The Streets of Chicago

The Streets of Chicago
I
In the early1990s, I was tutoring GED students as a volunteer on Chicago’s north side at a small non-profit community center. The young professionals were busy gentrifying the surrounding neighborhood. It wasn’t immediately noticeable. The main arterial streets still looked seedy, rundown and hopeless, but the side streets were quickly being transformed. Each of the restored turn of the century homes was a lovely little gem. The young professionals patted themselves on the back. They were urban pioneers. People wrote about them in the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, in the Reader, and a famous professor had even written a book about them. Little did they know about the other human dramas, the other stories which were being acted out right in their midst
That very gentrification was forcing the little community center to move. The old building had been sold and the lofts were going to become condos. The realtor was going to make a killing; the contractors and developers were going to make a bundle and IKEA, Crate and Barrel and the interior designers were going to clean up. It was explained to the staff and students that the school was only going to move four blocks north, no big deal. Some of the young men looked sick. They called me over and explained that the director didn’t understand. They couldn’t go there during the winter when it gets dark so early. The leader of the little group explained, “Some of us are in a gang, but not all of us. But, it doesn’t matter; none of us can go there. It would be asking for trouble. If the school moves we’ll have to quit.”
The school moved; the students quit, the school recruited new students (students who just weeks before couldn’t go four blocks south). And the original students? Who knows, nobody ever saw them again.
II
Back in the early seventies, the Chicago Board of Education was under immense pressure from the US Department of Justice to integrate the public schools. Of course nobody on the City Hall’s Fifth Floor or the Board of Education wanted to comply. They came up with a token gesture, Permissive Transfer, which said that a student from an overcrowded school could transfer to a school which was under enrolled. That sounded wonderful to students living on Chicago’s Southside, especially ones who lived near the old Jackson Park-Howard St. el line. All they had to do was get on the el and travel to the north side and get off the el at Bryn Mawr and either walk or take a bus to Senn High School. Which they did. At first everything was cool. And then it started. If one or two black students were by themselves they were harassed by the Thorndale-Jarvis Organization. The TJOs famous for their steel toed work boots had decided that “they” weren’t coming into their neighborhood. Eventually, the only way to get to school was for the black students to wait at the el station until there was a big enough group that nobody would bother them and then they would proceed to school in a group. Once inside the school, everything was more or less OK, but they had to eat together and they knew better than go anyplace by themselves especially the washrooms. After school, it was the same routine, round up the group and then as a group head for the el station. As you can imagine, Permissive Transfer wasn’t very successful. But then it wasn’t meant to be. The Board’s attitude, “If some dumb kids took it seriously, if some dumb kids thought they finally had a chance for a better education, too bad. Nobody ever said it was going to be about their education.”
If you think I’m just rehashing old history, read on. The TJOs had learned from their parents, from their teachers, from the Mayor, the Cardinal and the local priest that blacks meant nothing but trouble. They were only acting out what was discussed at the dinner table and everywhere else that whites gathered.
Later, the fight for dominance would be between the old TJOs and the new Asian immigrants. Again, the young professional and suburbanites who were frequenting the neighbor for the wonderful Vietnamese and French/Vietnamese Restaurants on Argyle and Broadway were oblivious to what else was going on in the neighborhood. And besides, they would have said, “Oh no, you’re mistaken. Young Asians are all hard working, driven by their parents to succeed in school and to excel in every pursuit. That can’t be true.” But it is true; all poor kids have to fight for survival on our city streets.
Everybody thinks of the west side as Chicago’s port of entry. They forget that for the last fifty years, the north side has been the port of entry for Appalachian whites, for immigrants from the old Indochina and now from the Middle East. Now adult Iraqi immigrants are trying to take back the streets from the gangs so that the streets can be safe for their children. What an irony—the Iraqis flee their own country, come to the States looking for safety and they have to fight to make their neighborhood streets safe for their own children.


III
It’s perverse. School administrators, if they have to contend with gangs, prefer a one gang school. A single gang school is relatively calm. No major fights or disruptions. If the recruiters tell a kid, “join”, the kid doesn’t have much choice and that can be a problem for him but not for the school. So there is drama and there is tragedy, but it’s all muted below the surface.
However, the school is only part of a larger community. And sometimes what goes on outside the school effects the school. Occasionally, on a Monday morning, a teacher will ask, “Does anybody know where Marcus is today? He’s was here on Friday.” Someone will quietly answer, “He was shot.” Sometimes, early in the morning, I would see small groups of students clustered together in the hall. I’d go up to them and ask what was going on. Someone would show me their friend’s obituary from previous night’s church service. I’d mumble something and remind them that they should get to class.
Big city neighborhoods surrounding a school are dynamic, in flux, always changing. An African American teacher who lived nearby in a middle class neighbor once told me, “We knew something was up. All of a sudden, here were these young white boys in good cars driving real slow down our street. I told my husband to drive around and find out what was going on. He did and he came back and told me they were dealing drugs on the corner. Now, I ask you, how did these white boys from the suburbs know what was happening, on my street before I did?”
And like my teacher friend, sometimes those of us in the school were the last to know. The neighborhood gang structure was changing. It didn’t have anything to do with kids or race; it was all about the money. A neighboring gang was moving in, trying to take over some of those street corners that sold drugs to middleclass white people. The gang fought back. Eventually the fight spilled into our school. The school did what it could to control the situation with little help from the police. A serious fight broke out which lasted almost two whole days. The police, on the second day, finally, noticed and came to the school’s help. They broke up the fight outside while the school dealt with the fights inside the building. The police made arrests and hauled people away.
However, peace wasn’t really restored in the school until the invading gang decisively won on the streets, out in the neighborhood.

