by Amy Sonnie
During World War II, Terry found her first stretch of steady employment in Kentucky working alongside her mother and sister in a weapons factory. Kentucky was the one place she considered home, but after the war, work dried up again. By the mid-1950s Peggy Terry reached a stop in her migration that altered her path forever. That town was Montgomery, Alabama, and in 1956 the Montgomery Bus Boycott shattered Peggy Terry’s complacency. For ninety years Jim Crow laws upheld the southern corpus juris of “separate but equal,” which reinforced vicious attacks on the minds and bodies of Black southerners. While Terry had heard rumors about the tempests brewing across the South as Black southerners began organizing against segregation, she certainly had never seen Blacks standing up for their rights, on the job or elsewhere. She worked in enough factories to understand the power of a strike, but this was different. This was Black people doing something on their own, demanding dignity, in the town where she lived.
The 381-day rider strike marked a highly publicized assault on Jim Crow and a push to finally challenge the specter of white supremacy in the United States. In a systematic effort to thwart the boycott, participants were fired from jobs, threatened and beaten. Local businesses denied car insurance to volunteer drivers who helped Black residents get to work, and city police jailed or fined participants for hindering lawful business. As the boycott gained momentum, though, the mass coordination of Black residents seemed a victory in itself. Before any legal victory was won, flyers announced, “Jim Crow is Dead!”3 Speaking volumes about the cloud of privilege shrouding white southerners, Peggy Terry saw the signs and wondered who Jim Crow was and how he died.
Despite her ignorance about segregationist vernacular she knew the boycott was a big deal. Several weeks into the protest Terry and a group of girlfriends took a bus to the city jail to check out the spectacle. A number of boycotters, including the movement’s budding emissary, a young pastor named Martin Luther King Jr., had been arrested for interfering with city commerce. As King exited the jail, a gang of white vigilantes grabbed him. Terry watched in disgust as they beat him in front of a crowd of onlookers. King’s nonviolence in contrast to the mob’s brutality shocked her most. At thirty-five years old, she saw the injustice of racial violence with new eyes. While it took a few years before she joined the freedom movement, that day forever altered her thinking. As she would tell her grandson’s history class years later, “It marked the beginning of my becoming a better person.”
Becoming a lifelong radical rarely occurs overnight, and in Terry’s case it took years, first, as an observer of a different way of being and, only later, as a leader of organized action. A year after the boycott, Terry moved to Illinois with her three children. She also married her longtime friend, Gil Terry. It was Gil who provided Terry her first experience seeing a white person treat a Black person with respect. Gil was active in local politics and a member of the Communist Party. One evening he invited a Black friend to their home for dinner. Terry was nervous. “I didn’t want it, but I didn’t make a fuss,” she said. As the front door opened, Gil greeted their guest and offered to take her coat. Terry froze. She didn’t know how to act or what to say. She had never in her life seen a white man hang a Black person’s coat. How did such a simple act seem so impossible? Of her own racism, Terry later said, “How can you be raised in garbage like that and not stink from it. You walk through garbage, you stink.”
Over the next few years, the Terrys attended local labor and political meetings and she joined her first radical organization, a group called Women for Peace that was opposed to redbaiting, nuclear testing and U.S. action against Cuba. By the time Peggy Terry walked into CORE’s headquarters in 1962, she had come to realize that racial discrimination was connected to a much bigger system, upheld through exclusionary practices of northern businesses and politicians just as efficiently as it had been back home. The laws were just a little less obvious. Chicago’s mayor paid lip service to better education for Black children, but had no intention of changing the fact that 90 percent of the city’s schools were physically and educationally segregated.4 After Black communities forced the district to address disparity and overcrowding, public school officials erected $2 million worth of aluminum trailers outside Black schools rather than permit integration into white schools with empty desks. An influential Black community group dubbed the trailers the “Willis Wagons” after then-Superintendent Benjamin C. Willis.5
Terry learned most of this on her first day at CORE. Some of it was shocking. Other facts were familiar. She reflected on conditions in her own daughter’s middle school with its falling plaster, outdated books, broken pipes and crowded classrooms. She had embarrassed her young daughter, Margi, on more than one occasion by marching into the school to confront teachers and administrators about the conditions and the lack of real opportunities for learning. She could scarcely imagine how a Black child would learn anything sitting in a tin box. With a protest planned for that afternoon, she had little time to think about the prospect of arrest. All she knew was she had to do something.
Despite the camaraderie she gained from her political involvement, Terry largely kept quiet about her own struggles living in the city’s white slums. Her southern accent, clothing and address in Chicago’s maligned Uptown neighborhood came with little esteem and even outright disdain from caseworkers, bosses and customers at the restaurant where she waitressed. Terry never experienced anything like that in the South where, as she put it, “the wool pulled over poor whites’ eyes” gave men like her father a sturdy sense of worth and security. Feeling one’s own poverty was relative to the nearest riches and in her youth there had been few displays of wealth to covet. Where the sting of poverty surfaced, a communal feeling that you were still better off than someone else usually compensated. In the North, though, the fabric of her privilege felt thinner somehow. Still, she worried that talking about her personal hardships would distract from the Black struggle for freedom. She adopted a behind-the-scenes role at CORE even though it proved a thin mask for the shame she carried. She was shocked and humbled when, after meeting Martin Luther King Jr. for the first time, he asked her about her experience as a poor white woman. How did he know? He asked her how other poor whites might become involved with the movement. Having thought little about this, she had no idea what to say.
