Word: ciceros
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Last year residents of Cicero, a Chicago-area community notorious for its racism, called the police to report that a black man was impersonating a police officer, wearing a police uniform and driving a squad car. That was patrolman Wesley Scott, the town's first and only black policeman. Almost ! daily, he endures racial insults and humiliation, not only from the people he has sworn to protect but also from some of his fellow officers upon whom his life may depend...
...March 1987, two days after Wesley Scott graduated from the police academy and joined the force in suburban Cicero, he discovered a photo of the Ku Klux Klan pasted to his locker. "Who's going to kill Wesley?" one of the robed Klansmen in the picture asked. Another replied, "I'm going to kill Wesley." Across the bottom was written "The Ku Klux Klan is going to kill you." Recalls Scott: "A few of the guys were shaking their heads, but a lot of the guys were laughing." Scott did not report the incident to his superiors, one of whom...
...been easy. "There is not a day that I haven't gone through some kind of hell," says Scott. "Practically every day, someone calls me a nigger." He sits in his modest apartment in a suburb called Justice, about four miles southwest of Cicero, ironing his five-year-old son's jeans for school. On the wall hangs a prayer: "Lord, help me to realize that nothing can happen today that you and I can't handle." Scott's wife D'Andrea tries to comfort him after each racial incident by saying, "Don't worry about it, that person...
Scott grew up in an integrated neighborhood in southwest Chicago. "I always believed I could go anywhere and mingle with anyone," said Scott. "It just didn't occur to me that Cicero could be so prejudiced." Still, it was impossible not to have heard of Cicero's reputation. Scott recalls how his family was appalled when Martin Luther King Jr. was forced to postpone a march through Cicero in 1966 because of the threat of violence. Scott was five years old at the time. Since then, there have been numerous assaults against blacks who attempted to live in Cicero. "Cicero...
...city of Cicero (pop. 61,000) has given Scott -- and all its municipal employees -- until Sept. 30 to move within the city limits. Scott is afraid for his three young children and his wife. Reluctantly, he has joined other officers in challenging the city's residency requirement. "The people he's afraid of are the people he's here to protect," says Cicero's attorney, Dennis Both. "If he has a fear, it's not founded...