As Bradford explained in a subsequent essay, the federally insured loans provided “the certainty that FHA will take the property from the lender after foreclosure and pay the claim,” and that led to lax underwriting and the profligate issuance of loans because “neither the mortgage companies that originated them nor the investor that purchased them—basically FNMA [popularly known as Fannie Mae, the Federal National Mortgage Association] cared about the soundness of the loans.” Indeed, as Bradford later observed, “the financial incentives were so great that scores of real estate agents, lenders, and even FHA officials engaged in fraud in order to make sales to unqualified and unsuspecting minority homebuyers.” The end result, as dramatically witnessed in Roseland, was “the government taking all of the losses and the communities suffering all the devastation” of foreclosed and abandoned homes.27
The impact of such policies and such behavior could be seen all across Roseland, both in “board-ups”—homes with plywood covering their windows—and in the rapid decline of the South Michigan Avenue shopping district. One group, the Greater Roseland Organization (GRO), founded in 1969, tried to ease the racial transition. The GRO was comprised of smaller, neighborhood-specific groups such as the Pullman Civic Organization and the Roseland Heights Community Association, and it included both older white residents, like Holy Rosary’s Ralph Viall, and newly arrived African Americans, like Mary Bates and Lenora Rodgers. With funding support from both CHD and the Chicago Community Trust, GRO emerged in the early 1980s as the only audible voice speaking for the neighborhood.
The summer of 1980 saw the first stirrings of gang influence in Roseland, and in September the long-famous Gatelys Peoples Store, the largest business on South Michigan Avenue, closed. A citywide study of different neighborhoods’ needs described Gatelys’ closure as “psychologically … probably the most serious blow imaginable” to Roseland’s economic well-being. Then early in 1981, in three separate incidents, three teenage students at Fenger High School were shot and killed. By this time, close to five hundred properties in Roseland and West Pullman were in foreclosure, and more than sixteen thousand people, one-quarter of Roseland’s population, were receiving public aid. A study of recent job losses in the area highlighted Wisconsin’s closing and stated, “Many of these workers were Roseland residents.” Their prospects for new steel plant jobs were nonexistent, the report underscored: “People in these types of jobs are not merely out of work, they are out of careers.”
A parallel study, focusing on men who had lost their jobs at U.S. Steel’s South Works, found that 47 percent had not found new employment, but that summary statistic concealed a significant racial disparity: 67 percent of black workers were still unemployed, as compared to only 32 percent of whites. “Once laid off from their mill jobs,” the study noted, “blacks in particular remain the least likely to find new jobs.”
In early 1983, Lenora Rodgers mounted a renewed push to win foundation funding for GRO. She told one foundation that “community organizing and an issue-based community organization is the key to neighborhood preservation.” She said GRO’s greatest need was to hire organizers, since “organizers help to identify new and potential leaders” who could mobilize Roseland against the dangers engulfing it. But Rodgers’s efforts were unsuccessful, and by April 1984 GRO was no longer responding to letters from potential funders.28
As Jerry Kellman extended CCRC’s presence into Roseland early in 1984, he accepted office space at Bill Stenzel’s Holy Rosary Parish in lieu of dues. IACT and UNO continued their antidumping protests, with Lena’s name appearing in Chicago newspapers almost weekly. On January 30, 1984, a city council committee, spurred by Alderman Vrdolyak’s desire to at least appear to be against dumping, approved a one-year moratorium on new landfills within the city. In mid-February Lena joined U.S. Representative Paul Simon, a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate seat held by Republican Chuck Percy, as he toured South Deering and its neighboring waste sites. Two days later, when the full city council approved the one-year moratorium, Vrdolyak amended the measure to exempt liquid waste handlers and transfer stations, leading Mayor Washington’s backers to oppose the diluted ban.29