Two years after she joined CORE, Terry’s friend and civil rights leader Monroe Sharp encouraged her to face what she’d been hiding. She had long imagined herself rebelliously working against her own interests in the struggle for others’ freedom. She had no idea what it meant to consider her own. Monroe Sharp knew she had much more to offer than she could at CORE. Peggy Terry had a natural way of connecting with people. Plus, she was whip smart. Sharp was working closely with the white student leaders organizing voter registration projects in the South and with Students for a Democratic Society, which had just started setting up community projects in northern cities. The Chicago project was in Terry’s neighborhood and Monroe suggested she join. Terry wanted nothing to do with it. She found it hard to imagine what possible good might come of a mostly white organization, let alone one filled with poor white southerners and started by college students. She left Sharp with no choice. He all but dragged Terry to the JOIN office, leaving her there with the friendly admonishment, “This is where you belong.… You have to really know who you are before you ever know who we are.”
After years crossing town to “help Black folks get their freedom,” Peggy Terry looked around her own neighborhood trying to imagine the work ahead. Chicago’s Uptown section was alternatively known as “Hillbilly Heaven” or “Hillbilly Harlem” after the large numbers of Appalachian families who moved there in search of work between 1930 and 1960. Like neighborhoods in Boston, Detroit and Cincinnati, Uptown started to change when the southern economy convulsed. Beginning with the Great Depression, the Appalachian region saw one of the greatest out-migrations in U.S. history. After automation decimated the mining industry and federal p
olicy curbed the region’s agricultural mainstay, people began migrating by the tens of thousands from mining towns and mountain hamlets.6 During the Great Depression alone, nearly one million white southerners left the South. The “Great White Migration,” as history remembers it, had a distinctly economic impetus for European descendents, while both economics and severe racial oppression propelled the massive out-migration of Black southerners during Reconstruction and again in the early twentieth century.7 Even decades into the exodus, most who left intended to make their way back home, but this proved nearly impossible as entire towns from West Virginia to northern Alabama to the western Carolinas succumbed to the economic fallout.
By the 1960s nearly seven million southern-born whites lived outside the South. Uptown received economically displaced southerners by the busload. Although the 120-block area on Chicago’s North Side was never exclusively white or southern, white southerners made up nearly 40 percent of all newcomers, accounting for more than 60 percent in certain census tracts.8 To profit from the influx of a new laboring class, speculators had transformed the formerly middle-class enclave of Uptown by subdividing stately homes into small, ramshackle apartments. Landlords paid no attention to building standards; they left plumbing exposed, garbage on the streets and repairs unfinished. Housing conditions in Uptown were typified by single room tenement-style apartments, dilapidated buildings, rat infestations, broken plumbing, peeling paint, missing locks and a constant, ominous police presence. Conditions in factories, on the railroads and in service jobs weren’t much better. Northern business owners seized the opportunity to recruit a cheap, dependent labor force “who had empty stomachs and pocketbooks but strong backs.”9 Available work was hard and temporary.
A southern hillbilly identity surfaced nearly everywhere through community centers, barbeque stands, country music and religious institutions. To its residents the neighborhood was a piece of mountain life carved in the asphalt of the North, but few outside Uptown welcomed the cultural renaissance. The neighborhood’s reputation as a bastion of southern culture stoked northern fears that indigent migrants would soon swallow the city. Uptown seemed the epicenter of northern anxiety. Harper’s Magazine warned the nation about the ominous threat hillbillies posed to prosperity and sanctity in the northern United States. Invoking imagery of an invading army the magazine warned, “The city’s toughest integration problem has nothing to do with Negroes … It involves a small army of white, Protestant, early American migrants from the South—who are usually proud, poor, primitive, and fast with a knife.”10
Exaggerated as Harper’s portrait might have been, Uptown gained a lasting reputation as the “most congested whirlpool of white poverty in the country.”11 When Bob Lee (later a leader of the local Black Panther Party) first visited Uptown as a volunteer, he described one of the most horrible slums imaginable. Many of Chicago’s Black neighborhoods fared as bad or worse, but Lee never imagined white people living under such conditions. In the early Sixties, the North Side and the South Side were night and day, but for residents like Lee who managed a glimpse of both sides, the similarities were striking. They offered proof that the postwar boon did little to help the nation’s permanent underclass.
