MICHAEL SINGLETON
Back home, the parish priest, Father Dan Malette, called us over and tried to get us to talk people out of rioting. He tried to get us to put controls on the people, but we refused. We felt people had to vent their anger in any way they chose. The rioting began soon after on Madison and Kedzie, Roosevelt and Kedzie, and the four blocks in between.
Later, after the National Guard came in, lots of people were picked up, innocent and guilty–indiscriminate arrests. Families and others couldn’t get in touch with people for weeks afterward. They were locked up and taken all over the city.
Chris Chandler was a Sun-Times reporter in April of 1968. He had joined the paper in ’64 and on the side had been active in Dr. King’s Chicago housing campaign and in the presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy. Late in ’68, he and several other young reporters (including Hank De Zutter and Ron Dorfman), disappointed with their employers’ coverage of the Democratic Convention riots, founded the Chicago Journalism Review to monitor and criticize the city’s establishment media. He left the Sun-Times in ’69 and founded the Daily Planet, an alternative biweekly, in 1977. He served for two years as Mayor Harold Washington’s deputy press secretary and is now the consulting editor of the New Patriot.
The arrest of Andrews and the others was used by Daley to try to prove that the riots were planned, and not spontaneous, and–though no one wants to say it–there was a pattern to the riots. The pattern of burning shows that it was mostly white institutions–white-owned stores, etc–that were looted and burned. It wasn’t blacks burning their own houses and stores down. People out there say there was a kind of joy in the crowds on the streets of the west side that night. You can call it a dance of death, but that’s a simple way to look at it. There was something deeper there. It was the first step in the political independence of the black community.”
“I went into business with my currency exchange in 1956. The neighborhood was mostly Irish, Italian, and Jewish at that time. Hillbillies were moving in, and Mexicans. The blacks were congregated up on Roosevelt Road, and they didn’t come past the [Eisenhower] Expressway until a few years later. The neighborhood was changing slowly but surely. By the time the riots came the area was 99 percent black. Most of my customers and all my employees were black.
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By the time I hung up the phone, my husband and my niece came to the rear where I was, and he said, “Antoinette, are you hit?” She says no. He said, “Well, I’m hit.” They said some boys had pulled up across the street, and one of them reached into his pocket and pulled out a pistol and shot two or three times. And then kept on going. The door panels was very thick, but that bullet somehow ricocheted through them and it struck him way back where he was leaning against the bubble gum machines.
