Seven Months' War

In a five-room apartment in Chicago's Trumbull Park Homes, a public housing project, a grey-haired police captain sat one night last week with two lieutenants, a squad of sergeants and a radio operator, taking walkie-talkie calls from patrolmen stationed for blocks around. The radio crackled: "Post No. 3 reporting, 9:30 p.m. All is peaceful." This reassuring word came from the street outside 10630 South Bensley, where six cops sat in a tin shack, a hole in its roof covered by an old dishpan, warming themselves at a portable stove and ignoring the shrill profanity of a gang of teen-agers across the street. If Post No. 3 had reported trouble (as it sometimes did), hundreds of additional policemen would have been rushed to the scene. But this was a quiet night in Trumbull Park's seven months of racial conflict.

The Beginning. No light came from the windows of an apartment at 10630 South Bensley; none has for months. But there were people there. Behind the plywood barrier set up to protect them from bricks and stones were Donald Howard, his wife and their two small children, going about their nightly routine, dinner, the television, bedtime for the kids. So they have been living for many weeks. The Howards are Negroes, the first of their race to become tenants in Trumbull Park. They got the apartment last summer partly because a state law forbids discrimination in public housing, partly because their name had moved to the head of the list of applicants--and mostly because Mrs. Howard, who signed the lease, is so light-skinned that the clerk did not recognize her as a Negro.

The Howards' first few days in Trumbull Park were without incident. Then, one Wednesday night as 25-year-old Don Howard sat with his son and daughter in the living room, a paving block crashed through the front window. That was the beginning. In the following weeks, more windows were smashed; sulphur stink bombs were hurled into the apartment; effigies of Negroes blazed on street corners; two neighborhood stores which sold to Negro customers were set afire; scores of fires have been set on the property of whites who refused to join the campaign to force the Negroes out; ten ugly crowds of up to 1,000 people were dispersed by police. As many as 1,000 cops have been on around-the-clock duty in the Trumbull Park area ever since.

The Churchgoers. Five other Negro families have since moved into the development, but the Howards bear the brunt of mob hatred. Whenever Don Howard leaves the apartment house, he gets into a paddy wagon and, with a police escort, is taken to a safe area to board his bus. The route is changed every day. But violence continues. Last month, as Betty Howard, 22, left the 11:30 Mass at St. Kevin's Church, some 40 people congregated outside, most of them also coming from the services. The group shouted insults and threats, and six shrieking women followed Mrs. Howard all the way home, throwing small stones at her.

Early last week, about 500 men, women & children, some of them armed with bricks and clubs, gathered near the Howard apartment. In the ensuing riot, four policemen and a six-year-old boy were injured. The police staunchly continue to protect the Negroes, although the huge details assigned to Trumbull Park mean that other areas of the city are going without adequate police protection. No real effort is made to punish rioters. Police make few arrests because, they say, magistrates (only two persons were charged with disorderly conduct in last week's riot) afraid of political reprisals will not take a firm line against the white demonstrators.

The trouble is not confined to Trumbull Park; it extends throughout the grimy steel district which surrounds the project. Last week a petition signed by 17,000 South Side residents was presented to city officials. It asked that police protection to persons moving into new homes be limited to the first 24 hours regardless of "the race, the color or the creed." Even on last week's quiet night, teen-agers skulked in the lot across from the Howard apartment. Growled a cop to a young tough: "Why aren't you home watching Arthur Godfrey?" The youth spat on the sidewalk. Said he: "It's a free country, isn't it?"

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