By Steve Rhodes
Don’t be fooled: The Sun-Times‘s war-is-declared size headline “‘Embarrassment’ Or Fair Tribute?” is not in reference to the photo of the naked male torso above it (with obligatory leaf covering the goods).
The torso belongs to the headline to the left, “Where Are All The Naked Men?”
(Not in the Sun-Times, it turns out. But I digress.)
No, the Embarrassment or Fair Tribute debate belongs to Day Two of Monroe Street Held Hostage: The Chairman Fred Hampton Way Story.
Former Black Panther Bobby Rush, now a U.S. congressman representing Illinois’s first district, which spans a chunk of the South Side and south suburbs, says he is “engaged in battle now” over whether a block of Monroe Street between South Western Avenue and Oakley Boulevard should be renamed “Chairman Fred Hampton Way,” as proposed by South Side Ald. Madeline Haithcock.
The police union is furious, Haithcock is back-peddling, and the rest of the city council is cowering.
In their own words: Here, for example, is West Side Ald. Walter Burnett: “It’s a no-winner. You end up getting somebody upset.”
And here is South Side Ald. Freddrenna Lyle: “[I have] nothing to say. A lot of people feel very strongly about it. Why would you want to say something that gets the police people mad at you? And I don’t want to do anything to get people who supported the Black Panthers mad at me.”
North Side Ald. Richard Mell “likened [the proposal] to naming a Chicago street “David Duke Way.”
Yes, let’s not forget race: What the Sun-Times has failed to do so far is to present a list of all the white people with dubious pasts who have streets named after them in Chicago, some of whom may have even killed more people than Fred Hampton, who, as far as I know, never killed anyone, though indeed he may have incited violence.
(On his blog, the Tribune‘s Eric Zorn gets the ball rolling: “It’s not like you have to have led a saintly life to get a street named after you. Good lord, Italo Balbo was a fascist henchman for the murderous Mussolini and was charged himself with the murder of a priest.”)
Ironically, we wouldn’t be having this debate at all if the police hadn’t martryed Hampton by pumping him (and Mark Clark) full of lead in that infamous 1969 police raid.
And don’t forget the mayor: Richard M. Daley, of course, has an opinion about this. But chances are you’ll never hear it. “Everybody has a right to name things . . . I don’t go down the list . . . You see those honorariums going in every day now, ” Daley said. Then the mayor called the street naming “a local matter.”
So something outside of his jurisdiction.
Meanwhile, the real news in the Sun-Times is on Page 10: “Daley Backing Stroger, But Praises Claypool.” It may not be a surprise that Daley is supporting the re-election effort of Cook County Board President John Stroger, but it is a surprise that Daley is saying so publicly. (A sign of weakness in the Stroger campaign? Daley rarely issues public endorsements.)
Daley, of course, refuses to explain why he is standing by a man who is demonstrably presiding over a mess. And the press, predictably, is letting Daley get away with it.
Over at The Blue One: The Chicago Tribune remained generally uninterested in the Hampton saga, jumping in today out of obligation with a Page 3 story in Metro, “Mayor Mum On Naming Of Street.”
The Tribune‘s top story on its front page is “Hawaii On Front Lines For Bird Flu.” I’m glad they’re on the case–both Hawaii and the Tribune–but the paper didn’t carry Daley’s Stroger endorsement at all.
The Tribune did recognize, however, the importance of Tuesday’s decision by the U.S Supreme Court that protests outside abortion clinics did not constitute extortion or racketeering. The paper put that story on its front page just below Hawaii’s front-line bird flu defense. The Sun-Times buried the story on Page 26, because who really cares about Supreme Court rulings when it comes to abortion? Apparently not the Sun-Times, which couldn’t even be persuaded by the fact that one of the parties was Chicago anti-abortion activist Joseph Scheidler.
Maybe They’re Still Confused
At first I thought it was a joke when Beachwood correspondent Tim Willette sent me this note:
“Remember when the council approved an official Fred
Hampton Day & later recanted because most of the
aldermen thought they were honoring Dan (#99) Hampton?”
Then Tim sent a follow-up:
“In 1990 the Chicago City Council voted to have a
Fred Hampton Day but after that sixteen white aldermen
objected on the grounds that they thought they had
voted to honor Dan Hampton the Chicago Bears football
player.” (Amazon review of Studs Terkel’s Race)
The Right to Homer
Meanwhile, the Sun-Times finds another excuse to put a picture of Homer Simpson in the paper, and who can blame them? The paper carries an Associated Press story today citing a study that found that more Americans know more about The Simpsons than the First Amendment.
More than half of those surveyed, the report says, can name at least two members of the Simpsons family, but only one in four can name one of the five freedoms named in the First Amendment.
The study was conducted by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum, which no Americans could name.
D’oh:
The Tribune ran its own version of the Simpsons/First Amendment story with no graphics whatsoever.
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In the Reporter today:
In Dirty Coppers we look at the post-9/11 shift in police dramas that never came to be.
In “Ways & Means” we look at how Peotone fogged in Stroger, Claypool, and U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. last week.
Was Milo right? Did Steve Stone unwittingly describe Harry Caray as a miserable phony? Check out Cubs Fan, Bad Man?.
If you missed Skeleton in the Olympics, take a look back with this report from our Turin bureau.
And discuss and debate it all in our Beachwood Forums.
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Posted on March 1, 2006