Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [1]
Jack was born in Chicago, where he spent much of his youth (minus some years in Green Bay, Wisconsin). Raised a devout Catholic, in his twenties he entered Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery in the blue hills of Kentucky. His novice master was the theologian and author Thomas Merton. Gethsemani required a vow of silence, and at dinner if you wanted salt, you had to stare hard at the shaker until another brother noticed. One day, cutting down a tree, Jack couldn’t contain himself. He held his head back and roared, “Timber.” After that, his days at the monastery were numbered. Within a couple of years, he had married, and he and his young wife, Fran, who herself had just spent a year in a nunnery, opened a Catholic Worker farm in eastern Missouri for recovering alcoholics.
Jack and Fran eventually had nine children together, and found their way back to Chicago, where they settled in Austin, a neighborhood at the city’s farthest western reaches, a collection of wood-framed single-family homes and grand-looking churches. The eleven of them lived in a three-bedroom home with one bathroom. Shortly after they moved in, in 1965, the complexion of Austin changed virtually overnight. As black families began buying into the neighborhood, realtors, in a scheme that became known as “blockbusting,” deliberately frightened whites into selling. Blockbusting was a rather simple yet utterly destructive tactic. First, a realtor would buy a home on an all-white street, and move in a black family. Then, the white families on the block would panic, selling their homes to the realtor at bargain-basement prices. The realtor would then make a hefty profit by turning around and selling them to more black families. But Jack and Fran insisted on staying in Austin, and they made a show of it, joining civil rights marches through Chicago’s segregated neighborhoods.
My wife remembers one rally her father took her to, where, at the age of ten, she clutched Ralph Abernathy’s hand, trying to hide her face from her best friend’s father, who was screaming racial epithets at the marchers from the curb. “Go-a back-a where you came from,” the angry refugees from Eastern Europe’s communism yelled at the blacks, refugees themselves from the Jim Crow south. This city is the story of newcomers, the Irish, Poles, Croats and Serbs, Mexicans, and more recently Asians and Africans, but in the end it’s defined by race, by a history that is by turn ugly and celebratory, from the 1919 race riots to the 1983 election of the city’s first black mayor, Harold Washington. Even milestones such as Washington’s election come at a cost, though; it was marked by the ugliest and most divisive of campaigns, in which Washington’s opposition rallied voters with the slogan, “Before It’s Too Late.”
In the 1960s and ’70s, white landlords wouldn’t rent to blacks. Jack didn’t think that was right. And so he did what he could to force their hand. Working for a local fair-housing organization, Jack invented “testing”—a benign appellation, given the ugliness it uncovered. A black couple would try to rent an apartment and inevitably be turned down. Then Jack and a colleague posing as his wife would try to rent the same place, usually successfully. A lawsuit would follow. Among the white parents in the neighborhood Jack became known as “the underground spy for the spooks,” an accusation he was perfectly comfortable with.
Jack eventually gave up that work to sell his V-Vax, as well as a lens cleaner that he liked to boast was used by NASA. Jack and Fran divorced in 1975, and a few years later, he and his new wife bought a three-flat on Elston Avenue, along the Chicago River.