Segregation, overcrowded schools and mobile classrooms combined to create turmoil in the 1960s

A truck towing what appeared to be a pair of house trailers pulled up to Parker Elementary School on Jan. 15, 1962. The aluminum structures, ordered by the Chicago Board of Education and built by Colonial Mobile Homes Manufacturing Co. of Hammond, were unhitched and joined together, creating a “mobile classroom.”

The mobile home company’s president, Dominic Conte, was proud of the 47-by-20-foot classroom that was assembled in just 12 minutes at 6800 S. Sangamon St., in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood on the South Side.

“This unit is the first one we’ve built,” Conte told a Tribune reporter, putting the structure’s worth at $13,000.

It was put there to test the theory of Chicago Public Schools’ Superintendent Benjamin Willis that portable classrooms would be the district’s salvation.

Schools in African American neighborhoods were overcrowded, while schoolrooms stood vacant in white neighborhoods. Mathematically the solution was obvious: Move students from overcrowded schools to underused schools.

But that would mean confronting racial prejudice — ”the American dilemma,” as Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal famously dubbed it in the 1940s.

Willis and CPS held fast to the traditional wisdom that students are better served by attending neighborhood schools. We’re not to blame, its proponents argued, for classrooms looking like the illustrations in the first-readers series where “Dick and Jane” don’t have Black schoolmates.

“The neighborhood school policy does not segregate the Negro,” said Edward Marciniak, executive director of the Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations. “It reflects residential segregation.”

Indeed, the city had been rigidly segregated ever since the 1919 race riots, which began when a Black 17-year-old crossed the invisible, but all too real, color line that divided a Chicago beach. He floundered and drowned as whites stymied efforts to rescue him, triggering a wave of violence that rolled across the city.

Twenty-three Blacks and 15 whites were killed, and 2,000 people were left homeless by arson fires. City leaders attributed the riot’s cause not so much to segregation, but to a lack of it.

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The state militia was called in to quell the violence on Chicago's South Side during the 1919 race riots. (Chicago Tribune historical photo)

The Kenwood Property Owners Association said the riot was the result of “promiscuous scattering of Negroes throughout the white residential areas of the city,” the Tribune reported. The City Council’s proposed remedy was the establishment of separate zones “for the residence of only colored or white persons.”

Those virtual lines were reinforced by so-called “restrictive covenants.” Undeterred by the 1919 riot, southern Blacks continued to see Chicago as a haven from Jim Crow segregation. Between 1920 and 1960, the city’s African American population increased from 109,000 to 813,000. Most were confined to the Black Belt, a narrow ghetto along South State Street, as well as to corridors on the West Side.

Residents of nearby white communities responded by requiring prospective homeowners to attest that they would only sell their property to white, Christian buyers.

Hemmed in by those restrictive covenants, Black families had to send their children to overcrowded schools that increasingly operated on double shifts. Half of the students attended from 8 a.m. until noon and the other half from noon to 4 p.m.

His first day on the job, Willis discovered that 22 schools might need to go on double shifts in the upcoming school year. The Tribune noted he was new to the problem. “Willis said he had no double shifts to contend with in Buffalo,” where he was superintendent of schools before being hired by Chicago in 1953.

Chicago’s overcrowded schools repeatedly tempted him to rob Peter to pay Paul. The year after arriving in Chicago, Willis moved students from Herzl Junior College out of the building it shared with Herzl Elementary School at 3711 W. Douglas Blvd., in the Lawndale neighborhood, to empty classrooms at Crane High School.

That enabled Herzl elementary school to take in students from nearby overcrowded Black grade schools. But by 1961, even a double shift couldn’t absorb the student load at Gregory Elementary School, at 3715 W. Polk St. in the Garfield Park neighborhood. Willis acknowledged the school was on the verge of adding a third shift when he transferred 350 students from Gregory to Herzl and Hess elementary schools.

Black parents protested that half days were shortchanging the children. When the school board met to approve its 1961 budget, William Busch, president of the Greater Lawndale Conservation Commission, noted that schools within 3 miles of Lawndale had operated at half their capacity for 6 years. Why not include a line item for busing Black kids to those schools?

CPS officials deflected such criticism with claims that double shifts were pedagogically sound. The Tribune reported that George Balling, Lawndale’s district superintendent, cited two schools on double shifts where reading scores were improving. Members of the commission responded, “that if double- shift sessions are good enough for Lawndale, they should also suffice for the remainder of the city,” the Tribune reported.

Willis thought that portable classrooms would get a good chunk of the 25,000 students in double-shift classrooms enrolled full time — without confronting the resistance to integration that inspired white neighborhoods to adopt restrictive covenants.

The school board agreed, but one member made an ominous prediction. “Trailer classrooms will become the symbols of segregation,” said Raymond Pasnick, a union official and school board member.

The Chicago Urban League waged a delaying tactic: It argued that no “Willis Wagons,” as they would be dubbed, should be purchased until the city’s empty classrooms — the organization estimated the number at more than 350 — were put into use. Willis said there were only 14 and that buying trailers had an advantage over building more brick-and-mortar schools.

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The mobile classrooms could be moved from their initial location to another one as needed. Experience showed that as a neighborhood aged, the number of school-age children declined, just as it rose when a new ethnic group arrived. Both situations could be handled by the mobile classrooms.

The school board authorized $1.35 million in spending for an initial 150 mobile classrooms, beginning with two prototypes: the one at the Parker school, and another assembled at Lemoyne School, at 851 W. Waveland Ave., by Ready Classrooms of Fort Wayne, Indiana. The district planned to analyze the use of those two trailers to determine specifications for the remaining portable units.

Where portable classrooms were installed, picket signs followed. On May 18, 1962, 1,000 students boycotted classes at Carnegie Elementary School.

The backlash only grew from there, with mass walkouts and demonstrations the following school year.

The protests were fueled by the frustration of Black students and their parents, who had the same dream as all parents: a vision of their children going on to a better life than their own.

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