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This is nothing new for a neighborhood where Irish and German gangs fought pitched battles in the streets during the 1850s. But the intolerance has roots in the present as well as the past. Since 1980, when low real estate prices began drawing Chinese and Mexicans into Bridgeport, the ethnic texture of the place has changed dramatically. Today Halsted Street, Bridgeport's commercial artery, is a bustling carnival of whites, Mexicans, Asians and blacks who mingle in the bakeries, the grocery stores and the luncheonettes.
Bridgeport whites began to feel abandoned when Mayor Daley departed the family seat in 1993 and purchased a new home on the city's tony South Loop. "You can feel a lot of fear going through the neighborhood," says Dominic A. Pacyga, a historian at Columbia College who grew up near Bridgeport. "People say to themselves, 'Is this another nail in the coffin?' They feel that it's not home anymore."
Some whites are determined to protect their dwindling enclave with an unwritten set of rules governing which avenues minority residents can walk on, which parks their children may play in and what time they must be off the streets. The rules are enforced subtly--steely glares, selective ticketing of cars, storekeepers who follow shoppers from aisle to aisle--and in more brutal fashion: racial epithets, trash thrown on lawns, windows shattered and beatings of the sort administered to Lenard Clark. "Here the No. 1 issue is color," says Curly Cohen, director of the Bridgeport Volunteer Center. "If you don't learn the rules fast, you could be dead."
Reggie Miller, 15, has been studying the rules ever since his family became one of the few black families to move to Bridgeport in 1994. Even so, he has been spit upon, chased, beaten up "dozens of times," called "nigger" and had a beer bottle broken over his head. "I feel like we don't belong in our own home," he says. Which seems fine by those whites in Bridgeport whose greatest fear is encroachment from the Stateway projects, part of a stretch of high-rise ghettos on Chicago's South Side where the porches are caged in steel mesh, 70% of the residents are under the age of 17, and, in the words of Sarah Johnson, a 19-year-old mother, "You just keep the little kids inside the house and pray."
That ghetto is what Reggie Miller's family moved up from when they came to Bridgeport. It is what Lenard Clark may return to, if and when he recovers from the treatment he received in Bridgeport. And it is what most terrifies those who terrorize others--not only within Bridgeport but throughout Chicago and in other parts of the country as well. "That's part of the tragedy of this event," declares Pacyga. "This isn't a Bridgeport problem. It's an American problem. And if we don't solve these problems on the South Side of Chicago, we're not going to solve them anywhere."
--Reported by Julie Grace/Chicago