Hot & Dry

Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley was hopping mad. Just the day before, midday Loop traffic had been snarled for four hours while 500 civil rights demonstrators marched on city hall and the nearby board of education building to protest a decision to keep School Superintendent Benjamin C. Willis on the job for another 17 months. Daley got Police Superintendent Orlando W. Wilson on the phone, told him: "Nothing like what happened yesterday will exist today." When the demonstrators showed up, cops arrested 252 men, women and children in what may well have been the opening round of a racially troublesome summer for Chicago.

Once lauded as an able, effective administrator, Willis has lately found himself the target of civil rights groups, who charge that he has pursued a go-slow policy in integrating the city's 550 public schools and has gerrymandered school districts in order to promote de facto segregation. For a while it appeared that the eleven-member Chicago school board would not renew Willis' contract, which expires in August. But then, at a recent meeting, the board voted to give him another four-year contract--with the firm understanding that Willis would retire in October 1966, when he reaches 65. Even that failed to mollify the civil righters.

A citywide school boycott scheduled for last week fell through when the board's attorney got a court injunction prohibiting it. Instead, the righters marched, causing the Loop's traffic tie-up. Next day some 500 marchers lined up in two lanes on Lake Shore Drive near Soldier Field to begin the 2 1/2-mile trek to city hall. After they had gone a few hundred yards and turned into a narrower street, police ordered them to walk in only one lane. A heated argument ensued, and suddenly the marchers began sprawling across the roadway, blocking a busy intersection. Some went limp as cops carried them to waiting paddy wagons; others kicked, bit and screamed.

Among those arrested were Congress of Racial Equality Director James Farmer, Negro Comic Dick Gregory and High School Teacher Albert Raby, who organized the march. Said Raby: "We're going to see to it that it will be a long, hot summer for Daley. Every Negro who cannot march will be asked to turn on all his faucets and drain the water." That seemed an especially silly way to protest, and could lead not only to a long, hot summer for Chicago but a long, dry one as well.

At week's end 150 more demonstrators were arrested when they sat down at State and Madison streets and began chanting "Go, Ben Willis, go now! Go! Go! Go!"

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