Good Morning POU! We continue with our reading of Remembering Jim Crow.
Bridgeport Library Branch, Chicago, IL, Circa 1963
Two friends and I visited the Bridgeport Library Branch in Chicago, Illinois.
Bridgeport was the neighborhood of former Mayor Richard J. Daily and is all white. We were three Black young men of 11 and 12 years old. We visited the Bridgeport Branch because we couldn’t find the books we needed at the Oakland branch, in the Black neighborhood. We crossed the color line to the other side of the tracks. We were young and didn’t know. We were more afraid of avoiding the Black street gangs on the other side of the projects (Stateway Gardens).
After we got our books, we started to walk back home. We had no particular problems at the library other than strange looks (e.g., like “what are you niggers doing here”). Half way back to our neighborhood we were chased by a mob of white youths. They were out for blood. I remember the shouts of “kill those niggers”.
We split up and ran in panic. One made it back to the library, one got caught in a storefront, and I ran like hell back to the neighborhood. I didn’t make it.
One of the mob members crashed his bike in front of me, a few hundred yards in front of the rest of the mob. We prepared to duke it out, before the rest of the mob arrived. I remember an old white man stopped his car and boomed, “leave that boy alone”. I was surely saved from a severe beating. I was literally saved by a stranger. The mob held back and I suffered no more than a few scrapes and bruises.
As I reached the overpass on the Dan Ryan highway at 35th Street, I stopped and waited for my buddies. To my surprise, one stepped off a CTA bus (the one who returned to the library). He was escorted to the bus by the librarian. More surprising was that my other buddy was being escorted by the store owner and a few more white adults to the overpass. He only suffered a bruised jaw from a sucker punch.
I was never so scared in all of my life. We were attacked by a white mob for our brazen boldness to use the white library branch. My mother had to return my books.
Epilogue. I read a few years ago that another Black youth was attacked by a white mob in Bridgeport for playing on a softball field. He suffered severe head trauma and last I heard he was in a coma. I was lucky, he wasn’t. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Kenneth M. Stone, CPA
St. Louis , MO