Chicago Daily News, August 14, 1965 p4.
On Wednesday night, August 11, 1965, police in the Watts area of Los Angeles stopped a young black man, Marquette Frye, on suspicion of driving under the influence. Just as in Chicago, blacks had poured into Los Angeles from the South during the years of the Second Great Migration.39 And as in West Garfield Park, and dozens of other large cities, blacks were segregated. Government redlining policy meant mortgages became unavailable when blacks moved into an area, so whites had deserted Watts in a mass exodus once African Americans moved into their neighborhood.
Often harassed and intimidated by the virtually all-white Los Angeles police force, excluded from jobs, housing, and politics, blacks in Watts were a community powder keg, ready to explode. Frye’s arrest lit the spark. After Frye’s mother and brother got into a physical confrontation with the officers, the local crowd of onlookers burgeoned into a mob, hurling rocks and chunks of concrete at the police. Violence escalated as up to thirty-five thousand rioters looted, set fires, and attacked police and white motorists. By Friday, August 13, rioting was so intense that as many as thirteen thousand national guards-men were called in to maintain order.
The evening after Watts convulsed in riots, on August 12, a fire truck pulled out of its station at Wilcox and Pulaski, just south and east of our buildings and near the neighborhood’s main business district. That simple routine turned into tragedy.
Neighborhood blacks perceived the Wilcox all-white fire department as racist. One African American woman who went to Providence St. Mel School, just south of Garfield Park, recalled why: “City services were such that you didn’t want to call the police or fire department; they would treat you with disrespect.”40
Despite numerous petitions by West Garfield Park African Americans to the city to hire more blacks to serve in the Wilcox firehouse, the requests were ignored. Just like Watts, WGP was a tinderbox of resentment. A fire alarm that Thursday night of August 12 struck the match.
A hook-and-ladder truck was dispatched to respond to the alarm, but the tillerman, whose job it was to control the ladder, never took his place at the back. He was supposed to press an “all-clear buzzer,” telling the driver that he was in position and that it was safe to pull out of the fire station. The driver mistook another sound for the buzzer and raced out of the firehouse without the tillerman in place. On a sharp turn, the uncontrolled ladder swung free, ramming a stop sign, which struck and killed twenty-three-year-old Dessie Mae Williams, a young African American woman.
The day of the fire-truck incident, I was spending a couple nights with a friend in a northwest suburb, focused only on teenaged fun. The next morning, unaware of Williams’s death, Mom and Dad decided to take a needed break from their non-stop work on the six-flat and the tense negotiations to buy the house on North Keeler. They, along with Billy, took one day off to relax at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, an hour and a half north.
The glow of owning their first single-family home was still fresh in their minds. In between brief swims, they discussed plans for remodeling, indulging in their dreams on that bright Friday afternoon of August 13. Swimming in Lake Geneva’s cool, calm waters under a cloud-puffed August sky, Mom and Dad had no idea of the fury fomenting after Williams’s death, just blocks from their apartment buildings.
Rumors had flashed through the neighborhood that the fireman whose ladder had hit and killed the young mother on Thursday night had been drunk. On Friday, angry leaflets circulated, fueling the rage. One screamed for attention in huge, bold type:
(In tiny print in the upper-left corner is the word “allegedley.” [sic])41
TheChicago Daily News reported that Lawrence Landry, chairman of an activist civil-rights group, ACT, addressed a large group of African Americans in front of the Wilcox firehouse. Landry exhorted his listeners to take action against the injustices blacks had suffered, saying, “Black people must control their own destiny,” and, “You’re being misused because you’re in a white-controlled society.” The crowd swelled. Clusters of angry youths took to the streets.42
My parents and Billy left Lake Geneva as the western sky blushed mauve and purple. Seldom having time to simply talk to one another, they didn’t bother to turn on the radio. And they had so much to discuss: the new house, the six-flat repairs, and catching up on Billy’s life and interests.
As the conversation shifted, the ongoing riots in Watts came up. Mom later told me they had wondered aloud whether such violence could happen in our neighborhood. Just the previous year, Harlem and Rochester, New York and Philadelphia had erupted in devastating race riots. Why not Chicago, too? An hour later, they were traveling south on Pulaski in the summer dark, clueless about the anti-white rage that was already boiling over just blocks from our home.
As the crowds swelled, the police cordoned off Pulaski Road at Washington Boulevard, our street. After twenty-four hours of furor and decades of frustration, black West Siders vented their outrage in volleys of missiles. From housetops, curbs, and doorways, in all sections of the community, youths pelted police with bricks, stones, and bottles. The crowds surged into the business district, just a few blocks away.
Two Chicago Daily News reporters, one black, one white, entered the fray. The black reporter, Burleigh Hines, donned old clothes and mixed with Chicago’s West Side rioters. He wrote about what he saw as my parents and Billy, oblivious to the melee, made their way toward home:
Young punks swarmed in the area, yelling and cursing. Some of them seemed almost hysterical with hatred. The hatred was directed at white men—all white men. . . . “KILL THE white ________” the punks screamed whenever a white person made the mistake of showing his face in the area.43
(Whatever epithet the reporter left blank in his story, it apparently was too raunchy even to allude to in a family newspaper in 1965.)
The paper’s white reporter wrote, “I’ll have to rate it as the most dangerous newspaper experience in fifteen years of covering stories in this, my hometown. . . . A young Negro boy stuck his head in the window of my parked car at Wilcox and Pulaski and shouted, “You get out of here, white man, and don’t come back . . . don’t ever come back.”44
Scores of drivers and passengers were struck by bricks that crashed through the windows of their moving cars. In one of these cars rode the Reverend David Nelson and his sister, Mary Nelson, both white, who were just arriving on the West Side. The children of a Lutheran pastor, both were devoted to helping the downtrodden. David was coming to West Garfield Park to be the new minister of our virtually empty Bethel Church. Mary came along to help him settle in and work on community development. Their welcome to the community they had come to serve was a brick through the window of their Volkswagen Beetle.
