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Chapter One

THE END OF THE WORLD AS THEY KNEW IT

CHICAGO’S FAR SOUTH SIDE

MARCH 1980–JULY 1985

Frank Lumpkin never forgot the first phone call that afternoon. Although he was off work that Friday with a broken foot, he had stopped by the pay office at Wisconsin Steel, where he’d labored for more than thirty years, to pick up checks totaling $8,084.57, money he was due in back vacation pay. He still had thirteen weeks of vacation coming, accumulated over five years, and he was about to take a long-planned trip to Africa. But March 28—“Black Friday,” as it would be called—was about to become absolutely unforgettable.

Wisconsin Steel’s hulking metal sheds stretched south and a bit eastward from the intersection of Torrence Avenue and East 106th Street in a neighborhood that most residents called Irondale, even if Chicago city maps labeled it South Deering. William Deering was a long-forgotten industrialist who had cofounded International Harvester Company in 1902; Wisconsin’s oldest corporate ancestor, Brown’s Mill, dated from 1875 and had been South Chicago’s first steel plant. Six years later, Andrew Carnegie opened a larger mill just north from where the Calumet River flowed into Lake Michigan, and by the dawn of the twentieth century the southwestern crescent of that lakeshore, stretching from the Calumet eastward across the Indiana state line to Gary and Burns Harbor, had become the most dense concentration of steel mills in the world.

Steelmaking was dangerous and strenuous work, as Frank Lumpkin well knew, but steelworkers had significant freedoms. “There were no time clocks, and they could come out for lunch,” a nearby barber recounted. “The workers figured that they could get their hair cut on company time because it grows on company time.”

By 1980 the region’s mills had sustained generation after generation of working-class families whose breadwinners didn’t need to graduate high school to get jobs that paid three times what college graduates could earn as public school teachers.

Frank and his wife Bea had raised four children during their thirty-one years of marriage, and they had just moved to South Shore, a middle-class neighborhood a bit northwest of where Carnegie’s mill—now United States Steel’s huge South Works—employed almost three times the 3,450 men who worked at Wisconsin. South Shore was a comfortable area for an interracial couple—Frank was black, Bea white—and tolerant too of a couple who had spent many years as dedicated members of the Communist Party USA. Frank’s fellow workers at Wisconsin—black, white, and Hispanic—didn’t view him as a radical, just an outgoing man who had worked his way up through the odd series of job titles a steel mill offered: chipper, scarfer, millwright.

A little after 3:00 P.M. that Friday, Frank limped across Torrence Avenue to the Progressive Steel Workers (PSW) union hall, just north of 107th Street. The PSW was a so-called “independent” union, not part of the United Steelworkers of America or any labor federation, but it was actually no more “independent” than it was “progressive.” Its first president, William Reilly, was a Wisconsin steelworker, but he left his union post to become chief labor spokesman for International Harvester, Wisconsin Steel’s corporate owner. PSW’s current president, forty-three-year-old Leonard “Tony” Roque, had been in office since 1973, and he had engineered an almost 50 percent increase in union dues, increased his own salary by thousands of dollars, and was overseeing a $150,000 expansion of the union hall. Roque was widely seen as nothing more than a flunky for the political king of South Chicago, 10th Ward alderman Edward R. “Fast Eddie” Vrdolyak, whose law firm received an annual retainer of $30,000 from the PSW and whose election campaigns the union also contributed to. Vrdolyak was a graduate of the University of Chicago’s highly prestigious law school, but some acquaintances remembered him more for the charge of attempted murder that had been filed against him, and then dropped, during his law school years.

The phone call Frank would always remember came when he was speaking with union vice president Steve Plesha at about 3:30 P.M. The message was abrupt: Wisconsin Steel was closing, the workers were being sent home, and the gates were being locked.

“He looked at me and I looked at him because I couldn’t believe it. I had just been there twenty minutes ago,” Frank recalled a decade later. What’s more, just the night before PSW had held a meeting where both Roque and Ronald K. Linde, board chairman of Wisconsin Steel’s new owner, Envirodyne Industries, had reassured some fifteen hundred members that reports about Wisconsin possibly closing were incorrect.

But the 3:30 P.M. phone call should have been less surprising than it was. Three weeks earlier, Crain’s Chicago Business—in fairness, a publication not often read by South Chicago steelworkers—had reported that Wisconsin faced “imminent bankruptcy” because its former corporate owner, International Harvester, which still bought some 40 percent of its steel from Wisconsin for use in Harvester’s farm equipment, was increasingly crippled by an ongoing United Auto Workers strike that had begun on November 1, 1979. Ironically, November 1 had also been the date when Wisconsin’s new owner, Envirodyne Industries, secured a package of loans, guaranteed by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (EDA), to modernize its plant.

International Harvester had begun trying to sell Wisconsin in 1975, and for good reason: in 1976, Wisconsin lost $4.6 million, bringing its cumulative losses since 1970 to $77 million. By early 1977 Harvester was in serious discussions with Envirodyne, a tiny enterprise boasting just a dozen employees that focused on acquiring larger companies through stock swaps. Envirodyne had no experience in the steel industry and badly needed cash to cover an existing bank loan, but Harvester was willing to accept $50 million in notes, secured primarily by the two iron ore mines in upper Michigan, one ore ship, and coal properties in Kentucky that Wisconsin Steel also owned. More crucially, Chase Manhattan Bank was willing to provide $15 million in cash to Envirodyne. The Chicago Tribune labeled the purchase “a minnow trying to swallow a whale,” but nonetheless the sale closed on July 31, 1977, and Wisconsin’s hefty ongoing annual losses continued: $32 million on revenues of $236 million in the twelve months ending in September 1979. Thanks to EDA’s loan guarantees, six insurance companies provided $75 million, and Chase Manhattan ponied up another $15 million for current operating expenses.

The Crain’s story went on to say that “without a strong infusion of working capital,” beyond the 1979 loans, “Wisconsin’s collapse is unavoidable,” and on March 27, the Chicago Tribune’s widely respected business editor, Richard Longworth, reported that the second $15 million from Chase had been expended and that the federal EDA would support additional money for Wisconsin only if International Harvester would advance Wisconsin new funds too.

Harvester, which had recently sustained losses of $225 million during the first quarter of its 1979–80 fiscal year, worried that Wisconsin’s iron and coal mine assets were vulnerable to potential seizure by external creditors. Thus, earlier on March 28, Harvester foreclosed on those properties and the ore ship. But Harvester had failed to consult with Chase Manhattan before acting, and, according to Wisconsin plant manager George J. Harper, several hours later, Chase “impounded all our inventories and stopped all our shipments. At that point, we were literally dead,” Harper explained. “We had to start telling the workers that we were shut down.”

As one employee recounted, “We got no warning of this closing at all. I was loading boxes and the foreman came up and just told me to go home. I figured they’d run into some kind of problem with the trucks.” As Harper remembered, “We just dumped them in the street with nothing to show for what they had done…. It was anything but honorable and anything but diplomatic…. It makes you feel sick inside.”

Harper and the workers also didn’t know that Chase had frozen Wisconsin’s bank accounts. By 5:00 P.M., the foremen were instructed to tell the men on their shifts not to come back to work. Frank had returned home by that time, and his foreman telephoned him there. “Lumpkin,” he said, “don’t expect to come back to work. It looks bad.” By early Saturday morning, the news had spread to all of the workers and their families. One woman remembers being a fourteen-year-old girl when her father worked at Wisconsin. She never forgot her mother waking her on Saturday morning to tell her what had happened: “They called the ore boat back,” with the coast guard radioing it to return to South Chicago. “It was a crucial moment of rupture,” she explained, when the “widespread belief in future prosperity for oneself and one’s family” and the stability that flowed from that assumption was first called into question. Wisconsin’s closing “would tear through a fabric that had sustained generations” and portended “the collapse of the world as I had known it in Southeast Chicago.” For her dad, the mill’s demise “upended the world as my father knew it.”¹

By midday on Monday, March 31, a sense of trauma, crisis, and fear had spread across the Southeast Side as people gradually realized that all of Friday’s paychecks were now worthless. Both of Envirodyne’s Wisconsin holding companies had filed for bankruptcy. One lawyer involved told Richard Longworth, “I pleaded with Chase to at least take care of those checks that bounced. Chase said they couldn’t see any legal responsibility. I told them there’s more than a legal responsibility involved here,” but that was rejected.

Scores of other businesses—industrial suppliers closely tied to Wisconsin Steel and retail establishments patronized by Wisconsin workers—immediately began to suffer their own financial consequences. By Wednesday, April 2, the Daily Calumet was reporting that more than a thousand workers at Chicago Slag & Ballast and the Chicago West Pullman & Southern Railroad, both of which had serviced Wisconsin, had also lost their jobs. The Daily Cal’s editorial page predicted “a chain reaction within the community” as “unemployment will spread forth from the plant,” and warned its readers to grasp “the all-too-real possibility” that Wisconsin “might never reopen.” If so, “in a short time, the life and breath of the community will cease to exist, and the neighborhood will be as dead as Wisconsin Steel.”

Each day the news grew worse. Before the week was out, the Daily Cal was reporting a total of “nearly 7,000 ‘ripple effect’ layoffs” by employers whose businesses had been tied to Wisconsin. The federal bankruptcy court authorized the EDA to spend up to $1 million to purchase the coal that was necessary to avoid shutting down the coke ovens—which once cooled become unstable and are impossible to restart—but as Easter weekend began, former Wisconsin workers complained that there was a two-week lag in unemployment checks, that food stamp applications were being rejected if children did not have Social Security numbers, and that Wisconsin wouldn’t let them into the plant to get their personal tools and work shoes. “All I feel now is hatred,” one worker told John Wasik, the Daily Cal reporter who was chronicling the debacle. South Chicago Savings Bank announced a three-month moratorium for Wisconsin borrowers with outstanding loans, and offered new emergency loans to the former workers too. The Daily Cal warned that “the longer the plant sits idle, the greater are the chances it will never reopen…. At stake is more than dollars and cents, more than jobs and employment … there are people at stake.”²

One voice that remained utterly silent even as the crisis moved into its third week was PSW president Tony Roque. But on Wednesday, April 16, about thirty men went first to the Chicago office of the federal National Labor Relations Board, and then to the Illinois State Department of Labor to complain about the PSW’s utter passivity, only to be told they should file claims in bankrupty court. Their efforts made the front page of the next day’s Daily Cal, and the story concluded by telling interested workers to call Frank Lumpkin at home. Roque responded immediately by sending letters to every member announcing a general meeting on Sunday, April 27—in the ballroom of the mammoth Chicago Hilton hotel, in the downtown “Loop,” more than fifteen miles north of South Deering.

The PSW’s Hilton meeting generated angry jibes—“Why have they rented the Hilton when their members can’t even buy food?” one wife asked the Tribune’s Richard Longworth—but when testimony in the federal bankruptcy case revealed that workers’ compensation coverage for the skeleton crew manning the coke ovens and blast furnace had ended on April 1, the PSW struck Wisconsin, pulling those workers from the plant. Only the EDA’s willingness to pay the $35,000 a week in natural gas costs prevented the coke ovens from going cold.³

As Wisconsin’s final death rattle was sounding, two progressive Chicago clergymen—Father Tom Joyce, a Claretian priest who directed the Claretians’ Peace and Justice Committee, and Dick Poethig, director of the Presbyterian Church’s Institute on the Church in Urban Industrial Society, decided to attend a mid-May gathering at St. Thomas More College in Covington, Kentucky, a “National Conference on Religion and Labor.” One of the featured speakers was Presbyterian minister Rev. Chuck Rawlings, who talked about his recent experience as principal organizer of the Ecumenical Coalition of the Mahoning Valley (ECMV), in northeastern Ohio.

As they listened to Rawlings, Tom Joyce and Dick Poethig could tell how similar the effects of the closing of Wisconsin were to what had occurred near Youngstown, Ohio, three years earlier. They also recognized that it had been clergymen, not union leaders, business interests, or elected officials, who had led the local community’s response.

