Rising Star

by David Garrow

  As Bradford explained in a subsequent essay, the federally insured loans provided “the certainty that FHA will take the property from the lender after foreclosure and pay the claim,” and that led to lax underwriting and the profligate issuance of loans because “neither the mortgage companies that originated them nor the investor that purchased them—basically FNMA [popularly known as Fannie Mae, the Federal National Mortgage Association] cared about the soundness of the loans.” Indeed, as Bradford later observed, “the financial incentives were so great that scores of real estate agents, lenders, and even FHA officials engaged in fraud in order to make sales to unqualified and unsuspecting minority homebuyers.” The end result, as dramatically witnessed in Roseland, was “the government taking all of the losses and the communities suffering all the devastation” of foreclosed and abandoned homes.27

  The impact of such policies and such behavior could be seen all across Roseland, both in “board-ups”—homes with plywood covering their windows—and in the rapid decline of the South Michigan Avenue shopping district. One group, the Greater Roseland Organization (GRO), founded in 1969, tried to ease the racial transition. The GRO was comprised of smaller, neighborhood-specific groups such as the Pullman Civic Organization and the Roseland Heights Community Association, and it included both older white residents, like Holy Rosary’s Ralph Viall, and newly arrived African Americans, like Mary Bates and Lenora Rodgers. With funding support from both CHD and the Chicago Community Trust, GRO emerged in the early 1980s as the only audible voice speaking for the neighborhood.

  The summer of 1980 saw the first stirrings of gang influence in Roseland, and in September the long-famous Gatelys Peoples Store, the largest business on South Michigan Avenue, closed. A citywide study of different neighborhoods’ needs described Gatelys’ closure as “psychologically . . . probably the most serious blow imaginable” to Roseland’s economic well-being. Then early in 1981, in three separate incidents, three teenage students at Fenger High School were shot and killed. By this time, close to five hundred properties in Roseland and West Pullman were in foreclosure, and more than sixteen thousand people, one-quarter of Roseland’s population, were receiving public aid. A study of recent job losses in the area highlighted Wisconsin’s closing and stated, “Many of these workers were Roseland residents.” Their prospects for new steel plant jobs were nonexistent, the report underscored: “People in these types of jobs are not merely out of work, they are out of careers.”

  A parallel study, focusing on men who had lost their jobs at U.S. Steel’s South Works, found that 47 percent had not found new employment, but that summary statistic concealed a significant racial disparity: 67 percent of black workers were still unemployed, as compared to only 32 percent of whites. “Once laid off from their mill jobs,” the study noted, “blacks in particular remain the least likely to find new jobs.”

  In early 1983, Lenora Rodgers mounted a renewed push to win foundation funding for GRO. She told one foundation that “community organizing and an issue-based community organization is the key to neighborhood preservation.” She said GRO’s greatest need was to hire organizers, since “organizers help to identify new and potential leaders” who could mobilize Roseland against the dangers engulfing it. But Rodgers’s efforts were unsuccessful, and by April 1984 GRO was no longer responding to letters from potential funders.28

  As Jerry Kellman extended CCRC’s presence into Roseland early in 1984, he accepted office space at Bill Stenzel’s Holy Rosary Parish in lieu of dues. IACT and UNO continued their antidumping protests, with Lena’s name appearing in Chicago newspapers almost weekly. On January 30, 1984, a city council committee, spurred by Alderman Vrdolyak’s desire to at least appear to be against dumping, approved a one-year moratorium on new landfills within the city. In mid-February Lena joined U.S. Representative Paul Simon, a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate seat held by Republican Chuck Percy, as he toured South Deering and its neighboring waste sites. Two days later, when the full city council approved the one-year moratorium, Vrdolyak amended the measure to exempt liquid waste handlers and transfer stations, leading Mayor Washington’s backers to oppose the diluted ban.29

  March 1984 was the fourth anniversary of Wisconsin Steel’s shutdown. Mayor Washington spoke at an SOJC anniversary rally, and on March 28, Frank Lumpkin and others picketed International Harvester’s downtown headquarters. Frank told one reporter he believed four hundred of the three thousand ex-Wisconsin steelworkers had died in the last four years. Later he told a U.S. congressional subcommittee that nowadays in South Chicago “the only ambition a kid can have is to steal hubcaps. There is nothing else there. There’s no jobs.” The Daily Calumet reported on the closings of more and more retail businesses; a UNO meeting on jobs drew more than five hundred neighborhood residents plus Mayor Washington’s top three development and employment aides.30