It was after nine thirty when Mom, Dad, and Billy approached the intersection of West End, a block north of Washington, where police cars blocked Pulaski. An officer directed Dad to turn west. Turning slowly, Dad peered south. Dozens of flashing blue lights scattered the darkness. In the distance rose tongues of flame and billows of smoke.
He drove down our alley, backed the station wagon into the garage, then started east on foot, calling over his shoulder, “I’m going to find out what’s happening.”
“Fred, please. Don’t go. This is not your business. With all those cop cars, it must be dangerous,” Mom pleaded.
“I’m going!” he shouted, and walked toward the whirling lights.
When Paul heard the back door open, he dashed from his bedroom into the kitchen. He looked to Mom and Billy. “Where’s Dad?” he demanded.
“A slew of police cars were blocking Pulaski,” Mom said, gesturing east. “I begged him not to go, but, as usual, he wouldn’t listen!”
“What? The radio said there’s a race riot going on. I’ve got to find him before he gets killed!”
Mom grasped Paul’s arm. Her voice cracked. “Paul, don’t go. Please. He’ll come back. If you go, then you’ll both be out there. I don’t want to lose my husband and my son!”
Paul pulled free of her grip and ran to the front. The door slammed. He leaped down the steps and strode east, half running, half walking. He knew Dad would have gone straight to the action. Dad’s years in the business of fire protection and underwriting had made him a junkie for conflagrations and firefighting tactics. Paul ran south to Madison Street, then turned toward Pulaski on deserted sidewalks. The eastern sky glowed a lurid, smoky red. Slowing his pace as he approached Pulaski, he couldn’t absorb what was happening on the streets where he had grown up, shopped, and played with friends. All hell is breaking loose, he thought. Fear clutched his throat tighter with each crash and whoosh in the distance. As he approached Madison and Pulaski, a scrum of young black men rounded the corner ahead and blocked his path.
“Hey, white boy?” one guy said to him. “You don’t wanna go down there.” He gestured at the red sky. “Don’t you know they killin’ your kind?” In moments, Paul was surrounded by at least seven black men, with many more behind them.
“I’m looking for my father,” Paul said, keeping his eyes on the guy who had spoken to him. The young man had bright eyes. Smart guy, Paul thought as he appraised his situation, even as he felt the sweat gathering under his armpits, his heart moving to his throat. The man confronting him stood about five foot nine, had a moderate build, and appeared to speak for the group. Next to him stood a guy, drunk or high on drugs, wide and muscular. He locked his bleary, empty eyes on my brother and didn’t move or say a word. Paul thought, This guy could kill me in a second—like squashing a fly. I can’t let them think I’m afraid.
The leader did all the talking, expounding of the injustices the black man had suffered at the hands of white people. He told Paul that blacks were better than whites. “You can only make white babies. We can make any color we want.”
Paul listened and nodded, saying little except an occasional, “You have a point.”
After about fifteen minutes, Paul said, “Well, I understand your position, but now I really need to go.” He backed away. The men behind him parted to let him through. He walked back west, toward our home, dazed and not certain what had just happened or if he might still be in danger. Not daring to look back, he hunched his shoulders and kept a purposeful pace. He was followed only by the crackle of flames and the roar of water gushing from fire hoses, until the din faded to a dull muffle.
By the time he arrived at our flat, Dad was back, too.
“Dad!” exclaimed Paul. “What happened?”
“The cops wouldn’t let me go any farther after I got to Washington and Pulaski, but it sure looks like a riot,” he said.
“Paul! Thank God you’re back safe,” Mom cried, throwing her palm to her forehead, her dramatic gesture when relieved. She paced the room. “Just don’t anyone go out again!” she commanded.
Only I wasn’t home. She picked up the phone. “I’ve got to call Linda and tell her what’s happening, tell her to call us before she comes back home tomorrow.”
Race riots were the focus of the entire front page of Saturday’s Chicago Daily News. The upper three-fourths was devoted to Watts, introduced by this enormous headline:
TERROR IN L.A.
16 Dead; 2,000 Troops Fail to Stop the Rioting Mob
The article at the bottom, “In Chicago, Scores Hurt in Riot,” reported that seventy-nine people had been injured during the Chicago riot, including eighteen police officers. The headlines conveyed the shock of both black and white reporters who had been on the Chicago scene: “Hysterical Hate on the West Side” and “A Night of Shame on Pulaski Road.” TheChicago Defender, Chicago’s venerable newspaper for African American readers, headlined less volatile sentiments in its August 14 issue, “Civic Leaders Condemn Violence.”
It seemed as if the entire country were disintegrating into racial hatred and violence, while we lived side by side and got along fine with our African American neighbors. The day after the riots, Mr. Lewis, whom Mom had always referred to as “the nicest man,” was helping Paul work on our car. This is what Mom recorded:
Police from all over the city were stationed on every corner of our neighborhood, ready for trouble. The strangest thing of all was that, on this day of racial tension, Paul and Mr. Lewis next door were working on [our] station wagon, doing a new valve job. So here they were, both black and white, working together, sweating together, while this racial situation was just waiting to explode. Later in the day, I brought up the subject, just casually, and [Mr. Lewis] said, “I just hate this worse than anybody.”
A new era had begun in our neighborhood—and our lives.