Bursar’s office takeover by NU black students, May 3, 1968; white sympathizers outside. Photo © James Sweet
Racial tensions had been simmering at Northwestern University for several years by the time King’s murder heated them to the boiling point. NU had admitted only five blacks to its 1965 freshman class. When I started at NU a year later, fifty-four African Americans entered. At the time of King’s murder, Northwestern’s total student population comprised approximately 8,000 students; about 160 were black—now restive and angry. They felt isolated, that prejudice permeated NU’s education and representation on campus. King’s assassination galvanized them. On May 3, about 100 to 120 of Northwestern’s black students took over the bursar’s office, refusing to leave until a list of demands was met.48
At the time, I didn’t know what the demands were, but rumors claimed that serving soul food in the cafeterias was at the top of the list. Raised to respect property, I was furious at the audacity of any group occupying a private building, and viewed the takeover as blatantly illegal.
Adding to my consternation, my studious, far-from-radical roommates joined scores of other white students to sit outside the occupied building in solidarity with the black kids inside. At the end of the day, back at the NU apartments, my roommates, their friends, and I stood or lounged on the beds in my dorm room and debated for hours. For the first time, I heard a point of view different from the conservative philosophy espoused by my parents. Many of the girls articulated persuasive arguments about the rationale behind the takeover. One, a chain-smoking, fur coat–wearing, seldom-smiling, cynical girl from New York, spoke most forcefully. “Those same people who claim ‘soul food’ is the main issue completely miss the point. If they were to sum up Christ’s message, they’d boil it down to ‘Eat fish and bread.’”
I learned later what some of the actual demands were: set up a home base for black students to congregate and pursue their own social, cultural, and political agendas; increase the number of blacks accepted into the university to be more in line with the percentage of African Americans in the country’s population; offer courses in black history; increase financial aid; create dedicated student housing for black students; and desegregate NU’s real-estate holdings in Evanston—among other demands.49
After the passionate debates in my dorm room, I saw beyond what at first struck me as criminal behavior. I came to view the occupation as a “civil disobedience” model of dissent, like Rosa Parks breaking the Jim Crow law requiring blacks to sit at the back of the bus.
The next day, I brought snacks to my roommates as they sat outside the continuing occupation. They greeted me with smiling enthusiasm, thinking I would be joining them, but I said, “I disagree with this takeover, but I admire your conviction.” Thirty-eight hours after the standoff began, the black students left the building. The university had agreed to virtually all of their demands. Some alumni were furious, but I learned later that the administration felt the demands made sense and were easy to accommodate. NU’s president had seen the outcome of confrontations on other campuses—it had gone badly for all.50
King’s murder won changes for black students at NU and raised my and many other white students’ consciousness, but his assassination had also rung the death knell for changing neighborhoods in large urban centers across the country.
Barbara Lilly, the woman who lived in West Garfield Park at the time, said of the rioters after King’s death, “They were just destroying their own. I guess they felt they didn’t have anything else when Martin Luther King was murdered—like he was their savior. . . . [After the riots], A&P and Madigan’s . . . a Jewel . . . all prominent stores—Robert Hall, Fish Furniture—all those stores left. We had to go out of our community to shop.”51
Seeing the images of Madison Street and the stores I knew so well, most now lying in smoldering ash, desiccated my heart. I had warm memories of those places, walking or riding my bike with Barbara, buying my first bra at Madigan’s Department Store, hauling a wagonload of groceries every Saturday from the A&P, shopping for school clothes with Barbara and her mom at Robert Hall. My former neighborhood was now a wasteland, a place where I could never again see the touchstones of my childhood.
The entire nation was still reeling from the riots and horrors in the aftermath of King’s death, when another assassination rocked the country—and my world. Just after midnight on June 5, Bobby Kennedy was shot three times at close range, just after finishing a presidential campaign speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. I stared at the newspaper photo of Bobby, taken right after the shooting. He lay on the floor, a bright light casting harsh shadows over his face, his arms outspread, as if he were surrendering, his eyes open. A young man cradled Bobby’s head. My gut twisted. He died twenty-six hours later.
Alone in my dorm, in between final exams, I slid down the wall of my room onto the floor, pressed my head against my scrunched-up knees, and sobbed for a fraying, incomprehensible world of brutality and murder. King’s death, riots, takeovers, protests, bombings, war, and now this. Life was the opposite of all my brothers and I had been taught to believe: that we—and all people—were in charge of our lives, our fate. That outlook now seemed like a fantasy.
