84: Harold
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- Before our story begins, let's remember how it used to be. Jackie lived on the south side in a black neighborhood. City didn't enforce the housing code properly, didn't investigate Arson's. - There would be fires going on and wouldn't want daily, several times a day. And it was just fire engines all the time. And so my daughter started to believe that when buildings got old and died, like people got old and died, that you knew a building was old and was dying because it would burn up. (upbeat music) - Before our story begins, Chicago was run by the Democratic machine and black Alderman, Danny Davis, would turn out the vote for the machine, election after election. But the machine didn't reward the black words of those votes, the way it paid back the white wards on the north side with street cleanings and sewers with newly paved roads and sidewalks and economic development money. - Well, actually, we had called the areas colonies, I mean, and just basically picking up the garbage in these wards. Just trying to keep them clean was a real problem. Person who was elected, there'd be so much focus on garbage pickup that you'd almost have to just be the garbage Alderman. I mean, I recall telling people time and time again that I was tired of just being the garbage Alderman. (upbeat music) - Before our story begins, Chicago political machines squeezed black kids into mobile trailers behind public schools rather than let them attend white schools, just blocks away. Before our story begins, the Chicago machine built high-rise public housing to hold blacks on the south side and keep them from moving into white neighborhoods. Before our story begins, the Chicago political machine built a system of highways that coincidentally divided black neighborhoods from white and particularly insulated the mayors all white neighborhoods, bridgeport. Typical inequities, unemployment in the white 11th ward was zero percent, unemployment in the fourth ward where blacks lived was 25 percent.
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