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The word rang and reverberated in my brain. My gut went queasy. I was about as sexually naive as any thirteen-year-old girl could be. I knew about sex, and I knew that rape meant forced sex. For years, my mother had been lecturing me to preserve my virginity for marriage. Would I be a whore, as Mom and Grandma K called girls who had sex before marriage, if I were raped? I hadn’t even kissed a boy yet!
I didn’t express these thoughts out loud. I was skittish of talking about sex—or rape. I just knew I didn’t want to go to those high schools. I had absorbed my mom and dad’s fear, an emotion I’d rarely seen in my stoic, forbearing parents.
They were not alone in their panic. Virtually every white parent Mom spoke with in our neighborhood wanted a transfer to Austin. Whites felt beleaguered, that they were the victims. Most had no understanding of the cramped and overcrowded conditions in the housing and schools in all-black neighborhoods. They just knew that once blacks moved into their communities, their property, the prideful symbol of their American success, was in jeopardy.
Most of our community was blue-collar: plumbers, printers, factory workers, some police officers and firemen. Dad straddled two worlds. With his chemical-engineering degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), he was among a minority in the neighborhood who had finished college. But his blue-collar upbringing, the son of immigrants who had worked as janitors, was just as important to his self-image. He had the interests of an educated man—science, poetry, literature, history—but I feel certain he wanted to replicate his janitor-parents’ success with rental property. It meant he held down a full-time job as an engineer with the National Board and did all the manual labor required for our two-flat. Perhaps by doing so, he would show that he could work as physically hard as his parents had—and could finally win his mother’s respect. Hiring outside workers for anything he was able to do himself (which was almost everything) would have been shameful in his—and his parents’—eyes.
The whites in most changing communities, usually working-class, felt that they had sacrificed, scrimped, and saved to own their homes, as had my parents. They had played by the rules, kept “their noses to the grindstone,” as Dad liked to say, and now their life savings, in the form of their homes, were threatened when blacks moved in. But it was more than that. When whites fled, they lost their community, where they’d attended church, sent their kids to school, and built a web of close friendships.
Of course, blacks had suffered from overt racism, attacks on their homes, overcrowded schools, and the inadequate education of their children. My parents and other whites didn’t understand that the racist mortgage laws, originally intended to give preference to whites, had turned around to bite them, and they felt victimized.
Many bristled at being called “racists” by the elite, wealthy people whose Chicago neighborhoods or suburban communities would never have to face integration. Blacks were priced out of those homes.24
At the time of the school boundaries change, white parents couldn’t understand why their children were being forced into dangerous communities when a safer school, Austin, was just as accessible. It was an attitude my own mother expressed. “Parents met with the alderman,” Mom told Dad. “He’s adamant. No transfers! So many nice white families are leaving. I think they’re trying to drive us out, just to accommodate the colored.”
A few months before my Tilton graduation, Mom invited one of the school’s teachers for coffee at our house during the lunch hour, so I was home as well. Leaning against the sink, holding the cup before her lips, the steam clouding her glasses, Mom’s voice was high and tense as she set the cup down without taking a sip. “We just don’t know what to do. I’m scared to death to send her to Marshall in that bad area.”
“Have you thought about Luther North?” the teacher asked. “It’s a small, Lutheran high school, up near Central and Irving Park.”
“I’ve heard of it,” Mom said, running her finger around the cup’s rim, “but, no, it hadn’t occurred to me.” She looked past him, at nothing in particular, lost in thought for a moment, and I knew the mechanics of her mind were churning. That afternoon, Mom was on the phone to Luther High School North (LHN). Registration was still open for the fall, but the tuition would be a financial strain. “Only $560 per year,” Mom wrote sardonically in her diary. Because Mom saved all her income-tax filings, I could look up what Dad earned at the time. LHN tuition was about 8 percent of his salary.
From Mom’s comments, I knew it was a lot of money, an expense they hadn’t planned for. My older brother, Paul, exceptionally talented in math and science, attended Lane Technical High School, a kind of CPS magnet school that accepted only boys who passed an entrance exam. No such school existed for girls. After a brief discussion, my parents decided I should go to LHN, that my safety was their top priority. I felt cherished that my frugal parents would spend such a huge sum just for me, even as guilt tweaked my conscience for taking an unfair share of the family budget.
