Showing posts with label Black Lives Matter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Black Lives Matter. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 8, 2020

September 8, 1969 -- Reverend Jesse Jackson Jailed on Trespassing Charge

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September 8, 1969 – The Reverend Jesse Jackson, leading a group of 600 protestors, is arrested on charges of criminal trespass at a construction site at the University of Illinois Circle campus after refusing to leave the site.  Jackson, along with two other men arrested for the same offense, refuses to make bond of $250 and is held in custody.  The demonstration is the result of Jackson’s effort to fight racial segregation in the city’s trade unions, an effort that was born of the belief that public construction contracts should include Black workers.  In a subsequent interview with the New York Times, Jackson says, “It’s not understood.  The same people who call us lazy lock us out of trade unions.  We’ve had to fight to get the right skills ot work … In the fight to rebuild where we live, there are countless jobs.  There are probably more jobs than people.  People ask how can you police poverty.  You can’t police poverty.  But you can develop people where you live so there’s less need for police.”  [New York Times, September 23, 1969].  In marching to the site at Halsted Street and Newberry Avenue where an $18 million science and engineering building is being constructed, the protestors defy an injunction issued on August 14, limiting the number of pickets at a construction site to six.  The injunction had been dutifully observed, but on the previous day, according to coalition leaders, union leaders walked out of talks scheduled between them and Black leaders.  It is a day of contrasts for Reverend Jackson as earlier in the day he had been honored as one of Chicago’s 10 outstanding young men at a luncheon at the Palmer House.  This evening he would spend the night in jail.  In the above photo Reverend Jackson uses a police microphone in the back of a police squadrol in an attempt to quiet demonstrators at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle Campus.


September 8, 1973 – Led by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, more than 8,000 people march through the Loop from a starting point at State Street and Wacker Drive, headed for a rally in Grant Park.  A spokesman for the Coalition for Jobs and Economic Justice, the sponsor of the march, says, “We are facing a crisis of everyday living.  It is the story of the jobless at the employment gate. It’s 40 million school children facing the loss of milk.  It’s the crisis of the welfare mother trying to fend off malnutrition at supermarket prices, the closed down factory, the bus line that died.”  [Chicago Tribune, September 9, 1973] Jack Edward, the Vice-President of the United Auto Workers says at the Grant Park rally, “In 1963 we had a friendly wind at our backs—John F. Kennedy. Now we have adversity at our faces—Richard M. Nixon, whose interest in economic and social justice was clearly demonstrated by his veto this week of a bill that would have raised the minimum wage in steps to $2.20 an hour and extended the protection of the Fair Labor Standards Act to about 7 million workers.”  Organizers had predicted a turn-out of 50,000 protestors, an estimate that was clearly optimistic.  As the above photo shows Reverend Jackson is still at it in 1975 as he leads a rally in favor of the Humphrey-Hawkins act that advocated using government-paid positions to combat the ravages of inflation and unemployment. 

September 8, 1929 – Gompers Park at the corner of Foster and Pulaski Avenues, a 39-acre expanse of green space that is divided by the Chicago River, is dedicated.  Originally a part of the Park District of Albany Park, one of 22 independent park districts that were brought into the Chicago Park District in 1934, the park’s plan was the work of landscape architect Henry J. Stockman. Clarence Hatzfield, a Chicago architect and member of the Albany Park board, designed the park’s fieldhouse.  The park was originally named after Samuel Matson, who had been the Superintendent of Albany Park’s Park District.  According to the Chicago Park District’s website, “Albany Park District President Henry A. Schwartz, an official of the shoemakers’ union, soon convinced the park board that it was inappropriate to name the park for a living person.” Therefore, on this day in 1929 the district renamed the park in honor of Samuel Gompers, who had served as the president of the American Federation of Labor from 1886 until his death in 1924.  A major donation from the Edward M. Marx Foundation led to the dedication of a life-sized statue of the labor leader on Labor Day of 2007.

September 8, 1860 – The schooner Augusta sails into Chicago, reporting that sometime during the night she had collided with the Lady Elgin on the lake.  The Lady Elgin, with somewhere between 400 and 700 passengers aboard, most of them members of Milwaukee’s Irish Union Guard, is holed below the waterline when the Augusta strikes her amidships in the midst of a lake squall, and within 20 minutes she sinks.  No one will ever know how many drown in the lake off Winnetka or die on the rocks just off shore.  Bodies continue to wash ashore well into December, some of them almost 80 miles from the wreck. Many of those aboard the Lady Elgin are never found.  Those who could be identified are returned to Milwaukee for burial, but a number of the unfortunate souls onboard the ship are buried in a mass grave In Highwood, not far from the Port Clinton lighthouse, a place that has since been lost to time.




