Vintage Chicago Tribune: Bernie Sanders, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. protest against ‘Willis wagons’ in schools

Kori Rumore, Marianne Mather, Chicago Tribune
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Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders was arrested in Chicago 60 years ago this week.

Then a 21-year-old University of Chicago student, Sanders was charged with resisting arrest during an Aug. 12, 1963 demonstration in Englewood — along with comedian Dick Gregory and 54 others — against the use of mobile classrooms in the city’s public schools.

Chicago Public Schools superintendent Benjamin Willis refused to allow Black children to be bused from their crowded neighborhood schools to those in white areas with more resources. That’s why the portable classroom trailers were nicknamed “Willis wagons” and became symbolic of the city’s long struggle over segregated education.

Demonstrations against Willis wagons were a precursor to a more sweeping civil rights movement in Chicago that drew the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to the city in 1966 — the same year Willis resigned.

Mobile classrooms began to be phased out of Chicago schools in the 1970s, but photographic proof of Sanders’ participation in the 1963 Englewood protest wouldn’t be discovered in the Tribune archives until decades later — when he was a Democratic presidential hopeful.

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June 8, 1953: Chicago ‘is a challenge which no man interested in public education can decline’

Benjamin Willis, of Buffalo, N.Y., accepts a $30,000 per year (roughly $340,000 in today’s dollars) offer to become superintendent of Chicago Public Schools.

His decision, Willis said, was based on two considerations: first, “the challenge presented by a position which offers greater opportunity in the number of persons to be served,” and second, “the professional advancement involved.”

Soon he would become the highest paid school official in the United States — and the third-highest paid public official, trailing only President John F. Kennedy ($100,000) and New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller ($50,000).

May 17, 1954: School segregation banned

The Supreme Court rules unanimously — in the Brown v. Board of Education case — that separating Black and white children is unconstitutional because it denies Black children the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.

The Brown decision overturned the court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which on May 18, 1896, established a “separate but equal” doctrine for Blacks in public facilities.

“In the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote. “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

Sept. 18, 1961: Lawsuit filed over CPS adherence to ‘neighborhood school’ policy

A lawsuit filed on behalf of 32 Black children — who attend five overly crowded elementary schools — accuses Willis of drawing school districts on racial lines and seeks a court order to allow the children to register at desegregated schools outside their present school districts where there are vacancies.

“Dr. Willis is fully aware that by rigidly adhering to these district lines he has compelled the children to attend not only racially segregated schools, but schools at which they are only able to obtain a part time education,” the lawsuit says.

Willis denied the allegations of gerrymandering district boundaries to keep the Chicago school system segregated. Instead, he says the double shift classes — where students attend school in half-day shifts — are the result of an overwhelming increase in enrollment in those areas.

December 1961: Chicago Urban League report finds 382 empty classrooms — most in white schools

Most of the empty rooms were in predominantly white neighborhoods, the report said, while largely Black neighborhoods had overcrowded schools. The report also found that Black schools received only two-thirds of the funding that white schools received.

Willis says only 14 classrooms are empty and that the “alleged 382 undercounted rooms evaporate into thin air when a proper and valid comparison is made.”

Jan. 10, 1962: Chicago Board of Education earmarks $1.35 million for purchase of mobile trailer classrooms

Rather than allowing children to enroll at underutilized white schools that in many cases were only a few blocks away, Willis recommends the purchase of 150 trailer classrooms as a solution to overcrowding and double shifts in schools on the city’s West and South sides. The more than $300 million budget for 1962 — the largest in Chicago Public Schools’ history at the time — earmarked funds for the 30-student portable trailers. The purchase of these trailers was approved by the board two weeks later.

“The job of the public school system is not integration but education of every child regardless of race, color or creed,” Board president William G. Caples told reporters.

“Board of education members should quit and make room for others if they do not want to face up to the problem of eliminating segregation in the Chicago school system,” said Rev. Arthur M. Brazier, pastor of the Apostolic Church of God and spokesperson for the Temporary Woodlawn Organization.

Opponents of the mobile classrooms start nicknaming them “Willis wagons” after the controversial CPS superintendent.

1962-65: Demonstrators call for Willis to resign

Where portable classrooms were installed, picket signs followed.

On May 18, 1962, 1,000 students boycotted classes at Carnegie Elementary School. Protesters held an eight-day sit-in at the office of the school board president in July 1963. One of the most publicized protests was held in August 1963 when activists blocked the installation of wagons in a vacant lot adjacent to the railroad tracks at 73rd Street and Lowe Avenue.

Willis resigned his position on Oct. 4, 1963, citing the school board’s encroachment on his authority. A Superior court judge had ordered him to put into effect a pupil transfer directive adopted by the school board. That order was rescinded and Willis remained superintendent.

Almost half of all Chicago Public Schools students — roughly 200,000 — boycott during a “Freedom Day” protest on Oct. 22, 1963.

1966: Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. moves to Chicago to assist the city’s fledgling civil rights movement

Three years after delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech and two years after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, King moved to Chicago to lead what he called “the first significant freedom movement in the North.”

King led marches — including one through Marquette Park in which he was struck in the head by a rock and announced, “I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today” — and met with city leaders to discuss how to provide better schools and housing for Chicago’s Black community.

May 23, 1966: Willis announces resignation

Though he had promised previously to retire on his 65th birthday (Dec. 23, 1966), Willis says he will step down Aug. 31, 1966 to allow for a more orderly transition for his successor.

April 11, 1979: Federal government says actions kept Chicago schools racially segregated for 35 years

Thirteen years after Willis left the Chicago school system, the U.S. Office for Civil Rights charges in a 102-page document that the Chicago Board of Education had systematically contained Black students in overcrowded, segregated schools, primarily through the use of mobile classrooms.

After the federal agency’s findings, the Chicago schools moved to create Magnet Schools and other programs that attract students from across the city.

Magnet schools and other programs designed to draw students from across the city were created in response to the findings.

Fall 1976: Willis wagons scrapped

No longer needed since school populations were decreasing, CPS Superintendent Joseph Hannon begins to eliminate mobile classrooms and introduces a multiphase plan to discontinue their use.

Feb. 19, 2016: Arrest photo of young activist Bernie Sanders emerges from Tribune archives

The black-and-white photo shows a 21-year-old Sanders, then a University of Chicago student, being taken by Chicago police toward a police wagon during a 1963 protest. An acetate negative of the photo was found in the Tribune’s archives more than 50 years later, said Marianne Mather, a Tribune photo editor.

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