Aftermath of April 1968 riots on Chicago’s West Side. Photo © Jo Freeman
In September of 1967, a few months before Mom’s confrontation with Lonnie and Annette Branch, Grandma Koroschetz died at the age of eighty-one. Mom had made the three-hour round-trip drive to visit her mother at Manteno State Hospital about once a month. Dad and we kids joined her off and on, even when Grandma K no longer recognized any of us. In the last few years of her life, she had developed full-fledged dementia, staring at us with blank, shimmering eyes and speaking only her native Austrian dialect. At the news of Grandma K’s death, Mom didn’t cry. “I’ve shed oceans of tears over my mother. I have none left.” She said this with a bitterness that kept me at a distance.
I felt little loss at Grandma K’s death. She had lived in our home as a troublesome, sometimes violent, enigma for the first nine years of my life and then, for another nine years, was at Manteno, where I saw her only occasionally, as a duty to appease my mother. I was relieved that the battles over visiting Grandma K would now be behind us, but I was sorry for Mom. I had seen how hard she tried to be the good daughter, but in her loyalty to her mother, she’d thrown a net of guilt over the rest of the family for not possessing the same devotion to Grandma K as she did.
We had a wake and a funeral, but Mom never buried her resentment against Dad for failing to join her on every Manteno visit.
Grandma’s death occurred just as I was starting my sophomore year at Northwestern, where virtually every girl lived on campus. Living at home, I had made almost no friends, a foreign experience for me. I decided my only option for connecting with other coeds was to join a sorority, so I subjected myself to the painful ritual of Greek rush.
Rushees walked from one sorority house to the next, where beaming members greeted the visiting group of would-be pledges with wide smiles and rehearsed songs. Once inside, we had fifteen minutes to “get to know” the women. Some of my conversations were so superficial and strained, my stomach flipped in an agony of stalled chitchat and painful seconds-long silences. At other houses, the girls and I warmed to one another. That’s what happened at Delta Delta Delta, where I was offered a bid to join. But with limited space, new pledges weren’t allowed to live in the sorority house, and I still longed to feel as if I were truly a part of Northwestern.
Walking out of my French lit class late in the fall quarter, I chatted with Marge, a girl who knew I wanted to live on campus. When one of her four roommates transferred out of NU, Marge arranged for me to meet the remaining two on a gray November day. Seated in an oak high-backed booth in the gloom of the university’s antiquated cafeteria, we exchanged backstories and fell into comfortable conversation. Rikki, Joannie, and Marge invited me to be their fourth roommate.
“Mom! Dad! Guess what?” I shouted, dashing through the house and dropping my books on the kitchen table. Mom was ripping apart iceberg lettuce and dropping it into a bowl. She looked up. “You certainly seem excited. What is it?”
“That girl I told you about—Marge? Well, I met her other roommates today, and they want me to be the fourth girl in their dorm! Oh, I really want to do this. Can we swing it?” I’d spoken with Mom before about the isolation I felt living off campus.
Mom picked up a tomato and sliced it into wedges. “Well, that’s great news,” she said, and cut up two more chunks before catching my eye. “But we’d have to figure out how to pay for it.”
I was prepared. “I stopped by NU’s finance office. I can take out some low-cost student loans, as long as you cosign them.”
“Hmmm . . . it’ll be a stretch. Let’s talk it over with Dad.” She handed me a couple of carrots and the vegetable peeler. “In the meantime, would you please peel and chop these carrots for the salad?”
After dinner, Mom, Dad, and I reviewed the price of room and board for two-thirds of the school year. They agreed that with loans, they could handle the extra cost for the winter and spring quarters. Mom, as the family CFO, would fill out the prodigious loan paperwork.
In January of 1968, I moved into the Northwestern Apartments, where Marge and I shared one of two bedrooms; Joanie and Rikki the other. We all used the common bathroom. I kept quiet when I learned the generous allowances each had. They often skipped breakfast or chose to order pizza for dinner instead of eating the dorm food. With my meals already paid for, I never missed a single one.
