The People's Justice: Clarence Thomas and the Constitutional Stories that Define Him by Amul Thapar

Author:Amul Thapar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regnery Gateway
Published: 2023-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

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Since the ruling, Chicago still suffers from gang violence. In 2021, Chicago had 3,561 shooting incidents and 797 homicides, approximately 64 percent of which were gang related. Most of the violence occurs on the South and West Sides of Chicago, where the gang presence is very high. And the majority of these violent crimes occur outside and in public places.25

CHAPTER 9 The Sharecropper’s Son

McDonald v. City of Chicago

Fannie Lewis wasn’t the only Midwesterner to begin her life in the South. From 1910 to 1970, six million other black Americans made the same journey. Often traveling with little more than a few dollars in their pocket and the clothes on their back, they went north to cities with great histories: New York, Toledo, Boston, Detroit, Muskegon, Saginaw, Chicago.

What moved them was hope: Word of jobs and a better life. Letters from cousins and brothers, telling of good pay and steady work. The dream of an apartment, a house, running water, a toilet, and lightbulbs. More important, many of them went with hopes of a better life for their children.

Otis McDonald was one of these men. He was born in 1933, the son of Louisiana sharecroppers and the grandson of slaves.1 At the age of sixteen, he left, bound for Chicago. But in spite of what Otis had heard, work was still difficult to find, even in Chicago, and what he did find was not much better than in the South. So Otis decided to take a drastically different course: the Army. There, he thought, he would find a meritocracy. When Otis enlisted, though, he found the military didn’t live up to his hopes, either. So he only served one term with the 42nd Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion.2

After finishing his service, Otis returned to Chicago. Even for a veteran, work was hard to find, especially when, like so many boys in the rural South, Otis had left school at fourteen. Finally, he found a job as a janitor at the University of Chicago.3 Meanwhile, Otis had met his wife, Laura. Pushing a mop put a roof over the McDonalds’ heads. Just in time, too—the McDonalds had one baby, and another on the way.

But Otis didn’t believe that the journey he’d begun in Louisiana was supposed to end with him pushing a mop to pay a landlord. He imagined something better for his wife, for his children. He imagined a home in a community he could be proud of. The community where he decided to build his dream was Morgan Park.4

A neighborhood on Chicago’s far South Side, Morgan Park was one of the most integrated areas in Chicago. And most important, it was a good place to raise a family. In order to give his dream a firm foundation, Otis began taking night courses at Kennedy-King College, one of Chicago’s public colleges. Otis loved to learn, and he was motivated. After a couple of years, this man who had never earned a high school diploma received an associate’s degree in engineering. Bit by bit, he worked his way up from janitor to supervisor, and finally to maintenance engineer.

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