BACKGROUND:

After having taught in the Chicago Public School system for five years, in June of 1964, I was accepted to do an internship with the Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial Foundation for one year. The foundation required that I choose from a list of social agencies one where I would spend that year. I selected to do my internship with the American Friends Service Committee at 431 South Dearborn Avenue, Chicago, Illinois. I was assigned to work in the Housing Opportunities Program that was designed to creatively encouraging the Chicago real estate industry to consider abandoning the discriminatory real estate practices, and make housing opportunities equal for all people. Within the Housing Opportunities Program was a unit called HOME, Incorporated, (Home Opportunities Made Equal), where I worked full time. Recognizing the racially segregated housing market, HOME was run as a real estate office to serve African American people who were in the market for housing in non traditional African American neighborhoods. The housing and rental stock was made available by willing White persons who sold or rented their properties to African Americans, thereby bypassing the city’s real estate system. HOME provided services free of charge with a monthly listing service.

The city of Chicago had a fair housing ordinance on the books but with no evidence of enforcement. HOME, Inc. organized a citywide real estate testing program with White and African American testers, and found, over a period of time, blatant wide spread housing discrimination through the city.
The city’s Office of Human Rights was obligated, by the terms of the ordinance, to use their enforcement powers. However, no positive resolution came from the city.

After the Selma, Alabama SCLC civil rights campaign, Martin Luther King, Jr. began looking for targets of opportunity in northern cities in an effort to demonstrate that racial segregation was not limited to the south. Because of the work that was being done by HOME, Inc., we produced a paper on the problems that we had encountered with unequal housing in Chicago, and sent it to Martin Luther King for review, and without a doubt, Chicago was agreed to be the targeted city in the north. In May of 1966 I was given the liberty by Kale Williams, who served as Director of the American Friends Service Committee, to work full time with SCLC to direct the Southside Action Center where most of the marches to Gage and Marquette Parks were organized and launched.

SUNDAY JULY 31, 1966:

A planned demonstration that was assembled at the New Friendship Baptist Church went to Marquette Park, via, automobiles, and reassembled in the park for a march through the neighborhood, and certain selected real estate offices that were known to discriminate from our testing program. We were given permission, by the police to park our automobiles in the park while marching through the neighborhood. We were under the assumption that the police would protect our automobiles. While the march was underway, the automobiles were set aflame, and pushed into the park’s lagoon, leaving us with no transportation to return to New Friendship. The police were complacent, and declared that they saw nothing of the perpetrators. We were left to the mercy of the police who were clearly adverse to our being in Marquette Park. Many were hostile and not helpful. This was a frightening time, and especially for many of the participants who were new at demonstrating in a nonviolent setting. We became sitting ducks for the hecklers.

I remember the constant refrain of a chorus that was sung by many young White male hecklers, as we were in the line of march. The refrain was sung by using the melody of the Oscar Meyer jingle:

“ I wish I were an Alabama Trooper, that is what I’d truly
truly like to be. Cause’, if I were an Alabama Trooper,
then I could kill the niggers legally.”

MAPPING THE MARCH ROUTES

Other tenuous times was the march route mapping in hostile neighborhoods in the middle of the night. In order to orchestrate well ordered marches, I was accompanied by a White Air Force Academy drop out volunteer, who happened to be proficient in mapping. He and I would go into Marquette and Gage Park, Belmont Cragin, and *Cicero to mark the march routes to be taken at the time of march. Often, we were recognized by the residents who yelled obscenities, which made us uncomfortable.

The hecklers in Marquette and Gage Park were violent in the attack on the marchers, and the police, for a while did nothing to restrain the hecklers until the brutal behavior was widely televised across the country, giving Chicago the reputation of a break down of law and order that caused a political concern for the mayor. The mayor gave orders to the Chief of Police to restrain the hecklers with force, and they did. Blood flowed like water, as the police turned on the hecklers with their truncheons. It took the request of Martin Luther King, Jr. to say to the mayor to stop the police from beating the hecklers, in the name of nonviolence.

* While Cicero was prepared for a march, once the Summit Agreement was reached, the Chicago Freedom Movement decided not to march on Cicero.

Elbert Ransom now lives in Virginia. he is President of Reach Incorporated: Racial Equality and Cultural Harmony.www.reachcultures.com