Chicago on the Make by Andrew J. Diamond

Author:Andrew J. Diamond [Diamond, Andrew J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520286481
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 13. The Wall of Respect, a site of frequent gatherings in the late 1960s. Photo by Robert Abbott Sengstacke/Getty Images.

Such celebrations of “race, community, and locality” created a level of political engagement by average people in the context of everyday Chicago life that has seldom been approached since. The problem was that the same primordial feelings and attachments that were bringing people into the streets were also reinforcing a logic of ethnoracial difference—a logic already embedded within the city’s ethnoracially balkanized social geography—that made the development of powerful multiracial coalitions a nearly impossible task. We will never know how far Chairman Fred might have taken his “rainbow coalition,” but we do know that, at the time of his death, such notions had, for the most part, captured the hearts and souls of only an avant garde fringe of activists, intellectuals, and artists.

More indicative of how the politics of identity were shaping grassroots progressive politics was the student-led movement to reform Chicago’s high schools in the spring and fall of 1968—one of the last of its kind. Emerging out of a general spirit of discontent about the sorry state of Chicago schools, this movement took the form of two parallel mobilizations—one black and one Latino—from its very first days. Ironically, black and Latino students had similar complaints regarding the Chicago Board of Education’s refusal to recognize their cultural identity and deal with the discrimination they faced at the hands of white teachers, but their demands never found common ground. White students, for their part, largely stood on the sidelines when they were not actively, even violently, opposing their fellow black and Latino students. Harrison High School, located on the 2800 block of West 24th Street, along the border between the Near West Side and Pilsen, found itself in the center of things. The leaders of the militant black student organization the New Breed went to school at Harrison, and the most vocal Latino student organization, a group that included famed Mexican activist Rudy Lozano, also formed here. Harrison was one of the only schools in the city at that time that mixed significant numbers of blacks, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and whites, so it could have served as a stunning example of multiracial cooperation against the machine. But this was not to be. The black, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and white youths at Harrison had come of age in a street culture that placed a premium on defending the boundaries of their ethnoracial communities against outsiders, and these were hard habits to break. If, as Paul Ricoeur has argued, the self achieves identity and meaning through the detour to the other, this process, in the context of Chicago politics, had profound consequences.19 In the end, the board of education had little reason not to accede to the demands of black and Latino students. And so Superintendent James Redmond pledged to extend the half-year Afro-American history course being offered in thirty-six high schools to a whole year, to purchase new textbooks that “placed

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