Chicago Blues: Discovering Race in the Windy City

Before 1973, when I arrived for my first year at the University of Chicago Law School, I had encountered black people only as isolated individuals in mostly-white environments. My high school in upstate New York had no black students, the university I attended in the South had barely begun to integrate, and the black airmen I knew during four years in the Air Force had at least met the qualifications for military service. Black dysfunction remained a rumor to me, easily explained by white oppression.

My education began on a hot Saturday night in June, two days after I left my final Air Force duty station outside Spokane, Washington. Eager to begin as a law student, I had hustled over the Rockies and across the Great Plains in my Volkswagen Karmann-Ghia convertible with a white suitcase strapped to the back.

I exited the Dan Ryan Expressway in South Chicago and headed east toward the University. I soon learned that knowing a few black people in a white-run setting is one thing; experiencing them where they dominate is quite another. My little car with its gleaming suitcase was pursued with hoots and threats through a vast, festering war zone, block after unrelieved block. I’m sure that if some gangbanger had taken a shot at me, it would have only added to the onlookers’ merriment. I was relieved to reach the campus alive.

As shocked as I was, there was no turning back. I sent for my wife and son, still in Spokane, and searched for a place to live in South Chicago.

My mission seemed to go well at first. I was pleased to find an apartment in South Shore, a genteel neighborhood not far from the university but (unfortunately, as I later learned) outside the defensive perimeter of the school’s large police force. South Shore included a lakefront country club and imposing — in places palatial — residential architecture. A friend who lived there had recommended it to me, and the price of a spacious apartment was right. My wife got a job at the university, we found a safe and pleasant daycare center in the Hyde Park neighborhood near the campus, and my first shock at encountering black Chicago started to fade.

What I did not know was that my new neighborhood was in the panicky end-stage of white flight. South Shore’s white population had declined from 90 percent in 1960 to 20 percent and falling by 1970. Now, in 1973, the remaining whites rarely lingered in public, and spaces hospitable to them had nearly vanished. There were short-lived exceptions: For the first year after my arrival, white ladies still patronized Johnson’s Tea Room across from the country club gate, but one day, the bright little tea room was shuttered and the proper white ladies went to ground. The thriving shopping district on 79th Street had been in decline for years — a process that accelerated, I later learned, in 1970 when the beloved owner of Wee Folks Toys was gunned down in his shop by a member of the Black P. Stone Nation. Even the friend who had encouraged me to live in South Shore ran to safer ground soon after I arrived.

A bizarre, black cultural mix filled the white void. The Nation of Islam converted a nearby Orthodox church to a mosque, guarded by a black-clad militia called the Fruit of Islam (see a photo of them here). Mohammed Ali, the Nation of Islam’s most loyal benefactor, was occasionally seen piloting his Rolls Royce between the mosque and a pied à terre he kept nearby. Young black men who could afford cars modified them to resemble the hero’s Cadillac Eldorado in the 1972 movie Superfly, with massive chrome grills and headlight lenses the size of manhole covers. Many brothers took to wearing pimp suits with garish colors, platform shoes, fur coats and feathered hats. Blackness was exuberant in 1973 Chicago.

It might have been possible for whites to coexist with these elements of the invaders’ society: the Black Muslims kept to themselves, and the ghetto flash and bling had entertainment value. But mere alienness was not all the invaders brought. The streets and parks increasingly hosted groups of sullen, idle young men at all hours. The sidewalks in front of the storefronts on 79th Street attracted dealers in individual cigarettes (loosies) and drugs. (Fortunately, the catastrophic crack epidemic was still in the future.) Shootings and lesser crimes became common. Predictably, the schools and property values crashed.

My wife and I quickly gave up exploring the neighborhood. We stayed in at night. We walked with our son from our building to our car each morning and spent each day in the relative safety of Hyde Park and the campus. When we returned to South Shore at night, we looked for a parking place as close to our apartment as possible, then braved the walk past a park often filled with surly youths.

