On ‘Freedom Day’ in 1963, thousands of Chicago students skipped school to protest segregation

Although civil rights leaders including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. supported the designation of Oct. 22, 1963, as “Freedom Day,” its success was not guaranteed.

Older Black organizations and clergy didn’t relish asking parents to back a one-day school boycott to demonstrate that segregated schools weren’t limited to the South. It was politically dangerous for anyone beholden to the Boss, Mayor Richard J. Daley.

“Absenteeism is a serious problem and if children are absent with no excuse if might change their attitude,” said one of two Black school board members, identified in a Chicago Defender story as Mrs. Wendell Green.

The boycott stemmed in part from anger over Chicago Public Schools’ policies that included the use of portable classrooms that came to be known as Willis Wagons — after district Superintendent Benjamin Willis — to relieve overcrowding at schools in largely Black neighborhoods.

Locally, all bets were off on how “Freedom Day” would play out. But at 8:30 that morning, Defender reporters found signs of impending success. On streets usually crowded with kids headed to school, the sidewalks were eerily empty.

“Indicative of the response to the call for active protest, Wendell Phillips High School, located in the heart of the South Side ghetto, was almost deserted,” the Defender noted. “At Beale School, scene of racial disturbances earlier this year, the principal reported 136 out of an enrollment (of) 1,708 attended. Some classrooms were empty. Others were reported to have had as few as two students in them.”

Final estimates had more than 200,000 students skipping classes. At the same time, police estimated 8,000 to 10,000 protesters marched on City Hall and the Board of Education offices demanding Willis’ dismissal. “They were led by a Boy Scout drum and bugle corps,” the Tribune reported.

“Two sound trucks played recordings of a song written to the tune of ‘This is My Land’, a folk song. It began these schools are your schools, these schools are my schools. It included these words: The board is a one man rule. He (Willis) makes it a fool board.”

As the march began, Willis gave the school board a lowball estimate of 54% of grade school students and 38% of high school students being absent. Then he quickly adjourned the meeting in the board’s headquarters at 162 W. Wacker Drive. A few blocks over, boycott champions mounted a flatbed truck at LaSalle and Lake streets.

Among those who spoke were 3rd Ward Ald. Ralph Metcalfe and comedian Dick Gregory. Afterward, Gregory and a few protesters sneaked into the basement of the Board of Education. They intended to stage a sit-in, but were ousted by the cops when they reached the first floor.

“We are petitioning for the rewriting of history books so that the Negro is included,” a boycott leader told a Chicago Defender reporter. “Then and only then will whites be able to shed their feeling of false superiority.”

Most of the absent students simply stayed home. But some attended ad hoc Freedom Schools in churches, synagogues and union halls. They sang “We Shall Overcome” and heard the story of Black heroes missing from their textbooks: Harriet Tubman who rescued slaves before the Civil War. Crispis Attucks who escaped slavery and is considered the first American killed in the Revolutionary War.

The morning after the boycott, the Chicago Defender’s headline read:

“250,000 Kids Make Willis Eat Jim Crow.”

That day of protests was orchestrated in part by a pair of college students, Lawrence Landry, who was Black, and Roberta Galler, who was white and Jewish.

“The response to the boycott was overwhelming, far greater than we hoped,” Galler told the Tribune.

Galler and Landry were members of the Chicago chapter of Friends of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the youthful battalion of the civil rights crusade.

The Chicago boycott that Galler and Landry directed was precipitated by Willis’ unexpected resignation on Oct. 4, 1963. He was ticked off at the board, which he feared was secretly considering the demands of the Coordination Council of Community Organizations, a coalition of civil rights groups, and encroaching on his power.

Black Chicago delighted in Willis being gone. The white community, which largely supported Willis, assumed it wasn’t voluntary. The board was in an untenable position, and refused to accept his resignation. Willis played the stalemate for all it was worth.

“Board On Knees To Beg Willis; He Ignores Them,” a Defender headline read, summing up the impasse.

Willis went back to work six days before the scheduled school boycott.

“An even greater amount of confusion, chaos, and continued bullheadedness will exist now that Willis is returning apparently carte blanche,” Landry said.

Hired in 1953, Willis confronted a daunting problem. Chicago’s Black population had grown from 30,000 in 1900 to 500,000 in 1963. Due to overcrowding, schools with soaring enrollments went to two-shifts daily.

Suburbanization had left empty classrooms in white neighborhoods. Logic said students should be transferred from overcrowded Black schools to underused white schools. Prudence dictated patience.

Chicago’s considerable racial antipathies would likely be reinforced by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that overturned the separate but equal doctrine. Issued the year after Willis arrived in Chicago, the ruling’s effect reverberated even in liberal neighborhoods.

Willis took the path of least resistance: creating more classrooms in Black neighborhoods. To sugarcoat his policy, he embraced the “neighborhood school” movement.

It projected images of Tom Sawyer conning village urchins into whitewashing Aunt Polly’s fence. But it didn’t resonate in a South Side schoolyard newly covered with 40-foot aluminum classrooms.

Dubbed “Willis Wagons,” the superintendent liked such classrooms because they had wheels enabling them to be moved as neighborhood demographics changed. Black Chicagoans saw them blocking the way out of second-class citizenship.

In practice, the vast majority of Willis Wagons were stationed along the lines separating white from Black Chicago. After the boycott, the school board created an Advisory Panel on Integration of the Chicago Public Schools, chaired by Philip Hauser, a University of Chicago professor of sociology. A year later, Hauser spoke at the convention of the American Federation of Teachers.

“The Chicago Board of Education, and boards in other cities, did not create de facto segregated schooling,” Hauser said. “But from now on they must bear responsibility for its continuation.”

Anger over Willis wagons and school segregation led to a number of confrontations in addition to the Freedom Day school boycott. In August 1963, future U.S. senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, then a University of Chicago student, was arrested while protesting the issues with hundreds of others.

Any accomplishments of those protests and boycotts were deferred. Willis Wagons didn’t immediately disappear. But as a first step, the Black community vowed to vote the school board out if Willis’ contract was renewed when it expired in 1965. He resigned a year later.

“I think we made progress,” Rosie Simpson, a parent activist who took part in the school boycott, told the Tribune in 2018. “We did get rid of Willis and eventually we got rid of the Willis wagons.”

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