America Behind the Color Line (49 page)

In 1939, Mr. Carl Hansberry, father of Lorraine Hansberry, the great playwright, went to the Supreme Court of the United States. He had enough money to be able to do that. He wanted the right to move into a restricted white neighborhood. It was the first time such a case had gone that far since
Plessy
v.
Ferguson,
in 1896, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ruling of separate but equal facilities for blacks and whites after Mr. Plessy had objected to separate transportation facilities for blacks in Louisiana.

Mr. Hansberry had the means to carry his case all the way to the Supreme Court, with the help of some other people and of the NAACP, of course. We had a very strong NAACP in Chicago. The case was
Hansberry
v.
Lee,
and Justice Hugo Black read the majority opinion that outlawed restrictive covenants in this one particular white section of Chicago. Those of us whose parents could afford it immediately moved into that section. And that’s what we were supposed to do. That was what part of the Civil Rights Movement was about: as soon as you could break it down, you got out of segregation and you integrated the white community.

The white community soon fled these neighborhoods, though the people who came in were better than those who were there, educationally and all kinds of ways, if you want to measure it in those terms. But the white people left, because there are factors called prestige and status that go with living in certain neighborhoods, around certain people. There was an attitude about living around all those colored people, but we didn’t care, because we had more space now and we brought our entertainment with us. We brought our jazz and all the good things that went with the life we’d had on the other end. And now we could brag that we lived in the better neighborhood.

In 1948, another case went to the U.S. Supreme Court,
Shelley
v.
Kraemer
. In 1945, Mr. Shelley had purchased a house in St. Louis on a tract of land that was restricted to white occupancy. And in that case the same justice, Hugo Black, read the majority opinion that restrictive covenants were unenforceable anywhere in the United States, which meant now that the second migration had barged in. Stylistically, the two Great Migrations were different, not inferior or superior to each other. Different people. Walked different, talked different. The new migrants brought with them country blues, not city jazz. Country Negroes. That’s what we unfortunately labeled those who came with the second migration. We gave them almost no help. The separation was dramatic and complete. The class separation was pronounced right away. If they lived on the West Side, those of us who lived on the South Side already had a snobbish attitude towards them. Still do. I’m the only one who can cross those boundaries. The mother of the person who runs Indigo grew up in Chicago. I asked her, what did she know about the West Side? She said, “What do I know? I don’t need to know about the West Side.”

A lot of people don’t understand that blacks have been divided among ourselves by class for a long, long time. And that separation removed the knowledge, the experience, and much of what we had been given by those who were part of the first Great Migration. You see, the black population at the time of the first migration outvoted the immigrant white population.

And then the new migrants didn’t vote. The new black migrants of the 1940s and 1950s plummeted almost immediately. I was teaching school, and I noticed the difference in attitudes towards education. I noticed the difference in the students I was teaching in the early 1950s. By that time, as a result of
Shelley
v.
Kraemer,
the more fortunate had moved to neighborhoods like Hyde Park and Woodlawn. They had begun to move into the South Shore and had created another neighborhood in Chatham, which is still a very stable middle-class black community. They began to move into Beverly and other neighborhoods. It was like two streams that just start to diverge. The rural Southern people in the second migration then went one way and became poor, and the other people went into the middle class.

Then another thing happened. When those in the second Great Migration first arrived, there were quite a few jobs for them. But then the jobs began to go away—they were going to the suburbs, or companies were going out of business and moving somewhere else. The stockyards, for example, began to move to places like Iowa. The steel mills began to send much of their business overseas and other places.

Jobs that could have unskilled labor were no longer available. Even jobs requiring semiskilled labor were no longer available. Now this meant that the woman would apply for welfare, but she could not receive it if there was a male in the house over eighteen years old. So the family began to be immediately affected. The social worker had the right to come into your apartment any time of the day or night and look around. And if she even saw a pair of shoes that belonged to a male, she had a responsibility to cut that person off the welfare list, very much in the same mood as John Ashcroft’s attorney general office.

So then the increase in public housing began and the beginning of the demolition of the old housing structures that were dilapidated, the real slum kind of housing. There was no resistance to that, because the people had not learned how to organize. And the idea came up to keep this population contained, to build more public housing. Like the Robert Taylor Homes. The high-rises. That was coming into the 1960s. The concentration of poverty and problems became intensified and greater. And that has continued up until the present.

