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Resistance See other Resistance Articles Title: Cold blast from the past; Chilly neighborhood reception greets Mount Greenwood Seven at elementary school they integrated 40 years ago It has been 40 years since a group of seven black eighthgraders were the first African Americans to attend Mount Greenwood Elementary School. The group was greeted with vulgar gestures, hoots and jeers by a crowd that at one point numbered 5,000. Although four decades have gone by, the racial intolerance that drove residents in the Irish-Catholic enclave to picket for six months -- in rain, sleet, and snow -- until the blacks students graduated, was still evident on Sunday when they returned to the school to take a photograph. "The first thing that struck us was there was a swastika on the bottom of the assembly hall door," said Toni Lewis Anderson. A Chicago Public Schools spokesman confirmed that school administrators discovered the swastika on the school's assembly hall door sometime on Monday while they were making their rounds. "It has already been removed," the spokesman said. "We will work with whatever authorities that are appropriate to find out who did this." Anderson said that as soon as the group arrived at the school on Sunday, several white men who were sitting in front of a house across from the school began to verbally harass them. "How would you like it if we would go to an all-black school in the black community and took pictures of gang signs,'' one of the guys allegedly shouted, while giving them the finger. "Go back to your own neighborhood." "It was deja vu," Anderson said. "It was a nightmare." The story of the group's historic reunion appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times on Sunday. After a brunch at Blu 47, the group went to Mount Greenwood Elementary School at 10841 S. Homan to take a photograph. It was the first time they had been back to the school in 40 years. In fact, after the group graduated, it took 10 years for another black student to enroll there. "We wanted closure. But as soon as we got out of our cars, the men threatened to call the police and began yelling at us," Anderson said. Besides Anderson, the other members of the Mount Greenwood Seven are Omar Hester, Deborah Hunter- Russell, Adrienne Shumac-Thompson, Janis Weatherall-Clark, Nancy Ward Wysinger and Steven Palmore. Although the group managed to take a photo, Hunter-Russell was too upset by the hecklers to get out of her car. "I was probably in this neighborhood before they were living in that house," said Palmore, who is a jazz musician who now lives in Queens, N.Y. "It is a shame that Mount Greenwood is the same racially intolerant enclave that we remember." In 1968, the year the Mount Greenwood Seven integrated the elementary school, the neighborhood was 99.9 percent white. By 2000, the area -- which is home to a lot of Chicago Police officers and firefighters -- was 93.5 percent white, 3 percent black, and 3 percent Hispanic. "I can't believe that 40 years later, things have not changed," Anderson said. "They were still telling us to get out of their community, out of their school, and we were not bothering anybody. We were there because of our own memories." Obviously, what happened on Sunday doesn't compare to the chaos they lived through in 1968, when Chicago Police officers had to escort them to and from school. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: X-15 (#0)
GOOD.
He who is not grateful for the good things he has would not be happy with what he wishes he had.
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