IV
Big city high schools are like small towns. Their hallways are like the town’s streets, dynamic and full of life. I was a young substitute teacher in the spring of 1971. I was sent to Austin High School, on the city’s far west side. The school was still trying to recover from the horrendous transformation that follows the upheaval and chaos when a school goes from white to black. I knew one side of the story. The previous winter I had student taught at Taft H.S., an all white, far northwest side high school which had a small tightly knit group of former Austin teachers on the faculty. They never tried of complaining about how “They had ruined one of Chicago’s premier (white) schools. How the Board did nothing to help the white teachers, did nothing to help the old school. Every day they kvetched about how they had received no help from downtown. Besides what could anybody do with “them?” “They won’t read, can’t write. They can hardly speak English. They shouldn’t be in high school. They’re not even city kids; they should go back down south where they belong.”
When I got to Austin the kids seemed just fine. I got along OK and they did the small things I asked them to do in their teacher’s absence. One day, we were talking. One of the girls, a leader in the division (homeroom) started by saying, “You know what use to bug me? If there was a fight in the hall between two white boys the teachers would break it up right away, if there was a fight between two blacks they’d break it up right away, if there was a fight between a white and a black they’d wait to see who was winning. If the black boy was winning, they’d break up the fight right away, but if the white boy was winning they’d let the white boy get in a couple of more licks first.”
The white teachers, “We were glad to get out when we could”, were wrong about the students. The students were just fine. The girl in the division room may have exaggerated a bit, but basically she was right.
V
At another school, a few years later, which was also trying to recover from the transition, a teacher was complaining in the teachers’ lounge, the small town’s coffee shop, about a black student who had corrected her. Her voice was quite, but full of venom. “I called him a boy. He told me he wasn’t a boy. He said, ‘Boy was the white man’s name for slave and I’m not a slave and don’t call me a boy again.’ I ask him how old he was. He told me fourteen. I told him he was a boy and he could go look it up in the dictionary. He got up and left the room. What can you do with ‘these people?’?” Some of us looked away, but some were softly nodding their heads in agreement. They would never say it out loud, they wished that their friend wouldn’t say it out loud, but she was right.
VI
He and I were colleagues. He was a black scientist teacher and I was a white English teacher. It was summer and we were sitting on my front porch watching the last of the rush hour traffic try to beat the system by cutting down my side street. We were discussing a special project that he and I were working on for school. We got to reminiscing. I told him about washing dishes in high school to save money for college. He told me about being a door to door magazine subscription salesman to make money for college. He said, “I usually worked the black neighborhoods. But one day, I thought, “Hey what the heck I’ll try Oak Park.” (And that’s how Clarence talked. Heck not hell. His students loved him. Quite and serious.) There’s a lot more money out there than on the west side. Things were going good all morning. I made more commissions that morning than I usually made in two or three days on the west side. Then about two o’clock a squad car pulled up to the curb. They ordered me over. They asked me who I was and what I was doing in Oak Park. And didn’t I know that I didn’t belong there. And didn’t I know that I’d best leave. I told them that I had a right to be there. I showed them my identification from the company, my sales sheets, and that people must have thought it was Ok because they were ordering magazines and writing checks. They said they didn’t care and that come dark they come looking for me and if I wanted to work till then find, but be gone by dark. I never went back.

VII
I taught night school in the early 1990s on the south side and never worried about my safety. Some of my students did, however. When they found out I taught in the evening and after we had talked about my Haitian students which fascinated them, they got to the main subject. I had told them I went down the street got a couple of hotdogs and fries and went over to Wooded Island to eat my dinner. The street wise young men told me that I couldn’t do that. Sounding more like my mother than my students they told me that the Island wasn’t safe, even during the day. They apologized about their language, but they explained that the place was a meeting place and a pickup place for gays and that I was just asking for trouble if I went there. I told them I’d stopped. I lied to them just like I use to lie to my mother. I continued to go over there and eat my dinner which was more of a threat to my cardiac health than anybody looking for some fun.

VIII
Later that same year, as usual, I went to my favorite hot dog stand for dinner. And because it was cold, gray and already getting dark I headed straight back to school. On the way back, just a block from school, within sight of the building, I was startled out of my day dream. A half dozen young men had spread out across the sidewalk in front of me. They looked like an NFL scrimmage line. “Oh no,” was all I could think. Then one of them said, “He’s OK, he’s my teacher.” They parted to let me by and I walked through exchanging mumbled “Hey” and “waddup”.
Sometimes when we make pronouncements we don’t always know the whole story. It’s hard to know the whole story. It’s hard to know that young professionals are basically well meaning, that most kids regardless of labels want an education, that many teachers are in situations that they didn’t create, no one helps them and they don’t know what to do and their frustration sometimes turns to anger. And knowing so little about our own streets is not much help.