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Thursday, September 3, 2020

September 3, 1982 -- Governor Dan Walker Loses Staff Members to Federal Indictments



September 3, 1982 – Three members of former Governor Daniel Walker’s administration and a top campaign contributor are indicted on charges of exchanging state contracts for campaign contributions. This will be the second time the group has been indicted in the scheme that involved state contracts in excess of a million dollars.  The original indictment was rejected by Judge Susan Getzendanner in the U. S. District Court in Chicago because it failed to define specifically the details of the alleged crime. The original indictment alleged that $1.3 million in state contracts went to Millicent Systems and Universal Design Systems at 201 North Wells Street in Chicago in exchange for $80,000 in campaign contributions.  Competitive bids were not required for the contracts because they were for professional services.  In the late 1980's the ex-governor, himself, would serve 18 months of a seven-year prison sentence for bank fraud and perjury.


September 3, 1950 – The Chicago Tribune reports that a 500-unit addition to Altgeld Gardens at 130th Street is soon to get under way.  It will be one of 13 sites that the City Council has approved as subsidized housing for low-income families.  The land for the project was purchased in 1946 and covers 32 acres.  Architects for the huge project will be Naess & Murphy, the same firm that will design the Prudential Building on Randolph Street before the middle of the decade.  The average monthly rental is projected to be $43, and the project will include its own shopping center and “an abundance of parking space.”  The Beaubein Forest Preserve is nearby, and the park district has acquired an additional 15 acres of green space adjoining the development.  It all sounds wonderful – an urban paradise – but as The Chicago Reader later observed, “Altgeld’s proximity to the southeast side’s slew of factories, landfills, dumps, and polluted waterways . . . left its residents exposed and vulnerable.”  [The Chicago Reader, September 4, 2015]
medium.com
September 3, 1923 – The Deputy Coroner holds an inquest into the death of Mrs. Nancy Green, an 83-year-old woman who dies when an automobile collided with a laundry truck, overturning on the sidewalk, where Green is standing under the elevated structure at 3100 South State Street.  Green was born on March 4, 1834, as a slave in Montgomery County, Kentucky.  She came to Chicago to serve as a nurse and household servant for the wealthy Walker family, and Charles M. Walker, the chief justice of the Municipal Court and his brother, Dr. Samuel Walker, raved to their friends about the pancakes that she made. [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 4, 1923].  At the age of 56 she was selected by the R. T. Davis Milling Company to serve as the living symbol for its pancake mix.  Nancy Green became Aunt Jemima, and in 1893 the company made the decision to begin a huge promotion of its product at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. According to the African American Registry, “Green was a hit, friendly, a good storyteller … Her exhibition booth drew so many people that special policemen were assigned to keep the crowds moving.”  [aaregistry.org]  The Davis Milling Company received more than 50,000 orders at the fair.  Green signed a lifetime contract and traveled all over the country, promoting the pancake mix.  By 1910 more than 120 million Aunt Jemima pancake meals were being served annually, roughly equivalent to the population of the United States.  [medium.com]. Green was more than a spokesperson for a flour company, though.  She was also an organizer of the Olivet Baptist Church, one of the largest African-American churches in Chicago.  She raised her voice consistently in her late years to advocate for anti-poverty programs and equal rights. She is buried in Chicago’s Oak Woods Cemetery.  In June of 2020 Quaker Oats announced that it will retire the nearly 130-year-old Aunt Jemima brand and logo, acknowledging that the origins of the brand are based on a racial stereotype.

Burnett M. Chiperfield
September 3, 1909 – The Chicago Daily Tribune reports on an investigation by the Chiperfield land investigating committee, authorized by the state legislature to look into abuses related to “made land” along Illinois lakes and rivers.  The current brouhaha relates to land in Edgewater where “a few years ago a broad sandy beach stretched along the shore of that part of the city” and where now residents are not pleased “to have Sheridan road, which used to skirt along the edge of the lake between Bryn Mawr and Foster avenues, shoved back 200 to 500 feet, and to have their beloved beach turned into building lots by the dumping of refuse upon the sand.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 3, 1909] It is alleged that the Lincoln Park board has given two real estate agencies, Cochran and McClure and Corbett and Connery, the right to make new land in the area and sell the property.  One resident says, “When we bought our property last August we supposed that we were within two blocks of the lake, but instead of that we find a real estate sign offering lots for sale at the foot of the street.”  Burnett M. Chiperfield of Canton, Illinois, the head of the Submerged and Shore Lands Legislative Investigating Committee, says, “We have decided that in all cases where we have found individuals or corporations occupying land which we think belongs to the state we shall subpoena them to appear before us and bring with them any proofs which they may have to offer showing their alleged title to the land … We want to get a bird’s eye view of the whole shore line, and a general idea where the towns are located and of the water front streets and that sort of thing, so that when we take testimony regarding certain alleged land grabs, we will have some knowledge of the location … We found some things in East St. Louis and along the Illinois River that look like big steals, and I believe that conditions are as bad all along the water fronts of this state.”


