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To: MNDude

I went to high school in the late ‘60s in Chicago. In that place and time, at least, blacks despised whites.


34 posted on 07/06/2012 9:21:10 AM PDT by Nea Wood (When life gets too hard to stand, kneel.)
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To: Nea Wood

My mother’s family moved to Chicago from the South circa 1955; she came to Chicago for the first time that fall when she was on leave. Her family was living out on the west side, which was still predominantly working-class white then, but change was on the move.

The two things her parents quickly told her:

1.) The parks weren’t safe, especially Garfield Park. It was big, beautiful and tempting, but it wasn’t safe.

2.) The black neighborhood of the near west side (the old Maxwell Street/Near West Side) was slowly but steadily spreading west at about 3-4 blocks per summer. When she came to town the “color line” was at California Avenue (2800 west); from there west to Kedzie Avenue (3200 west) was a sort of no-mans land. Her parents told her that if she was on a CTA bus on Madison or Washington that broke down east of Kedzie, not to get off for ANYTHING until the replacement bus showed up.

When her parent’s neighborhood began to change (around 1961-2) things unraveled quickly. Street crime, noisy neighbors, vandalism, harassment etc. all shot up like a rocket. The owner of the upscale Graemere residence hotel overlooking Garfield Park was literally chased out of the park by a mob of black youths in the summer of 1962; he sold the hotel that fall. People felt threatened and got out of Dodge as fast as they could. A friend who grew up a few blocks west and south of there remembered much the same sequence of events; his area flipped within the summer of 1965.


51 posted on 07/06/2012 12:40:35 PM PDT by M1903A1 ("We shed all that is good and virtuous for that which is shoddy and sleazy... and call it progress")
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