On September 19, 1977, the Lykes Corporation announced the closing of Campbell Works, with a loss of more than forty-one hundred jobs. When Chuck Rawlings, who worked for the Church and Society department of the Episcopal Diocese of Ohio, heard of the closing, he called Episcopal bishop John H. Burt, who in turn phoned James W. Malone, the Roman Catholic bishop of Youngstown. An interfaith breakfast was convened, and Rawlings circulated a memorandum calling for church leaders to confront the steel crisis. In the meantime, Youngstown attorney Staughton Lynd contacted the Washington-based National Center for Economic Alternatives (NCEA), whose codirectors, Gar Alperovitz and Jeff Faux, believed the shutdown called for an infusion of investment capital from the federal government, which would require an “unusual political mobilization” featuring “a dramatic local and national moral campaign.” In a New York Times op-ed essay, Alperovitz and Faux called for a Tennessee Valley Authority–style “development corporation” with “mixed community and employee ownership” to oversee such a federal investment.

Rawlings’s band of Ohio bishops and pastors called themselves the Ecumenical Coalition of the Mahoning Valley (ECMV), and they convened a “Steel Crisis Conference,” at which Alperovitz was the featured speaker. Out of that came “A Religious Response to the Mahoning Valley Steel Crisis,” which was signed by more than two hundred clergy members. In this pastoral letter, the clergymen echoed Alperovitz in declaring that “this is not in any sense a purely economic problem.” They were “convinced that corporations have social and moral responsibilities,” and said they were “seriously exploring the possibility of community and/or worker ownership” of a reopened Campbell Works.

U.S. Steel chairman Edgar Speer condemned their efforts as “nothing short of a Communist takeover,” but ECMV, taking advantage of $335,000 in federal support from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, commissioned Alperovitz to undertake a six-month study to determine if Campbell could be reopened. National newspapers like the Times and the Washington Post covered the effort, especially once Alperovitz announced a preliminary finding that about $500 million would allow Campbell to reopen with about half of its prior workforce. But White House aides to President Jimmy Carter would support only $100 million and quietly asked Harvard Business School professor Richard S. Rosenbloom to evaluate Alperovitz’s analysis while postponing any decision until after the November 1978 midterm elections.

In March 1979, the White House notified the ECMV that their proposal had been rejected. Chuck Rawlings thought he and his colleagues had been “naive” to expect federal help, especially when Youngstown parishioners had remained far more silent than their pastors, but when Tom Joyce and Dick Poethig spoke with Rawlings after his presentation at the May 1980 conference about Wisconsin’s demise, his advice was decisive—“Go back and organize!”—and Tom and Dick agreed to do just that.⁴

Joyce knew even before he returned to Chicago that the first person he would contact was Leo Mahon. Fifty-four years old at the time of Tom’s call, Mahon had been pastor of St. Victor Roman Catholic Church in Calumet City, the first suburb just south of Chicago’s southeastern city limits, since 1975. Mahon had been ordained a priest of the Chicago archdiocese in 1951. Early on, he worked with Puerto Rican parishioners and learned Spanish while also rubbing shoulders with a young community organizer named Nicholas von Hoffman and von Hoffman’s well-known mentor, Saul Alinsky, the father of community organizing. Within a few years, Mahon became head of the archdiocese’s Committee for the Spanish Speaking, which planned to start a mission in Panama. Archbishop Albert Cardinal Meyer, whom Leo adored, chose Mahon to lead it, and in early 1963 Leo left for Panama, where he spent the next twelve years.

The San Miguelito mission flourished under Leo’s leadership, but government officials took a dim view of his pastoral defense of human rights, and pliable Catholic leaders in Panama twice put Leo on trial for heresy. After Cardinal Meyer died, in early 1965, the Vatican named St. Louis native John Patrick Cody as his successor, and Cody was far less supportive of Leo’s work. When Leo returned from Panama to Chicago in 1975, Cody, perhaps out of fear of Mahon’s possible radicalism, refused to take advantage of his Spanish and Latin American expertise and instead “exiled him” to Calumet City.

Leo had left San Miguelito despondent, knowing that Cody’s attitude meant his long-standing expectation of becoming a bishop would come to naught, but at St. Victor Mahon found a core of energetic and committed young adult parishioners with whom he quickly bonded. Father Leo was “a breath of fresh air,” Jan Poledziewski recalled, selecting female altar servers and using the Sunday Bulletin to advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment. “He empowered laypeople” and “everyone just adored him,” Christine Gervais remembered. “He was such a charismatic person that if he asked you to do something, you just couldn’t wait to help him out.”⁵

Sometime in late May 1980, Tom Joyce and Dick Poethig met Leo at St. Victor and asked him to lead a clergy effort to respond to Wisconsin’s closing. “It was quite obvious that the man to see was Leo,” Tom later explained. “Right away, within five minutes, he says, ‘Yes, we’ve got to do something about it.’ ” Dick Poethig remembered it similarly: “He had the right feeling, right off the bat.” The three clergymen agreed they would invite some ecumenical colleagues on both sides of the nearby Illinois–Indiana state line to an initial meeting at St. Victor on Friday, June 6.

Come that day, sixteen clergymen and four laypeople joined the initial trio at St. Victor, and, as Joyce wrote in a memo the next day, reached “unanimous agreement that the Church or the parishes and congregations should organize in an effort to get some community say into the steel mill closings.” On June 23, nine of them again assembled at St. Victor, with Tom Joyce stating that their “only model” was the clergy response in Youngstown. He went on to say that the community deserved to have “a modernized, efficient, competitive steel industry” based upon “modernization of the present plants.” At a third meeting on July 7, they chose August 23 as the date to host “a workshop for key leadership people in the community, labor and church.” For that session, Leo emphasized that their effort must not be seen as simply pro-union but instead be “distinctly a religious response.”⁶

Later on July 7, Frank Lumpkin and twenty-four other former Wisconsin workers assembled at the union hall of United Steel Workers Local 65—which represented employees at U.S. Steel’s huge but shrinking South Works—and signed a declaration that “we are tired of waiting” and that action was needed “Now.” When contractors for Chase Manhattan Bank tried on July 22 to remove the existing steel inventory, which Chase had arranged to sell for $16 million, from the Wisconsin site, angry former workers blocked the plant gates; on August 5, when contractors sought to remove a crane, the ex-workers prevented that too.⁷

On Monday night, July 28, Frank Lumpkin’s group of workers, now calling themselves the Save Our Jobs Committee (SOJC), were joined by Mary Gonzales, a Chicago native in her late thirties who, with her new husband, Greg Galluzzo, had begun working in the Southeast Side communities just before Wisconsin’s demise. Gonzales and Galluzzo had first met eight years earlier, when Greg was a Jesuit seminarian working for Chicago’s Pilsen Neighbors Community Council and Mary was married with several young children. By 1979, Mary was a single mother of three daughters and Greg was leaving the priesthood, and late that year Mary was hired by the Latino Institute as director of advocacy while Greg was working for the Illinois Public Action Council (IPA), which traced its organizational roots back to Saul Alinsky, who had died in 1972. Together they began to work in the Southeast Side’s increasingly Hispanic—primarily Mexican—neighborhoods, but as of February 1980, when they married, their only office in South Chicago was their car.

Mary and Greg went person by person through South Chicago, focusing on its Catholic parishes. Their long-range goal was to have “a citywide coalition” of permanent, neighborhood-based advocacy groups. By early March, they had conducted scores of one-on-one interviews, established contact with five parishes, and had five small nascent groups of residents meeting and talking.

Mary’s father had worked at Wisconsin Steel for thirty-five years, never missing a single day, before dying of brain cancer at age sixty-two. Mary had not heard any advance rumors about Wisconsin closing, but when it did, “it just reverberated through that whole neighborhood,” with thousands of families losing all of their health care coverage. Doing one-on-one interviews all across South Chicago, she recalled years later, the most common refrain was “I don’t have a doctor.”

By June, their new organization had a name—the United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) of Southeast Chicago—and Mary had drafted a proposal to circulate to potential funders. Wisconsin’s demise had created not only “tremendous unemployment,” but also “psychological pressure on families.” Life “has changed in a shattering fashion,” and more than two dozen people out of the several hundred they had approached were now actively participating in the nascent UNO. “The staff’s main function will be to train leadership,” Mary’s proposal said, and they hoped to publicly launch UNO as a southeast-wide organization within eighteen months. “Never since the Depression has this community been hit so hard.”⁸

Leo Mahon’s August 23 conference at Calumet College in Whiting, Indiana—just across the state line from southeastern Chicago’s largely white East Side—was a four-hour event that attracted a good crowd and good press coverage. Leo presented a vision that was grand, or grandiose, given how little he knew about Chuck Rawlings’s unsuccessful effort to save Youngstown’s steel economy. A statement issued on behalf of the conveners asked how management “can morally justify divestiture” in light of “its unwillingness to invest its profits” to modernize antiquated plants. They went on to say that local parishioners must force “the industry to see its responsibility to the community rather than simply to shareholders,” yet Leo confessed to a reporter, “I had one of my parishioners tell me we’re two years too late.”

The conveners believed the conference gave them “a mandate to organize a permanent structure,” and Dick Poethig imagined they might attract $60,000 in support from the Presbyterian Church and a combined $35,000 from Cardinal Cody and the Catholic bishop of nearby Gary, Indiana. Leo suggested they name themselves the Calumet Religious Community Conference—soon changed to Calumet Community Religious Conference, or CCRC—and that they hire Roberta Lynch, who had contacted him when she heard about his efforts to mobilize the community in response to Wisconsin’s closing; Roberta had two uncles who were priests in Panama, so she had long heard of Leo Mahon. Roberta brought experience from working for progressive Southeast Side Illinois state representative Miriam Balanoff. By the end of August, CCRC hired Roberta as its first staff member, at a salary of $500 a month.⁹

Two days after CCRC’s conference, the PSW’s attorney informed the federal bankruptcy court that PSW, Chase Manhattan, and International Harvester had reached agreement that Chase would cover 100 percent of the March 28 checks that had bounced—$1.3 million, including vacation pay—and 30 percent of an additional one week’s wages—some $1.1 million—that Wisconsin workers were owed contractually. An earlier offer of just the $1.3 million had been rejected seventeen hundred to sixty-two, but the new deal elicited an angry protest by several hundred workers because this agreement also cleared the way for Chase to sell the accumulated inventory that the workers had previously blocked. The Tribune reported that these workers “also marched on their union headquarters,” but Tony Roque “refused to meet with them.”

During September, reports spread that Thomas Fleming, a businessman who had helped Envirodyne acquire Wisconsin Steel, had encouraged an African American friend, Walt Palmer, to pursue reopening the mill. Savvy journalists were highly dubious, but on October 6 Palmer, Tony Roque, and Chicago mayor Jane Byrne appeared before what the Tribune called “1,500 cheering steelworkers” at the downtown Auditorium Theatre to announce that Wisconsin Steel would reopen on November 1. Byrne stated that President Carter—just four weeks away from a tight reelection face-off against Ronald Reagan—had said federal support was available, and “as soon as there’s agreement on the financial plan presented by Mr. Palmer, you can count on the steel mill opening.” According to the Tribune’s Richard Longworth, Palmer was “a mesmerizing speaker,” who received “a standing ovation” from the workers, many of whom “had tears of joy in their eyes as they left.” But it was only a political chimera, and nothing more. By the end of October Byrne was claiming that the government would loan $10 million to rehabilitate Wisconsin’s coke oven, but she admitted that Walt Palmer was “no longer in the picture.”¹⁰

CCRC’s efforts to become an active organization met with mixed success, as Roberta Lynch was having trouble organizing groups of parishioners. At the CCRC Steering Committee’s monthly meeting, she said that “getting people involved at the congregation level is taking much more time than we had originally anticipated.” Neither the bishop of Gary nor Cardinal Cody had offered any firm financial support, and as 1980 was ending, CCRC’s clergymen worried that “a fully-staffed and functional organization” would not be in place prior to 1982, and they reduced Roberta’s work to just half-time.¹¹

By the end of October, Mary Gonzales and Greg Galluzzo had a small UNO office in the heart of South Chicago’s commercial district. On Thanksgiving, in full alliance with Frank Lumpkin’s Save Our Jobs Committee (SOJC), UNO staged its first protest action as thirty former Wisconsin workers, and their families, descended upon the “Gold Coast” block where Jane Byrne lived in a forty-third-floor condominium apartment, chanting, “The mayor is a turkey.” Much of Mary’s work focused on organizing parents at an overcrowded elementary school to push for construction of a new building. By the outset of 1981, she and Greg had won financial support for UNO from Tom Joyce’s Claretian Social Development Fund and also from two small, progressive Chicago funders, the Wieboldt Foundation and the Woods Charitable Fund, the latter of which had just hired its first staffer, a young woman named Jean Rudd.¹²

At CCRC’s first monthly meeting in early 1981, Roberta Lynch echoed something Dick Poethig had said two months earlier: “there is still not a widespread sense of crisis about the steel industry in our area.” What’s more, she admitted, “the vagueness of CCRC’s program makes it difficult for people to see what they might accomplish by getting involved.” Dick Poethig suggested that CCRC mount “a mortgage-protection campaign to prevent the unemployed in the region from losing their homes” and pursue “state legislation calling for advance notice of a plant closing” plus state funding “for retraining the unemployed.”