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Friday, July 10, 2020

July 10, 1966 -- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Delivers Soldier Field Address

Chicago Tribune Photo
July 10, 1966 – The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. heads up a rally at Soldier Field, beginning a summer-long Chicago campaign against segregation in education, housing and employment.  It was a brutally hot day with the temperature standing at 98 degrees … the city’s beaches were crowded with over 100,000 people.  Before a crowd of 30,000 people, King declares, “This day we must declare our own Emancipation Proclamation.  This day we must commit ourselves to make any sacrifice necessary to change Chicago.  This day we must decide to fill up the jails of Chicago, if necessary in order to end slums.”  [Chicago Tribune, July 11, 1966].  “We are here,” he continues, “because we’re tired of living in rat-infested slums.  We are tired of having to pay a median rent of $97 a month in Lawndale for four rooms while whites in South Deering pay $73 a month for five rooms … We are tired of being lynched physically in Mississippi, and we are tired of being lynched spiritually and economically in the North.”  Following the Soldier Field rally, King leads a crowd of tens of thousands to the La Salle Street entrance of City Hall where he uses adhesive tape to affix a series of demands, calling for an end to police brutality and discriminatory real-estate practices, increased Black employment and a civilian review board for the police department.  The next day he presents the demands to Mayor Richard J. Daley in person.  As tactful as he has ever been in his political career, Daley observes, “Dr. King is very sincere in what he is trying to do.  Maybe, at times, he doesn’t have all the facts on the local situation.  After all, he is a resident of another city.”  [Chicago Tribune, July 10, 2016).  Operating from an apartment at 1550 South Hamlin Avenue in Lawndale, Dr. King directs a campaign that lasts throughout the summer, culminating in an open-housing agreement between Daley and him that was signed on August 28, an agreement that many consider a template for the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

chicagology.com
July 10, 1941 – Members of the German consulate in Chicago leave the city, one day ahead of the U. S. State Department’s deadline.  The chancellor of the consulate, Dr. Wilhelm Freidel, turns over the keys to the consulate offices to the manager of the 333 North Michigan Avenue building, the site of the German consulate for the previous decade.  Office furniture and equipment is placed in storage.  The diplomatic contingent will sail from New York on July 17, bound for Lisbon, Portugal on the S. S. George Washington. From there the individual members of the group will return to their homes in Germany.

July 10, 1929 –The Clark Street bridge is dedicated in a program arranged by the North Clark Street Committee of the North Central Association.  A parade starts on North Avenue and Clark Street with marchers and floats and several members of the Sac and Fox tribes in native dress, an acknowledgement that Clark Street began its life as a trail for Native Americans.  After the ribbon for the new bridge is cut, participating dignitaries adjourn to a luncheon at the Sherman Hotel.
J. Bartholomew Photo
July 10, 1925 – Building Commissioner Frank Doherty gives approval for the proposed 40-story Jewelers’ Building, today’s 35 East Wacker, recommending that Corporation Counsel F. X. Busch issue the necessary building permits as quickly as possible.  There is one major hang-up in getting the construction started – Fire Commissioner Joseph Connery wants a delay in construction until considerable modification is made in a scheme that would see 572 cars parking in the lower levels of the structure.  Connery believes that nothing will eliminate the hazards attendant to a huge parking garage in a skyscraper.  The Corporation Counsel seems ready to take the chance, saying, “Recent surveys indicate that an average of 3,000 automobiles are parked daily in loop streets.  Five or six other such buildings with equal facilities would nearly solve the parking problem and certainly relieve street congestion.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 11, 1925]  

July 10, 1893 -- Halfway through the greatest event in the city’s history, tragedy occurs on this day.  A day later the lead in the Chicago Daily Tribune captures the depth of the tragedy as the paper reports, “The World’s Fair received a baptism of fire and blood yesterday afternoon, the Cold-Storage Building proving a funeral pyre for twelve firemen, twenty-four persons receiving serious injuries.”  The cold storage building, the location of the tragedy, was erected by the directors of the Hercules Iron Works and sat on the east side of Stony Island Avenue just south of the Sixty-Fourth Street entrance to the fairgrounds.  The building, designed to resemble a Moorish palace, was five stories high and included a skating rink on the top floor.  There were four towers on each corner with a central tower, encasing the boiler flue, the central tower rising 191 feet above street level.  A promenade encircled the central tower about 70 feet below its inaccessible top.  The flue that ran up this central tower had been a subject of considerable debate since it veered so dangerously away from original specifications and had been subject to minor fires that had flared up in June, causing the cancellation of most of the insurance policies on the building.  At 1:30 p.m. an alarm went out when a small fire was spotted at the top of the flue stack in the tower’s crowning cupola, an area that was supposed to have been made of wrought iron instead of wood and lined with asbestos.  About a dozen firemen climbed to the gallery around the tower, nailing boards to the structure to get closer to the fire.  As they climbed, a puff of white smoke at the roof level of the warehouse preceded flames that cut off the escape of the fourteen firefighters trapped on the narrow ledge surrounding the tower.   As 50,000 fair-goers watched, the trapped men began to jump, one by one, leaping 60 feet onto the burning main roof.  The paper described the horrific scene, “Strong men turned their heads away and women fainted by the score.  The crowd was so dense that escape was impossible.  Down on his knees in the center of the plot surrounding the Pennsylvania railroad exhibit went a well-dressed man, and with hands uplifted he prayed to the Almighty to avert the awful calamity that seemed imminent.  As he prayed tears streamed from his eyes and his words were lost in the sobs and groans of those around him.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 11, 1893]  Twelve brave firefighters lost their lives on that July day, along with three civilians.   
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