Chapter 4: Growing up

Chapter 4

Growing up

 

 My family moved from all white Forest Park, to all white Westchester Illinois which was another town that made up Proviso Township. My parents weren’t deliberately looking for a white neighborhood. They simply wanted a nice house with a good school.  They weren’t concerned with the color of their neighbors skin. There I attended Junior High School, and found the very same attitudes.  During the seventh grade, I had a Social Studies teacher that seemed to spend an entire month on the virtues of the  country of South Africa. I learned about the “heroic” Afrikaners that kept the black majority under their racist rule. That very same teacher staged a ridiculous production of “Little Black Sambo” for the PTA. One of my best friends had the starring role, black-face and all. He was carefully coached to speak his lines in an over-the-top exaggerated “black” dialect.  It was hideous.  All the kids in my graduating class would be attending West High which was all white. Not because it was officially segregated,  but simply because blacks didn’t live in the villages that were in that district. It was actually economic segregation.  During my last year of Junior High, my parents were looking to move once again, and I begged them to find a house that was within East High district. All my family had attended that school. All my Aunts, Uncles, both parents and my brother went there. I wanted the same experience. East High was also already integrated with kids coming from Maywood where the school was located. Most of my friends were bigots as were their parents. None of them could understand why I’d want to go to school with the “N”’s. They never imagined I wouldn’t want to go to school with them. 

 I entered High School in 1962. We had an enrollment of around 4,000 and about 35% were African-American. There were never any incidents at the school involving race relations. Not then at least. That would come later. There was one incident that caught my attention. It was the Senior Prom. The star athlete was a handsome black guy. He was taking a pretty white girl to the prom. The Administration wouldn’t allow it. So, my brother and his girlfriend, double dated with them. They skipped the Prom, and they went to Second City in Chicago and caught a show and then a dinner at a nice restaurant. I thought that was pretty cool of my brother.  I looked up to him a lot. He always set a good example for me to follow.  

The Civil Rights movement was beginning to take hold and I was immersing myself in folk music and blues music as opposed the pop of the time (although I was taken completely by the Beatles).  In 1964 word came that three Civil Rights Workers were murdered in Neshoba County Mississippi just outside of the town of Philidelphia. (Hardly the “City of Brotherly Love” that we know about).  

The following provides historical context for the first installment that appeared in the print edition of the Neshoba Democrat on April 28, 2004.— Jim Prince

 

“On June 21, 1964, three civil rights workers were murdered in Neshoba County. The trio had come here to investigate the burning of the Mt. Zion Methodist Church in the Longdale community off of Mississippi 16 east. 

 The night the church was burned three parishioners were beaten, some severely. The murders of Michael Schwerner, 24, James Chaney, 21, and Andrew Goodman, 20, were part of a plot hatched by the Lauderdale County unit of the Ku Klux Klan and carried out by members of the Neshoba County unit. 

The civil rights workers were part of a broader national movement that hoped to begin a voter

registration drive in this area, part of the Mississippi Summer Project, what became known as Freedom Summer. 

A coalition of civil rights organizations known as COFO (Council of Federated Organizations) conceived of a project in the state with massive numbers of student volunteers who would converge on the state to register black voters and to conduct “freedom schools” which would offer curriculum of black history and arts to children throughout the state. 

Chaney, a plasterer, had grown up in Meridian, in nearby Lauderdale County, and even as a young student had been interested in civil rights work. Schwerner, a Jewish New Yorker, came south to Meridian to set up the COFO office because he believed he could help prevent the spread of hate that had resulted in the Holocaust, an event that had taken the lives of some of his family. (this obviously struck a nerve with me) 

 Chaney volunteered at the Meridian office, and the two young men began to make visits to Neshoba County to find residents there to sponsor voter registration drives and freedom schools. They made contact with members of Mt. Zion Methodist Church and Mt. Nebo Missionary Baptist Church, as well as other individuals. They made plans for a COFO project in the area. 

Tensions were mounting that summer as some of Mississippi’s segregationist newspapers propagated the idea of a “pending invasion” of civil rights workers. The state was a powder keg, as the Ku Klux Klan increasingly made its presence known and fears were heightened among both blacks and whites. In April 1964 the Klan burned about a dozen crosses in Neshoba County. The Neshoba Democrat spoke against the cross burnings and the coercion and intimidation employed by the Klan. 

The Ku Klux Klan and other groups had become more active in response to increasing civil rights activity, especially since the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation. In addition to the Klan’s resistance, the state of Mississippi was continuing to monitor activists through the Sovereignty Commission, which worked in conjunction with the White Citizens Council, to use economic intimidation and threats to attempt to keep blacks in subservient positions.  

