Monthly Archives: January 2014

Goodbye Old Friend: RIP Pete Seeger

28 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by in Activism, Chicago, Hyde Park Kenwood, Memoir

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Lucia drove all the way out here from Oakland because she wanted to be with me at her home and with the grandchildren on Tuesday morning for Obama’s first Inauguration.  We watched the Lincoln Memorial on her lap top – a wonderful show and cried tears of happiness, especially for me when I heard Pete Seeger sing. Did you know that man has played an important role in my life since I first heard him in 1948 at the Progressive Party convention in Philadelphia when Henry Wallace was running on a Progressive Party ticket for president against Harry Truman? I once heard Seeger introduced as the only human being who would sing and talk at the same time.

Attached is a bit I wrote on Pete Seeger.  Please note:  It was written after watching Obama’s first inauguration.

JANUARY 21, 2009 10:30 PM

Three generations of Pete Seeger memories came rushing to eighty year old me as I watched three generations of singers: Pete, Bruce Springsteen and Tao Seeger sing at the Lincoln Memorial the Monday before Obama’s Inauguration.

I first saw Pete Seeger hold his banjo high, belt out “Ain’t Gonna study war no more…”. That was1948 on a movie (or was it early tv?) screen from at the Progressive Party convention in Philadelphia when Henry Wallace was a third party candidate for president against Harry Truman. Wallace lost, but a young Pete Seeger joined up with the Weavers: Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays and Fred Hellerman . They topped the charts with “Good Night Irene” and “Tzenat, tzenat”

Then In the early 50’s, Sen. Joe McCarthy started a vendetta against anyone even the slightest liberal labeling them “Communists”, “Reds”, traitors. Pete was among the many entertainers who were black listed because he refused to testify before McCarthy’s committee. Consequently, Pete’s venues were cancelled, records were taken off the air and finding new venues was pretty near impossible.

Except for Hyde Park – Kewood, Chicago, that “hot bed of communist University of Chicago faculty “and the home of parlor pinks like me. There Pete found a concert home at our modest Kenwood Ellis preschool where he gave us many benefit concerts. I have multiple memories of multiple children sitting on my lap – a bright spot in those dark McCarthy years- listening to Pete, their small voices singing along with “Puff the Magic Dragon.”

One time Pete gave us parents an adult only concert with Blues singer, Big Bill Broonzy . Broonzy’s signature song was: ‘If you’s white, you’s alright,/ if you’s brown, stick around/ but if you’s black, get back, get back get back’). Broonzy, six and half feet tall, very black, played a 12 string steel guitar. After the concert we went our leftist friend’s home and stayed up all night listening to Seeger and Broonzy swap songs.

Pete’s first public concert, in the late 1950’s after McCarthy days, was right there in Hyde Park, that “hot bed of red communism”, the University of Chicago. Seeger kept giving encore after encore to an SRO house. When it came time to close Mandel Concert Hall, he led the entire audience out into a cold April day, all of us laying down our swords and shield, “Down by the Riverside”. We continued singing, bundled up on the steps of Mandel Hall until we froze up and decided to go home.

There followed concerts at orchestra hall, the phenomenal Weavers Reunion at Carnegie Hall. Both Seeger and the Weavers were back in the limelight.

In the late 1970’s, I saw Pete perform at the gym at Sonoma State University where I was re-entry student. A small child started crying, Pete stopped singing, walked down the aisle to the mother and child, sang a lullaby and the child went to sleep. He then returned to his presentation.

He sang at Berkeley High at Malvina Reynold’s memorial services singing Reynold’s songs and many of his own. Later, I took Lucia, my youngest daughter, who’d somehow never managed to see him (She had the flu or measles or something) to hear him sing with his grandson at Berkeley High. Then there was the time our whole family went to hear the Weaver’s Reunion at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley.

On Monday night in 2009. I learned for the first time, lyrics had been censored lyrics to “This Land is Your Land” – a song much used by Harry Truman in his 1948 campaign. There on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Pete sang these uncensored words in a hundred thousand voice sing-a-long:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing;
“That side was made for you and me.

“In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
“By the relief office I seen my people;
“As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
“Is this land made for you and me?