Within the week, Mom took me to register at Luther High School North.
LHN was far—seven miles northwest, requiring two bus rides—a minimum of forty-five minutes each way on the best of days. I didn’t care about the long commute or going to a school where I knew no one. I wouldn’t have known anyone at Marshall either. Most of my classmates’ families had moved far away from the West Side or found apartments further west, in Austin High School’s district.
I was jittery, like any thirteen-year-old would be, anticipating high school for the first time, but I was open to the adventure. Dad had always encouraged his kids to try new experiences. My parents and Dad’s family had modeled selbstständigkeit (self-reliance) and the need to carry on, preferably with optimism. How could I complain about anything when my parents were making such a great financial sacrifice?
CHAPTER 12: Blockbusters
1962–63
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 blockbusters 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.
CHAPTER 13: A New Start
Linda and Peggy, October 1962. Caricature of Linda’s Dad behind them.
1962–63
In the fall of 1962, Dad’s job at the National Board of Fire Underwriters was terminated, and he received ninety days of full salary as severance. After a couple months of searching, he was hired as a loss-control engineer at Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company. Dad drove throughout his Chicago territory, inspecting bars, bathhouses, hunting-goods stores, motels—any business insured by Fireman’s Fund. He chatted up the owners before inspection, not just because they would be more receptive to his recommended changes, but because he loved conversation and interaction. “Every man has his story,” he often told us.
He might suggest thick metal fire doors to keep blazes contained or accordion-pulled grates over windows to prevent theft. The secretaries competed to type up Dad’s cassette tape–recorded reports, eager for a good yarn. He opened one report on a South Side motel with: “This is a place where the beds never have a chance to get cold.”
“You gotta hear this one,” said the transcriber passing around the tape.
At the same time Dad was enjoying his newfound freedom at Fireman’s Fund, I was discovering a new life at Luther High School North, seven miles from our home and a world away from the West Side. Learning to navigate the shoals of adolescence, I was in a school with a homogeneous population, made up of kids from German and Swedish backgrounds. They had names like Strauss, Radtke, Diener, Faust, Schroeder, and Nelson.
I met my best high-school friend, Peggy, sitting next to me in homeroom, on the first day of school at Luther North. Peggy was very blonde with
pure blue eyes, perfect skin, and beautiful, long fingernails. I bit mine. I began the conversation with this pretty girl sitting next to me by openly complimenting her nails, a feature I’d never have. She jumped right in with a funny rejoinder, “My mother sometimes strokes my nails.”
“Wow, that’s nutty!” I exclaimed. Instantly we were talking and laughing nonstop, and we continued chatting until the bell rang—and between every class for the whole day. Magically, our schedules were identical!
Our personalities melded seamlessly, even though our childhoods had been markedly different. Peggy’s mom read Seventeen magazine to know what was “in” for the new school year. I had never heard of Seventeen magazine, and Mom had no time to read the women’s magazines that piled up month after month. Peggy and her mom shopped for new school clothes in August, just when they’d be the most expensive. Mom and I shopped for some of my fall wardrobe when the winter clothes went on sale in February, purchasing each item one size larger. Grandma Gartz also passed on to me hand-me-downs from tenants. Some of the items were at least acceptable to my untrained eye, so I wore them.
Frugal and practical, Mom had bought Paul a winter coat with two sets of buttonholes. After he outgrew it, she switched the buttons to the left (girls’) side when I was ready for it in about third grade, then back to the boys’ side for my younger brother. We were middle class but spent money sparingly. My parents’ mantra, “Save for a rainy day,” meant they could afford LHN tuition.
Peggy, like most Luther North students, came from a middle-class family, too. Her dad was an accountant, and her mother worked part-time at a movie theater, spending most of her income on Peggy’s clothes. Sometimes when I went to Peggy’s apartment after school, her mother had surprised her with two or three new outfits laid out on her bed! Always dressed stylishly and more adept at negotiating the high-school social scene, Peggy became my adolescent guide and consultant.