Marge—zaftig, smooth-skinned, smart, and focused—had beautiful clothes, lovely lingerie, and an open smile. She had brought her record player, which she invited me to use anytime, the first gesture of many that made me feel welcome in the group. And what wonderful albums she had! Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, Bob Dylan, the Beatles—all the sixties greats, none of which I owned. I played them all, over and over.
Rikki, a high achiever, had been president of her high school’s senior class and had scored the prestigious role as director of NU’s Freshman Carnival. A drama major, she won leading roles in university productions, where her powerful intensity spread goose bumps across my skin. Her thick, black hair fell to her waist, swaying with the vigor of her brisk, purposeful walk, on to the next endeavor.
Our fourth roommate, Joanie, was often away for a long weekend with her boyfriend. I heard her sobs from down the hallway when she returned on Sunday nights, and ran out to greet her. Tears streamed in black rivulets from her mascara-drenched lashes surrounding large blue eyes, the heavy suitcase she carried listing her to one side. I gave her a long hug, took her suitcase, and, with an arm around her shoulder, listened to her heartsick laments.
Girls from other rooms came to ours to chat, gossip, and share their traumas. One hated the food (I thought it was fine); another despised Northwestern and planned to quit. Thrilled to be able to attend NU, I was perplexed by her petty grievances. Some girls were just psychological messes, anxious and sobbing over a project due the next day, about other girls stealing their boyfriends, about fights over money with their “horrible” parents. Some talked openly about their sexual escapades with this guy or that, sometimes boys in the same fraternity house. With my anti-premarital-sex upbringing, I was flummoxed. They all seemed like perfectly nice girls, not “whores,” as my mother referred to women who slept around.
As January came to a close, I was getting comfortable with dorm life and the widely disparate characters I’d met. I had no way of imagining the upheavals that lay ahead.
Nightly news programs beamed the Vietnam War right into America’s homes and college dorms across the nation. War was a vague concept I had studied in history class. I knew Ebner’s death after World War II had permanently scarred Dad and my grandparents, but I had experienced none of it. Now TV gave all Americans an eyewitness view. I saw scared, mud-splattered boys about my own age hunkered down in swamps. Many of these soldiers confessed to interviewers they didn’t know why they were in Southeast Asia.
I watched CBS news reporter Morley Safer broadcasting from a small Vietnamese hamlet that had been burned to the ground by American troops. Children and elderly women, stunned and blank-eyed, wandered like ghosts among the charred ruins. I felt sick at the images—at the thought of my brothers, friends, or Bill moldering in those swamps; killed, blown apart, or tortured in a POW camp.
Day after day, television showed us body bags being unloaded at airports; I tried to comprehend the young men dead and rotting in gray zippered plastic. We saw footage of helicopters—the “whop-whop-whop,” a soundtrack to countless scenes—spraying Agent Orange, defoliating thousands of acres of farmland. We learned only later it had poisoned our own troops.
Meanwhile, our nation’s generals and President Johnson assured us that all was well—we had the enemy on the run and were winning this war. But after the Tet Offensive, well-coordinated North Vietnamese attacks against more than a hundred towns and cities in January of 1968, Americans realized the Communist Viet Cong were far from defeated. We’d been lied to, and a longer war was inevitable.
The specter of being drafted and sent to Vietnam hung heavy over every young man, including Paul, Bill, and Dietmar. As college students, they all had deferments—for the time being.
I watched tens of thousands of young Americans march and demonstrate in antiwar protests across the nation, denouncing the war as immoral. I was not politically astute, and read the conflicting opinions of the “Hawks” and the “Doves,” unsure of what to believe. But the lies and dissembling, the scenes of innocent children and farmers killed, their livelihoods destroyed, drove me into the antiwar camp.
The mood of NU’s campus had flipped since I’d enrolled. When I was a freshman, in the fall of 1966, Greek life was all-powerful. The mostly wealthy population of coeds had dressed for class in expensive skirts and sweaters, even tying color-coordinated bows into their hair. By 1968, dressing up was becoming passé, replaced by a uniform of jeans and T-shirts, better suited to the spreading mood of defiance. Students focused on the war and the civil rights movement instead of sororities and fraternities, a transition still in flux when I pledged.