  By August 1984, Jerry Kellman was ready to publicly launch the reborn CCRC. Thanks to Leo Mahon’s core parishioners from St. Victor—Fred Simari, Jan Poledziewski, Gloria Boyda, and Christine Gervais—CCRC was ready to play an active role in a retraining program for one thousand former heavy industry workers in several south suburban Cook County townships, funded with $500,000 from the U.S. Department of Labor under the 1982 Job Training Partnership Act. And thanks to Bill Stenzel’s hosting of Kellman at Holy Rosary church in Roseland, Kellman was beginning to pull together a new network of virtually all-black Catholic parishes across Roseland under the distinct rubric of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), with DCP for the moment a “project” or “subgroup” of CCRC.

  Kellman asked each parish for two lead representatives. From Holy Rosary came Stenzel’s two most active parishioners, Ralph Viall and Betty Garrett. At St. Catherine of Genoa, Father Paul Burak suggested two people he felt had “a passion I think for social justice”: Dan Lee, who had attended deaconate school, and Cathy Askew, a young white single parent with two mixed-race daughters who was teaching at St. Catherine’s School. St. Catherine’s senior deacon, Tommy West, was interested too, but he channeled much of his community work through another parish well north of 95th Street, St. Sabina. At St. Helena, Father Tom Kaminski volunteered himself and Eva Sturgies, an active parishioner who lived on 99th Street. From St. John de la Salle at 102nd and South Vernon Avenue, eleven blocks north of Holy Rosary, Father Joe Bennett asked Adrienne Bitoy Jackson, a young woman with an office job at Inland Steel, and Marlene Dillard, who lived in the London Towne Homes cooperative development east of Cottage Grove Avenue. Not every Roseland pastor responded with enthusiasm. At Holy Name of Mary Parish, Father Tony Vader brushed off Kellman but told his associate pastor, Father John Calicott, the only African American priest on the Far South Side, to do what he could.

  The most unusual Catholic parish Kellman contacted was Our Lady of the Gardens, a church that traced its beginnings only to 1947 and which was staffed by fathers from the Society of the Divine Word. When Kellman visited Father Stanley Farier, the priest recommended two women of different circumstances: Loretta Augustine, in her early forties, who lived in a single-family home in the Golden Gate neighborhood west of the church, and Yvonne Lloyd, a fifty-five-year-old mother of eleven who lived in the Eden Green town house and apartment development just west of both Golden Gate and the sprawling public housing project from which the parish drew its name: Altgeld Gardens.31

  Altgeld Gardens was a by-product of World War II. When Chicago faced a dire housing shortage during the war years, officials looked to the land south of 130th Street, west of the CID landfill and Beaubien Woods Forest Preserve, north of the Cal-Sag Channel (a man-made tributary dug during the 1910s) and east of St. Lawrence Avenue. This area had in earlier decades served as the sewage farm for George Pullman’s eponymous town a mile northward. The Metropolitan Sanitary District’s massive sewage treatment plant, opened in 1922, was located just north of 130th Street. Construction began in 1943 on a 1,463-unit “war housing development” on the 157-acre site. The first
families moved in come fall 1944, and a year later, in August 1945, a formal dedication ceremony featuring local congressman William A. Rowan plus Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) chairman Robert R. Taylor, an African American, took place before a crowd of five thousand. More than seven thousand residents were already living there, the Tribune reported, “nearly all Negroes.” An elementary school and then a high school, both named for the black scientist George Washington Carver, who had died in 1943, were soon part of the new development, but by 1951 school parents were protesting the presence of an open ditch carrying raw sewage that abutted the school grounds. In 1954 another five hundred apartments, officially called the Philip Murray Homes, were added to the Altgeld development.