Undertaking such struggles for equality, exemplified by the trio was dangerous and courageous work.

In mid-June, Chaney and Schwerner traveled to Oxford, Ohio, to participate in the Freedom Summer volunteers training session being held there. While they were away, on June 16, Klansman assaulted members of the Mt. Zion church, looking for Chaney and Schwerner. Later in the evening, they burned the church to the ground. Having been alerted of the attack, Chaney and Schwerner, joined by new volunteer Goodman immediately drove south to investigate and offer solace to the church members. 

On Sunday afternoon, June 21, Father’s Day, the three young men drove to Philadelphia from Meridian and visited members of Mt. Zion. On the way back through town they were pulled over by a sheriff’s deputy. Chaney was charged with speeding and Schwerner and Goodman were held on suspicion of burning the Mt. Zion church.” 

The details of the murders came later. The group took the activists to a remote area and beat them until they died. Special treatment, however, was reserved for James Chaney, the one black in the group. The Klansmen, in addition to beating Chaney, also used a small handgun to shoot him through his penis and anus, ostensibly because he “knew better” than to be consorting with outside agitators looking to change the status quo in Mississippi. After several weeks of searching, and after recovering more than a dozen bodies not belonging to the missing civil rights workers, the authorities finally found them buried under an earthen dam. Several Klansmen, including Price, were arrested and tried for the brutal killings. The jury, made up of their cousins, friends, and sympathizers, found them all NOT GUILTY. Some time later, the federal government charged the murderers with violating the civil rights of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney. This time the Klansmen were convicted and served sentences ranging from two to ten years. And that…was called justice.
 

News of this nature was beginning to have its effect on the black students at my school and I felt

ashamed and helpless to stop the mistrust that had to be taking place. Still during my time there, our affections for each other were quite open. We were all friends in school and competed on sports teams together, even though we tended to go our separate ways outside of the school environment. By my senior year, two African-American girls were elected to the Home Coming Queens court. One of the girls was in several of my classes. She was a friend and much loved by everyone at school. She’d laugh at your stupid jokes and listen to your boring stories. She was a classical violinist and her father was a doctor. I voted for her, as did most of the kids in school, but she somehow wasn’t selected as Queen. She went on to study music at the University of Illinois, and later married a man named Robert Johnson. Together they founded BET and she became the first African-American female billionaire. Her name is Sheila Crump Johnson. 

I graduated Proviso East High School in 1966 and the next year something happened that was bound to happen sooner or later. Proviso East was pretty famous for an illustrious alumni that included, NBA Basketball stars Jim Brewer, Doc Rivers (coach of the Boston Celtics) All Star Michael Finley, NFL Hall of Famer Ray Nitschke, actor Dennis Franz, business woman Sheila Crump Johnson, Grammy winning folk singer John Prine,  and US astronaut Eugene Cernan…the last human to walk on the moon. 

Proviso East was caught up in a great deal of the racial turmoil that was prevalent in the country in the late 1960s. The 1967-68 school year saw local tensions become violent. 

In September 1967, a large fight, started in the school cafeteria when five aucasian girls were selected by school officials as finalists for the school’s Homecoming Queen, escalated as students were dismissed. Property damage, some caused by the use of gasoline bombs, and fighting caused more than 100 state troopers to be called in, and a strict curfew to be enforced. Principal Hubert Pitt announced that he would appoint a racially balanced group of students to select a new slate of candidates. Apparently after selecting two African-American girls just the year before, the school administration had decided not to let something like that happen again. God forbid one of them be elected Queen.  

One of my classmates was Fred Hampton. He graduated with me in 1966. Although black and white students at Proviso East rarely mixed socially outside of classes, because of his popularity among both groups, Fred was selected to be head of the Inter-racial Council, which met whenever there was racial friction. Fred could always calm the situation.  The year after we graduated, the principal called Fred back to ease the growing racial tensions.  

Fred promoted Black Power. The response of the media and most whites to the term Black Power was swift, negative, and over the top hysterical. Many saw Black Power as an attack on all white people.

Blacks saw it differently. It was about a positive message to them (the black community), to bring blacks together and build their confidence.  Fred said that “blackness was what was in your  heart, not the color of your skin”. But any symbol of black unity, including the modest Afro that Fred wore, threatened many whites.  By 1967, Fred was put on the FBI’s Key Agitator Index;  a list of activists that FBI director J. Edgar  Hoover ordered FBI agents to monitor closely.  Fred became a leader of the Black Panther movement in Chicago. He was killed in a police raid on Panther headquarters in October of 1969. Like Emmett Till before him, his body was viewed at the Raynor Funeral Home in Chicago.