After I graduated from eighth grade in the summer of 1962, CPS made a decision that turned the flow of whites out of our community into a flood.
Hoping to alleviate overcrowding, CPS reconfigured boundary lines for four West Side grade schools. From kindergarten through eighth grade, my older brother and I had walked down our alley the one block to Tilton. It was “our” school. But starting in the fall of 1962, all the kids who lived west of Keeler, including my eight-year-old brother, Billy, had to walk six blocks to the recently built Marconi School, which also drew students from south of Madison. Ever since the house on Jackson had been sold to African Americans in 1959 (and whites had rioted), that area of West Garfield Park had seen a steady increase in its black population.
Not everyone was unhappy about the change. In our neighborhood were plenty of blockbusters—those unprincipled real-estate agents who preyed on racial fears. Whites panicked if they thought blacks were moving into the area, thinking it was better to be among the first to sell before prices plummeted.
When the school districts changed, blockbusters couldn’t have wished for a better scenario. Starting in the fall of 1962, waves of black kids crossed Madison Street to walk to Tilton or Marconi, down streets with all-white residents. The block-busters didn’t have to hire an African American woman to walk up and down the nearby sidewalks with a baby carriage, a common tactic they’d used in some white neighborhoods, to frighten whites into believing the neighborhood was “turning”—the modified boundaries did it for them.
But the blockbusters didn’t stop there. That fall, panic peddling began in earnest. We found flyers with large print in our front hallway warning: “GET OUT BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!” Other neighbors told of phone calls late at night. The caller just said, “They’re coming,” and then hung up. “They’re trying to scare us,” Mom said, staring at the phone receiver for several seconds before placing it back on the cradle. She turned to Dad and me. “But what if the colored start buying on our block?”
Dad said, “We have the right to live with the people we want to live with!” But unlike many white West Siders, Mom and Dad never joined neighborhood groups that, without saying so directly, worked to keep the community white. My parents were too busy working in their never-ending rooming house to have time for (or even awareness of) such organizations.
They tried writing classified-ad copy for their vacant apartments to encourage white applicants: “Do you feel you’re being forced out of your community? Do you want to live with people like yourself?” However, the newspaper representative said that the newspaper’s policy wouldn’t allow an ad that seemed discriminatory.
Dad was incensed. “It’s my property! I have a right to choose who lives here!”
My parents felt adrift in a gale that blew in without warning, with no port in sight.
Rumors and gossip of race-based attacks, especially at Marconi, exacerbated white fears. We heard that a group of black kids at Marconi had doused a white kid with gasoline and set him alight. Neighbors didn’t check the source of these rumors; they simply left. Tension between the races became so fraught that police were positioned outside of the school to separate the black and white kids, sending each group home down different streets.
As the school year neared its end in May of 1963, the world watched, along with me, as peaceful black protestors were clubbed, hosed, and attacked by dogs in Birmingham, Alabama.
A few weeks later, on June 9, my parents and I attended my good friend’s Tilton graduation ceremony. It was the first June graduating class after the attendance lines had been moved. I had never seen so many black kids on stage in the nine years I’d attended Tilton graduations. What did it mean? Our block, and nearby blocks north of Madison, were still all white, but the Parker house two doors down was for sale, and the adults were nervous. My parents openly said, “Do you think they’d break the neighborhood?” I knew what that meant. Selling to blacks was a betrayal, destroying everyone’s property values.
Yet right here in my former grade school, I could see evidence that blacks had already arrived, but I didn’t give it much more thought. At fourteen, I was sad that I’d be losing another neighborhood friend, the girl who was graduating. She and her family would soon be moving two miles west, to the suburb of Oak Park.
That evening, Mom wrote in her diary, “What a change from Linda’s graduation last June! Seemed like more colored than white.”
She was right. My 1962 graduating class of seventy-four included four African Americans, 5 percent of the total. Just one year later, out of sixty-seven graduates, thirty-nine, 58 percent, were black—more than a 1,000 percent increase.
Two days after my friend’s graduation, I was studying for freshman final exams at the dining-room table, when the television distracted me with yet another confrontation between blacks and whites. The TV anchor said President Kennedy had sent the deputy attorney general to Alabama to force segregationist governor George Wallace to allow African American students entry into the University of Alabama. I stared at the screen. I now saw two different sets of authority facing off: a governor with hundreds of Alabama state troopers against soldiers federalized by President Kennedy.25
I didn’t understand at the time how Wallace had tried to use the Constitution to back racism. Calling on the Tenth Amendment, which gives power not delegated to the federal government to the states, he decried the “oppression of the rights, privileges, and sovereignty of this state,” and the “illegal usurpation of power by the Central Government.”
Wallace put on a show for his constituents, but he’d known from the start that a federal order trumped his authority, and he would have to allow the black students to register.26
That same evening, June 11, 1963, Kennedy spoke on national television, making an impassioned plea to white Americans to treat black citizens as equals.
The next day, on June 12, 1963, in a vicious rejoinder to Kennedy’s call for fairness, thirty-seven-year-old Medgar Evers, Mississippi’s NAACP field secretary, was shot in the back with a high-powered rifle as he walked from his car to his home. He died an hour later. Again, mass black protests, followed by mass arrests, were broadcast on TV around the world. I later learned that neighbors had heard Evers’s children screaming, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!”27 I thought of my own father. What would I do without my daddy?
The killer was Byron De La Beckwith, a white supremacist and Klansman. He was released after two trials ended in hung juries. (It took thirty-one years to finally convict De La Beckwith for the murder, in 1994.)28 Race, now inextricably bound with violence and death, became America’s daily news fare that summer and into the fall. Everything in our lives suddenly revolved around race. The civil rights movement filled our television screens and dominated newspaper headlines. Pundits and reporters headed south to document vicious confrontations over civil rights and segregation, while my family and I faced a new racial reality in our own backyard.
Ten days after Evers’s murder, the first black family moved onto our block. By August, three more African American families joined them, meaning two-thirds of the homes had black owners, not counting the multiunit apartment building on the corner. “Unbelievably fast,” Mom commented. I overheard my parents talking about what they should do, but they made no plans. I’m sure I met the new black family, but I don’t remember much. I spent my summer doing chores and traveling miles to Foster Avenue Beach, far north, where my Luther North friends hung out.
My parents and all the neighbors had spoken so fearfully of blacks moving into the neighborhood, but when it became reality, nothing had actually changed—except that we had African American families living on our block! Our new neighbors were friendly and respectful. My parents were friendly and respectful in turn. No violence ensued.
After months of seeing vicious beatings, dog attacks, and confrontations over black youths sitting peacefully at lunch counters or students trying to register at a public university, it was comforting to be in my home neighborhood, where blacks and whites lived peacefully on the same block. But integration was short-lived.
A homeowner of the era, questioning what the correspondents of our local paper, the Garfieldian, meant by “integration,” wrote to the editor: “From your words, one can only conclude that for you it is the time between when the first Negro family moves in and the last white family moves out.”29 Based on home sales that summer, it appeared that our block was headed down that same path.