Two weeks ago, Kartemquin Films confirmed that it had footage of the arrest of Bernie Sanders at a school segregation protest in August 1963. The Chicago Tribune subsequently uncovered from its archives a striking photo of the 21-year-old University of Chicago undergrad being carried by two police officers.
Community opposition was swift. Parents pulled their children from the still nameless school, picketing the building with signs that read “This Was and Still Is a Warehouse,” “The Railroad Tracks Will be Your Children’s Playground,” and “This is a Firetrap and Not a School.” School administrators tried hard to explain how the secondhand warehouse with no playground space or fire sprinklers would make “an excellent school.” Alleging that “outside elements” were whipping up the controversy, principal John W. Hahn grumbled that the protests were “all too well organized to be spontaneous.”
But at the end of July, the parent council learned that CPS planned to install 25 mobile classrooms just a few blocks away, near the intersection of 73rd and Lowe. Parents dubbed the mobile classrooms “Willis Wagons.”
On Friday, August 2, the first day of protests, there were 67 arrests of both black and white demonstrators, virtually all for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. In the driving rain, they knelt or lay in the mud in front of construction trucks, defying police orders to move.
Willis, returning to the city from a lucrative consulting job for the state of Massachusetts, held a disastrous press conference at which he was unwilling or unable to answer any question about the conflict at 73rd and Lowe. Still, all four dailies continued to oppose the protesters. “The near riot at 73rd Street and Lowe Avenue is irrational not only because of the behavior of the mob but because the issue chosen as the occasion for violent demonstration does not merit serious attention,” complained the Tribune. Daley himself charged that the demonstrators were “outside agitators” that did not represent the parents of the school district.
