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March 30, 2008

Remembering the tragic riots of 1968

By Patrick Butler

CONTRIBUTOR

When looting and fires broke out on the West Side after the death of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Catholics throughout Chicago mobilized and aided victims

When St. Malachy’s School had a reunion two years ago, a lot of the people who came back didn’t even recognize the old neighborhood, said Fred Jones when asked what had happened to one of the worst-hit areas during the riots following Rev. Martin Luther King’s assassination 40 years ago this month.

Until about 10 years ago, large parts of Lawndale were still a patchwork of burned out lots and empty storefronts, “and now you’ve got homes starting at $250,000,” said Jones, a retired teacher who helps out these days at St. Malachy’s front office.

“I thought it would be a ghost town. I didn’t foresee it coming back. The neighborhood was so completely destroyed people had to go out of the community to get groceries,” he said. “At that time, you could buy property that was almost being given away. Today you can’t touch it.”

A local resident for “at least 55 years,” Jones was a young teacher at the nearby Grant elementary school when the rioting began on April 5 — the day after King was assassinated by James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tenn., while lending support to a sanitation workers’ strike — and “some of the teachers fled the building, leaving the kids alone in their classrooms. They were frightened to death and so were the kids. And you can imagine how it must have been for the parents at work who had no way of knowing if their children were safe,” he said.

Miraculously, no parishioners appeared to have been injured during the riots, said Jones, who added, “some of the people from those days are still around. They tell stories about standing on their back porches and watching Madison Street in flames.”

The safety of the children was also a big concern at nearby Presentation BVM School where Mary Dowling was both a parishioner and a teacher in the parish school. Dowling told author Marjorie Frisbie in “An Alley in Chicago” that at one point “we were surrounded by fire within a block all around us” and with the electricity out the only information came from transistor radio and “eyeballing the terrain.”

“We could see a lot of shopping carts pushed by looters. The kids justified the thefts the next day, saying they saw police stealing television sets,” Dowling said.

In an effort to calm the neighborhood, Msgr. Jack Egan asked Presentation employees to go door-to-door reassuring the neighbors, but ordered the women to wear veils. “And I wasn’t even a nun, mind you,” Dowling told Frisbie.

For Josephine McCord, another longtime St. Malachy parishioner who still lives in the house she moved into back in 1959, that weekend was especially traumatic since she is among a shrinking handful who got to know King when he moved into an apartment at 15th and Hamlin to lead a summer of civil-rights activities.

“We’d all meet at the Warren Avenue Baptist Church where my family and I were the only Catholics coming all the time. He used to tell me, ‘Josephine, if you keep coming down here, you’re going to have to learn to eat chicken,’” McCord said.

She remembers the Nobel Peace Prize laureate as just an ordinary person in an extraordinary role.

“Sitting around talking to him, you knew he was wonderful, but he never came off as Mr. Big, but someone who told a lot of jokes,” said McCord, who said that in the back of her mind she knew that something would probably happen to him one day, but when it happened, it was a complete shock.

Catholics responding

But by Friday afternoon, April 5, Loop workers went home early as the West Side became engulfed in flames and Chicago’s Catholic community sprang into action.

While Fathers George Clements and George Morrisroe (the latter a white priest who was wounded earlier by a gunman while registering black voters in Mississippi) were conducting a memorial service for King at St. Dorothy Church, thousands of Catholics brought food and clothing to their parish churches or some 20 other collection points for transfer to relief centers at St. Catherine of Siena Church and a Chicago Conference on Religion and Race operation at Austin and Washington in Oak Park.

There, an estimated 100 truckloads of food and clothing were distributed to those stranded in the rioting. The Catholic Interracial Council passed out at least 10 tons of food through its headquarters at 21 W. Superior.

At St. Agatha Church, not far from what had become a fire-gutted strip along Roosevelt Road, more than 1,000 people received food and clothing between April 6 and 9, Father Owen McAteer told reporters at the time.

Further east, near the Cabrini-Green housing projects, Father Mark Santo, pastor of St. Dominic Church, said that while not many homes had been burned as was happening on the West Side, almost every food store had been looted and burned.

Santo estimated that the Catholic Interracial Council had provided food to about 400 families and that the parish was busing people to areas where they could shop at supermarkets.

“The (families) say that the supermarkets we drove them to have better food at lower cost than they could ever get in the neighborhood stores that were burned,” he was quoted as saying. That also left more of the donated food available “for the most urgent cases,” he added.

When the Catholic Interracial Council’s food supplies were all gone, it was time to empty the pantry in Holy Name Cathedral’s cafeteria.

Help from everywhere

Help in getting food to the neediest families came from everyone from Loyola University students to North Park Evangelical Covenant seminarians who drove the delivery cars and trucks as the seminary’s acting dean, Sigurd Westberg, and pastoral studies professor Earl Dahlstrom helped with the loading.

“We heard the appeal on three radio stations this morning and we had a group of seminarians come over to see if they could help,” Westberg told Catholic New World reporter Jim Wisniewski the weekend of the riots.

One offer of help came from a blind man who asked that his donation be picked up at his house.

Individuals also did their part, even providing housing for burned-out families. “We’ve had more offers of shelter than requests for it,” said Lynn Williams, chairman of the archdiocesan housing committee.

By the second day of rioting, the command post at St. Catherine of Siena’s rectory had received 138 offers to house riot refugees from suburbs as far away as Barrington. When the number of offers finally topped 200, callers were told they probably wouldn’t be needed.

In the end, only eight families – about 30 people – were actually placed in temporary housing, some believe because the blacks were uneasy about going to all-white neighborhoods at a time like that and chose instead to double up with nearby friends and relatives.