More violence was just two months away. The 1968 Democratic National Convention was scheduled to be held in downtown Chicago. Hippies, Yippies, and protestors were planning huge antiwar demonstrations to disrupt the convention and take advantage of the media spotlight. I was back at home for summer break, working downtown at First Federal Savings & Loan. When the news hit that Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman threatened to spike Chicago’s water supply with LSD, panic flamed through the city. It sounded wacky to me, but nothing seemed too far-fetched that year. Why would anyone consider poisoning an entire city? Dad said, “They’re anarchists. They want to destroy everything. They’re just sick people and should be put away.” I had to agree.
Mayor Daley was leaving nothing to chance. I later learned that he had dispatched nearly 12,000 police officers on twelve-hour shifts, ordered 5,649 Illinois National Guardsmen with 5,000 more on alert, and up to 1,000 FBI and military intelligence officers at the ready. The 101st Airborne Division and 6,000 army troops, equipped with bazookas and flamethrowers, were waiting as backup in the suburbs.52
By August 23, thousands of young people settled into Lincoln Park, a few miles north of the convention site on Michigan Avenue. I had zero interest in taking part. The nightly news turned into a kind of bizarre theatre. Mayor Daley was determined to clear out all protestors by eleven o’clock, the park’s official closing time. Ordered to disperse, the crowd defied baton-wielding police officers, who shot tear gas into the throngs. The protestors took to the streets, chanting anti-war slogans and marching south toward the convention center.
With this backdrop, Grandma Gartz called Mom to chide her and Dad for not keeping the fence at the six-flat properly painted. Grandpa had driven by his former building and said if we didn’t paint it, he’d go there himself to do it.
In her lifelong attempt to mollify her impossible mother-in-law, Mom said to Dad and Billy, “Well, if it will make her happy, why don’t we go and paint the fence?” Dad refused, but Mom found a willing accomplice in Billy. They spent three days painting that fence while mayhem unfolded five miles to the east.
Between August 23 and 28, confrontations escalated between twenty thousand Chicago police officers and as many as ten thousand protestors—and television again brought it all home. Police roughed up reporters, innocent bicyclists, residents in their doorways, and a young man who stripped a flag from its pole. Demonstrators responded by throwing food, rocks, and concrete at the officers, as crowds of young people shouted to the cameras: “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!”
In the fall of 1968, there were no open slots in campus housing, so I was living at home again. But I did have the sorority. I met Katy from North Carolina during fall rush. At her first visit to our Tri Delta open house, Katy’s huge blue eyes fixed on mine, her lilting North Carolinian accent sweetly unique among the throngs of girls coming through. We hit it off immediately, discovering we were both German majors. She was voted in and became my pledge daughter. With her advanced-placement credits and an extra load of courses, Katy’s plan was to achieve junior status in one year—and join the Junior Year in Munich program. My commuter status had again left me uninformed. I had never heard of any year abroad program. After making some inquiries, I discovered that I could still participate in the program the following school year as a senior.
To live in Europe someday had been only an inchoate dream, one I couldn’t name or grasp. Perhaps it was the pride with which Dad always spoke of his German heritage, which had influenced me in choosing my major. Now the dream turned real, from a misty thought to a tangible brochure and application—a goal I could actually pursue.
Persuading my parents was the next step. The sponsoring university, Michigan’s Wayne State, had cheaper tuition than Northwestern, and the German government subsidized University of Munich dorm rooms, which cost students only twenty dollars a month. All my credits would transfer to NU, but because the Munich semester ended in July, after NU’s graduation ceremonies, my diploma would be mailed to me. A year studying in Europe or dressing up in a cap and gown? No contest. My mother’s biggest concern was that her daughter would live away from home without a chaperone. Dad, of course, was all for it.
I had lived amicably with my roommates in the Northwestern Apartments, but we hadn’t become close friends. We parted ways after the quarter ended. In Katy, I had a real pal on campus. We hung out in her freshman dorm, drinking Constant Comment tea and smoking Marlboro Lights. Bill often rode up to Evanston on his newly purchased cherry-apple-red-and-white Honda 350, which Katy thought was the ultimate in cool. She’d hop on the back for a fast ride up Sheridan Road and back to the NU campus, her red hair flying behind her. Sometimes I’d ride back home with him from Katy’s dorm, roaring up to my parents’ house.
Even Dad showed his displeasure. “It doesn’t look right for a young lady to be on the back of a motorcycle,” he said.
Mom was more direct. “You’re embarrassing us! You look like hoodlums on that motorcycle.”
As finals week approached at the end of the fall quarter, my despair over the traumatic events of the previous year was fading, but an ongoing war was still being waged on the West Side. Victims were residents like my parents’ tenants. When burned-out businesses left, the West Side’s economic base was destroyed. Anyone who could afford it moved to safer areas; they were replaced by an increasingly impoverished population, followed by escalating crime. Mom and Dad were on the front lines of coping with the results. In Mom’s diaries, I discovered details neither Mom nor Dad had shared with me. Reading those entries decades later induces admiration for their fearless devotion, but raises questions about their choices.