This last part of our routine especially bothered me. A friend told me that the best response was to carry myself with an air of confidence. I followed his advice. I began wearing a trench coat with slash pockets. In one pocket, in defiance of the laws of the City of Chicago, I carried a .45 caliber pistol with seven rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber. It worked. I exuded so much confidence that I never needed to display, much less use, my firearm.

Still, this was no way to live: cowering indoors, going out only when prepared to deal lethal violence, starved of any amenities from which a civilized person could take comfort and pleasure. After my second year of law school, we found a new apartment in Hyde Park, where we could walk the streets, visit neighbors, and enjoy an occasional dinner out. One year after my graduation, we moved to the suburbs.

In the meantime, South Shore had been taken up as a cause for improvement. It was the subject of a 1974 New York Times article touting its potential to host a thriving black middle class. Money and energy poured into the neighborhood, including efforts to replace the commercial establishments that had fled. None of this had any lasting effect. As of 2022, South Shore’s white population had dwindled to 2.8 percent amidst the usual woes: bad schools, high crime, and general urban malaise.

Back then, my energies were devoted more to my studies and my family than to finding the underlying causes of black failure. When I thought about it at all, I was willing to entertain the idea that white neglect and a defective culture, rather than the genetic endowment of black people, accounted for the problems I had seen. That is, until I found two illuminating articles in the stacks of the University of Chicago Law Library.

The first article, the name and author of which I do not recall, was a law review piece discussing the affirmative action admissions program at the prestigious University of Michigan Law School. The author showed that the program went well beyond a mere “thumb on the scale,” and admitted minority students with credentials far inferior to those of white applicants. In fact (and this nugget stayed with me), the author found that the best-prepared minority admittee at the University of Michigan had credentials inferior to those of the lowest-scoring white student; and that this stellar black student would not have qualified for admission, as a white applicant, at the far less demanding law school at Michigan’s Wayne State University.

Why were the credentials of black applicants so poor that their admission to a competitive law school required abandoning — not just tweaking — standards? The author did not answer this question. I preferred to think that the circumstances of black applicants’ lives were largely responsible for their inability to earn strong GPAs or Law School Admission Test scores; but I uneasily noted that proponents of the environmental explanation for low black achievement relied more on wishful thinking than evidence.

The next article I found was the mother lode: Arthur Jensen’s magisterial essay in the Harvard Educational Review from the winter of 1969. Jensen demonstrated, with a clarity that later writings on the subject have not surpassed, that educational attainment is strongly predicted by IQ, and that IQ is largely heritable and resistant to modification. He also showed that black and white student populations differed in average IQ by a standard deviation, resulting in drastic differences in the presence of black and white students at the high-end “tail” of the IQ distribution.

I understood intuitively that Jensen’s explanation accounted for more than differing educational attainment. A population with only a tiny percentage of average- and higher-IQ people, such as a black neighborhood from which all sensible and responsible residents had fled, could look only like South Shore (or worse). No amount of outside money and benevolence could change that by much or for long.

Finally, in recent years, I’ve learned that I had a distinguished neighbor when I lived in South Shore: a schoolgirl named Michelle Robinson, later to become First Lady of the United States. Mrs. Obama has recounted her own struggles with the trying circumstances of the neighborhood, but with an emphasis somewhat different from mine. Her observations are set out in a recent article:

Michelle was born in 1964, and during her early years, she noted that her neighborhood was very diverse. Her family moved to her great-aunt’s home so Michelle and her brother could take advantage of improved educational opportunities. Unfortunately, as time went on, Michelle realized that people were moving away due to racism. In addition, she noticed the schools and parks were falling apart as local resources dwindled. “I feel a sense of injustice,” Michelle stated during an Obama Foundation Summit. “You know people are running from you.”

As one of the runners-away to whom Ms. Obama refers, I can say only that my family’s safety took precedence over her feelings. It still does.