Nevertheless, the offers sometimes came at the most opportune times, Williams said. “We received a phone call offering shelter for a large family and just a few minutes later received a request for shelter for a family of 12.”

When Cardinal John Cody arrived at St. Catherine’s Saturday evening and learned the most urgent need by then was for more trucks, he got on the phone and got trucks from the National Guard, Jewel and several smaller companies, as well as the village of Oak Park.

At one point, 35 cars were lined up to drop off food and clothing donations at the Oak Park command post.

“Did you ever see such a tremendous movement of materials? It’s like the Battle of Britain,” said Father William Kelly of St. Catherine’s at the time.

Msgr. Michael Dempsey, who oversaw the archdiocesan participation in the relief effort, called the ecumenical response “one of the greatest acts of religious charity that Chicago has ever seen.”

Bishop William McManus ordered all Catholic schools closed on the day of King’s funeral, advising the pupils to go to Mass and “spend the day in prayer and fasting … in reparation for sins of racial hatred, injustice and violence.”

Looking back, McCord admitted she wasn’t always sure the West Side would ever recover, but insists she never had any doubts about St. Malachy’s.

“No, there was never a time when people thought the parish would go under. We really hung onto that. Today we’re building back the parishioners (from both the longtime residents and the newcomers). We’re still there,” she said.

How things played out

  • Thursday, April 4

    At 7 p.m., as the Lake View Citizens Council was about to begin its annual meeting, Rev. Carl Lezak of St. Sebastian’s Church interrupted the chair with the news that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had just been shot in Memphis. Similar scenes would be repeated across Chicago throughout the evening.

  • Friday, April 5

    • Noon: Groups of young blacks have already started smashing windows and looting. Arson and sniper attacks soon follow.

    • 2 p.m.: Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner mobilizes more than 600 National Guard troops and Mayor Richard J. Daley calls in all off-duty firefighters and borrows engines from eight suburbs. Between 4 and 10 p.m. 36 major fires are reported on the West Side. At one point, about half the city’s firefighting units are working a two-mile stretch of Madison Street. By the end of the day, the fires had not only destroyed many mostlyblack neighborhoods, but cut off electric power to much of the West Side, allowing still more looting under cover of darkness.

    • Later: Chicago Cardinal John Cody issues a statement voicing “dismay” at King’s murder at a time when “our country is now engaged in a mighty crusade for justice and equality.”

  • Saturday, April 6

    In an effort to reclaim the city, 1,000 more National Guardsmen take up positions at every intersection on the West Side and on Eisenhower Expressway overpasses. Mayor Daley imposes a 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew on everyone under age 21 and bans liquor sales in neighborhoods deemed in “serious disorder.” The streets are quieter than the night before, but far from normal as rioters continue torching buildings and shooting at firefighters, police officers and news reporters.

    After taking a helicopter tour of the burned-out areas where he sees some looters and arsonists, Mayor Daley orders police to “shoot to kill” snipers or anyone even holding a Molotov cocktail and to “maim or cripple” looters. Mayor Daley tells reporters he issued those orders after being “most disappointed” to learn that police were using their own discretion. “In my opinion, they should have had instructions to shoot to kill arsonists and to maim and detain looters.”

    A City Hall spokesman later blames the press for the “misunderstanding,” saying “they should have printed what he meant, not what he said.” Within a few days, Mayor Daley’s office is saying it has received 11,000 letters running 15 to one in favor of the “shoot-tokill” order.

  • Palm Sunday, April 7

    By the end of the day, an uneasy order is largely restored, with the help of 10,000 police, 6,700 National Guardsmen and 5,000 federal troops ordered in by President Lyndon Johnson. By the time it is all over, 11 are dead and more than 500 are injured. Some 3,000 are arrested, at least 1,000 are homeless and more than 125 separate fires are reported, with an estimated $10 million in damages across the city.

Past, present and future

Forty years after the death of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Father Michael Pfleger sometimes isn’t sure whether it’s 2008 or 1968.

Poverty still runs rampant, 40 children were killed in gang violence on Chicago streets over the past year, the country is in the fifth year of another unpopular war and “while [King] was fighting for living wages for sanitation workers in Memphis we’re still fighting for a living wage from Wal-Mart,” said Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina Church.

While African-Americans have indeed made progress, “the fact that Sen. [Barack] Obama had to give the speech he recently gave [on race] shows how little things have changed. After 40 years, the race issue is still with us,” the priest said.

“His [King’s] daughter Bernice once confessed that ‘as I look around the country my father lived and died for, I sometimes wonder if it was in vain.’ You can take Dr. King’s agenda from 1968, put 2008 on it and realize we still have many of the same issues and that many of the battles we thought we won back then are still not run,” said Pfleger, who spent many of his years as a priest serving low-income African American South and West Side parishes.

Pfleger, in fact, was still a seminarian working at Precious Blood Church on West Congress (“the best training experience I ever had”), when the riots erupted after King’s assassination. He remembers “looking out the windows of my room on the third floor of the school building seeing nothing but fire and smoke. But what I really realized was the pain and agony of people and that the fire was only the outward expression.”

Riots, he said, aren’t usually started by a single incident but long periods of festering resentment that eventually explodes.

Back then, the Catholic Church was deeply involved in what Pfeger called the front-line of the social-justice movement. “You had the Jack Egans and the Dick Morrisroes. You had nuns in full habits marching in Birmingham, Selma and Montgomery. Before Jack Egan died, he often wondered out loud what ever happened to that hunger for justice,” the priest said. “I don’t know why, but it’s not the same kind of passion today.”

On the positive side, however, many of those who marched back in the 1960s probably never dreamed America would have traveled as far as fast as we have. “The fact that we have Barack Obama and a Hilary Clinton running for president says we’ve come a long way,” Pfleger said.