The separation, psychological and social and certainly economic and cultural, was very pronounced. For a period of time, during Harold Washington’s mayoralty—the first black mayor of Chicago, who was also a Du Sable High School graduate—we brought people together. I got money for Mayor Washington’s campaign from Ed Gardner, who had a big business, according to black business standards. Ed brought all the black businessmen together because the whites would not finance a black man.

If I had been born in the Robert Taylor Homes in the 1960s, it would have been very much more difficult. There are examples of those who somehow did it and there are some who will do it. They are usually people who have met with a great teacher or a minister or a very strong woman or someone else who has helped them, like a mentor or some kind of role model. Sometimes just Mama, who somehow can see that future that my mother and father saw for their children.

The way to transform the tragedies of that period and those people—the decline from the wonderful self-contained colored world to all the statistics that we know about the Robert Taylor Homes today—is that number one we must provide quality education, the kind of education that will prepare all of the young people for college and for citizenship and for earning a living. We can do that. We must break down the barriers that cause any form of segregation, so that people can make a choice as to where they want to live. And we must create institutions of mentoring that will help those less fortunate people recognize that they must somehow change their style of living if they are to be accepted.

We must also teach them the nature of power. We must help them understand finances, as we understood in my generation. People were taking money that we earned out of the community. I walked my first picket line when I was twelve years old and thought that things would be all right after that. We created a slogan: Don’t spend your money where you can’t work. We must use our finances much more carefully and we must organize politically. Not exclusively for any party, but so that we can bargain—with our vote, with the power that comes from the black vote—with all of the parties. We can do all these things on the inside, among ourselves. The rest of the society needs to recognize what it promised: freedom, equality, and justice to all people. The larger society must recognize its role and understand that if it does not play its role fairly, the society itself may be in jeopardy in the long run. So there’s societal responsibility. There is group responsibility and individual responsibility.

The breakdown of the community, so rapidly as it occurred, left those who were left behind with relatively few resources to survive. That community then was given an opportunity, or maybe it was imposed by outside forces that said, we can help you live. Then those outsiders brought in drugs in great quantities to be delivered to other people and guns to protect the turf. Those people who live in the Robert Taylor Homes do not make the drugs and they don’t manufacture the guns. That’s an outside industry that is very, very prosperous. The people who do these things and who live in the suburbs or in the more wealthy communities are respected citizens in those communities, while they have exploited these poor people who have no choice if they are to survive.

One reason the people in those conditions were exploitable was that they did not have the protection or the wisdom and support of those who had left the old community. The black middle class had left because of the end of segregation, in housing especially, and because great opportunities in education began to open up. We’re talking about the civil rights period again now, in the 1960s particularly, when young people, my children, for example, were able to go to any school they wanted to go to, if they had the qualifications. The old colored middle class moved in with the white middle class.

The breakdown of the family occurred partly because of the poverty and the fact that resources were not available for a full family, particularly if there were males over eighteen years old in the house. Then you had the concentration of this despair and poverty, and you began to get three generations living in the same building or adjacent to one another, feeding on each other’s misery. One of the things some of them felt was that to have more children was to get more money from the welfare system. There are great-grandmothers who live in those situations who are not forty-five years old. When I approach some of these young people, where I would ordinarily be the grandfather, say, of a teenager, or maybe even someone in their early twenties, they consider me at the very least a great-grandfather.

In the rural South, where most of these young people’s families came from, children were considered part of a responsibility. They could slop the hogs and they could milk the cows and gather the eggs and pick cotton. They were an asset there. They were a liability here. That tradition still exists in the South because it has not been erased. But as a sign of manhood and womanhood in the environment where they now are, girls will say to other girls, this girl has a baby. Something must be wrong with you, honey; you’re not pregnant yet. A boy is accused of being something different if he has not fathered a child by the time he’s fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen years old. So for them in that group, that’s normal. Leon Dash wrote a superb book about this, called
When Children Want Children: An Inside Look at the Crisis in Teenage Parenthood.
And since we haven’t broken that cycle, then you’re acting out of normalcy. You’re acting out of the normal trend in a community to become pregnant or a father at such an early age. And then once a girl has one or two children, she becomes fair game for all the other young men, because they know she has done it. And so they are predators.

