Africana Studies Instructor

I mean, for example, where I grew up on the West Side [Chicago, Illinois], when the Latino community first began to move over there--the Mexican community, Cermak Road was the division line and the Douglas Park [Chicago, Illinois] train. Black people didn't go south of that. Mexicans didn't go north of it. That's changed to a very large extent now, but at that point, in the, what, early '60s [1960s] throughout the '60s [1960s], never done, never done. When I worked for Harold Washington, I remember being assigned one day to help work with police in stamping out the tension 'cause some Mexican families had gone north of Ogden Avenue to go to a playground and had been--one of the girls had been raped by somebody from the Vice Lords [Conservative Vice Lords] and the Latin Council--Latin Kings, at the time, got in their cars--fifty, sixty cars with shot guns, had cruised 16th Street. And in return the Vice Lord, had put fifty, sixty men, and gone into the 21st Street, Little Village [Chicago, Illinois] area. It was about to go up. That's how I first got to know people like [HistoryMaker] Howard Saffold and others because that was--we really was on the cusp of a major riot. But I think the antecedents of all those kind of tensions rests in the earlier period in this rigid apartheid-like character to the city.$$Do you have any sense of why Chicago [Illinois] is like that? I mean of--$$Well, I think partly it's the industrial system that brought people here in groups. I mean the steel industry was really crucial, and it brought groupings of people here as groups, specifically, often to set them off against earlier groupings who had unionized.$$So that explains like say in South Chicago [Chicago, Illinois], you have like the Irish and you--then they bring in all the Croatians and Eastern Europeans, then the Mexicans, you know, I guess. So--$$Honkies, you know--my mother [Sadie Crain Nesbitt] was the first person to tell me what a honky was. And people today, the honkies were some white group, no, honkies came from Hungarians and they got that term out of the steel mill situation, the mills and the plants, where that was a term used when large groups of Hungarians were brought in, en masse, often to displace or replace workers that had been organized.$$Yeah, it was--so to go to one part of the city to the next--now, you were going to the north, from the West Side to the North Side?$$We were going to the north, from the West Side (simultaneous)--$$(Simultaneous) The North Side has been, you know, has been more, traditionally, more cosmopolitan than other parts of town.$$It wasn't then though.$$Okay.$$In the '50s [1950s] and '60s [1960s], it was not that cosmopolitan. That was an all-white, working class area. Clark Street from Diversey [Parkway] south all the way to the Loop [Chicago, Illinois] was all-white, working class.$$So you needed some allies on the streetcar.$$We had to have allies on the streetcars (laughter) going--I remember very much an Armenian guy that I went to Francis Parker [Francis W. Parker School, Chicago, Illinois] with. He and I used to get tired of Parker and we'd go over to Waller High School [Robert A. Waller High School], which today is called Lincoln Park High School [Chicago, Illinois] and we'd eat ten-cent hot dogs with greasy French fries and play basketball 'cause you could find a few Puerto Rican and black guys, a few, at Waller High School. Waller was known to be a bit different kind of little place, but those other schools up there, Senn [Nicholas Senn High School, Chicago, Illinois] and Lake View [Lake View High School, Chicago, Illinois]--it was a race riot when you played them.$The meeting with Nyerere [Julius Nyerere] was just the first of several that I would have in the period of time that I was in and out of Dar es Salaam [Tanzania] but it was--it was one of the things that was formative for me, was to get to know Julius Nyerere somewhat and to be at the White House [Ikulu, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania], at his presidential residence, I think a couple times in '65 [1965], '66 [1966] and later in the period of '68 [1968] and '69 [1969]. I was in Dar es Salaam at one of the most exciting periods to be there. I went there as a student '65 [1965], '66 [1966]. I would later come back to work for the Mozambique Liberation Front [FRELIMO] in '68 [1968] and '69 [1969]. But in that, those two periods of time, incredible stuff was happening. Dar es Salaam was the center of the liberation struggles in Africa by that point. I remember going to a seminar, for example, held at a place called Patrice Lumumba Institute, in Dar es Salaam and the person speaking at the seminar was Che Guevara. It was unannounced. My professor was teaching adult studies at the Lumumba Institute and also taught me political science, a woman named Irene Brown, a wonderful socialist from Britain. She told me that, to come by and lo and behold I get there and who's doing the seminar but Che Guevara--the Che Guevara, and that's not unusual in the Dar es Salaam, in that atmosphere of this extraordinary sea town with all the liberation movements having offices there. And so for me, it was an awakening of a whole new world that I had really not had that kind of exposure to. I--when I got off the plane in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the first thing that happened was a group of refugees, students from South Africa, who were students with me at the university, three of four of them, one of them whom would become my roommate, wonderful man named Leffert Singye [ph.]. They took me immediately to go and listen to a man speak, a record that they had, a 78, to tell you how long ago. We cranked it to play it. And it was Nelson Mandela's speech, "Why I'm prepared to die," [I Am Prepared to Die] which, that he gave at the Rivonia Trial, which was in '63 [1963] [sic. 1964]. So it's, you know, this is only '65 [1965], so it was sort of living current history and that kind of thing happened all the time, the, all the liberation movements had offices there. I spent a lot of time at another place that was called, the Kurasini School for Refugees [Kurasini Special Training Center, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania], which was run by the African American Institute [Africa-America Institute, New York, New York], which later I would learn much about it that was questionable, but at that time, it was an important school for South African, and Namibian, and Zimbabwean and Malawian refugees, all of whom had fled their countries, and had come to be based at Dar es Salaam. At the same time, during the period that I was there, especially the second trip, Nyerere opened up Tanzania to African Americans, coming as a haven for African Americans to come. And he urged them to come and bring their skills and resources. And I have to say that (laughter) it was a kind of mixed bag of folks that came and some of them were quite dubious. I remember the classic case of a dentist from here in Chicago [Illinois], who had killed his wife. I can't remember his name (simultaneous)--$$(Simultaneous) Yeah, there is a, that's a famous story and--$$That's a famous case.$$--I know he's related to [HistoryMaker] Oscar Brown, Jr.$$That's exactly right--$$--and there--it's never been really proven that he killed his wife, but they--$$His wife was, his wife was related to Oscar Brown, Jr.$$Right, that's right, right, but--$$But my family is related to Oscar Brown, Jr. My--one of my aunt's twin sister was Dorothy Brown, who was married to William Brown [William H. Brown], who was Oscar Brown, Sr.'s--the older one, and they had a law practice [Brown, Brown, Green and McLaughlin, Chicago, Illinois] together right there on 47th, in the old professional building at 47th Street and, then it was South Parkway Boulevard [Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive, Chicago, Illinois]. So we heard a lot about this from the family's point of view.$$Yeah, it's a celebrated case. It's been covered on one of the--even the, television magazine shows did a piece on it once.$$Yeah. The family I don't think had any ambiguity about this, and I think he was, it was only more recently that finally he was extradited back to Cook County [Illinois] (simultaneous).$$(Simultaneous) Right, because I think he stayed in Uganda with Idi Amin for a while.$$I think he stayed in a number of places in Africa.