Word: neighborhood
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that responding to the concerns of one's constituents, whether it pertain to obtaining "pork barrel" funds for a particular local project, providing shelter for the homeless, or ridding the neighborhood of the drugs that are daily being sold on its street corner, is pandering...
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...
...days later, a car nearly knocked the Sleds' 14-year-old nephew off his bike. "Nigger, what are you doing around here?" the driver shouted. A week later, two wooden fence posts crashed through Wilbur's dining room window, the penalty for welcoming the Sleds to the neighborhood. "It doesn't seem like America with people acting like this," she says...
...Attorney Valukas takes the matter more seriously. He has sent FBI agents into the Melrose Park neighborhood to protect the Sleds. Two weeks after the Sleds moved in, Melrose Park's building commissioner, C. ("Sonny") Stamatakos, cited the house for ten housing-code violations. Stamatakos says the timing was unrelated to the arrival of the Sleds. Valukas says he finds the timing "very curious...
White families living near the Sleds insist they are not racists. But, they say, they are afraid that the Sleds may be followed by other black families, that white residents will move, then property values will plummet, and the neighborhood will deteriorate. "I'm afraid of what could happen," said one 75-year-old woman. Until 1972 she and her husband lived in Austin, a Chicago suburb that went from predominantly white to predominantly black. "We had to sell our home for nothing," she said. "What happens if this whole doggone neighborhood gets up and leaves...