I think the only way to change that is we have to break those communities up, just like the people who live across the street from me in the high-rise have to be separated from that background. They may be moved out; the university wants to clear the property. Even though they are not friendly to people like me, I have tried to be friendly with them. I live in a building with middle- and upper-middle-class people. The people who live in the high-rise think I’ve got something and that I think I’m better than they are. And then the males may think I’m a spy for the police, because I’m almost sure that drug dealing is going on over there. I have approached some of them on occasion, and I find myself being asked by the men, what do you want? I think that’s a sign they’re suspicious I might be doing undercover work for the police or something of that sort.

We have to find young men and young women who came out of those environments and who are willing to go back and do some mentoring and some lecturing. What I have found, however, is that once most of those young men and women escape that environment, they never want to go back. They’ve escaped, and they never want to return to that pain. And unfortunately, too many are stuck in that environment.

That’s a very dangerous situation for a society that claims equality, justice, and opportunity for everyone, because the enemy, those who are now picking at the United States for its own lack of opportunity, can say, look there. You have a black people there and at least one third of them are living below the poverty line. No child among them under the age of eighteen has much chance of being in a house where there are two parents, a male and a female.

The break has to come within us, and as old as I am, I refuse to give up on them. I continue to go to places like Du Sable High School and Phillips High School to assist, if I get asked. But I’m not going in the Robert Taylor Homes. I used to. I’ll go if I have a friend who lives there, because they know how to deal with that situation. But as long as we allow, or force, that population to be concentrated with one another, and we reject them in various ways and do not provide them with an education to prepare them for the new world in which they must live, then we will continue to have the kind of separation of race and class that we have now.

ELAINE RHODES
Twirling for Success

We moved into the Robert Taylor Homes in 1962—my mama and me and my four siblings. I was nine or ten years old. I’m the baby girl of the family, and I have a brother who’s younger than me. Ruby L. Rhodes was my mama. She’s deceased now. I dedicate this vignette to her, my baton teacher and friend. Mama was active in politics and community activities. She was the founder of the original Henry Horner Home, the Angels of Mercy Twirlers, and the Robert R. Taylor Home Cadettes Baton Twirling Troupe. She stood by me through everything, and she taught me how to stand on my own.

When the Robert Taylor Homes first opened, they were a very positive symbol, not demeaning. We lived in 5322 State, at the corner of 53rd and State, in apartment 501. Then there was 5326 State and 5323 South Federal. Eventually, these three buildings were called the Hole, because they were shaped like the circumference of a U. They were big buildings, 22, 23, and 26, bam, bam, bam.

The windows had Xs on them because they were new. Not all of the buildings had been opened yet. It was just brand-spanking-new. There was a feeling of excitement. You could smell the newness of the tile, and the walls were beautiful. The banisters were shining; the stairwells were well lit. The elevators were shiny. Oh, it was just really great.

There were 10 apartments on a floor, and sixteen floors. So there were 160 apartments. If you had, say, two daughters and a son, you had to have a bedroom for the son. Or if you had two sons and a daughter, you had to have a separate bedroom for the daughter. The family structure would dictate how many rooms you would need for your apartment. The 01 apartments had four bedrooms, and a basic family of maybe six to eight lived in each one. The 02 apartments had two bedrooms; 03 had three bedrooms; 04 had two; 05 had three; 06 had two; 07, two; 08, three; 09, three; and the apartments on 10 had four bedrooms. If you had four bedrooms, you often had more than three or four people in a bedroom. People needed a place to stay, and relatives who weren’t officially residents were always staying with families there. People helped out their extended family. It became overcrowded. But everybody took care of their own business in their own way.

At first, we felt safe, because everyone who moved in was excited about their new home. I attended Farren Elementary, down the way on 51st and State. I could walk to school. Then we transferred to Mary Church Terrell Elementary, which is still standing but is closed now.

I remember Red Rooster, the grocery store. We used to have fun with the brand-new red carts. Red Rooster was near the Beasley Elementary School, at 5255 State. And I remember Mr. Berry, a black entrepreneur who owned the Starlight Paper Company and Starlight Supermarket. He helped families that didn’t have it. You could shop at his store even if you didn’t have money. He gave you credit.

I graduated in 1965 from Du Sable Upper Grade Center, a middle school for sixth through eighth grade. They built the middle school addition in 1964. Before then, Du Sable was just a high school. It opened in the 1930s because the Phillips High School caught fire and the students there didn’t have anyplace to go. It’s named after Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable, a black man from Haiti who founded the city of Chicago. The city recognized him as its founder in 1999.