A CCRC training session in mid-February allowed Roberta to describe why she, like Leo, rejected Saul Alinsky’s confrontational approach to community organizing. She said they would not use a model where “you find a target, you look for ways to bring people quickly into confrontation with it” yet only “on a very narrow … basis … looking to win a very quick victory.” The CCRC, she said, should not be “deluding people” with any easy victory “to get this or that” because that “isn’t going to have meaning in terms of what the real problems are.” Instead, since the church is “a tremendously vital and important force,” reaching out to “clergy people in every congregation in the region” would allow CCRC to become “an organization that can go to U.S. Steel and say we represent 200 churches, 50,000 people in the Calumet region.” But so far congregations’ responses had been “very mixed,” since “one of the big problems we have is just … convincing people that a problem exists.” In a subsequent memo, Roberta again emphasized how CCRC needed “to identify an initial program,” for “a concrete focus is essential if we are to convince people to work with us.” Investing time made sense to parishioners only if they believed it was “building toward something that will have an actual impact,” and she confessed, “I have certain hesitations about whether we will really be capable of carrying out sustained activity.”¹³

Early in 1981 the federal bankruptcy court awarded title to the Wisconsin Steel site to the federal EDA. The EDA imagined selling the plant, perhaps for use as a “mini-mill” that would employ less than half of Wisconsin’s onetime work force, but everyone realized that with Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, the chances of federal action to prop up antiquated steel plants had vanished. Nonetheless, Frank Lumpkin announced that 150 former Wisconsin workers would travel to Washington, D.C., to lobby for federal action. Frank estimated that only 10 percent of the ex-employees had found new jobs, and he stressed that all benefits had now run out. When the workers visited the House gallery, six members of Congress rose to speak on their behalf, including Chicago’s Harold Washington.¹⁴

In April, Roberta Lynch resigned to pursue a full-time job. CCRC continued to meet for the rest of 1981, but without even a part-time paid staffer, little meaningful outreach activity was taking place. In stark contrast, Mary and Greg’s UNO of Southeast Chicago was receiving funding commitments from multiple sources ranging from the United Way of Metro Chicago and the Chicago Community Trust to the Wieboldt Foundation and the Roman Catholic Church’s national Campaign for Human Development (CHD), a then relatively low-profile program with a social-action support mission very similar to Tom Joyce’s much smaller Claretian program. Mary also contacted Jean Rudd at the Woods Fund, and by the end of 1981 UNO had scheduled a large ceremony for May 8 to publicly launch the organization. Similarly, Frank Lumpkin and his Save Our Jobs Committee, with UNO acting as their fiscal agent, successfully approached small foundations such as the Crossroads Fund for modest support to ensure SOJC’s future. More significantly, thanks to progressive attorney and legendary former Chicago alderman Leon Despres, Frank secured the pro bono services of a savvy young attorney, Tom Geoghegan, so that from mid-1981 onward, SOJC would be an increasingly active participant in the legal arm-wrestling about liability for Wisconsin Steel’s demise.¹⁵

Most important, by early 1982 Greg Galluzzo had added to UNO’s staff a thirty-one-year-old organizer who quickly found his way to Calumet City to introduce himself to Leo Mahon. Jerry Kellman had grown up in the New York City suburb of New Rochelle, drifted through two years of college, first in Madison, Wisconsin, and then Portland, Oregon, and by 1971 was undergoing Alinsky-style training by the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) staff, the truest—and most aggressive—disciples of the late community organizing guru. That training led to organizing assignments in Chicago, suburban DuPage County, Philadelphia, and Lincoln, Nebraska, where he put together a citizens coalition made up primarily of one congregation’s parishioners. By 1979, Kellman was back in Chicago and in graduate school, first at Northwestern and then at the University of Chicago. Galluzzo knew immediately that he wanted to add Kellman’s faith-based organizing expertise to UNO’s expanding work on the Southeast Side.

In February 1982, Leo told Tom Joyce, Dick Poethig, and his other colleagues about Kellman, and they agreed to invite him to CCRC’s next meeting. The organization’s bank account balance totaled $473, but UNO and the Latino Institute had Kellman’s salary covered and within four weeks Jerry, Mary, and Greg sent Leo a detailed three-page memo titled “Our Suggestions for a Church-Based Organization in the Calumet Region.” “We agree with you that the Calumet Region needs organizing if it is to avoid becoming an economic wasteland,” they wrote, but there were two essential challenges: first, “how to organize enough strength to change the situation, rather than set people up for still another defeat,” and second, “how to sustain the organizing over an extended period of time by developing the parish as a community through the organizing process.”

The trio wanted to expand UNO’s Catholic-parish-based organizing from Chicago’s Hispanic neighborhoods southward into parishes in majority-white suburban towns like Calumet City, with Kellman doing that outreach. Once a core group of at least ten parishes was organized, the effort could expand to Protestant churches. Funding for the expansion could be sought from CHD and foundations like Woods and Wieboldt, so that by 1984–85 Kellman could add staff to do “leadership development within each parish and congregation.” Then those parishes could “come together for common programs which affect the entire region. The issues start small, but grow progressively larger as the organization grows stronger and as the leaders become increasingly sophisticated.” Leadership training would be ongoing, and “the professional staff is there to share what they know, not to make the leadership dependent on them.”¹⁶

Leo took their proposal to his CCRC colleagues, telling them, “I feel that this is the kind of direction our organization must take.” He half-humorously told his own parishioners that “the talk around Calumet City … is that the parish of St. Victor’s is openly going ‘Communist.’ ” Frank Lumpkin, the actual Communist, was continuing his work for SOJC, and the Tribune’s Richard Longworth published a moving profile of Frank and his colleagues, in which Frank estimated that five hundred former Wisconsin workers had left town, fifteen hundred were still unemployed, and twelve hundred or so, including his friend Daniel “Muscles” Vitas, had found some type of new job, Vitas as a school crossing guard.

UNO’s May 8 founding convention was “a sight of such inspiration that few will forget it,” observed Father Tom Cima, UNO’s new board chairman and pastor of Our Lady Gate of Heaven Parish in Jeffery Manor—a primarily black middle-class neighborhood located between South Chicago and South Deering. UNO and SOJC collaborated in a downtown protest at which marchers chanted “We want jobs,” and progressive Catholic clergy throughout Chicagoland—as most residents called the metropolitan area—were overjoyed when on July 10 Joseph Bernardin, the liberal archbishop of Cincinnati, was named archbishop of Chicago, succeeding the widely reviled John Patrick Cody, who had died on April 25.¹⁷

Of seemingly lesser consequence, in the summer of 1982 Mary and Greg’s corps of southeastern Chicago organizers received a new recruit. The twenty-two-year-old Bob Moriarty had grown up in an Irish working-class Chicago suburb, and during his junior year at Northwestern University in Evanston, the town just north of Chicago, he had taken a community organizing seminar taught by a professor named John McKnight. A fifty-year-old Ohio native and navy veteran, McKnight had worked for the Chicago Commission on Human Relations, directed the Illinois chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and headed up the Midwest office of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. In the latter role, McKnight had been in the room when Martin Luther King Jr. negotiated a much-criticized end to his 1966 civil rights protests that had roiled Chicago, and from that post, McKnight had moved to Northwestern.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, McKnight wrote a series of influential articles on how service economies reduce citizens to consumers and clients. Writing first in the Christian Century in 1975, McKnight explained that each time a social problem, or need, is identified, “citizens have an increased sense of deficiency and dependence.” Two years later, McKnight expanded on that analysis and argued that service economies “are peopled with service producers and service consumers—professionals and clients.” The former controlled the relationship, and “the client is less a person in need than a person who is needed” in order to justify the salary or income of the provider. As “the interpretation of the need necessarily becomes individualized,” it disables “the capacities of citizens to perceive and deal with issues in political terms.”

By 1979, McKnight had honed his analysis further. “A service economy needs ‘deficiency,’ ‘human problems,’ and ‘needs’ if it is to grow…. This economic need for need creates a demand for redefining conditions as deficiencies” and “the power to label people deficient and declare them in need is the basic tool of control and oppression.” As government social welfare bureaucracies expand, “the professional servicers now receive more money for their help than the recipients receive in cash grants.” Quite possibly, McKnight contended, “there are more people in Chicago who derive an income from serving the poor than there are poor people…. The welfare recipient is the raw material for the case workers, administrators, doctors, lawyers, mental health workers, drug counselors, youth workers, and police officers. Do the servicers need the recipient more than she needs them? … Who really needs whom?” McKnight believed that professionals willing to cast aside their own self-interest must commit themselves “to reallocation of power to the people we serve so that we no longer will need to serve.”¹⁸

John McKnight was unquestionably the most influential social analyst in 1980s Chicago, and he brought Bob Moriarty to organizing. But Greg Galluzzo thought the twenty-two-year-old Moriarty was too young for the congregation-based organizing that UNO was moving toward under Jerry Kellman’s tutelage, so by September 1982 Moriarty was going door to door in South Deering, just like Mary Gonzales had in South Chicago two years earlier. Moriarty’s job was to warn residents that Waste Management Incorporated (WMI), a huge garbage conglomerate that already operated a four-hundred-acre landfill farther south, below 130th Street, had just applied for a city permit to open a new landfill on the 289-acre “Big Marsh,” located just south of 110th Street and west of Torrence, only a few blocks from residents’ homes and the Bright Elementary School on South Calhoun Avenue.

One day Bob knocked on the door of a home on 108th Street, hardly four blocks from the now-shuttered gates of the Wisconsin Steel plant. Moriarty introduced himself to a woman named Petra Rodriguez, who was interested in his information, but Rodriguez also had a hugely consequential recommendation for him: “You should meet my daughter.” And so Bob walked around the corner to her home at 10814 South Hoxie Avenue and brought to Chicago organizing the most important recruit of the decade. The next eight years of Chicago politics would be different because he did so.

Mary Ellen Rodriguez Montes was a twenty-four-year-old stay-at-home mother of three young children. In Spanish, her name was Maria Elena, but to her family, and to the young organizers she would work with, she was simply Lena. “She was very smart, very beautiful, very tough,” Bob remembered, and a “quite extraordinary person,” another organizer explained. A priest who knew Lena well recalled her as “a real dynamo. She was also very attractive: great charisma and personality and very engaging.”

Lena easily recalled Bob’s first visit: “I remember him coming to the door.” She knew about the Love Canal environmental disaster near Niagara Falls, New York, and Chicago newspapers were reporting that a company called SCA Chemical Services had asked the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) for permission to move toxic chemical waste from downstate Illinois to an incinerator located at 11700 South Stony Island Avenue, just southwest of where WMI wanted to locate its landfill. Lena and her husband Ray agreed to host the first meeting of Bob’s recruits in their second-floor living room. Another young stay-at-home mom who attended was Alma Avalos. One year younger than Lena, she had grown up on Petra Rodriguez’s block and now had two young children. Bob, Lena, and Alma then spent the next several weeks recruiting other South Deering residents to protest against the two facilities.

