Billy with classmates at his Lutheran school, 1963-1964.
As our block was integrating in West Garfield Park, a quarter of a million people gathered in the nation’s capital for the August 28 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King gave his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. In the distance, towering amidst the throngs demanding equality for African Americans, the Washington Monument rose like a giant exclamation point. Our family watched the news that night but heard only a part of King’s speech. “Look at that crowd!” Mom said, staring at the TV.
“I’ve never seen so many people in one spot,” I said, awe-struck by the sea of bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder, filling every inch of space, starting at King’s podium and stretching far into the distance, past the Washington, DC, mall.
“The man sure can express himself,” Dad said grudgingly. With his love of words and poetic mind, Dad recognized brilliant writing when he heard it, but he found it hard to reconcile his prejudices with King’s cogent appeals to justice. “He’s a good speaker,” Dad went on, “but that doesn’t mean the time is right.”
“This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism,” King intoned in his speech, rejoining head-on the common attitude Dad had expressed.
We gathered in the dining room, which served as our family room, where the broad television, a ubiquitous piece of furniture in middle-class 1960s homes, sat squat at the east side. At fourteen, I absorbed the mesmerizing rhythm of King’s language and his repeated calls for justice, but I was too young to discern their real power—in the cadence of his delivery, his southern preacher’s gift to raise the stakes for the millions of blacks who heard in his inspiring words a call to action; in his repeated references to the Constitution’s promise of freedom and his expanded metaphor of that promise as a “bad check” to the “Negro people,” a check the crowd that day had come to cash.
Just about every sentence in King’s speech is quotable, but one dream, which he had specifically envisioned for Alabama, had some promise of possibility on our block: “I have a dream that one day . . . little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”38
Within days of moving in, the son of our first African American neighbors and my little brother shouted greetings to one another across the yard between them. “Hey!” yelled Billy, hands cupped around his mouth. “What’s your name?”
“Junior,” came the shout back. “What’s yours?’
“Billy. Can you come over to play?” Soon, Billy and Junior, both age nine, were hanging out in our yard or playing basketball in the alley. Junior suggested a game he called “Cops and Niggers,” a variation on Cops and Robbers. Both boys, unconcerned about their racial status vis-à-vis one another, took turns at each role. “Now you be the nigger, and I’ll be the cop,” said Junior, and they happily exchanged parts, running and hiding, shooting back and forth, the black character arrested or escaped. The two races of children weren’t the “sisters and brothers” King had envisioned, but for the first time in our lives, whites and blacks, kids and adults, came to know—and like—one another.
But integration wasn’t all Kumbaya. Just a week before King’s speech, Billy and the boy living in the second-floor apartment rode their bicycles to Madison Street late one afternoon. Earlier in the summer, our garage had been broken into and Billy’s bicycle stolen. The thieves left behind a rusty, falling-apart bike. With Dad’s help, Billy dismantled the bike— pedals, bearings, wheels, chains, etc.—sanded, primed, and spray-painted it black, then reassembled it. It shone like new, and Billy was rightly proud of his summer project.
After arriving on Madison Street, Billy and Frankie locked their bikes to a couple of signposts and walked into Kresge’s five-and-dime to buy the pièce de résistance for Billy’s like-new bicycle: handlebar streamers. They left the store around four thirty, and Billy pushed the streamers into the handlebar holes. Now it looked really cool.
Billy crouched to unlock the chain he’d threaded through the wheels and around a light pole. He was twirling through the numbers of his combination lock, when a nearby black teen started chatting with him. The instant Billy pulled apart the lock, the older boy punched him in the face, leaped on the bike, and took off. Shocked more than injured, Billy picked himself up, hand to his sore jaw, and watched in dismay as the pride of his summer disappeared into the Madison Street crowds.
Sobbing when he got home, Billy told Mom what had happened. She called the police, who said they’d send over an officer to take a report. We all tried to comfort Billy for his loss, assuring him it wasn’t his fault, that the police would catch the thief.
Detectives came to our house that evening. Dressed in rumpled trousers and open jackets over shirts, ties loosened at the neck, they showed their badges at the door and introduced themselves. Mom and Dad led them into the living room, where they questioned Billy and jotted down the details of the crime. Flipping his notebook closed, one said, “Even if we caught the culprit, they’d let him go. The house of corrections is too crowded as it is.” They bade us goodbye.
“Well, that certainly was eye-opening,” Mom said, after closing the door behind them. “I guess we’re on our own.”
As far as I knew, we’d always been on our own. More relevant to our situation at the time than the cop’s cynical analysis of crime and punishment was what I discovered decades later in Mom’s diary.
Mom recorded the basic facts of the battery and bike-theft incident, but made no comment about it. Instead, she wrote this: “Boy, did I have the ironing tonight! Ironed into the wee hours.” She continued with a long list of completed chores. Instead of reflecting on her son’s safety—whether an assault and robbery in broad daylight might be a signal to move—she focused on her own accomplishments. My father also knew about the attack, but I don’t recall either of my parents talking about relocating. But they had decided, even before the assault, to take Billy out of dicey Marconi School and enroll him in a Lutheran grade school a few miles north.
The mugging didn’t change Billy’s friendship with Junior. He, more than Paul or I, was growing up with black kids; he wasn’t ruled by the negative stereotypes that whites had created for blacks. He saw the good and the bad—from personal experience.
But stories like Billy’s, an overriding fear of what would happen next, and the continuing decline of their property values prompted other white families to desert the community as if outrunning a wildfire. All of my neighborhood friends either had already moved or were planning to move. Unlike Dad’s generation, when West Side neighbors and Bethel Church members maintained close ties with each other’s families for decades, the winds of racial change now blew us permanently apart.