The paradox for poor neighborhoods, of course, exists where systemic government neglect of people and infrastructure collides with overwhelming scrutiny by media, police, speculators and even sociologists fascinated by the primitive ways of the poor. In Uptown residents faced job discrimination, constant police harassment, invasive home visits by welfare counselors and the beginning throes of urban renewal. After the Housing Act of 1949 authorized local governments to demolish and redevelop areas deemed as blighted, areas like Uptown started to see changes, not all of them good. Invariably blight was in the eye of the beholder and most often found on valuable urban land occupied by low-income people. In Chicago the Act simply accelerated the process of displacing working-class communities. Between 1941 and 1965, 160,000 Blacks and 40,000 poor whites were displaced from their homes by freeway construction and city development projects. Only 3,100 received replacement public housing.12
Urban renewal programs treated poor neighborhoods like chessboards, chopping up neighborhoods to build new housing residents could no longer afford and forcing them to move into other poor neighborhoods or out of the city entirely. It was here that northern segregation persisted through an entrenched web of laws, regulations, and the informal practices of Chicago real estate agents, the Federal Housing Association, and neighborhood groups intent on curtailing Black homeownership. Restrictive zoning laws prevented public housing construction in any place other than existing ghettoes, while proposed highway construction decimated working-class neighborhoods including Italian and Greek ethnic enclaves.13 In these circumstances the politics of white flight took a particularly bizarre turn. A real estate agent might offer to locate a Black family in a white ethnic area and simultaneously whip up fears among whites of an impending invasion of their neighborhood. For the whites that could leave, the agency would offer to sell them a house in the suburbs.
In Uptown the poor were left to fight for their homes and make sense of growing racial tensions that came with neighborhood integration. However, conflicts between new neighbors took second shift to the area’s other ongoing battle: police brutality. The neighborhood was a hotbed for conflict between police and residents. According to witnesses, police in Uptown used anti-riot tactics and brute force to squelch even petty crime.
As mother to two sons, Peggy Terry tried in vain to keep her boys from ending up in jail—or worse, murdered. In one incident her thirteen-year-old son was nearly shot in the back as he ran home ten minutes past curfew. When an onlooker asked why they shot at the boy an officer supposedly reasoned, “He had to be running from something.” Terry told anyone who would listen what Uptown residents knew all too well: police shot first and asked questions later. She pointed to the bullets lodged in the tree outside her apartment. From the concrete beneath Chicago’s el tracks to residents’ front doors, shell casings and bullet holes were more common than playgrounds.
Uptown in the Sixties belied the myth of the American Dream, and naturally social service agencies flooded in with programs to uplift and appease the poor. Most preached the benefits of assimilation in northern culture. Some blamed laziness and liquor. By the mid-Sixties there were dozens of agencies vying for “a share of the humanitarian good works.”14 Among the largest were the Montrose Urban Progress Center and the Council of the Southern Mountain. They represented two sides of the same coin. The Urban Progress Center was run by welfare administrators who placated the poor by promising residents a voice in local services, while the Council was run by conservative business owners hoping to protect their investments in the neighborhood. Both businesses and city officials worried social unrest would spread as demographic changes reshaped the region. Between 1950 and 1970 Chicago’s white population declined by more than 20 percent, as its Black, Latino, Asian and Native American populations grew cumulatively to 35 percent.15 By the end of the Sixties even Uptown became a more multiracial neighborhood. But as employed and middle-income whites fled to the suburbs, poor whites and more recent European immigrants had few avenues out of the city. Fearing rebellions, the city’s elites saturated the neighborhood with do-gooders hoping to curb “political liberalism and the perceived threat of socialism.”16
That perceived threat crystallized in 1963 when the North Side received a new group of migrants: student radicals. Even before the Vietnam War draft took direct aim at their generation, progressive student activism surged. No organization captured the youth movement’s idealism, outrage and aspirations in greater numbers than Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The group’s early gatherings included an all-star cast of civil rights leaders, academics, influential authors and young intellectuals: Bayard Rustin, James L. Farmer Jr., Michael Harrington, Tom Hayden, Bob Ross and Sharon Jeffrey. Each shaped some of the Sixties’ headlining events: from Har
rington’s detailed exposé on poverty in The Other America, to the first pivotal March on Washington, to the televised clash between protestors and police at 1968’s Democratic National Convention.
SDS and its leaders were on the verge of making history, though no one could have predicted the group would grow into the most well known student organization of the 20th century.17 Their rapid growth, in no small part due to their vision and leadership, also owed a great deal to other movements of the era. In the South, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “Snick”) was collaborating with CORE and King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference to train northern supporters in community organizing and nonviolent civil disobedience. SNCC grew out of the lunch counter sit-ins of 1960, when four black members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s youth council refused to leave the “whites only” section of a restaurant in Greensboro, North Carolina. SNCC quickly became the leading force for the youth and students in the southern civil rights movement. Thousands of college students from all around the country descended on the southern states, participating in voter registration, freedom schools, sit-ins and direct actions. Within just a few months, more than 50,000 people either participated in or supported the campaigns including almost all of SDS’s early members.