Before the end of October they were ready to act. They wanted a public meeting, in South Deering, with IEPA director Richard Carlson, but they got no response. Then Moriarty, along with another organizer, Phil Mullins, who had come to UNO from Pilsen, suggested taking a busload of residents, along with their children, to Governor James R. Thompson’s office in downtown Chicago. Arming the children with sticky caramel apples, the group made its way to the governor’s suite via an unsecured back stairway. With Lena and Alma in the lead, the group said they weren’t leaving until they spoke to Carlson. Unhappy staffers got Carlson on the phone, and he promised a meeting, but by the upcoming Election Day, November 2, one still had not been scheduled. Jerry Kellman happened to know where the governor voted, so another bus trip was scheduled for what turned out to be a chilly, rainy day. After a wait of several hours, Thompson’s limousine finally appeared, and the group dashed toward him brandishing picket signs. With plenty of journalists looking on, a public meeting was quickly promised.

Four weeks later, on the evening of December 6, Carlson traveled to the Trumbull Park Fieldhouse, on South Deering’s northwestern flank, to speak to a crowd of more than two hundred residents. Moriarty and his recruits had prepared carefully for the session. They were concerned, however, by the presence of Foster Milhouse, a well-known precinct captain in Alderman Vrdolyak’s 10th Ward political organization and a leader of the old-line South Deering Improvement Association (SDIA), a group that traced its roots back to an infamous August 1953 race riot. When the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) accidentally assigned one black family to the housing project that adjoined Trumbull Park, SDIA’s membership responded with violence. After more African American families moved in during the next four years, even greater violence erupted in July 1957. When Milhouse began heckling at the outset of the December 6 meeting, Moriarty’s recruits responded quickly. “We call him Judas,” Moriarty remembered, and “they just jeer him out of the hall … ‘Judas, Judas, Judas.’ ” Once Milhouse was dispensed with, Carlson quickly agreed to the residents’ requests, but it was Lena who emerged as the star of the evening. “I somehow kind of like blossomed in this room,” she remembered. “I actually enjoyed it,” and indeed “felt called to it.” Also present was her husband Ray, who “really had an interest in being a lead person” and who “seemed a little bit upset about it,” Lena explained, when his wife emerged as the residents’ lead spokesperson. Ray “was a decent guy, but really insecure,” Bob recalled, and Alma described it similarly: “jealousy.”¹⁹

Carlson’s appearance put their group on the map, and by the end of the year, they had chosen a name to distinguish themselves from the larger UNO: Irondalers Against the Chemical Threat, or IACT. In February 1983, a wary Alderman Vrdolyak met with them about WMI’s proposed landfill. Lena recalled that he “met with us on the site of Waste Management’s proposed dump and from where we stood, we could see our homes. He said, ‘Gee, I didn’t realize that it was this close to the houses.’ I said, ‘Does this mean you’re going to oppose it?’ And he said, ‘Oh no, I’ll reconsider and get back to you.’ Well, he never did get back to us.”

In the meantime, when incumbent mayor Jane Byrne, whom Vrdolyak energetically backed, finished second in the Democratic mayoral primary on February 22, Vrdolyak’s political fortunes took a turn for the worse. Byrne got 33 percent, and Cook County State’s Attorney Richard M. Daley—a son of the late Richard J. Daley, Chicago’s powerful mayor from 1955 until his death in late 1976—placed third with 30 percent. The upset winner was African American congressman Harold Washington, who rode a tidal wave of enthusiasm among black voters to a 36 percent plurality. Washington still had to win the general election against Republican former state legislator Bernard Epton, and the racial symbolism of Chicago electing its first black mayor—or white voters uniting to stop it—cast the contest in starkly racial terms.

Washington visited the IACT activists at Bright School on March 29, and on April 12, he narrowly edged Epton, winning 51.7 percent against the Republican’s 48 percent. Analysts concluded that only 12.3 percent of the city’s white voters, primarily from the generally liberal lakefront wards, voted for Washington. Seventeen days later, on April 29, 1983, Chicago’s first black mayor took office.²⁰

Throughout the latter part of 1982 and the first five months of 1983, the outlook for Southeast Side steelworkers grew worse and worse. There was even more concern when word got out that PSW president Tony Roque had signed an agreement with Chase Manhattan in August 1980 that allowed the workers to recoup their bounced checks, but that also potentially released International Harvester from most if not all of its pension obligations to Wisconsin’s former workers. Roque had not understood the legal implications of what he had signed. Some families were becoming so desperate that SOJC had initiated free food distribution twice each month and received additional funding support via UNO.

For decades, U.S. Steel’s South Works, located well north of 95th Street, had been the unchallenged behemoth of the Calumet region’s steel mills. Its 1973 workforce of ninety-nine hundred had shrunk to seventy-four hundred in 1979, fifty-two hundred in early 1981, and then forty-eight hundred in the spring of 1982, but in September 1982, U.S. Steel chairman David M. Roderick announced that the company would build a new rail mill at South Works thanks to concessions from both USW Local 65 and the state of Illinois. The new facility would add up to one thousand jobs, and completion was targeted for late 1983. “If we were going to be shutting down South Works, we wouldn’t be building the rail mill here,” Roderick assured Chicago journalists and state officials. Six months later the USW accepted an openly concessionary contract, hoping that laid-off workers would be brought back. Then, in May 1983, Roderick reversed himself and told U.S. Steel’s annual meeting that South Works might indeed be closed due to the impact of environmental regulations on such an aged plant. The same week that Roderick spoke, a comprehensive survey of Southeast Side neighborhoods showed “a job loss rate of 56 percent since 1980” and “an unemployment rate of 35 percent.”²¹

In late May, more than 150 IACTers and other antidumping protesters descended upon WMI’s annual meeting in tony suburban Oak Brook. The protest drew significant press attention, and next the IACTers—who had revised their name to Irondalers to Abolish the Chemical Threat, rather than just “Against”—blockaded the entrance to WMI’s large Calumet Industrial District (CID) landfill south of 130th Street, creating a backlog of scores of garbage trucks. Chicago police, unsure whether the remote location was in Chicago or instead in Calumet City, made no arrests. In the meantime, Mary Ellen Montes, who was seeking an appointment with the city’s new mayor, met with his sewer commissioner on June 10, and six days later the IACTers again blocked the CID entrance. This time Chicago police had a map, and seventeen of the sixty protesters were arrested, including Lena. Her mother Petra spoke to reporters, and Moriarty and others went door to door in South Deering to raise bail money.

Everyone was released in time for a 10:00 A.M. meeting the next day with new mayor Harold Washington. At least one woman showed Washington the visible bruises she had from her arrest, and the mayor agreed to speak at an IACT meeting in South Deering. By midsummer, IACT had access to a crucial meeting place which previously had been denied it: St. Kevin Roman Catholic Church, on the east side of South Torrence, just north of the rusting Wisconsin Steel plant and by far the neighborhood’s largest church. Up until early 1983, St. Kevin’s pastor had been Father Bernard “Benny” Scheid, a notoriously hateful and sometimes drunken political ally of Alderman Vrdolyak. Two years earlier, when the Chicago Sun-Times had publicly exposed the extent of then-Cardinal Cody’s financial misdeeds, Scheid wrote a letter to the paper’s editor warning him to “get your affairs in order. We pray for your sudden and unprovided death every day.”

Fortunately for IACT and South Deering, Scheid’s successor was Father George Schopp, who for several years had worked with Greg Galluzzo and UNO as pastor of St. Francis de Sales Parish on the East Side. Schopp was inheriting a parish that included not only Lena and Alma, but, far more menacingly, Scheid’s buddies and Vrdolyak precinct captains like Foster Milhouse (“we used to call him Fester Outhouse,” Schopp recounted) who were “kind of a goon squad.” But Schopp was already familiar with Vrdolyak’s iron grip control of Southeast Side politics, and his arrival at St. Kevin dramatically altered the parish’s political role, as all of Chicago would soon see.

In late August, Harold Washington announced that he was blocking WMI’s attempt to open a landfill in Big Marsh as well as a proposed expansion of the nearby existing Paxton Landfill on East 120th Street. Then, on Wednesday evening, August 24, Washington came to South Deering to speak to an IACT-organized crowd of some six hundred people packed into St. Kevin’s large basement hall. As the Tribune’s headline the next morning put it, “Washington Invades Ald. Vrdolyak’s 10th Ward Turf.”

Both George Schopp and Dennis Geaney, Leo’s associate pastor from St. Victor, were worried about what Benny Scheid and Vrdolyak’s lackeys might try to do, so Schopp asked a number of supportive priests to stay close to Scheid. As reporters scanned the crowd and a television crew set up their camera, Scheid “assured me that he would work over the crowd by telling them that Washington was an ex-convict and still a big crook,” Geaney recalled a few weeks later. Once Washington arrived and the meeting got under way, Geaney happened to sit beside Petra Rodriguez, “who told me that the chairperson was her daughter, Mary Ellen Montes. This tiny woman steered the tight ship of 600 people like a seasoned sea captain. Benny and the 10th Ward Regulars never got an opening.” Scheid “got up and started blustering, trying to berate Mary Ellen,” Schopp recalled, but Lena was unbowed and the hecklers were silenced.

Washington was a powerful and emphatic speaker, and he took control of the crowd. “There is an over-concentration of waste facilities in this community” and the multiple dumps posed a significant danger. “I am appalled things have gone this far.” Washington singled out WMI by name: “I believe this company has a horrible record of violating the public trust and endangering the public health,” he said. “We’ll do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of this. We’re investigating this now. Apparently Waste Management has quite a bit of influence over certain key people,” an obvious allusion to Vrdolyak, who had received at least $18,500 in political contributions from WMI.

As Washington concluded, the crowd rose to give him a standing ovation, but Lena, standing beside him, immediately intervened: “The meeting’s not over yet, Mr. Mayor. We’re not finished.” She then sternly insisted that Washington give a yes or no answer to each of five specific IACT demands for city action, and as she recited them, Washington smilingly said “yes” each time. After her fifth one—“Are you committed to stopping Waste Management?” to which Washington responded, “Yes, I am”—Lena reached up, “threw her arms around him and kissed him” on the cheek, as 10:00 P.M. news viewers all across Chicagoland soon witnessed. Washington looked smitten. “Now I know why she is your leader. She’s quite a politician,” he told the crowd. To Lena herself, the mayor was even more complimentary: “Boy, you’re a tough woman. I don’t want to mess with you. I’ll do anything you want me to do,” and Washington gave her his private home phone number.

Observers were blown away by Lena’s aplomb. “It was an impressive performance by Mary Ellen,” environmental expert Bob Ginsburg remembered. “She held him there until he agreed” and “it made UNO a citywide player” operating from the veritable backyard of a powerful city council figure who had already become Washington’s greatest political nemesis. “It was a big deal.” Dennis Geaney felt likewise: Lena “was too astute to let him use his charisma as a substitute for hard answers.” Phil Mullins, who had just succeeded Bob Moriarty as UNO’s IACT organizer, was astonished. “It was an awesome meeting…. It was amazing. It just changed everything.”²²

George Schopp felt the backlash, “big time…. It sent Vrdolyak off the wall.” Former alderman and Vrdolyak ally John Buchanan told the priest, “You’re part of a Communist conspiracy.” Different repercussions came from beyond the neighborhood. The CID landfill below 130th Street received almost two-thirds of Chicago’s garbage. It and the older Paxton Landfill at 122nd Street were essential sites; after all, the city’s waste had to go somewhere. The chairman of the Zoning Board of Appeals saw the Southeast Side locations as simple common sense: “from a land use point of view, that is an area that has become dedicated to this type of business.” The other most relevant city official viewed WMI in economic development terms: “Their proposal is no different from a steel mill starting to expand. I’m looking at it as an industry expanding, and we need jobs.” The Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry agreed, which led to a Tribune headline saying “Dumping Ban Called Threat to Business.” Unlike with landfills, the city had no regulatory authority over the SCA incinerator at 117th Street, and in early October the Reagan administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) gave what the Tribune called “the largest commercial toxic waste incinerator in the United States” a permit to burn PCBs inside Chicago’s city limits. The chemical waste company confidently declared: “This is a state-of-the-art incinerator. It will not pose a health threat to residents.”²³

But the most pressing threat to the Southeast Side’s well-being was the ongoing uncertainty of what U.S. Steel would do with South Works, where the active workforce was down to twelve hundred. Although the ongoing shrinkage of South Works’ employee roster was not as sudden or dramatic as the Wisconsin catastrophe, the cumulative job loss over time was almost three times greater, and it was the result of industry-wide trends, not a series of missteps. Between the late 1970s and the mid-1980s, the domestic U.S. steel market shrank dramatically, especially because of greatly reduced demand from the U.S. auto industry and a more than 50 percent growth in the import of steel from abroad.