“Nobody living can ever stop me,
“As I go walking that freedom highway;
“Nobody living can ever make me turn back
“This land was made for you and me.”*

When I look back over sixty-five years of hearing Pete Seeger’s voice of hope, of love, of compassion, I wonder if Pete isn’t an incarnation of Elijah, reappearing to bring peace to the world.

 

Gensie

16 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by in Activism, Chicago, Civil Rights, Hyde Park Kenwood, Memoir

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This was written in 1950, in the early days of Hyde Park’s experiment in creating a viable interracial urban community. The Hyde Park Kenwood Conference was a strong grass roots organization which joined together diverse ethnic and racial groups by means of block group meetings and social activities. This was a beginning of a time for the white population to listen to the peoples of color.

Gensie

We sat around Herb and Lenore T.‘s living room, ten or twelve of us, at a meeting of the Maryland Drexel block group of the Conference. Everyone was busy counting white faces. black faces and Asian faces. Nobody admitted, especially to themselves, that they were counting. People talked about rats in the alleys and street lighting; how Hyde Park must not become a slum and that we need to press for city services. All valid complaints, but an easy way to avoid talking about the real issues: race. Everyone was afraid to ask what if felt like to be black (a term not yet invented in 1950) or white. No one dared ask the University professor if he liked living next door to a Pullman porter. Or how the Pullman porter liked living next to the professor. The issues were there, but never placed on the table.

Until Gensie F. appeared at a meeting.

She was a small woman, stylishly dressed is a tailored suit with a shy feathered hat perched on her head. Her soft voice was commanding, so filled with quiet rage that the room stopped breathing.

“You folks think because I moved here and because my house was torn down by Slum Clearance ? That I lived in a slum? Do you honestly believe that Negroes bring slums with them? “Well, let me tell you something. I had a home that looked out on the Lake. Every morning I woke up early to watch the sun rise over that lake and into my house. In all the years I lived there, the Lake was never the same color twice; sometimes it was purple, sometimes it was green, and sometimes, in a fog, it was silver. “That’s the house they told me was a slum, I had three fireplaces with tile scenes on them: one had cupids, another knights and ladies, and another pyracantha leaves. My oak floors were beautifully refinished and every Saturday I polished my brass door knobs.

“One day this man I never saw before knocks and my door and tells me the Slum Clearance is going to tear down my beautiful home. He offered to buy my house for a third of what it was worth. I refused. He told me I had no choice. Slum Clearance would take my house with eminent domain.

So what could I do? I took the little money they gave me and went partners with my sister. We purchased a small house in Hyde Park. I come to meetings now and hear everyone talking about rats in the alley and not wanting to make a slum. Let me tell you: I never made a slum, I didn’t take a slum with me when I moved. And like a lot of Negroes, all we want is a decent place to live, to raise our families. Sometime, I drive past my where my old home was. Everything is gone. Instead, there are white only apartment buildings for the rich folks to watch the sun rise over the Lake. Evidently, that’s not for colored school teachers like me.

Hyde Park, 1950

10 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by in Activism, Chicago, Hyde Park Kenwood, Memoir

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(note from Penny: this is the first of many essays/articles from “Fragment of a Memoir: Hyde Park Herald 1952-1967″.  I’ve always known of Hyde Park Kenwood on the south side of Chicago as “The First Integrated Neighborhood In America” but there is much, much more to the story. It is a story of displacement, urban renewal, and people coming together in new and groundbreaking ways)

 

1950

Hyde Park- 1950- the winter I moved in. Here was a one mile square community inclusive of the prestigious University of Chicago. Bordered on the East by Lake Michigan, parks, and beaches; on the North by an African American ghetto, on the West by a large urban park separating the university’s white community from the black neighborhoods pushing against it. To the South was a broad greensward, the Midway Plaissance, stretching one mile east to west, separating the academic world of the University from the rest of the city. The “Midway”, as it was called, was a remnant of the 1893 Chicago Colombian Exposition. Along the lake front was “Indian Village” so called because each of the high rise apartment buildings had Indian names, Algonquin, Chippewa, etc. including several steel and glass apartment buildings designed by avant garde Bauhuas architect, Meis Van de Rohe. Moving inland from the Lake were stone townhouses and large three and six flat apartment buildings occupied by middle and upper middle class academic and professional families. Heading west from the Lake, the number of single family homes and townhouses decreased, more and more six flat buildings appeared.