  For its first fifteen to twenty years, residents described Altgeld—or, more colloquially, just “the Gardens”—as “this heavenly place,” “just paradise,” as two different residents recalled. “It was just really a wholesome place to live,” a third remembered. “There was a feeling of family throughout the entire development,” said a fourth. The Gardens was its own world: almost anyone who worked had to own an automobile because public bus service to and from Altgeld was poor at best. “We felt so isolated and away from the mainstream of what was occurring in Chicago. . . . We were cut off from a lot of opportunities,” one resident explained.

  Loretta Freeman Augustine grew up in Lilydale, married a man from Altgeld at age nineteen, and lived in an apartment there from 1961 to 1966, when the couple moved to a single-family home in Golden Gate, just to the west. “The community had a stability” during those years. “People had nice lawns with beautiful flowers,” and it was “very much a family-oriented community.” The Carver High School basketball team, under Coach Larry Hawkins, won the Illinois state championship in 1963.

  By the late 1960s, things had changed for the worse. Many blamed the CHA, which had evicted residents when their incomes rose above the ceiling allowable in public housing. “People were being forced out because they were over the income,” one woman recalled. Dr. Alma Jones, hired as Carver Elementary School’s principal in 1975, had had a similar experience some years earlier at the CHA’s LeClaire Courts. “It was absolutely beautiful,” but “my husband got a raise, and they put us out: excess income,” she recalled. “I was devastated because I had just had twins . . . it was heartbreaking.” It was also destructive. “That eliminated everybody who was upwardly mobile, because if you . . . started to progress, then they put you out, which was the worst thing that could possibly happen” because “you take out the element of folk who know how to live in a community.”

  One young man who grew up in Altgeld in the 1950s returned to the Far South Side twenty-five years later as a police officer. Initially “there were very few troubled families. I would say less than 5 percent. When I returned, I saw that the 5 percent was still residing in that development, but so were their children, and grandchildren, it was just a procession. The 5 percent had expanded to 85 percent.” Another resident said, “It began to change in the 1970s. I don’t think it really started to decline until the drugs became prevalent.” A 1972 Tribune article marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of Our Lady of the Gardens parish described Altgeld as a place “from which long-time residents are striving to get out” and stated that drugs and crime were the Gardens’ top problems. As Father Al Zimmerman commented, “With no job prospects, the temptation to turn to drugs is powerful.”32

  In April 1974 Altgeld made news in a different fashion when the entire facility was evacuated after a tank containing 500,000 gallons of silicon tetrachloride ruptured at a tank farm just ten blocks to the north. “A dense cloud of fumes half a mile wide” drifted toward the project, and almost twelve hours passed before residents were allowed to return home. More than two hundred people were hospitalized from exposure to “a heavy cloud of hydrochloric acid” that was generated when clueless workers turned firehoses on the tank, making the emissions far worse, rather than notify public officials. Chicago soon filed suit against Bulk Terminals, the tank’s owner, and the Tribune quoted a state official as saying, “It should be a criminal offense to know of a leakage of toxic materials without reporting it immediately.”

  A 1982 citywide neighborhoods study found that Altgeld’s needs were especially dire. “The physical isolation of this community from the rest of the city” was so great that “residents of this area are rural rather than urban poor,” it noted. Tenants believe “that job training is one of their community’s most important needs,” but people who had never held a job needed to be taught “how to look for work.” Yet “many do not own cars,” and public transport was still “frightfully poor.” The Gardens’ one small food store shocked the outsiders. Not only did it smell “particularly bad,” but rats were now regularly “visible in the food store during daylight hours.” That study pointedly advised that “Altgeld Gardens needs an advocate and/or organizer to improve the coordination of the many municipal services provided to the development, and to work with the private sector to help create employment opportunities for local residents.”

  Altgeld residents were theoretically represented by a local advisory council, but by the early 1980s, the council had for years been dominated with an iron fist by its president, Esther Wheeler, or “Queen Esther” to many dismayed residents. “Her whole concern was nobody would take her place, or usurp her authority,” Carver principal Alma Jones later explained. “She was extremely authoritarian and she owned Altgeld.” But come September 1982, residents had a new opportunity to organize against the toxic waste, garbage, and sewage that surrounded them, when Hazel Johnson, a forty-seven-year-old widow and mother of seven who had first moved to the Gardens in March 1962, founded People for Community Recovery (PCR) and attracted a small band of active members.