Throughout the fall of 1983 and into early 1984, U.S. Steel’s leadership continued to threaten a possible shutdown of South Works unless environmental protections were seriously loosened and the United Steelworkers union surrendered even more far-reaching contract concessions. Two days after Christmas, U.S. Steel announced that it would shrink the plant to just its beam mill and one electric furnace, reducing the workforce to just eight hundred. Members of Congess were joined by Archbishop—and now Cardinal—Joseph Bernardin in denouncing U.S. Steel’s behavior, and Tribune business editor Richard Longworth wrote an angry column, declaring that U.S. Steel’s behavior “violated every standard of decency and broke every obligation to the workers and the community that made it rich.” The company had betrayed “every principle of economic fair play established over the last fifty years” and new federal legislation might be necessary “to protect the country from companies like U.S. Steel.” Indeed, “U.S. Steel is operating so far outside the rules of normal free enterprise that it is challenging the entire American industrial system.” Among those responding to the essay was St. Victor’s Father Dennis Geaney, who commended Longworth and rued the damage done to “people who are being treated like obsolete machinery.”²⁴

While IACT and the Southeast Side steel crisis were making news throughout the summer and fall of 1983, Jerry Kellman reactivated CCRC in tandem with the Catholic parishes that stretched across Cook County’s suburban townships, the area that comprised the archdiocese’s Vicariate XII. Mary Gonzales and Greg Galluzzo also were expanding UNO’s organizational reach into three more predominantly Hispanic Chicago neighborhoods: Back of the Yards, Little Village, and Pilsen, where Danny Solis was transforming the Pilsen Neighbors Community Council into a UNO affiliate. Before the end of the year Mary and Greg also added to UNO’s staff Peter Martinez, a veteran IAF organizer. Martinez had known and clashed with Kellman a decade earlier, and his arrival not only increased tensions between Jerry and Greg, but it spurred Kellman’s gradual shift from UNO to Leo Mahon’s CCRC. Jerry sought support for CCRC from the archdiocese’s CHD, the Woods Fund, and Tom Joyce’s Claretian Social Development Fund, emphasizing that his congregational organizing would lead parishioners toward “understanding social action as part of a faith commitment.”

By midsummer, Kellman had visited pastors across the vicariate and had won the support of urban vicar Father Ray Nugent. Combining the vicariate’s numerical designation with the Book of Ecclesiastes’ (3:1–2) well-known invocation of “time,” Kellman and the pastors came up with “Time for XII” as the name for a program which would work hand in glove with CCRC to train lay leaders in each parish to listen to fellow parishioners’ thoughts about the region’s economic crisis.

Cardinal Bernardin gave Time for XII his enthusiastic support, and on August 29 he endorsed it at a meeting of three hundred parish leaders from across the vicariate. Kellman and Leo Mahon believed it would take until October 1984 to raise the necessary funds—in part through contributions from each church—to hire staff and begin work at the more than twenty parishes that said they would sign on. In the interim Kellman would kick off “pilot projects” at St. Victor and at Father Paul Burke’s Holy Ghost Parish in neighboring South Holland.

At St. Victor Parish, Leo’s—and soon Jerry’s—right-hand layman was the energetic Fred Simari. Under the tutelage of Leo’s first young associate pastor at St. Victor, Bill Stenzel, Fred had proceeded through the archdiocese’s three-year deaconate school. At almost forty years old, Fred was six years older than Kellman, who quickly impressed him as an “incredibly hard worker” who “was great at what he did.” Also involved at St. Victor were two other key parishioners, Gloria Boyda and Jan Poledziewski. Within St. Victor, “lots of laypeople got involved,” Jan recalled, another of whom was Christine Gervais. “We just went into different homes and spoke to the people and then kind of brought back all of our information,” Gervais remembered. We “just sat and talked,” especially about what families needed. People just “refused to believe that the steel industry was going down,” because for many families, the plants were the only jobs that three successive generations of breadwinners had known.

By the beginning of 1984, Kellman was expanding beyond St. Victor and Holy Ghost, and at Annunciata Parish on the East Side Kellman used a small retreat as an opportunity to explain Time for XII. Soon thereafter Jerry spoke with one young man from the parish, Ken Jania, about joining him to do further outreach. Jania, newly married and running a small, failing East Side restaurant, jumped at the chance, and by May 1984, Ken was CCRC’s second paid staff member.

“My job was to connect with the parishioners,” Jania recalled, “to make a presentation in front of church” and “organize and start the interview process with parishioners.” On the East Side, in predominantly Polish Hegewisch, Chicago’s southeasternmost neighborhood, in Calumet City and other southern suburbs, there were “hundreds of interviews that we documented.” The job was harder than it sounded, for “it was very difficult for me to come from that neighborhood and to go and do those interviews, because in many cases I knew the people” going back to high school. “It was very difficult with these families” since “they’d lost everything” when a father’s steel plant job disappeared. “He’s got nothing,” since “their skills didn’t translate to anything,” and that meant “absolute desperation,” with prolonged unemployment signaling how “the traditional blue collar nuclear family’s exploded.”

As IACT’s Alma Avalos explained, “I don’t think the reality really sunk in until after a couple of years passed.” As Christine Walley, the most poignant chronicler of the Southeast Side’s disintegration, later wrote, “it sometimes felt as if our entire world was collapsing.” Permanent closure of the mills, whether Wisconsin or especially South Works, “was simply unfathomable,” and for many men “the stigma of being out of work was deeply traumatic.” In her household, following the Wisconsin shutdown, “my dad became increasingly depressed, eventually refusing to leave the house…. He would never hold a permanent job again.” The Southeast Side’s economic demise also “caused untold social devastation” among neighbors as another former Wisconsin worker attempted suicide and a third drank himself to death. Her father lived on, wallowing in “the deep-seated bitterness of a man who felt that life had passed him by.” All across the Calumet region, it slowly dawned on people that a “world we thought would never change” had suddenly proven “far more ephemeral” than anyone had imagined possible.

Jerry Kellman’s reenlivened CCRC had an expanded geographic reach thanks to Vicariate XII’s archdiocesan links with neighboring Vicariate X, which encompassed all of the Chicago neighborhoods that comprised Greater Roseland. Far more crucial, however, in early 1983 Leo Mahon’s protégé and former associate pastor, Bill Stenzel, was assigned to the small, struggling Holy Rosary Church at the southwest corner of 113th Street and King Drive. Stenzel had spent some previous months with Father Tom “Rock” Kaminski at neighboring St. Helena of the Cross Parish on S. Parnell Avenue at 101st Street. One of Stenzel’s tasks was to merge an even weaker nearby parish, St. Salomea, a historically Polish church, into Holy Rosary, which had been traditionally Irish. Holy Rosary had some deeply committed parishioners, like Ralph Viall, a white man in his fifties, and Betty Garrett, an African American woman who had moved to Roseland in 1971, but the merger faced no opposition because there was hardly anyone either Irish or Polish or—excepting Ralph Viall and his friend Ken—indeed white left in Roseland.²⁵

If any one neighborhood in America epitomized the experience of “white flight” in its most traumatic form, Roseland was it. The name went back to the earliest white settlers, Dutch immigrants who first arrived in 1849 to build homes and farms in the area around what would become 103rd to 111th Streets at South Michigan Avenue—the same street that fifteen miles northward becomes Chicago’s “Magnificent Mile” shopping district. In 1852 the Illinois Central and Michigan Central Railroads interconnected just a little to the southeast, and the settlement that grew up there would be called Kensington. Over the next quarter century Chicago’s role as major rail hub grew dramatically, and in 1880 the already-famous sleeping car magnate George Pullman chose an area just to the northeast—between what later would be 103rd and 115th Streets—to build a new manufacturing plant as well as a company town he would name after himself. By the turn of the century, Pullman’s burgeoning plant employed many workers who lived in Roseland and Kensington, and in the coming decades and the World War II era, thousands of men—white men—who found well-paying jobs in the steel plants east of there, across the large geographic divide of Lake Calumet and its attendant marshes, made their homes in Roseland or the adjoining neighborhoods of West Pullman and Washington Heights, both of which, like Kensington, were often lumped into Greater Roseland.

Black people were almost nonexistent in those neighborhoods. To the north, between 91st and 97th Streets astride State Street, a small black community called Lilydale grew up in the years after 1912, and by 1937, its residents successfully protested for the construction of a neighborhood public school. At the time of the 1930 census, Kensington had 170 black residents. In 1933, when an African American woman purchased a duplex some fifteen blocks southwestward, near 120th Street and Stewart Avenue, white neighbors bombed the property. A decade later, when white real estate developer Donald O’Toole announced the construction of Princeton Park, a new neighborhood of primarily single-family homes for African Americans just west of Lilydale, eleven thousand whites petitioned unsuccessfully to block the development. The end of World War II created a serious housing shortage, and when the CHA moved the families of several black war veterans into a reconstructed barracks project on the east side of Halsted Street at 105th Street, it took more than a thousand law enforcement officers to finally end three nights of violent white protest riots.

Following World War II, Greater Roseland’s racial composition changed gradually, and then incredibly abruptly. Blacks were 18 percent of the population in 1950, but the proportion increased to 23 percent in 1960, to 55 percent in 1970, and then to 97 percent by 1980. But those statistics, while dramatic, nonetheless fail to convey how stark the transformation was. In 1960, West Pullman was 100 percent white; by 1980, it was 90 percent black. Washington Heights, 12 percent black in 1960, was 75 percent so by 1970, and 98 percent by 1980. In central Roseland, the dominant church presence, reaching all the way back to the original settlers, was the four congregations of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) and four more of the Reformed Church of America (RCA). One of the CRC churches considered reaching out to new African American residents in early 1964, but then dropped the idea in July 1968, concluding that the neighborhood was in “rapid decline” by the spring of 1969. As in other neighborhoods all across Chicago’s vast South Side, the onset of the real cataclysm could be dated quite precisely: April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. “From that day on, everything changed,” one resident told Louis Rosen, who wrote a powerful memoir of the transformation before becoming a successful musician. “It was rapid. It was awful,” one white person recalled. “It was an exodus.”

That is what happened in Roseland. In hardly twelve months in 1971–72, all four self-governing CRC churches abandoned the neighborhood and moved to the white suburbs. Of the RCA churches, one decamped in 1971, a second in 1974, and a third in 1977; the last survivor held out well into the 1980s. Of all the statistics measuring white flight, one may capture the price that the neighborhoods—and the new residents—paid more powerfully than any other: in 1960, fifty-eight M.D.s practiced in Roseland. Twenty years later, in 1980, after a population increase of five thousand residents, there were only eleven.

While virtually all whites fled, one Christian Reformed couple in their late thirties walked against the tide. Rev. Tony Van Zanten had finished seminary in the early 1960s, spent some time in Harlem and then over a decade in Paterson, New Jersey, another city experiencing serious decline. In August 1976 Tony and his wife Donna relocated to Chicago and opened Roseland Christian Ministries Center in the heart of South Michigan Avenue’s once-vibrant business district. They fully realized how “the racial change in Roseland was a very radical and very swift one,” maybe more stark than in any other place. “There were no social services at all,” Donna remembered. “There was nothing there for the new people.”²⁶

Standing against the tide were the Roman Catholic parishes that for decades had stood within fifteen blocks or so of each other all across Greater Roseland. Several closings and mergers had taken place in the previous decade as the area’s Catholic population shrank due to the racial turnover, but new African American members energized some parishes. Father Paul Burak was newly ordained when he arrived at St. Catherine of Genoa in West Pullman in 1972, when white flight was near its peak and the population, for the moment, was roughly 50 percent black and 50 percent white. St. Catherine’s retired pastor, Father Frank Murphy, had been a forceful proponent of racial equality, but that hadn’t stemmed the flight. “I experienced a lot of struggle and confusion about the parish” through the early and mid-1970s, Burak recounted. “Every weekend I would meet someone saying ‘Father, this is our last weekend here.’ ” Burak left St. Catherine in 1978, only to return in 1981, and by then few white parishioners remained. Tom Kaminski arrived at St. Helena in 1977, and only a few elderly white people were still in the congregation.

