In late October, just two weeks before the November general election, Lena and her colleagues successfully targeted incumbent U.S. senator Chuck Percy after he skipped a UNO candidates’ forum with Democratic challenger Paul Simon. UNO followed Percy to a black radio station, WVON, and stormed the building, causing the beleaguered senator to take refuge in a women’s restroom. Percy remained locked inside there for some hours, and the standoff made for memorable local television news footage. On November 6, Simon defeated Percy by fewer than ninety thousand votes out of more than 4.6 million that were cast.36
When the U.S. EPA denied an IACT request to review the state’s finding of no health threat, Lena told the media the refusal was “quite ironic” in light of the Maryland Manor contamination. In mid-November, when state officials authorized the cleanup of an abandoned dump at 119th Street that contained 1,750 barrels of unknown chemical waste, Governor Thompson showed up wearing a protective suit, boots, and a mask to tell journalists that the site was “a monument to man’s greed and disregard for the health and safety of fellow citizens.” Along with Frank Lumpkin’s SOJC, UNO also continued to push city officials to open a job retraining center on the Southeast Side, but environmental issues had now replaced economic ones at the top of the local agenda.37
ACORN’s fall 1984 efforts in Altgeld Gardens underscored that shift. Once Steuart Pittman took over from Grant Williams, the small group changed its name to Altgeld Tenants United (ATU). Williams had warned Pittman that local advisory council (LAC) president Esther Wheeler was “kind of nuts,” but when ATU sought to use the project’s community building for a neighborhood-wide meeting, Wheeler summoned “your Leader” to meet with her executive board. ATU still drew more than one hundred residents to an October 30 meeting, but Wheeler showed up to accuse Pittman of having an intimate relationship with an elderly and devout ATU leader: “That white boy is shacking up with Maggie Davis.” It was a ludicrous allegation, but Wheeler’s role in Altgeld caused untold harm to the Garden’s residents. As Pittman reported to ACORN’s Madeline Talbott, “the grocery store”—the one whose visible population of daytime rats had astonished outsiders several years earlier—“has a plaque award for community service in it from Esther Wheeler and the LAC.”
ATU reached out to both the city’s sewer department and to CHA’s Altgeld head manager, Walter Williams, who told the organization, “I’ll resign my job before giving in to tenants’ demands.” The sewer department deployed workers, who told residents Altgeld’s sewers were the worst they had ever seen and would take months to clean, but work was halted after one week by the CHA, which would have to foot the bill. In response, over a dozen ATU members picketed CHA headquarters in the downtown Loop on November 14 and then held a press conference.
The African American Defender gave them front-page coverage, and the local 9th Ward alderman, Perry Hutchinson, took an interest, telling the Defender that “Chicago has forgotten about south of 130th Street” and the people marooned there. But Pittman was disappointed that turnout at ATU meetings was declining. When he arranged a January 23 tour of WMI’s huge CID landfill east of Altgeld, only ten people showed up. Hoping to spur greater interest, he adopted Lena and IACT’s tactic from almost two years earlier, and on February 19 sixteen ATU protesters blocked garbage trucks’ entry into the landfill. Pittman, the elderly Ms. Davis, and one young man were arrested. For a second blockade on March 7, only eight people participated, and the protest resulted in three more arrests. Pittman had privately given ACORN notice four months earlier that he would be leaving as of March 15, 1985, and when he departed no one immediately replaced him. At their final meeting, ATU members wondered whether they should join Hazel Johnson’s PCR.38
In mid-January 1985, PCR received attention citywide for the first time when Hazel held a press conference to publicize the IEPA complaint forms she had circulated within Altgeld over the previous six months and to highlight that the city’s one-year moratorium on new landfills would expire on February 1. One week later, Mayor Washington called a City Hall press conference, and with both Lena and Hazel standing behind him, recommended a six-month extension of the ban, which was unanimously approved by the city council. Washington also appointed a Solid Waste Management Task Force to study the city’s landfill options. Lena, Hazel, and Bob Ginsburg from Citizens for a Better Environment were all named to the panel, as were 9th and 10th Ward aldermen Hutchinson and Vrdolyak and South Chicago Savings Bank president James A. Fitch; Washington administration insiders like Jacky Grimshaw and Marilyn Katz were also included to assure that the task force would not go astray.
By early spring 1985, however, rumors had gradually spread that the city administration was quietly considering an entirely different new landfill possibility, centered on 140 acres of Metropolitan Sanitary District property south of 130th Street on the east bank of the Calumet River, a location generally spoken of as the O’Brien Locks site after a nearby dam. A city Planning Department draft report had discussed the idea a year earlier, and while Mayor Washington reiterated his opposition to any dump at the 116th Street Big Marsh location when he spoke at UNO’s annual convention at St. Kevin in late April, concerned residents of Hegewisch and its northern Avalon Trails neighborhood—both just east of the O’Brien property—publicly criticized Lena and UNO for not pressing Washington for a similar commitment concerning the O’Brien site.
The weekly Hegewisch News began to sound the alarm, with editor Violet Czachorski proclaiming that while Hegewisch residents had supported people in South Deering in opposing any Big Marsh landfill, now UNO and IACT were failing to take a similarly principled stance when a landfill was proposed for Hegewisch’s backyard rather than theirs. Writing in the News, University of Illinois at Chicago geographer James Landing, who in 1980 had created the Lake Calumet Study Committee to help protect that body, warned that a “lack of unity among neighborhood groups … serves the interests of the dump companies.”39
Harold Washington and his top aides were devoting attention to Roseland as his four-year term approached its halfway mark. In part their concern was stimulated by the Borg-Warner Foundation, whose executive director, Ellen Benjamin, had taken an interest in the neighborhood and had commissioned a “needs assessment” from a team at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Roseland had lost more than sixty-eight hundred jobs between 1977 and 1983, and loss of employment meant “many people are having trouble maintaining their houses, keeping food on the table” and avoiding foreclosure. The researchers conducted 115 interviews in Roseland, and while 33 respondents named jobs as the top problem, almost twice as many—64—described how “crime and gangs have proliferated and the feeling of insecurity has increased.” Before the report was issued, Washington’s top staffers were briefed on the findings. “Highest infant mortality rate in city,” “highest number of foreclosed homes in the nation,” South “Michigan [Ave.] business district gone,” their notes recorded. With just one exception, community groups were disappointing: “Good Roseland Christian Ministries,” the staff notes emphasized.
At 1:30 P.M. on Sunday, March 17, a man wearing a long dark coat and a baseball cap with the Playboy logo drew a gun on cashier Lavergne McDonald inside Fortenberry Liquors at 36 East 111th Street in central Roseland. She screamed, and the gunman fled. Fifteen minutes later, Roger Nelson, a seminary student who had interned at Roseland Christian Ministries, his fiancée, and his parents finished