Jim Crow Lives On in Cicero

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The Justice Department sues to end old-fashioned racism

In the 1920s Cicero achieved a measure of national notoriety for being the home base of Al Capone. In the early 1950s the industrial Chicago suburb achieved another, uglier kind of infamy after a young black bus driver and his family moved into the all-white town. A mob of several thousand whites hounded them out of Cicero and set fire to their furniture as police stood idly by. Today, some 30 years later there are still rackets and plenty of brawling honky-tonks along South Cicero Avenue. And the town is still astoundingly white. Indeed, residents seem nostalgic about Capone's gang and as panicked as ever about the specter of a black invasion. Al didn't bother us much in Cicero," says a retired foundry worker who was a boy when Capone came to town, "and we didn't bother him. But we can't count on the colored not to bother us like Al did."

Now the Justice Department has stepped in to make sure Cicero is bothered It charges that Cicero officials have gone out of their way to violate two federal laws by keeping blacks off the municipal payroll and preventing blacks from moving into town at all. U.S. Attorney Dan Webb calls it perhaps "the most egregious, aggravated case of race discrimination" his office has ever prosecuted. The statistical evidence is stark. The 1980 census found only 74 blacks in a population of 61,232, despite the fact that adjacent Chicago is 40% black. Not one of Cicero's schoolchildren is black. Nor are any of its 400 municipal workers, since Cicero requires that its employees live there for a year before they can be hired.

The Justice Department charges that town officials have threatened and "physically harassed" prospective black residents. All but seven of Cicero's blacks work at Sportsman's Park Race Track and live on the grounds in cinder-block huts for the eight months the thoroughbreds are running. "I don't go far from the track," says Raymond Johnson, 31 a groom since 1976. "It's just a known fact: Cicero is Cicero, the same as it's always been—racist. You watch your step." In the fall of 1980, two black race-track families enrolled their children in Drexel Elementary School, three blocks away. A crowd of glaring white parents forewarned, confronted the five children on their first day of school. The principal declared that he could not guarantee their safety. The youngsters did not return after the first week, and no black in Cicero has dared to register since.

Ronnie Stackhouse, 23, a black who manages a fried-chicken restaurant in nearby Forest Park, rented an apartment in Cicero last February. His car was promptly shot at and, in April, firebombed. At police headquarters, while Stackhouse was describing the attack his scarred car parked just outside was battered again. When he went back inside to report the new violence, police arrested him for disorderly conduct. "I get a lot of harassment," says Stackhouse, who lives with his wife and two children. "People yelling at me from cars. Right now the neighbors don't yell too much. I guess they got used to me."