At first glance, the massive white depopulation of these neighborhoods promised a wonderful opportunity—thousands of newly available, often well-constructed brick bungalow-style homes—for African American Chicagoans whose families had for decades been trapped within the clear racial boundaries of Chicago’s South and West Side neighborhoods. But the reality of Roseland’s racial transformation again made black families highly vulnerable to exploitative white real estate “professionals,” this time due almost entirely to federal government policy choices. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), by 1968 part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), was indisputably the villain, but until the mid-1970s, almost no one fully fathomed—or sought to expose—the consequences of government policy-making gone awry.

At first only one little-known housing policy expert, Calvin Bradford, was determined to unmask a widely ignored evil. The term “redlining” was well known, if not well understood, but in newly African American neighborhoods like Roseland, it was not lenders’ refusal to make conventional home mortgage loans available to black home buyers that wreaked widespread damage, but how the FHA, starting in August 1968, made government-insured loans available to such purchasers—often through exploitative mortgage bankers, and even for properties of dubious quality—that ended up decimating newly black neighborhoods in which such insured loans were concentrated.

Bradford and a coauthor figured out that while seeking to “encourage inner-city lending,” the FHA caused local mortgage bankers to simply maximize the number of black purchasers they could entice to buy homes. As a result, thousands of black families were issued mortgages that they were not qualified to successfully carry—especially in an urban economy where blue-collar jobs like those at the Southeast Side’s steel mills were vanishing by the thousands year after year. The result was “massive numbers of foreclosed and abandoned properties,” with the FHA insurance actively encouraging fast-buck lenders to foreclose as quickly as possible on as many properties as they could.

As Bradford explained in a subsequent essay, the federally insured loans provided “the certainty that FHA will take the property from the lender after foreclosure and pay the claim,” and that led to lax underwriting and the profligate issuance of loans because “neither the mortgage companies that originated them nor the investor that purchased them—basically FNMA [popularly known as Fannie Mae, the Federal National Mortgage Association] cared about the soundness of the loans.” Indeed, as Bradford later observed, “the financial incentives were so great that scores of real estate agents, lenders, and even FHA officials engaged in fraud in order to make sales to unqualified and unsuspecting minority homebuyers.” The end result, as dramatically witnessed in Roseland, was “the government taking all of the losses and the communities suffering all the devastation” of foreclosed and abandoned homes.²⁷

The impact of such policies and such behavior could be seen all across Roseland, both in “board-ups”—homes with plywood covering their windows—and in the rapid decline of the South Michigan Avenue shopping district. One group, the Greater Roseland Organization (GRO), founded in 1969, tried to ease the racial transition. The GRO was comprised of smaller, neighborhood-specific groups such as the Pullman Civic Organization and the Roseland Heights Community Association, and it included both older white residents, like Holy Rosary’s Ralph Viall, and newly arrived African Americans, like Mary Bates and Lenora Rodgers. With funding support from both CHD and the Chicago Community Trust, GRO emerged in the early 1980s as the only audible voice speaking for the neighborhood.

The summer of 1980 saw the first stirrings of gang influence in Roseland, and in September the long-famous Gatelys Peoples Store, the largest business on South Michigan Avenue, closed. A citywide study of different neighborhoods’ needs described Gatelys’ closure as “psychologically … probably the most serious blow imaginable” to Roseland’s economic well-being. Then early in 1981, in three separate incidents, three teenage students at Fenger High School were shot and killed. By this time, close to five hundred properties in Roseland and West Pullman were in foreclosure, and more than sixteen thousand people, one-quarter of Roseland’s population, were receiving public aid. A study of recent job losses in the area highlighted Wisconsin’s closing and stated, “Many of these workers were Roseland residents.” Their prospects for new steel plant jobs were nonexistent, the report underscored: “People in these types of jobs are not merely out of work, they are out of careers.”

A parallel study, focusing on men who had lost their jobs at U.S. Steel’s South Works, found that 47 percent had not found new employment, but that summary statistic concealed a significant racial disparity: 67 percent of black workers were still unemployed, as compared to only 32 percent of whites. “Once laid off from their mill jobs,” the study noted, “blacks in particular remain the least likely to find new jobs.”

In early 1983, Lenora Rodgers mounted a renewed push to win foundation funding for GRO. She told one foundation that “community organizing and an issue-based community organization is the key to neighborhood preservation.” She said GRO’s greatest need was to hire organizers, since “organizers help to identify new and potential leaders” who could mobilize Roseland against the dangers engulfing it. But Rodgers’s efforts were unsuccessful, and by April 1984 GRO was no longer responding to letters from potential funders.²⁸

As Jerry Kellman extended CCRC’s presence into Roseland early in 1984, he accepted office space at Bill Stenzel’s Holy Rosary Parish in lieu of dues. IACT and UNO continued their antidumping protests, with Lena’s name appearing in Chicago newspapers almost weekly. On January 30, 1984, a city council committee, spurred by Alderman Vrdolyak’s desire to at least appear to be against dumping, approved a one-year moratorium on new landfills within the city. In mid-February Lena joined U.S. Representative Paul Simon, a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate seat held by Republican Chuck Percy, as he toured South Deering and its neighboring waste sites. Two days later, when the full city council approved the one-year moratorium, Vrdolyak amended the measure to exempt liquid waste handlers and transfer stations, leading Mayor Washington’s backers to oppose the diluted ban.²⁹

March 1984 was the fourth anniversary of Wisconsin Steel’s shutdown. Mayor Washington spoke at an SOJC anniversary rally, and on March 28, Frank Lumpkin and others picketed International Harvester’s downtown headquarters. Frank told one reporter he believed four hundred of the three thousand ex-Wisconsin steelworkers had died in the last four years. Later he told a U.S. congressional subcommittee that nowadays in South Chicago “the only ambition a kid can have is to steal hubcaps. There is nothing else there. There’s no jobs.” The Daily Calumet reported on the closings of more and more retail businesses; a UNO meeting on jobs drew more than five hundred neighborhood residents plus Mayor Washington’s top three development and employment aides.³⁰

By August 1984, Jerry Kellman was ready to publicly launch the reborn CCRC. Thanks to Leo Mahon’s core parishioners from St. Victor—Fred Simari, Jan Poledziewski, Gloria Boyda, and Christine Gervais—CCRC was ready to play an active role in a retraining program for one thousand former heavy industry workers in several south suburban Cook County townships, funded with $500,000 from the U.S. Department of Labor under the 1982 Job Training Partnership Act. And thanks to Bill Stenzel’s hosting of Kellman at Holy Rosary church in Roseland, Kellman was beginning to pull together a new network of virtually all-black Catholic parishes across Roseland under the distinct rubric of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), with DCP for the moment a “project” or “subgroup” of CCRC.

Kellman asked each parish for two lead representatives. From Holy Rosary came Stenzel’s two most active parishioners, Ralph Viall and Betty Garrett. At St. Catherine of Genoa, Father Paul Burak suggested two people he felt had “a passion I think for social justice”: Dan Lee, who had attended deaconate school, and Cathy Askew, a young white single parent with two mixed-race daughters who was teaching at St. Catherine’s School. St. Catherine’s senior deacon, Tommy West, was interested too, but he channeled much of his community work through another parish well north of 95th Street, St. Sabina. At St. Helena, Father Tom Kaminski volunteered himself and Eva Sturgies, an active parishioner who lived on 99th Street. From St. John de la Salle at 102nd and South Vernon Avenue, eleven blocks north of Holy Rosary, Father Joe Bennett asked Adrienne Bitoy Jackson, a young woman with an office job at Inland Steel, and Marlene Dillard, who lived in the London Towne Homes cooperative development east of Cottage Grove Avenue. Not every Roseland pastor responded with enthusiasm. At Holy Name of Mary Parish, Father Tony Vader brushed off Kellman but told his associate pastor, Father John Calicott, the only African American priest on the Far South Side, to do what he could.

The most unusual Catholic parish Kellman contacted was Our Lady of the Gardens, a church that traced its beginnings only to 1947 and which was staffed by fathers from the Society of the Divine Word. When Kellman visited Father Stanley Farier, the priest recommended two women of different circumstances: Loretta Augustine, in her early forties, who lived in a single-family home in the Golden Gate neighborhood west of the church, and Yvonne Lloyd, a fifty-five-year-old mother of eleven who lived in the Eden Green town house and apartment development just west of both Golden Gate and the sprawling public housing project from which the parish drew its name: Altgeld Gardens.³¹

Altgeld Gardens was a by-product of World War II. When Chicago faced a dire housing shortage during the war years, officials looked to the land south of 130th Street, west of the CID landfill and Beaubien Woods Forest Preserve, north of the Cal-Sag Channel (a man-made tributary dug during the 1910s) and east of St. Lawrence Avenue. This area had in earlier decades served as the sewage farm for George Pullman’s eponymous town a mile northward. The Metropolitan Sanitary District’s massive sewage treatment plant, opened in 1922, was located just north of 130th Street. Construction began in 1943 on a 1,463-unit “war housing development” on the 157-acre site. The first families moved in come fall 1944, and a year later, in August 1945, a formal dedication ceremony featuring local congressman William A. Rowan plus Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) chairman Robert R. Taylor, an African American, took place before a crowd of five thousand. More than seven thousand residents were already living there, the Tribune reported, “nearly all Negroes.” An elementary school and then a high school, both named for the black scientist George Washington Carver, who had died in 1943, were soon part of the new development, but by 1951 school parents were protesting the presence of an open ditch carrying raw sewage that abutted the school grounds. In 1954 another five hundred apartments, officially called the Philip Murray Homes, were added to the Altgeld development.

For its first fifteen to twenty years, residents described Altgeld—or, more colloquially, just “the Gardens”—as “this heavenly place,” “just paradise,” as two different residents recalled. “It was just really a wholesome place to live,” a third remembered. “There was a feeling of family throughout the entire development,” said a fourth. The Gardens was its own world: almost anyone who worked had to own an automobile because public bus service to and from Altgeld was poor at best. “We felt so isolated and away from the mainstream of what was occurring in Chicago…. We were cut off from a lot of opportunities,” one resident explained.

Loretta Freeman Augustine grew up in Lilydale, married a man from Altgeld at age nineteen, and lived in an apartment there from 1961 to 1966, when the couple moved to a single-family home in Golden Gate, just to the west. “The community had a stability” during those years. “People had nice lawns with beautiful flowers,” and it was “very much a family-oriented community.” The Carver High School basketball team, under Coach Larry Hawkins, won the Illinois state championship in 1963.

By the late 1960s, things had changed for the worse. Many blamed the CHA, which had evicted residents when their incomes rose above the ceiling allowable in public housing. “People were being forced out because they were over the income,” one woman recalled. Dr. Alma Jones, hired as Carver Elementary School’s principal in 1975, had had a similar experience some years earlier at the CHA’s LeClaire Courts. “It was absolutely beautiful,” but “my husband got a raise, and they put us out: excess income,” she recalled. “I was devastated because I had just had twins … it was heartbreaking.” It was also destructive. “That eliminated everybody who was upwardly mobile, because if you … started to progress, then they put you out, which was the worst thing that could possibly happen” because “you take out the element of folk who know how to live in a community.”

One young man who grew up in Altgeld in the 1950s returned to the Far South Side twenty-five years later as a police officer. Initially “there were very few troubled families. I would say less than 5 percent. When I returned, I saw that the 5 percent was still residing in that development, but so were their children, and grandchildren, it was just a procession. The 5 percent had expanded to 85 percent.” Another resident said, “It began to change in the 1970s. I don’t think it really started to decline until the drugs became prevalent.” A 1972 Tribune article marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of Our Lady of the Gardens parish described Altgeld as a place “from which long-time residents are striving to get out” and stated that drugs and crime were the Gardens’ top problems. As Father Al Zimmerman commented, “With no job prospects, the temptation to turn to drugs is powerful.”³²

In April 1974 Altgeld made news in a different fashion when the entire facility was evacuated after a tank containing 500,000 gallons of silicon tetrachloride ruptured at a tank farm just ten blocks to the north. “A dense cloud of fumes half a mile wide” drifted toward the project, and almost twelve hours passed before residents were allowed to return home. More than two hundred people were hospitalized from exposure to “a heavy cloud of hydrochloric acid” that was generated when clueless workers turned firehoses on the tank, making the emissions far worse, rather than notify public officials. Chicago soon filed suit against Bulk Terminals, the tank’s owner, and the Tribune quoted a state official as saying, “It should be a criminal offense to know of a leakage of toxic materials without reporting it immediately.”