Until after World War II, Hyde Park Kenwood had a predominantly white and heavily Jewish population. In 1948, the Supreme Court declared respective covenants unconstitutional. Concurrently, two miles North of Hyde Park in what was considered the “black belt”, the Chicago Land Clearance began mass demolition. Large tracts of homes and apartments, owned by African Americans were acquired by the City of Chicago using powers of imminent domain often paying far below the market price for the properties. These were demolished, sold to white real estate developers for the construction of high price, high rise rentals. African American homeowners and tenants were left with no place to live.

African American families looked South to Hyde Park. Many joined together to purchase six and eight flat buildings on Hyde Park’s western edge. It was then, in late 1949, that a group of Unitarians, Quakers, Jews, and liberal U of C academicians met to explore welcoming the new neighbors. A grass roots group, the Hyde Park Kenwood Community Conference, was formed. Their goal was the creation of the first stable integrated community in the nation.. The Conference formed block groups, invited neighbors to gather together to meet one another and discuss needs of the immediate area. Gensie Fields and Dr. Gleason are specific examples of the kind of interchange which took place within the aegis of the Conference.

The winter of 1950 I moved, with my first husband, Warren and infant son Steve into a six flat building on the western edge of Hyde Park. Our landlord was an Asian Indian (I’d never before seen an Asian Indian) who was quite explicit about not being “colored,” but “Caucasian.” An orthodox Jewish couple, escapees of the Holocaust, lived across the hall. Six months after we moved in, they moved out- too many “schwartzes”. On the second floor were two Chinese couples, one with a little girl Steve’s age, and an African American couple with no children. I looked at my building -5548 Maryland Avenue –observed my neighbors- many of whom were African American. Pleased that I was far from the segregated South I’d grown up in. I was living with Negroes in an integrated world.

Every Wednesday, a stack of Hyde Park Herald newspapers was deposited in our building lobby- In that newspaper, every single week, were photographs of African American people and white people, side by side at meetings and at social functions. An integrated paper in an integrated community. In those pages I saw an actualization of an ideal from my childhood: as a nine year old hearing Paul Robeson sing “”Ballad for Americans”; as a teenager intent on author activist, Lillian Smith’s goal of all the children of the world – of all races, all colors or all religions, playing together, Now this seemed true on the pages of the Hyde Park Herald.

Two years later I joined its staff as advertising sales rep.

The Tea Party: A True Story About My Mother

04 Saturday Jan 2014

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THE TEA PARTY
(A True Story About my Mother)

By Marylou Shira Hadditt

In 1933 Sophie was tired of rented homes and went shopping for a home of her own. Since nothing she saw on the housing market suited her, she convinced Lawrence to build her a house. After making my father drive the streets of Atlanta for nearly a year, she found the perfect site for her dream house: in exclusive Druid Hills, she chose a steep lot with three large oak trees and two dogwoods in the front, ascending an acre to a partially landscaped back yard. Sophie insisted on an architect -designed house and, because Lawrence got status from his beautiful well-dressed wife, she always got her way. Atlanta’s most noted architects were retained to design and supervise construction of a perfectly ordinary white-washed brick Cape Cod cottage centered on the crest of the hill, behind the oaks. Sophie was very specific about her desires; she wanted green porcelain fixtures in the bathroom, black and white tiles in the kitchen, and a slate roof. The architects told her slate would not be practical in a house with steep dormers, that the slates could break in a rain or ice storm. A composition roof would be better. Sophie was stubborn and refused to approve anything other than Vermont slate, “That’s final”, she said. No one dared cross her.

Bootsie and Sophie c.1939

Bootsie and Sophie c.1939

The house was completed in time to move in on New Years day, 1934, so my father could listen to the Rose Bowl game in our new house. Sophie decided to give an open house in early February when the jonquils and forsythia were in bloom. She and Necie (my Nanny and our housekeeper) spent hours dusting, polishing, wiping, vacuuming to create a spotless house. Grandma came over to make tea sandwiches: little hearts, clubs, spades and diamonds cut from soft white bread and filled with layers of pink and green dyed cream cheese. Necie alternated between baking cakes and polishing the silver tea service borrowed from the jewelry store.