In the early sixties, Du Sable—the Big D, as we called it—was a very good high school. There were a lot of kids there, over four thousand, because of the Robert Taylor Homes. But by the mid-sixties, when I entered the ninth grade, the gangs and the teenage pregnancies made it into a different school. The gangs would try to recruit during school time on the school grounds. People who were seniors started transferring out of the school, to get away from the trouble.

Before things got bad, the 5322, 5323, 5326 residents had a softball team. Mr. J.B., the coach, lived in 5326. We had leagues and tournaments. You couldn’t just play one game. People would come out to watch the games. We even messed around and got some uniforms. We used to play softball against the other buildings and against different teams in the community. I held down third base. Nobody came home. Batted left, threw right. The 5322 building and 23 and 26, all of us formed one team. We were the In the Hole Kids.

My mama had a baton-twirling troupe in the 5322 building, and from the time I first performed, I loved it. More than anything else, being a twirler in my mama’s troupe gave me tenacity and confidence. I wasn’t considered pretty, but I had stamina, and I was an excellent student of my mama’s. My marching position was the caller, from the back line. My mama said I couldn’t be the leader—it wouldn’t be right, she said, me being her daughter, even though I was the best of them all. So I called out routines from the back line up to the front line. We had five lines, marching four across; then a front center mascot; and Mama.

The troupe didn’t practice every day, but I did. I practiced hard every day at home, with my mama coaching me harder each time I made up new twirls and dance steps for my partner and line marchers. She let me and the back line, the four of us, march all the way to 39th and Federal, down the fire lane, just to get the routines down. She would take out one line at a time to go over their routines. Then when we had it together, we’d march as a troupe down to 39th and Federal.

Mama’s coaching was brutal: Get those legs up! March on your toes! Point those toes! Shoulders back! Stomach in! Chin up! Left hand on your hip, and keep it there till you use both hands to twirl or unless you’re using your arms for choreography! Smile! Do not be distracted! Keep in step, breathe, keep going, go right into the next routine, and don’t forget the footwork. Let me hear those toe taps on your boots! Now do everything over till you get it right! Turn around and let’s go back and try it again!

We would practice for at least three hours at a time, in white, traditional majorette boots. Mama said they were a must! This type of drilling is what developed my performance level. Some of the girls could not keep up and stopped coming to practice, mostly the cute ones in the front line. I didn’t quit. I was determined that one day I’d be up front leading.

At Du Sable High, I wanted to be a cheerleader, but they were going with the cute girls with pretty legs. They had majorettes with uniforms who performed for the basketball team—the Du Sable Panthers—but they just danced; they weren’t twirling. The team was going downstate to Champaign-Urbana in 1965, my freshman year, to compete in the citywide championship, and they needed the majorettes to go. Well, Ms. Nezelle Bradshaw appointed me captain of the majorettes. It was my job to teach the other girls and to take responsibility for the squad. From then on, it was no more back line. I was the leader. I was following in my mama’s footsteps. And I was beginning to understand that I could help others increase their self-esteem and develop their athletic skills through an activity that was part sport, part art. After the citywide championship, we twirled at every Panthers game through my senior year at Du Sable, and I was captain all four years.

Everything I think, feel, and do is generated by what happens inside me. My baton is the tool I use to twirl for spiritual development and self-support. When I pick up the baton—my “stick”—I can create, I can choreograph, I can dance, imagine, feel empowered, and yes, have a damn good time. And fortunately, I can reproduce the same skill and technique in others.

As a young girl living in the Hole at 5322 South State Street, apartment 501, I had a brick-house body with a side of big, beautiful legs and thighs. I had short, “nappy” hair, as they called it, and a dark complexion. More than my siblings, I looked like my mama. People teased me by calling me “Boston Blackie,” who was a white detective. It’s a good thing that the Black Power Movement came into being, for many reasons. Oh yeah, I was also called “Buckwheat,” a nickname given to one of the Little Rascals because of his hair. Ain’t that a blip; now that’s one of the hairstyles that’s been brought back into full circle.

The kids called me ugly too! I took it and dealt with it. I could fight, and I would if I got too mad. I’d beat up the boys and girls. I was a tomboy when I had to be, but I was really a back-line marcher, dancer, strutter, and twirler. Even in the back line, we were powerful as we sang one of the old church hymns, “Holding Up the Blood-Stained Banner.” We were jammin’ and kickin’ ass! You could hear the toe taps of our majorette boots louder than the whole rest of the troupe.