A 1982 citywide neighborhoods study found that Altgeld’s needs were especially dire. “The physical isolation of this community from the rest of the city” was so great that “residents of this area are rural rather than urban poor,” it noted. Tenants believe “that job training is one of their community’s most important needs,” but people who had never held a job needed to be taught “how to look for work.” Yet “many do not own cars,” and public transport was still “frightfully poor.” The Gardens’ one small food store shocked the outsiders. Not only did it smell “particularly bad,” but rats were now regularly “visible in the food store during daylight hours.” That study pointedly advised that “Altgeld Gardens needs an advocate and/or organizer to improve the coordination of the many municipal services provided to the development, and to work with the private sector to help create employment opportunities for local residents.”

Altgeld residents were theoretically represented by a local advisory council, but by the early 1980s, the council had for years been dominated with an iron fist by its president, Esther Wheeler, or “Queen Esther” to many dismayed residents. “Her whole concern was nobody would take her place, or usurp her authority,” Carver principal Alma Jones later explained. “She was extremely authoritarian and she owned Altgeld.” But come September 1982, residents had a new opportunity to organize against the toxic waste, garbage, and sewage that surrounded them, when Hazel Johnson, a forty-seven-year-old widow and mother of seven who had first moved to the Gardens in March 1962, founded People for Community Recovery (PCR) and attracted a small band of active members.

Hazel’s husband John had died of lung cancer in 1969, at age forty-one, and by the early 1980s, questions arose about the long-term health of those living at Altgeld. In late April 1984, Hazel saw a television news story about a study of cancer rates in the Far South Side. Its statistics were alarming, yet Illinois EPA director Richard Carlson brushed aside the findings. In response, Hazel contacted the IEPA, which tried to placate her with some pollution complaint forms. She responded by distributing several hundred of them throughout the Gardens over the ensuing six months.³³

In late 1983, a new organizing effort began in the Eden Green community. Madeline Talbott and Keith Kelleher, two Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) organizers, had met Tom Joyce while working in Detroit, and Tom’s Claretian Social Development Fund provided the initial seed money to launch ACORN in Chicago. ACORN’s Eden Green organizer was Grant Williams, who had worked for ACORN in Philadelphia and St. Louis. Williams viewed Eden Green as more promising turf than Altgeld, but after a founding meeting of South Side United Neighbors, Williams expanded his work into the Gardens. He contacted Lena and her IACT colleagues about the new-dumps moratorium, but in Altgeld, the residents’ biggest concern was the poor public bus service to the outside world. By March 1984 Williams had interested a reporter from Chicago’s premier African American newspaper, the Defender, in Altgeld’s transit plight, and a community meeting to oppose possible service cuts by the Chicago Transit Authority drew a good crowd.

By summer, Williams had signed up some eighty-three dues-paying members for ACORN—$16 a year—but by late August, he was moving to Detroit, and a brand-new University of Chicago graduate, Steuart Pittman, would take over in September.³⁴

Before the end of summer 1984, Jerry Kellman also made his first successful forays toward enlisting some Protestant pastors to join his previously all-Catholic CCRC. His first two recruits were Rev. Bob Klonowski of Hegewisch’s Lebanon Lutheran Church and Rev. Tom Knutson of First Lutheran Church in Harvey, a far-from-prosperous suburban town two miles southwest of Altgeld Gardens. Also joining CCRC was St. Anne Parish in suburban Hazel Crest, whose new pastor, Father Len Dubi, had known Kellman for more than a decade. The city parishes’ DCP designees first met Kellman and their CCRC colleagues from St. Victor and the other predominantly white congregations at Tom Knutson’s church in Harvey.

An early August issue of the Daily Calumet ran a prominent story heralding CCRC’s “phoenix-like return.” It quoted Kellman as saying he hoped sixty churches would join by October, and that by year’s end he wanted to have “a full range of support programs for laid off workers.” His top goal was to devise “a long-range plan for economic development,” and within a year he hoped to have “three or four full time employees.” Fred Simari and Gloria Boyda from St. Victor were appointed to a task force overseeing the new federally funded suburban job retraining program, but the program would not be able to accept applications until December or January.³⁵

Throughout the fall of 1984 and early 1985, IACT, Hazel Johnson’s PCR, and even ACORN appeared more visibly active than CCRC and DCP. A mid-September appearance by IEPA director Richard Carlson at St. Kevin drew an angry crowd that erupted in shouting when he insisted that the Southeast Side’s bevy of waste facilities posed no threat to anyone’s health. Marian Byrnes from Jeffery Manor, a widowed, recently retired schoolteacher who had founded the Committee to Protect the Prairie to avert construction on the undisturbed, 117-acre Van Vlissingen Prairie north of 103rd Street, forcefully told Carlson, “We will never believe you! You might as well go home!” That tussle was quickly overshadowed when the Chicago Sun-Times reported that water from at least three residential wells just south of Altgeld Gardens contained cyanide, benzene, and toluene. Most Chicago residents were no doubt surprised that anyone within the city limits had to rely upon wells for water service, but city officials had been aware of the issue for three months. Homeowners in the tiny, seven-home enclave called Maryland Manor paid city taxes but had neither paved streets nor water and sewer service. The residents were wary enough of their cloudy well water that they used it only for toilets and the like, as opposed to drinking, but the extensive press coverage was a huge embarrassment for Mayor Washington, one that would have been worse had the press known that the issue had been handed off to an intern over the summer.

In late October, just two weeks before the November general election, Lena and her colleagues successfully targeted incumbent U.S. senator Chuck Percy after he skipped a UNO candidates’ forum with Democratic challenger Paul Simon. UNO followed Percy to a black radio station, WVON, and stormed the building, causing the beleaguered senator to take refuge in a women’s restroom. Percy remained locked inside there for some hours, and the standoff made for memorable local television news footage. On November 6, Simon defeated Percy by fewer than ninety thousand votes out of more than 4.6 million that were cast.³⁶

When the U.S. EPA denied an IACT request to review the state’s finding of no health threat, Lena told the media the refusal was “quite ironic” in light of the Maryland Manor contamination. In mid-November, when state officials authorized the cleanup of an abandoned dump at 119th Street that contained 1,750 barrels of unknown chemical waste, Governor Thompson showed up wearing a protective suit, boots, and a mask to tell journalists that the site was “a monument to man’s greed and disregard for the health and safety of fellow citizens.” Along with Frank Lumpkin’s SOJC, UNO also continued to push city officials to open a job retraining center on the Southeast Side, but environmental issues had now replaced economic ones at the top of the local agenda.³⁷

ACORN’s fall 1984 efforts in Altgeld Gardens underscored that shift. Once Steuart Pittman took over from Grant Williams, the small group changed its name to Altgeld Tenants United (ATU). Williams had warned Pittman that local advisory council (LAC) president Esther Wheeler was “kind of nuts,” but when ATU sought to use the project’s community building for a neighborhood-wide meeting, Wheeler summoned “your Leader” to meet with her executive board. ATU still drew more than one hundred residents to an October 30 meeting, but Wheeler showed up to accuse Pittman of having an intimate relationship with an elderly and devout ATU leader: “That white boy is shacking up with Maggie Davis.” It was a ludicrous allegation, but Wheeler’s role in Altgeld caused untold harm to the Garden’s residents. As Pittman reported to ACORN’s Madeline Talbott, “the grocery store”—the one whose visible population of daytime rats had astonished outsiders several years earlier—“has a plaque award for community service in it from Esther Wheeler and the LAC.”

ATU reached out to both the city’s sewer department and to CHA’s Altgeld head manager, Walter Williams, who told the organization, “I’ll resign my job before giving in to tenants’ demands.” The sewer department deployed workers, who told residents Altgeld’s sewers were the worst they had ever seen and would take months to clean, but work was halted after one week by the CHA, which would have to foot the bill. In response, over a dozen ATU members picketed CHA headquarters in the downtown Loop on November 14 and then held a press conference.

The African American Defender gave them front-page coverage, and the local 9th Ward alderman, Perry Hutchinson, took an interest, telling the Defender that “Chicago has forgotten about south of 130th Street” and the people marooned there. But Pittman was disappointed that turnout at ATU meetings was declining. When he arranged a January 23 tour of WMI’s huge CID landfill east of Altgeld, only ten people showed up. Hoping to spur greater interest, he adopted Lena and IACT’s tactic from almost two years earlier, and on February 19 sixteen ATU protesters blocked garbage trucks’ entry into the landfill. Pittman, the elderly Ms. Davis, and one young man were arrested. For a second blockade on March 7, only eight people participated, and the protest resulted in three more arrests. Pittman had privately given ACORN notice four months earlier that he would be leaving as of March 15, 1985, and when he departed no one immediately replaced him. At their final meeting, ATU members wondered whether they should join Hazel Johnson’s PCR.³⁸

In mid-January 1985, PCR received attention citywide for the first time when Hazel held a press conference to publicize the IEPA complaint forms she had circulated within Altgeld over the previous six months and to highlight that the city’s one-year moratorium on new landfills would expire on February 1. One week later, Mayor Washington called a City Hall press conference, and with both Lena and Hazel standing behind him, recommended a six-month extension of the ban, which was unanimously approved by the city council. Washington also appointed a Solid Waste Management Task Force to study the city’s landfill options. Lena, Hazel, and Bob Ginsburg from Citizens for a Better Environment were all named to the panel, as were 9th and 10th Ward aldermen Hutchinson and Vrdolyak and South Chicago Savings Bank president James A. Fitch; Washington administration insiders like Jacky Grimshaw and Marilyn Katz were also included to assure that the task force would not go astray.

By early spring 1985, however, rumors had gradually spread that the city administration was quietly considering an entirely different new landfill possibility, centered on 140 acres of Metropolitan Sanitary District property south of 130th Street on the east bank of the Calumet River, a location generally spoken of as the O’Brien Locks site after a nearby dam. A city Planning Department draft report had discussed the idea a year earlier, and while Mayor Washington reiterated his opposition to any dump at the 116th Street Big Marsh location when he spoke at UNO’s annual convention at St. Kevin in late April, concerned residents of Hegewisch and its northern Avalon Trails neighborhood—both just east of the O’Brien property—publicly criticized Lena and UNO for not pressing Washington for a similar commitment concerning the O’Brien site.

The weekly Hegewisch News began to sound the alarm, with editor Violet Czachorski proclaiming that while Hegewisch residents had supported people in South Deering in opposing any Big Marsh landfill, now UNO and IACT were failing to take a similarly principled stance when a landfill was proposed for Hegewisch’s backyard rather than theirs. Writing in the News, University of Illinois at Chicago geographer James Landing, who in 1980 had created the Lake Calumet Study Committee to help protect that body, warned that a “lack of unity among neighborhood groups … serves the interests of the dump companies.”³⁹

Harold Washington and his top aides were devoting attention to Roseland as his four-year term approached its halfway mark. In part their concern was stimulated by the Borg-Warner Foundation, whose executive director, Ellen Benjamin, had taken an interest in the neighborhood and had commissioned a “needs assessment” from a team at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Roseland had lost more than sixty-eight hundred jobs between 1977 and 1983, and loss of employment meant “many people are having trouble maintaining their houses, keeping food on the table” and avoiding foreclosure. The researchers conducted 115 interviews in Roseland, and while 33 respondents named jobs as the top problem, almost twice as many—64—described how “crime and gangs have proliferated and the feeling of insecurity has increased.” Before the report was issued, Washington’s top staffers were briefed on the findings. “Highest infant mortality rate in city,” “highest number of foreclosed homes in the nation,” South “Michigan [Ave.] business district gone,” their notes recorded. With just one exception, community groups were disappointing: “Good Roseland Christian Ministries,” the staff notes emphasized.