March 1984 was the fourth anniversary of Wisconsin Steel’s shutdown. Mayor Washington spoke at an SOJC anniversary rally, and on March 28, Frank Lumpkin and others picketed International Harvester’s downtown headquarters. Frank told one reporter he believed four hundred of the three thousand ex-Wisconsin steelworkers had died in the last four years. Later he told a U.S. congressional subcommittee that nowadays in South Chicago “the only ambition a kid can have is to steal hubcaps. There is nothing else there. There’s no jobs.” The Daily Calumet reported on the closings of more and more retail businesses; a UNO meeting on jobs drew more than five hundred neighborhood residents plus Mayor Washington’s top three development and employment aides.30
By August 1984, Jerry Kellman was ready to publicly launch the reborn CCRC. Thanks to Leo Mahon’s core parishioners from St. Victor—Fred Simari, Jan Poledziewski, Gloria Boyda, and Christine Gervais—CCRC was ready to play an active role in a retraining program for one thousand former heavy industry workers in several south suburban Cook County townships, funded with $500,000 from the U.S. Department of Labor under the 1982 Job Training Partnership Act. And thanks to Bill Stenzel’s hosting of Kellman at Holy Rosary church in Roseland, Kellman was beginning to pull together a new network of virtually all-black Catholic parishes across Roseland under the distinct rubric of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), with DCP for the moment a “project” or “subgroup” of CCRC.
Kellman asked each parish for two lead representatives. From Holy Rosary came Stenzel’s two most active parishioners, Ralph Viall and Betty Garrett. At St. Catherine of Genoa, Father Paul Burak suggested two people he felt had “a passion I think for social justice”: Dan Lee, who had attended deaconate school, and Cathy Askew, a young white single parent with two mixed-race daughters who was teaching at St. Catherine’s School. St. Catherine’s senior deacon, Tommy West, was interested too, but he channeled much of his community work through another parish well north of 95th Street, St. Sabina. At St. Helena, Father Tom Kaminski volunteered himself and Eva Sturgies, an active parishioner who lived on 99th Street. From St. John de la Salle at 102nd and South Vernon Avenue, eleven blocks north of Holy Rosary, Father Joe Bennett asked Adrienne Bitoy Jackson, a young woman with an office job at Inland Steel, and Marlene Dillard, who lived in the London Towne Homes cooperative development east of Cottage Grove Avenue. Not every Roseland pastor responded with enthusiasm. At Holy Name of Mary Parish, Father Tony Vader brushed off Kellman but told his associate pastor, Father John Calicott, the only African American priest on the Far South Side, to do what he could.
The most unusual Catholic parish Kellman contacted was Our Lady of the Gardens, a church that traced its beginnings only to 1947 and which was staffed by fathers from the Society of the Divine Word. When Kellman visited Father Stanley Farier, the priest recommended two women of different circumstances: Loretta Augustine, in her early forties, who lived in a single-family home in the Golden Gate neighborhood west of the church, and Yvonne Lloyd, a fifty-five-year-old mother of eleven who lived in the Eden Green town house and apartment development just west of both Golden Gate and the sprawling public housing project from which the parish drew its name: Altgeld Gardens.31
Altgeld Gardens was a by-product of World War II. When Chicago faced a dire housing shortage during the war years, officials looked to the land south of 130th Street, west of the CID landfill and Beaubien Woods Forest Preserve, north of the Cal-Sag Channel (a man-made tributary dug during the 1910s) and east of St. Lawrence Avenue. This area had in earlier decades served as the sewage farm for George Pullman’s eponymous town a mile northward. The Metropolitan Sanitary District’s massive sewage treatment plant, opened in 1922, was located just north of 130th Street. Construction began in 1943 on a 1,463-unit “war housing development” on the 157-acre site. The first families moved in come fall 1944, and a year later, in August 1945, a formal dedication ceremony featuring local congressman William A. Rowan plus Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) chairman Robert R. Taylor, an African American, took place before a crowd of five thousand. More than seven thousand residents were already living there, the Tribune reported, “nearly all Negroes.” An elementary school and then a high school, both named for the black scientist George Washington Carver,