Word: ciceroism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...
...Cicero is a compact community, just 5.5 sq. mi. Its squat houses were mostly built between 1910 and 1940, when thousands of East European immigrants swarmed in to take factory jobs. Today Cicero's tidy yellow-brick houses are owned mainly by the thrifty children and grandchildren of thrifty Poles, Czechs Lithuanians and Yugoslavs...