Untenable by Jack Cashill

Author:Jack Cashill [Cashill, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781637586471
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2023-04-22T03:21:58+00:00

Below Grade

By the 1960s, the breakdown in public education, not just in Newark but throughout urban America, was becoming too obvious to ignore. The case of Michelle Obama is instructive. Born in 1964, Michelle spent the first six years of her life in Chicago’s Parkway Garden Homes, the nation’s first cooperatively owned African American housing development. Parkway Gardens was a big deal at the time. When its cornerstone was laid in 1950, the Chicago mayor and both US senators came to witness. The spacious apartments had all the amenities, and middle-class Black professionals vied to get in. Among its early residents were Michelle’s parents, the Robinsons. Her mother, Marian, was a stay-at-home mom, and her father, Fraser, worked for the municipal water department, a front for his real job as a precinct captain in the Daley machine.

In 1962, the bright and shiny new Dulles Elementary School opened just a block away from the Robinson home. After sending Michelle’s older brother, Craig, there for two years, the Robinsons had seen enough. From their perspective, the problem wasn’t the school building. It was the school’s students, many of whom came from nearby housing projects. When Michelle was ready to start school, the Robinsons took a risky step. They used the address of Marian’s sister in Chicago’s middle-class South Shore neighborhood to enroll both Craig and Michelle at Bryn Mawr Elementary, a fifteen-minute drive from Parkway Gardens.

Born to immigrant parents the same year as Michelle, 1964, Carlo Rotella grew up in South Shore. In 2019, the University of Chicago Press published Rotella’s unusually bold book about that experience, The World Is Always Coming to an End. Now an English professor at Boston College, Rotella understood why the Robinsons were drawn to the neighborhood, given its history “as one of the most physically attractive parts of the South Side, blessed with good housing stock, lovely parks and beaches, convenient public transportation, and a long-established reputation for respectability.”87

Although their motives were understandable, the Robinsons had committed a class C misdemeanor. If found out, they would have had to reimburse the school district for the cost of tuition. Nor did they get what they bargained for. The heavily Jewish neighborhood was deep in transition. Although South Shore had been the center of Jewish life on Chicago’s South Side in the 1950s, by the late 1960s most of the Jews had fled for the same reason the Robinsons were about to flee Parkway Gardens—schools and crime.

“Crime did rise sharply in South Shore during its era of racial turnover,” writes Rotella. “Crime had previously been low in South Shore, so it came as a shock when the neighborhood’s rate of FBI-designated index crimes—murder, assault, rape, robbery, burglary, larceny, car theft (arson was added later)—soared from well under the citywide average to double and almost triple that average, among the city’s highest.”88 As Rotella notes, the Blacks of South Shore blamed the crime spike on what they called “the element,” the refugees from the city’s public housing projects.

In researching

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