In early December, a crook jimmied open the six-flat outer-door lock. He unscrewed the light bulb in the vestibule—and waited. When a tenant, Mr. Murry, entered the darkened foyer, the assailant beat him to the ground and stole his wallet. In the one day it took for my parents to get the lock repaired, a thief walked into the building, broke into the Murrys’ apartment, and stole their television.
Mom recorded that event and more in her diary:
Our tenants all have the jitters with these robberies and purse snatchings going on. Headd has had the tires stolen off his car, which was in a garage down the alley before he moved into ours. Then his car was stolen out of a repair shop recently. Darden had been robbed in the alley right by his garage about a year ago, and he just begged Fred to install a lock on the front outer door because he said teenage gangs are roving the streets and stealing light bulbs out of front halls and then later breaking in.
I find that the situation has become much, much worse since the April riots after Martin Luther King’s assassination. Mrs. McKinney said she’s so tired of hearing women scream when their purses are stolen. Darden said “I’d rather die than be fenced in,” meaning fear is forcing everyone to stay in the house. The neighborhood is starting to go.
I’ll say we’re awfully patient.
Starting to go? Mom had been noting problems in the neighborhood that could affect their property values since 1953, when she had written about the “trashy” appearance of a nearby building and the racial change in a border community, North Lawndale. Now after two riots, its infrastructure destroyed, and the middle class in frenzied flight, West Garfield Park’s slide had accelerated into a plunge. The nation as a whole had been traumatized by assassinations and riots throughout the year. We all said a grateful farewell to 1968 and hoped for a better 1969.
But for the tenants in West Garfield Park, 1969 held the same horrors as the previous year. In May, thieves broke into Lonnie and Annette Branch’s apartment at the six-flat. “Annette’s a nervous wreck,” Lonnie told my mother. “She’s worried those crooks will come back here, and she’s too scared to even take the bus from work anymore. I have to pick her up at her job.”
1969 was a turning point for Mom. Incessant West Side lawlessness and the added work of maintaining our North Keeler home accelerated her stress. Dad seemed to take the crime and craziness in stride, even though he labored for hours after work and weekends to repair the damages. Dad’s work was tangible. He did extensive on-site physical work, but Mom bore the brunt of coordinating repairs and tenant communication.
And another major change in her life was imminent. The gaggle of young people who’d filled the North Keeler house and pitched in with major projects during the past three years would soon be moving on. The previous year, Paul had earned a full scholarship from Bell Laboratories to pursue a master’s degree at Stanford University in electrical engineering. The research and development subsidiary of AT&T at the time, Bell Labs was considered the most innovative scientific organization in the world. After his first year at Stanford, Paul headed east to New Jersey for his summer job at Bell Labs before returning to the university in the fall.
His work on military contracts shielded him from induction, but the Vietnam War still hung like the sword of Damocles over Bill’s head, more menacing than ever. In 1968, at least sixteen thousand American troops had been killed in action—more than in any previous year of the war. All young men, and the people who loved them, were scared.
In the summer of 1969, Bill had two years of law school behind him, but pursuing a degree no longer guaranteed a deferment. Talk of a lottery to choose draftees was gaining traction, and no draft-age men would be exempt—unless they were in another branch of the armed forces.
Bill applied to the Army Reserves. His application included his recently earned commercial pilot’s license (the lessons were a college-graduation gift), which impressed the Reserves’ aviation unit. He was invited to join. At the end of July, he boarded a plane bound for Fort Benning, Georgia, to complete basic training for the next five months. A month later, I would leave to study in Munich for a year.
Mom threw a farewell party for me, replete with a bon voyage cake, decorated with a confectionary ship. But Grandma Gartz didn’t come. “She hasn’t earned the right to go to Europe!” she told Mom and Dad. “She should stay home and help her mother!”
Linda with Bon Voyage cake at farewell party, August 1969.
Shortly after my farewell party, Peggy and I flew to visit New York for a week before my ship departed. We stayed with Paul in Newark, New Jersey, near his Bell Labs’ offices. Seven days later, Katy and I boarded the ocean liner SS Rotterdam for the nine-day overseas voyage to the ship’s eponymous city.
I was the last to leave of the older kids who had brought so much verve and fun into my parents’ home, and to Mom’s life in particular. Only Billy, sixteen, remained behind. For Mom, the trauma of being overworked was soon augmented by the desolate emotions of a woman whose home, once vibrant with youth and laughter, had become quiet and nearly empty.