The violence at the Robert Taylor buildings began with the gangs, in the mid-sixties. You could tell when the community changed because we stopped playing softball. Different gangs would come from across town to recruit there, from the Ickes projects on 22nd and State Street and from Stateway Gardens and other projects. Some of the gangs were already started at the Robert Taylor buildings. Some of them began with the baseball teams. Certain teams started protecting themselves by fighting with the other team on the field during an argument, and most of the teams would get into rival fights after the games. Each gang had their own philosophy, their own identity. Part of it was the way they dressed, or danced. If they got one guy to go along with them, they had recruited him. That guy would bring along two or three friends. But it was one or two or three guys that started organizing the gang.

It got so you weren’t free to walk with your purse hanging. You could leave your door open just long enough to go knock on your neighbor’s door and say, hey, you got a cup of sugar or whatever. At that time, they began to put locks on the stairwell doors for the first time. We had a security system installed. And then we got guards for the elevators.

You began to see a difference then not only in the Robert Taylor buildings themselves, but in the structure of the families living there and the structure of the community within the Homes. Some family members had gone on to meet their maker because of gang violence. Some had been incarcerated. Members of the family were being taken away from the family as a whole, and that weakened the family structure. The sense of community within the Homes began to break down. The community no longer embraced certain families because of the violence.

In my junior year of high school, in 1968, I became pregnant. It was a difficult time for me. I was still living with my mama, and I began to think about taking the initiative to make some important decisions. I knew I was gonna go to school regardless. I didn’t consider getting an abortion, nor did I think about giving up my baby for adoption. My mama thought it would be best if I gave the baby up. She knew I had to finish high school and that I wasn’t financially ready to support a child. And she was concerned about the Rhodes family image. In our family it was home, church, school. School, church, home. That’s the way it was.

I became a teen mother in June of 1968. And as a teen mother, I realized that things had changed not only because I was a parent, but because my living circumstances were about to change. CHA—the Chicago Housing Authority—ran the Robert Taylor Homes and was saying, okay, you have an extra person living there now, so your rent is going up. If you were a child living in Robert Taylor and then you became a parent and your child was there with you, that changed the structure of your lease, because the baby wasn’t on the lease. That’s when I began to realize it was time to think about making it. And my mother was letting me know I was gonna have to get out on my own. I finished high school living at home with my mama and my baby boy, Edwin. My little brother, Louis, helped baby-sit while I attended day and evening classes in my senior year, and I graduated from the Big D on time with the Class of ’69.

In the summer of 1969, I left home to attend Alabama A&M in the town of Normal. I took Edwin with me. My mama was from Alabama, and there was family there who supported me all the way through college. In 1974, I returned to Chicago, and to my mama, with a bachelor’s degree.

We were back in apartment 501, and I knew things were bad, but I needed a place to stay. There was a lot of drug dealing going on in the buildings and on the streets. The older guys in the gangs had to handle the drug deals. Everything started getting uglier in the buildings, and most of my siblings had left home. My older sister, Genice, who had graduated as valedictorian of her class at Crane High School, had entered Northern Illinois University. The Baptist Training Union from our church, Greater Harvest, provided some financial assistance for her college education. Genice is the doctor in our family. She was a scholar even at a young age. My sister Peggy had graduated high school and was at the University of Colorado. My older brother, Jesse, was in the army. Louis, my younger brother, was in school. Louis was astute. He was a prominent athlete, but he excelled in academics. My mother sent him away to Amundsen High School on the North Side of the city because of the gang violence. That’s how devastating it was at the Robert Taylor Homes. I don’t know if it’s different now, but back then, she had to go through changes to get him into Amundsen because you couldn’t live in one area and go to the school across town.

When Jesse returned home from the army, wearing his uniform, the police beat him at the Greyhound Bus Station, claiming insubordination as the reason. Then when he came back to the 5322 building, a gang beat him with a bat. I got a call from St. Bernard Hospital. I never will forget it. My son was still very young at the time. Jesse has beautiful hands for a man, and he had a scar or something on his hand from the service. That was the only way I could tell it was my brother. To this day Jesse is not the same; he’s a disabled vet. A lot of tragedies have happened to families who lived in the Robert Taylor Homes, because of people’s mentality, I guess. Some stuff just makes no sense.