  Hazel’s husband John had died of lung cancer in 1969, at age forty-one, and by the early 1980s, questions arose about the long-term health of those living at Altgeld. In late April 1984, Hazel saw a television news story about a study of cancer rates in the Far South Side. Its statistics were alarming, yet Illinois EPA director Richard Carlson brushed aside the findings. In response, Hazel contacted the IEPA, which tried to placate her with some pollution complaint forms. She responded by distributing several hundred of them throughout the Gardens over the ensuing six months.33

  In late 1983, a new organizing effort began in the Eden Green community. Madeline Talbott and Keith Kelleher, two Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) organizers, had met Tom Joyce while working in Detroit, and Tom’s Claretian Social Development Fund provided the initial seed money to launch ACORN in Chicago. ACORN’s Eden Green organizer was Grant Williams, who had worked for ACORN in Philadelphia and St. Louis. Williams viewed Eden Green as more promising turf than Altgeld, but after a founding meeting of South Side United Neighbors, Williams expanded his work into the Gardens. He contacted Lena and her IACT colleagues about the new-dumps moratorium, but in Altgeld, the residents’ biggest concern was the poor public bus service to the outside world. By March 1984 Williams had interested a reporter from Chicago’s premier African American newspaper, the Defender, in Altgeld’s transit plight, and a community meeting to oppose possible service cuts by the Chicago Transit Authority drew a good crowd.

  By summer, Williams had signed up some eighty-three dues-paying members for ACORN—$16 a year—but by late August, he was moving to Detroit, and a brand-new University of Chicago graduate, Steuart Pittman, would take over in September.34

  Before the end of summer 1984, Jerry Kellman also made his first successful forays toward enlisting some Protestant pastors to join his previously all-Catholic CCRC. His first two recruits were Rev. Bob Klonowski of Hegewisch’s Lebanon Lutheran Church and Rev. Tom Knutson of First Lutheran Church in Harvey, a far-from-prosperous suburban town two miles southwest of Altgeld Gardens. Also joining CCRC was St. Anne Parish in suburban Hazel Crest, whose new pastor, Father Len Dubi, had known Kellman for more than a decade. The city parishe
s’ DCP designees first met Kellman and their CCRC colleagues from St. Victor and the other predominantly white congregations at Tom Knutson’s church in Harvey.

  An early August issue of the Daily Calumet ran a prominent story heralding CCRC’s “phoenix-like return.” It quoted Kellman as saying he hoped sixty churches would join by October, and that by year’s end he wanted to have “a full range of support programs for laid off workers.” His top goal was to devise “a long-range plan for economic development,” and within a year he hoped to have “three or four full time employees.” Fred Simari and Gloria Boyda from St. Victor were appointed to a task force overseeing the new federally funded suburban job retraining program, but the program would not be able to accept applications until December or January.35

  Throughout the fall of 1984 and early 1985, IACT, Hazel Johnson’s PCR, and even ACORN appeared more visibly active than CCRC and DCP. A mid-September appearance by IEPA director Richard Carlson at St. Kevin drew an angry crowd that erupted in shouting when he insisted that the Southeast Side’s bevy of waste facilities posed no threat to anyone’s health. Marian Byrnes from Jeffery Manor, a widowed, recently retired schoolteacher who had founded the Committee to Protect the Prairie to avert construction on the undisturbed, 117-acre Van Vlissingen Prairie north of 103rd Street, forcefully told Carlson, “We will never believe you! You might as well go home!” That tussle was quickly overshadowed when the Chicago Sun-Times reported that water from at least three residential wells just south of Altgeld Gardens contained cyanide, benzene, and toluene. Most Chicago residents were no doubt surprised that anyone within the city limits had to rely upon wells for water service, but city officials had been aware of the issue for three months. Homeowners in the tiny, seven-home enclave called Maryland Manor paid city taxes but had neither paved streets nor water and sewer service. The residents were wary enough of their cloudy well water that they used it only for toilets and the like, as opposed to drinking, but the extensive press coverage was a huge embarrassment for Mayor Washington, one that would have been worse had the press known that the issue had been handed off to an intern over the summer.