In the Spring of 1963, Jerry traveled with a Campus (ISU) Ministry group to Savannah, Georgia to work with a local effort to register Black voters. Hosea Williams, who was to become a key SCLC organizer around Mississippi Summer headed the local group. Jerry finished his work at the University later that year and moved to Chicago. He joined the demonstrations against the “Willis Wagons” while teaching in the Chicago Public School system. He taught first at a middle school on the South Side and later at Crane and Forrestville High Schools. As a new teacher, he quickly became aware of the school systems inadequacies. He described them as virtually criminal if one considered the impact of this kind of negligence on the future of Chicago students. He continued his community organizing, joining with Dick Gregory in challenging the notion that Blacks were confined by history and activity to the inner areas of Chicago. They held major breakthrough demonstrations in Bridgeport. They were arrested continuously in the summers of 1964/65.
After the joint decision by CCCO and the SCLC to form the Chicago Freedom Movement, an effort to break the unspoken restrictions on Black life, Jerry began an organizing support effort on the Near North Side of Chicago. Al Raby asked Jerry to attend a Saturday meeting with him in a downtown hotel, where they met with Walter Fauntroy, an SCLC representative. Jerry remembers this meeting as his first understanding of how the joint organizational effort would work. The SCLC staff began arriving in Chicago and setting up shop on the West side. Dorothy Wright (Tillman) was assigned to work with him on the Near North side of the city. The Chicago movement continued to probe ways of engaging the city, meaning whether the central thrust would be housing, labor, schools, etc. Jerry reflected that housing and closed communities seemed to be the issues that created the most tension. He thinks that the demonstrations in areas like Bridgeport helped the movement leadership decide to challenge closed communities with the concept of open housing.
The demonstrations in racially closed areas commenced and resistance were immediate and violent. Jerry participated in every demonstration, including the violence in Marquette Park. Thousands of White residents, mostly young folks attacked the busses with an intensity that obviously worried demonstrators, but also the city and state government. The city government, aware of its image, finally sent in busses to transport them out of the violence. Jerry remembers how they hugged the floor as the busses shuttled through a gauntlet of bottles and bricks. Every window was smashed in his bus. Jerry was more concerned about the numbers of students he had brought into the movement, many of whom had attended the march. Fortunately they survived without injuries. Martin King was struck in the head during the Marquette Park demonstrations.
Later the city government began meeting with the Chicago Freedom Movement Leadership. These meetings led to an “agreement” on a protocol toward an open city. Many local Chicago community leaders felt that King’s threat of a March to Cicero, which was used as a wedge to move the “agreement” forward, should have been carried out. Jerry agreed with the need to use the threat of a march to Cicero strategically, but felt that because a march to Cicero was being called by a number of community leaders, that he was obliged to participate. Jerry recalls, feeling very strongly that citizens have the right to walk safely in every neighborhood in Chicago and in the nation. He joined the march, and recalls it as one of the most difficult of the period.
Jerry Herman went on to direct a major organizing effort against apartheid in South Africa and for a fundamental change of U.S. policy in Southern Africa.
JH, August 2005