Grimy Cicero, Ill. (pop. 67,000), which huddles close to Chicago's west boundary, has never had a reputation for being exclusive. During the roaring '20s, the Torrio-Capone mob roared through Cicero's streets in armored cars, ruled its wide-open gambling joints, honky-tonks and whorehouses. Cicero is also an industrial town, with tree-lined neighborhoods of workingmen's homes, and friendly corner taverns where jukeboxes play lively polkas and the talk at the bar is in many languages. Though its history is pockmarked with crime and violence, Cicero makes one proud boast: no Negroes live there.
That was one thing Harvey E. Clark Jr. didn't know. Clark, a Negro, graduate (A.B.) of Fisk University and a World War II sergeant, was sick of living in a tiny apartment on Chicago's South Side, with his two kids sleeping in the windowless hallway. He rented an apartment in Cicero.* But when he tried to move his family in last month, two Cicero cops refused to let the Clarks unload their furniture because they had no "permit." Beefy Police Chief Erwin Konovsky arrived, ordered the Clarks to leave town. The real-estate agent who rented the apartment said Chief Konovsky struck him several times and shouted: "Get out of Cicero and don't come back ... or you'll get a bullet through you."
Growing Crowd. Clark, a Chicago bus driver, decided to make an issue of it. He filed a $200,000 damage suit in federal court against Cicero officials and the town of Cicero. The court issued a temporary injunction, warning Cicero police to see to it that the Clarks were not molested.
But when they returned to Cicero last week and moved their furniture into the apartment, they found a handful of Cicero and Cook County police—and a large and hostile crowd. Frightened, the Clarks left —but the crowd didn't. Until midnight, the crowd milled in the street, booing, and jeering when Cook County Sheriff John Babb ordered them to disperse, occasionally throwing stones.
Next night the crowd was back, again, bigger and in an uglier mood. The 50 cops made no effort to stop teen-agers who, from well-hidden positions, tossed stones at windows in the Clark apartment.
Violence at Midnight. Around midnight the mob got bolder. A dozen or so young bloods rushed the cops at the doorway to the apartment house, pushed past them, smashed in the front door, clambered upstairs to the Clark apartment. Out the window, to the accompaniment of cheers from the crowd, went all of the Clarks' furniture, including a piano. Then the young vandals tore out door and window jambs, gouged holes in the walls, ripped out light fixtures, smashed radiators, a refrigerator and stove, bashed in the toilet bowl. For good measure they ripped up two apartments below the Clarks (the tenants, like most of the 19 families in the apartment house, had long since fled). Then the mass of broken furniture on the lawn was set afire and the cheers grew louder. Police did not make a single arrest. At about 2:30, the mob once again faded away, but everybody knew that it would be back.