Chapter 3

I finished Chapter 3 today, and you probably will have by the time you read this. I have said previously that the racial troubles in Chicago didn't start till after I was long gone, but that's obviously not the case. I remember all that stuff in Chapter 3, well not all of it, but the general scenario and the names of some of the players. I don't remember talking about it in school or church or around the dinner table at home, so I must have read about it in the newspapers. I remember hearing about some schools being over crowded and the kids attending by shifts, and I remember that we had empty classrooms in Sawyer Elementary, but I didn't know it had anything to do with race. Our principal told us that it was because many of the young couples with kids were moving to the suburbs, leaving mostly older people behind in our neighborhood.

At the time, I took neighborhood schools for granted, not knowing any other way. Sawyer didn't even have a cafeteria because almost all of us lived so close that we could easily walk home for lunch. There were a dozen or so kids who lived "across the tracks" or were "sight savers" who commuted from far away, and they had a couple tables set up for them in the basement where they ate the lunches they brought from home. I suppose those sight savers would be called "special needs" kids today. They had vision problems and had to sit in the front seats of the classroom, and I think some of them had mental issues as well. That basement was actually pretty nice, and I once heard our principal lamenting that he couldn't make more use of it. The school nurse had her office down there, and there was a loading dock where the milk was delivered. Other than that, we only used it for air raid drills and P.T.A. hot dog or bake sales. The furnace room, where the janitors hung out, was also in the basement, but the only times we allowed to go there was to ask one of the janitors to come clean up the mess when some kid threw up.

Although I now remember reading about the integration controversy, I don't remember anybody in our neighborhood getting very excited about it. The "color line" was still two or three miles away, which is a long distance in the city when you don't have your driver's license yet. I find it strange that the people in the book were so concerned about integrating the schools instead of integrating the whole neighborhoods. It seems like, if they had integrated the neighborhoods, the schools would have  taken care of themselves, but maybe they thought that was too tough a nut to crack at the time. I was surprised to learn that the segregation of neighborhoods, far from being a mere social custom, was the result of a deliberate plan formulated in 1917 by realtors hoping to maximize their profits. And you wonder where all those conspiracy theories come from!

Then there were all those committees, boards, panels, and councils, whose main function seems to have been to play dumb and stonewall the issue. Maybe some of those guys were sincerely trying to solve the problem but, from what the book says, I doubt it. It's like that old saying: "Anybody can make a mistake but, to really screw things up royally, you need a committee."