We questioned everything. In the spring of 1968, women protested the paternalistic curfews governing female students. Northwestern men could come and go from student housing as they pleased, but women had to be in their rooms by eleven o’clock on weekdays and midnight on weekends. Just a couple months after I moved onto campus, NU introduced more gender-equal hours, but only with parental approval for the females. Mom felt the more lenient dorm rules were an “invitation to temptation.”
Since my childhood, Mom had lectured me against pre-marital sex, adding admonitions like, “Why buy the cow when the milk is free?” I know her intention was good—to protect me from an unwanted pregnancy. Abortion was illegal, and use of birth-control pills (FDA-approved in 1961) was severely restricted. As recently as 1972, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared the state’s “Crimes against chastity” law unconstitutional, it had been a felony in Massachusetts to provide birth control to unmarried people.
Dad believed in as much freedom as possible for his kids, so I had to persuade only my mother to sign off on the unrestricted hours, which she finally did. But dorm rules turned out to be the least of my parents’ problems that spring.
On April 4, an assassin gunned down Dr. Martin Luther King as he stood on the balcony of his hotel room in Memphis, Tennessee. Riots exploded in cities across the country. West Garfield Park again went up in flames, but with far more destruction than in the 1965 riot. Looting and arson engulfed the community where I had walked and played. One of the six-flat tenants called my mother as the mayhem unfolded that first night. She told Mom she had just returned from taking her husband to Garfield Park Hospital. On his way home from work, he had been ensnared in the rioting and shot in both hands.
“Don’t come down here to collect the rent,” she told Mom, her voice rushed and staccato. “They’re turnin’ over white people’s cars, throwin’ rocks at any cars. Mobs of folks are just lootin’ the stores on Madison. They’re comin’ out with armloads of clothes, TVs, dressers, furniture. The police are just ignorin’ them. It’s like they’re directing looter traffic!”
On TV, I saw rioters smashing windows and smiling looters hugging TV sets with both arms. Some pushed shopping carts loaded with goods down the sidewalks, fire and smoke rising behind them.
Years later, I talked to Barbara Lilly, an African American woman and member of my former church, Bethel. She had moved into West Garfield Park about the same time we’d moved north. After more than forty years, the 1968 riots were still seared in her memory. Here’s what she recalled:
People were burning up houses. They were just rollin’ clothes out of Robert Hall [a Madison Street clothing store]. . . . The National Guard was right there. . . . They had tanks in front of my house and down the streets on West End. I had to get my kids out of school. My kids saw all those tanks going down West End and said, “Look, Mommy! Look! What’s that?” Then at night, when we looked out the window, you would have thought it was Vietnam!
Neighbors climbed up to their rooftops for a better view of the eastern sky, where flames stabbed through swells of rolling black smoke. Barbara Lilly also recalled that mayor Richard J. Daley commanded his police, “Shoot to maim looters and shoot to kill any arsonists.” The order outraged many in Chicago, but it especially incensed African Americans like Lilly.45
“It was terrible,” said Barbara Lilly, as she recalled the riots. “We were already devastated by the whole thing. He’d a never given that order if they’d been white.”46
While the riots and flames engulfed the West Side, Mom and Dad drove to the six-flat to fix a furnace problem. Annette Branch greeted my parents with more bad news, her voice frayed with fear. “Someone got shot just north of the six-flat—right here on Keeler Avenue,” she said.
Dad patted the gun in his waistband. “We’re being extra cautious,” he assured her.
The King riots had reduced our once-vibrant commercial district to ashes. After more than forty-eight hours of looting, arson, and attacks on firemen and police, eleven Chicago citizens were dead, forty-eight people had been wounded by police gunfire, ninety police officers were injured, and 2,150 people had been arrested. Thousands were left homeless, and a two-mile stretch on West Madison Street was reduced to rubble.47 Two weeks later, my parents’ last white tenant, elderly Mrs. Dilzer, moved out.