The Tea Party afternoon arrived. I was posted in the entrance hall, dressed in a pale blue iridescent taffeta dress, pale blue hair bow, pale blue lace tipped socks in my little Mary Janes holding a silver tray, curtseying and saying, “Welcome to our new house. May I have your calling card?” Everything, including six year old me, had to be perfect, precisely as Sophie has dreamed.

Except the slates rebelled.

Last week’s hail was followed by a pelting rain storm. The slates cracked, water seeped through the broken slates saturating the attic insulation. The morning of the party, a blister formed in the living room bay window. By noon, it had become a large bubble with a constant drip. Necie put a pail underneath to catch the water. Sophie anxiously watched, hoping a miracle would cause the bubble to disappear. A half hour before the party, she had Necie replace the zinc pail with a sterling silver ice bucket. If she had a leak, she’d at least do it in style.

The cousins and aunties were the first to arrive and greeted me with their usual attack of pinched cheeks and calling me a “living doll”.

Bootsie

Bootsie

Sophie ritually embraced them, gave them a tour of the house and with a slight cough and giggle, apologized for the ever enlarging bubble on the ceiling.

“Of course the architects insisted that we have a slate roof for a house of this style and period. They said anything else would not be fitting”, Sophie spoke with complete aplomb. “It’s from Vermont, you know”. In the midst of her explanations, short, plump Aunt Esther, bounded into the living room, speaking faster than her rapid pace:

“Oh, Sophie! I love your house … I’m so glad you got your jonquils in the ground early enough so they are blooming and the forsythia look perfect under those green shutters … and that Jenny Lind portrait is just right over the mantel … and such nice marble … from Vermont?” Aunt Esther seldom stopped talking long enough to take a breath.

“No. Georgia.”

“Well, it’s certainly the handsomest black marble I’ve ever seen … matching seams … Sophie, they did a fine job on the details. I bet you and Lawrence are really pleased.. and, oh! My goodness. What is that?”
She pointed to the dripping bubble in the bay window.

Sophie tied to be nonchalant. “Well, Esther, the architects insisted that we have a slate roof no matter what Lawrence or I said, so we figured we’d hired the experts, we should listen to them.”

“From the looks of that thing, Sophie … Hmmmm. Ought to be something we can do about that before everybody arrives. Hmmmm.”

Aunt Esther walked over and stood directly under the dripping bubble, then she asked me to run into the kitchen and tell Necie to bring a pail and a small ladder. “Don’t just stand there, Mary Louise. Scoot!”

I looked at Sophie who was frozen with her back against the mantel, her shoulders erect, refusing to admit to anyone, and especially herself, that she had made a mistake. She held her hands together across her abdomen, determined to give the appearance of serenity. Sophie nodded for me to follow Aunt Esther’s instructions.

Necie, wearing her pink “serving” uniform, came into the living room toting a battered apple green step stool in one hand and the old zinc pail in the other. Sophie watched, biting her lip.

Aunt Esther put the ladder under the bubble, “Mary Louise, now you come over here and hold my hat for me. Careful, I don’t want it to get squashed … no, no, give me the hat pin … that’s it… thank you. Now, Necie, I want you to hold the pail right under this bubble and hold it good and steady because I don’t want any spills…quick now.”
She heisted her tight skirt, climbed the small ladder, reached up, pushed her gold beaded hat pin into the bubble, watched first a dribble, then a gusher, filling the pail. Aunt Esther climbed down from the ladder, brushed her hands on her skirt, put her hat on, fastened it with the hat pin. She told Necie to remove the ladder and pail so we could get on with the party.

My mother was a proud woman. I watched her almost succumb. I was afraid her honor would gush out like the water from the bubble. Her shoulders drooped over her chest and she looked almost as short as Aunt Esther. Sophie lowered her head, struggling to hold back the tears.

“I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me, Miss Sophie,” Necie’s firm voice unequivocally spoke to the Lady of the House.

“Thank you, Necie”. Sophie straightened her shoulders, pressed her hands against her skirt, brushed back a straggling hair, raised her head in a proud smile, nodded to Aunt Esther and reminded me to open the door for guests.
END