At 1:30 P.M. on Sunday, March 17, a man wearing a long dark coat and a baseball cap with the Playboy logo drew a gun on cashier Lavergne McDonald inside Fortenberry Liquors at 36 East 111th Street in central Roseland. She screamed, and the gunman fled. Fifteen minutes later, Roger Nelson, a seminary student who had interned at Roseland Christian Ministries, his fiancée, and his parents finished chatting with Tony and Donna Van Zanten after church services and crossed South Michigan Avenue just north of 109th Street to the lot where their car was parked. The same gunman came up to them, ordered them into the car, and instructed them to hand over their valuables. Roger’s father, fifty-year-old Northwestern College of Iowa professor Ronald Nelson, was in the driver’s seat, with the gunman crouched by the open driver’s door. As the quartet fumbled through their belongings, Donna Van Zanten and her son Kent approached and were also ordered into the back seat. Ronald Nelson handed the man his car keys and checkbook, but the gunman angrily said, “I don’t think you gave me all you have.” Nelson protested, but the gunman handed back the checkbook, called Nelson a “Goddamned lying bastard,” and fired one shot into the left side of Nelson’s abdomen.

As Ronald Nelson lay dying at the scene, the gunman fled past two men working on a car nearby. “Brothers, you all be cool,” the gunman called out. “You know them was honkies over there.” One of the men was on work release for possession of a stolen car, but the gunman’s appeal to race fell flat: they not only knew Roseland Christian Ministries, one of them knew Roger Nelson from his work there. After police arrived, a shaken Donna and Kent Van Zanten accompanied officers on a ninety-minute drive throughout the neighborhood while Roger and his fiancée went to a station house with detectives to look at photos of possible suspects.

Twelve days later, one of the car repairers identified a photo he believed matched the gunman; police also received an anonymous telephone tip that the man they wanted went by the nickname “Squeaky.” Detectives went to 10727 South Indiana Avenue, less than four blocks from the scene of Nelson’s murder, and told the older man who answered the door that they wanted to speak with Clarence Hayes. “Hey, Squeaky,” he called upstairs. Hayes wasn’t home, nor was he on five subsequent occasions when police stopped by, but on Sunday morning, April 14, the thirty-four-year-old three-time ex-convict and drug addict was arrested at a nearby currency exchange. That afternoon, Lavergne McDonald, Donna and Kent Van Zanten, and both of the car repairers picked Hayes out of a police lineup, as did Roger Nelson and his fiancée when they arrived in Chicago that evening.

Ronald Nelson’s murder—a white victim, a black gunman, a Sunday church parking lot—drew more news coverage than anything else that had happened in Roseland in years. Eighteen months later Clarence Hayes was convicted of murder and multiple counts of armed robbery and sentenced to death; after appellate review he was sentenced to life in prison. Over a quarter century later, he was still challenging his conviction in the courts, but on the thirtieth anniversary of Nelson’s murder Clarence Hayes remained safely ensconced in the maximum-security Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, Illinois.⁴⁰

March 28, 1985, was the fifth anniversary of Wisconsin Steel’s sudden shutdown. Frank Lumpkin, now sixty-seven, was one of the few ex-workers whose more than thirty years at the plant meant he was collecting his full pension. Those not so fortunate received little if anything: Felix Vasquez, age fifty-seven, was receiving $150 a month for his twenty-four years of work. Lawyer Tom Geoghegan, whose lawsuit on their behalf against International Harvester was mired in the courts, told one reporter that men like Vasquez “were cheated by a company they gave their whole lives to.”

Thanks to ongoing support from the Crossroads Fund, Lumpkin’s Save Our Jobs Committee (SOJC) remained active, but in South Deering, the plant was now little more than “heaps of rusted scrap.” An anniversary rally drew only two hundred people, and one former worker told the Tribune that South Deering was now “a battered hulk of a neighborhood” strewn with “battered, empty hulks of men.” Now, five years later, no one at all doubted that “Black Friday” had indeed been “the end of an era.”

The former Wisconsin workers were not alone. At South Works, most of the south half of the mill had been demolished during the previous winter, and the remaining workforce was static at eight hundred. The Southeast Side’s third major mill, Republic Steel, on the East Side, had a storied history—ten striking workers had been shot dead by Chicago police on Memorial Day 1937. By the mid-1970s, however, it was known to suffer from a “morale problem,” and longtime United Steelworkers Local 1033 president Frank Guzzo “throws up his hands when discussing the increasing number of men who are drinking on the job.” The consequences were severe: in early 1976, 46 percent of the steel shipped from Republic was “rejected because it was not up to standards,” a problem Frank Lumpkin had also seen at Wisconsin.

As of early 1982 Republic had an active workforce of five thousand, but eighteen months later that number had been halved. Then, in early 1984, Republic was bought by the Ling-Temco-Vought (LTV) conglomerate, which six years earlier had acquired Youngstown Sheet & Tube in Ohio. Guzzo tried to put a bright face on the move, but workers grew increasingly unhappy with Guzzo’s concessionary attitude. In April 1982, Guzzo had won reelection over a young challenger by a margin of 1,167 to 935 in a multicandidate field, but as the April 1985 election neared, a different outcome loomed.

Guzzo’s top challenger both in 1982 and three years later was thirty-year-old Maury Richards, a tall, physically imposing man who was attending law school part-time and who in 1984 had mounted a credible insurgent challenge against an East Side state legislator and bar owner who was a Vrdolyak lackey. When the April 1985 ballots were tallied at Republic, it was clear that an era had ended there as well when Frank Guzzo finished fourth with just 331 votes and Maury Richards prevailed with a plurality of 538. However dim the future might be for steelmaking on Chicago’s Southeast Side, the workers now had a new voice, one almost forty years younger than Frank Lumpkin.⁴¹

As 1985 dawned for Jerry Kellman’s CCRC, Time for XII, and DCP trio, he and Ken Jania were joined by a third organizer, an old IAF colleague of Kellman’s named Mike Kruglik. A 1964 graduate of Princeton University, Kruglik had spent several years as a history graduate student at Northwestern University before shifting into organizing in 1973. He spent the mid-1970s working in Chicago, but by 1979 Kruglik was in San Antonio, Texas. Then, late in the fall of 1984, the Roman Catholic Church’s national Campaign for Human Development committed at least $42,000 to CCRC for 1985, and Kellman invited Kruglik back to Chicago to take the lead in building DCP. Several months later the Woods Fund, which had just designated community organizing as its “primary interest,” indicated that it would provide a further $30,000 to support CCRC and DCP salaries.

When Ken Jania was offered a much better paying job and left CCRC in March, Kellman asked Adrienne Jackson, who had been conducting parishioner interviews as a volunteer, to come on board full time, and she took up outreach to new churches. Mike Kruglik focused on expanding DCP’s reach across Greater Roseland; a public meeting at St. Thaddeus parish just south of 95th Street attracted both the 21st Ward alderman and Nadyne Griffin, an energetic woman in her late forties who had lived in the Lowden Homes town house project north of 95th Street for many years. She took an immediate liking to Kruglik, but other DCP members, who already found Kellman’s hard-driving style to be grating, thought Kruglik was just more of the same.

In late April or early May, the tensions came to a head. “My compadres felt Mike was kind of pushy,” St. Catherine deacon Dan Lee remembered. “So one night we had a little caucus, and it was just us. Mike wasn’t there, Jerry wasn’t there.” The small group agreed that “we are talking about black issues,” Dan recounted. “When we talk to Mike, it’s like we can’t get through…. We need a black person to be our mentor. We need a black person…. Let’s talk to Jerry.” Dan, Loretta Augustine, and Yvonne Lloyd went to Kellman. “Nothing against Mike, but we want somebody black over here because we are black,” Dan recalled. Kellman didn’t argue. “Okay, if that’s what you want, that’s what I’ll do.” From 1980 forward, the entire UNO and CCRC organizing effort had failed to employ an experienced black organizer; only parish volunteer Adrienne Jackson, just added to staff, was African American.

Kellman tried to make good on his commitment, but no plausible candidates could be found. “Jerry was busting his behind to find a black organizer,” CCRC’s Bob Klonowski recalled, but was “just having no luck.” Reluctantly, Kellman asked the DCP members to stick with Kruglik after all, but Loretta Augustine took the lead in saying no: “He’s not what we feel we need.” Loretta was “a very strong-willed person,” her colleagues knew, “very outspoken … if she didn’t like something, she let you know,” and her verdict on Kruglik was final.

But it was Father John Calicott, the African American associate pastor from Holy Name of Mary, who hammered the point home most forcefully. Calicott had seen the same pattern too many times before throughout the Chicago archdiocese. “I just had a problem with white folks always figuring that they knew more about what to do for us than we did,” he later explained. He had had the same reaction when he first met Kellman. Jerry was “well intentioned, really wants to do the right thing, but cannot hear,” Calicott recalled, and when Kellman had first introduced Kruglik to the DCPers, the same dynamic reoccurred. Calicott posed several questions, asking, essentially, “Are you willing to listen to our ideas?” In essence Mike replied, “ ‘Well, yes, but you know, this is the way we’ve done it before, and we know this is going to work.’ ” That “really left a bad taste in my mouth,” Calicott recounted.

When Kellman again asked them to accept Kruglik, and Loretta said no, Calicott spoke up to second Loretta’s refusal: “Let’s get somebody who knows us!” As Loretta vividly recalled, Calicott didn’t stop there. “The priest pointed his finger at Jerry, and he said, ‘I don’t know where you’re looking, but there’s got to be somebody out there who looks like us and thinks like us and understands our needs. So wherever you’ve been looking, you go back and look again.’ ” Yvonne Lloyd remembered those five words just as Loretta did: “go back and look again,” but “Jerry was livid,” Loretta recalled. Kellman insisted he would not jettison Kruglik, and Calicott said fine, but not for DCP. “The whole room was just absolutely quiet,” Loretta remembered, but Kellman agreed that he would look again.

Mike Kruglik was not happy about what had happened. “The people said, ‘We don’t want you because you’re not black,’ ” he acknowledged years later. Kellman, feeling “desperation,” told CCRC clergyman Bob Klonowski he would shift gears and advertise for a “black organizer trainee” in addition to an experienced organizer. Since the late 1970s, a little-known national organization called the Community Careers Resource Center had published Community Jobs, a small newsprint magazine comprised mainly of want ads that came out ten times a year. Community Jobs did not have many individual subscribers, but many university and public libraries paid twenty dollars a year to subscribe. It was not a publication they saw any point in retaining—who could possibly want to read job ads from 1985?—and so a quarter century later only one single library would still possess the June 1985 issue containing the job ad that Jerry Kellman submitted.

Community Jobs organized its ads geographically, so on page 3, under a large “Midwest” heading and directly below an ad for “Canvass Director, North Dakota,” appeared Jerry Kellman’s ad with a boldface title, “Two Minority Jobs Chicago.”

The Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) is an Alinsky organizing project in the industrial heart of Chicago. This region was once a world leader in steel production. However, in the past four years, 50,000 jobs have been lost. CCRC has pulled together 60 churches from the far Southside of Chicago and suburban Cook County to address this economic crisis. Half of CCRC’s budget comes from local church dues. The project is also committed to church renewal.

APPRENTICE DIRECTOR

Duties: Help to supervise all organizing on the far Southside of Chicago, an area which is 95 percent black. Serve as consultant to local parishes; recruit and train lay leaders in listening skills, research, strategic planning, public action skills and (with local clergy) theological reflection.

Requirements: Experience with church-based or community organizing; or experience in leadership and church development; highly disciplined; confident; mature; reflective; able to think and act strategically; experience in black community preferred.

Salary: $20,000/year to start, negotiable for more experienced organizer. Automobile allowance; health insurance.

To apply: Send resume to Gerald Kellman, Director, CCRC, 351 E. 113th St., Chicago, IL 60628. 312/995-8182. Selected candidates will receive phone interviews. Finalists will have interview in Chicago (CCRC will cover travel expenses). Affirmative action position.

TRAINEE

Duties and Requirements: Same as for Apprentice Director but not expected to have skills in advance, must have ability to pick up skills and master them quickly.

Salary: $10,000/year to start. Similar benefits as Apprentice Director.

To Apply: Same as for Apprentice Director.

In early June 1985, the new issue of Community Jobs started landing on library shelves across the United States.⁴²