influenced my, and my classmates’, high-school choices. At one time, our home had been in Austin High School’s district. Austin, where my father had graduated, was about fourteen blocks west, located in its eponymous community. Two years prior to my graduation from Tilton, Austin was 99.84 percent white.22 Our home had been redistricted to high schools in East Garfield Park, where the population in 1960 was 60 percent black,23 and undoubtedly higher by 1962. My two choices were Lucy Flower, a girls’ vocational school, known to have tough female gangs, or Marshall, already overcrowded and also notorious for gangs. Dad slapped his left hand with his right for emphasis and shouted, “They expect us to send a young white girl into that dangerous, colored neighborhood? She could be raped!”
The word rang and reverberated in my brain. My gut went queasy. I was about as sexually naive as any thirteen-year-old girl could be. I knew about sex, and I knew that rape meant forced sex. For years, my mother had been lecturing me to preserve my virginity for marriage. Would I be a whore, as Mom and Grandma K called girls who had sex before marriage, if I were raped? I hadn’t even kissed a boy yet!
I didn’t express these thoughts out loud. I was skittish of talking about sex—or rape. I just knew I didn’t want to go to those high schools. I had absorbed my mom and dad’s fear, an emotion I’d rarely seen in my stoic, forbearing parents.
They were not alone in their panic. Virtually every white parent Mom spoke with in our neighborhood wanted a transfer to Austin. Whites felt beleaguered, that they were the victims. Most had no understanding of the cramped and overcrowded conditions in the housing and schools in all-black neighborhoods. They just knew that once blacks moved into their communities, their property, the prideful symbol of their American success, was in jeopardy.
Most of our community was blue-collar: plumbers, printers, factory workers, some police officers and firemen. Dad straddled two worlds. With his chemical-engineering degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), he was among a minority in the neighborhood who had finished college. But his blue-collar upbringing, the son of immigrants who had worked as janitors, was just as important to his self-image. He had the interests of an educated man—science, poetry, literature, history—but I feel certain he wanted to replicate his janitor-parents’ success with rental property. It meant he held down a full-time job as an engineer with the National Board and did all the manual labor required for our two-flat. Perhaps by doing so, he would show that he could work as physically hard as his parents had—and could finally win his mother’s respect. Hiring outside workers for anything he was able to do himself (which was almost everything) would have been shameful in his—and his parents’—eyes.
The whites in most changing communities, usually working-class, felt that they had sacrificed, scrimped, and saved to own their homes, as had my parents. They had played by the rules, kept “their noses to the grindstone,” as Dad liked to say, and now their life savings, in the form of their homes, were threatened when blacks moved in. But it was more than that. When whites fled, they lost their community, where they’d attended church, sent their kids to school, and built a web of close friendships.
Of course, blacks had suffered from overt racism, attacks on their homes, overcrowded schools, and the inadequate education of their children. My parents and other whites didn’t understand that the racist mortgage laws, originally intended to give preference to whites, had turned around to bite them, and they felt victimized.
Many bristled at being called “racists” by the elite, wealthy people whose Chicago neighborhoods or suburban communities would never have to face integration. Blacks were priced out of those homes.24
At the time of the school boundaries change, white parents couldn’t understand why their children were being forced into dangerous communities when a safer school, Austin, was just as accessible. It was an attitude my own mother expressed. “Parents met with the alderman,” Mom told Dad. “He’s adamant. No transfers! So many nice white families are leaving. I think they’re trying to drive us out, just to accommodate the colored.”
A few months before my Tilton graduation, Mom invited one of the school’s teachers for coffee at our house during the lunch hour, so I was home as well. Leaning against the sink, holding the cup before her lips, the steam clouding her glasses, Mom’s voice was high and tense as she set the cup down without taking a sip. “We just don’t know what to do. I’m scared to death to send her to Marshall in that bad area.”
“Have you thought about Luther North?” the teacher asked. “It’s a small, Lutheran high school, up near Central and Irving Park.”
“I’ve heard of it,” Mom said, running her finger around the cup’s rim, “but, no, it hadn’t occurred to me.” She looked past him, at nothing in particular, lost in thought for a moment, and I knew the mechanics of her mind were churning. That afternoon, Mom was on the phone to Luther High School North (LHN). Registration was still open for the fall, but the tuition would be a financial strain. “Only $560 per year,” Mom wrote sardonically in her diary. Because Mom saved all her income-tax filings, I could look up what Dad earned at the time. LHN tuition was about 8 percent of his salary.
From Mom’s comments, I knew it was a lot of money, an expense they hadn’t planned for. My older brother, Paul, exceptionally talented in math and science, attended Lane Technical High School, a kind of CPS magnet school that accepted only boys who passed an entrance exam. No such school existed for girls. After a brief discussion, my parents decided I should go to LHN, that my safety was their top priority. I felt cherished that my frugal parents would spend such a huge sum just for me, even as guilt tweaked my conscience for taking an unfair share of the family budget.
Within the week, Mom took me to register at Luther High School North.
LHN was far—seven miles northwest, requiring two bus rides—a minimum of forty-five minutes each way on the best of days. I didn’t care about the long commute or going to a school where I knew no one. I wouldn’t have known anyone at Marshall either. Most of my classmates’ families had moved far away from the West Side or found apartments further west, in Austin High School’s district.
I was jittery, like any thirteen-year-old would be, anticipating high school for the first time, but I was open to the adventure. Dad had always encouraged his kids to try new experiences. My parents and Dad’s family had modeled selbstständigkeit (self-reliance) and the need to carry on, preferably with optimism. How could I complain about anything when my parents were making such a great financial sacrifice?