Where Is The Gold?

Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island’s beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:

They . . . brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned . . . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features . . . They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane . . . They would make fine servants . . . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

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Posted on November 28, 2013

By Steve Rhodes

Chicago famously taught the late Tribune editorial writer Leanita McClain, the first African American to serve in that function at the paper, to hate white people, as she told the nation in the pages of the Washington Post in 1983.
McClain, who had suffered from depression through much of her life, committed suicide a year later.
The 25th anniversary of her death just passed us on May 30th. Here are a few links and comments that appeared around town, followed by excerpts from Gary Rivlin’s indispensable Fire On The Prairie about McClain’s frustrations inside (and out of) the Trib newsroom.
*
– “Twenty five years ago today, I discovered that Leanita McClain, my friend and colleague, was dead,” writes former Trib colleague Monroe Anderson. “It was a suicide that came as no surprise to me. For more hours than I care to remember, I sat in her office at the Chicago Tribune joking, cajoling and questioning her repeated proclamation that she was going to kill herself.
“During these discussions, I’d asked why. ‘There are black women who’d give their right arm to be where you are,’ I’d argue.
“‘But, I’m not happy,’ she’d counter.”

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Posted on June 18, 2009

By The Beachwood History Club

“I thought the patronage was an institutional theft of city resources.
– Leon Despres, April 2005
In 2005, former Ald. Leon Despres published Challenging the Daley Machine, his memoir of opposing the reign of Richard J. Daley. He once said of the book, “I am describing the last of the great urban political machines in America and the birth of a new globalized political machine with its permanent campaign and high-tech politics and government, but with the same old-fashioned patronage, nepotism, and corruption which characterized the first Daley Machine.”

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Posted on August 12, 2007

By The Beachwood History Club

Excerpts from:
American Pharaoh
Mayor Richard J. Daley
His Battle for Chicago and the Nation
By Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor
*
Previously:
Part 1/Daley mobilizes black machine politicians to undermine King’s efforts here.
Part2/Daley denies there are slums in Chicago, then pledges to eliminate them within a year.
Part 3/Daley negotiates an agreement long enough to get King out of town, then reneges. His private feelings about King are revealed.
*
With the election safely over, the truth about the housing summit came out. Keane, the number -two man in city government and Daley’s co-negotiator at the summit, declared on the floor of the City Council that there was no open-housing agreement. “There were only certain suggestions put down and goals to be sought,” he said.
. . .
[Daley] agreed with Keane that the housing summit had produced no enforceable agreement, although he did concede that there was a “gentleman’s agreement unded a moral banner” to address the concerns that were raised there. By backing up Keane, he was sending a clear signal to the white wards that they did not need to worry that the summit agreement would cause their neighborhoods to be integrated. At the same time, his talk of a “gentleman’s agreement” and a “moral banner” offered blacks just enough that they could probably be convinced to continue to vote for the machine.”

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Posted on January 19, 2007

By The Beachwood History Club

Excerpts from:
American Pharaoh
Mayor Richard J. Daley
His Battle for Chicago and the Nation
By Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor
*
Previously:
Part 1/Daley mobilizes black machine politicians to undermine King’s efforts here.
Part2/Daley denies there are slums in Chicago, then pledges to eliminate them within a year.
*
The night before the summit began, [the Chicago Freedom Movement] cobbled together a set of proposed reforms. True to his character, Daley plotted his course of action more carefully. He assembled a team of experts who would be able to go head-to-head with the civil rights delegation on any subject they were likely to raise.
. . .
Daley’s approach, as it had been with the 1963 open-housing ordinance he drafted, was to blame the lack of fair housing in Chicago on the real estate industry rather than city government. Once again, it was a formulation that made Realtors and the civil rights movement the combatants, and avoided placing Daley in a showdown with King.
. . .
White working-class residents of the Bungalow Belt, accepting the open-housing language of the agreement at face value, were convinced Daley had handed their neighborhoods over to blacks . . . Black activists were just as convinced it was their side that had been betrayed.

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Posted on January 18, 2007

By The Beachwood History Club

Excerpts from:
American Pharaoh
Mayor Richard J. Daley
His Battle for Chicago and the Nation
By Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor
*
Previously:
Part 1/Daley mobilizes black machine politicians to undermine King’s efforts here.
*
Coming back from an eight-day vacation with Sis and four of the children to the Florida Keys and Puerto Rico, Daley declared at the San Juan airport that there were “no slums” in Chicago, only “bad housing.” In a January 26, 1966, taped television appearance, he predicted that all of the city’s blighted buildings would be eliminated in the next two years.
Daley insisted that he was working as hard as anyone to improve conditions in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods. “All of us, like Dr. King, are trying to eliminate slums,” he said. “Elimination of slums is the No. 1 program of this administration, and we feel we have done more in this field than any other city.”

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Posted on January 17, 2007

By The Beachwood History Club

Excerpts from:
American Pharaoh
Mayor Richard J. Daley
His Battle for Chicago and the Nation
By Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor
*
Martin Luther King, who was by now leaning strongly toward bringing his movement north to Chicago, had his mind made up for him one sweltering summer night in Los Angeles. On August 11, 1965, a California highway patrolman pulled over a black man for what should have been a routine driving-while-intoxicated stop. But Watts, a northern-style ghetto set down among the palm trees of Southern California, responed by erupting in rioting . . .
The depth and breadth of the anger that set off the rioting struck him as a powerful argument for extending the civil rights movement to the rest of the country, and trying to improve the conditions of blacks in places like Watts.
. . .
The SCLC considered serveral large cities, including New York, for its historic journey north. But there were many compelling reasons for choosing Chicago. In terms of racial segregation, it was as bad as any major city, north or south. In 1959, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights had called Chicago “the most residentially segregated large city in the nation.” The racial separation that the Jim Crow system preserved by law, Chicago had simply achieved through other means: racial steering by real estate brokers; racially restrictive covenants on house sales; and the ever-present threat of violence if established racial boundaries were crossed . . . To King, Chicago was “the Birmingham of the North.”

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Posted on January 16, 2007

By Cate Nolan

Like most Americans, I was taught the version of history that was edited to make white people feel okay and that history was simple.

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Posted on October 5, 2006