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What were ‘Willis wagons’ that got Bernie Sanders arrested in 1963?

While the world watched the battle over civil rights unfold in the South in the 1960s, another tumultuous struggle was taking place in Chicago.

It wasn’t about voting rights or being allowed to drink from a public water fountain. This one was about school desegregation. And at the center of it was something the local protesters called “Willis wagons.”

The term for the portable classroom trailers set up to keep black children from attending white schools has become symbolic of the city’s long struggle over segregation. It represents a dark and desperate period in Chicago’s history, when students and parents joined forces to break down a school system that provided ample resources for white children and denied basic services to African-Americans.

The demonstrations over Willis wagons were a precursor to a more sweeping civil rights movement in Chicago that drew the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to the city in 1966.

“The problems in Chicago were more subtle,” said Robert McKersie, a business professor at the University of Chicago during the 1960s who participated in the protests. “In the South, segregated lunch counters and white-only toilets were obvious. But in Chicago, it was housing, jobs and education that discriminated.”

Willis wagons re-emerged in the news recently after an arrest photo of young activist Bernie Sanders was discovered in the Tribune archives. The photo shed new light on the role Sanders played in the Chicago demonstrations and bolstered claims by his presidential campaign that he has a long history of commitment to the causes of African-Americans and other disenfranchised citizens. 

The photos were published as the Vermont senator engages in a tight race with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. As the candidates move to the South and other densely populated states where African-Americans and Latinos make up a large portion of the electorate, Sanders has sought to penetrate Clinton’s strong hold on minorities. Black voters, in particular, historically have had an important say in who becomes the Democratic presidential nominee.

In 1963, Sanders was a student at the University of Chicago who took to the streets with hundreds of others to protest a plan by Chicago Public Schools Superintendent Benjamin C. Willis to set up mobile classrooms in black neighborhoods to ease overcrowding.

In a town hall meeting with students at the University of Chicago Thursday night hosted by MSNBC, Sanders said Chicago is where he learned about the trade union and civil rights movements.

“For me, coming here to the University of Chicago … what was mind-blowing for me was beginning to get involved with a whole lot of people who are very different from the people I grew up with in Brooklyn,” Sanders told moderator Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s “Hardball.”

“And I became involved in the civil rights movement. I think one of the first jobs that I ever had here in Chicago was with what was called the Packinghouse Workers of America.”

The desegregation efforts began after the Urban League published a report in 1961 saying that 382 classrooms were vacant and that the city’s Board of Education maintained a policy of segregation. The report also found that black schools received only two-thirds of the funding that white schools received.

Willis’ answer was to install poorly built 20-by-36-foot aluminum trailers in vacant lots and on the grounds of overcrowded black schools rather than allow children to enroll at underutilized white schools that in many cases were only a few blocks away.

The Chicago demonstrations took place against a backdrop of widespread discrimination in a city where many blacks, having fled the Jim Crow South for a better life up north, were stymied by restrictive covenant laws, which forced them to live within defined boundaries primarily on the South Side.

Though the Willis wagons were named for the controversial superintendent who served from 1953 to 1966, the city was under the strict control of Mayor Richard J. Daley. The protests were as much about his policies as those of the Board of Education. 

Rosie Simpson, who headed an organization of parents, said Chicago was ripe for demonstrations at the time.

“Chicago was one of the most segregated cities in the country,” said Simpson, then a young unemployed mother of six. “Every time a community opened up that had good schools, blacks would move in and whites moved out and our schools became overcrowded. Our kids didn’t have access to libraries or adequate textbooks. The white schools had all of that. Our attitude was that our children deserved better. We were taxpayers, too. People were tired of this.”

There was a core group of about 20 people, according to Simpson, but whenever there was a protest, parents and students poured into the streets in support, though they knew they would likely be arrested.

In July 1963, protesters held an eight-day sit-in at the office of the school board president. The following year, they organized a boycott in which 175,000 students walked out of the CPS classrooms.

But one of the most publicized protests was held in August 1963 when activists blocked the installation of wagons in a vacant lot adjacent to the railroad tracks at 73rd Street and Lowe Avenue. That’s where Sanders was hauled off to jail. 

Though he was arrested in Chicago, Sanders said it did not compare with what was going on in the South.

“The hard work and the dangerous work was being done in the South — that’s where people were getting killed … and their heads bashed off,” he said.

Sanders said his work also focused on forcing the U. of C. to desegregate apartment housing it owned in the city.

“Then I got involved in a broader issue at that point. The schools in Chicago were pretty segregated. And I got involved in that. And that’s where I got arrested,” he said.

It is hard to find anyone who remembers Sanders from the Willis wagon protests. He was one of many who marched, sat in front of bulldozers or struggled with police.

Charles Smith, the former Chicago chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, which organized the protests, said many people drifted in and out of the movement. Some of them, he said, had their own agenda.

Sanders was different from the majority of the working-class protesters — the ones who had a personal stake in the outcome, Smith added.

“He was one of those privileged white folks who could go to school and get a degree,” said Smith, 74, who dropped out of junior college to join the movement and later went on to earn a degree in architecture. “Things were different for us. We were black people trying to figure out how to live.”

Among them was Sibylle Bearskin, then an 18-year-old high school student who said she joined the movement because of the discrimination she had experienced as a Native American.

Bearskin is best known for climbing a telephone pole and refusing to come down during the Willis wagon protest on 73rd Street.

That day, she and her friend Wayne Yancy decided to climb onto the top of the pole to make a statement. They had been walking through an alley when they spotted a ladder leading to the pole. They stayed up there most of the day, Bearskin said, until she had to come down to use the restroom.

“He told me I should just do it out in the public. I would do almost anything, but not that. So I came down and walked to the park on the other side of the railroad track. And that’s where they put me in a squadron,” said Bearskin, who is now 70 and lives in Wisconsin Dells.

The following year, Yancy was killed in a car accident near Holly Springs, Miss., where he was working as a Freedom Summer volunteer registering voters.

Robin Washington, a first-grader in 1963, remembered being inside the Board of Education building with his now-deceased mother, Jean Birkenstein Washington, and other protesters. For him, the Willis wagon protests were a way of life.

“My mother was one of the negotiators and planners, and she brought my 9-year-old brother and me with her everywhere. That’s the kind of thing we did as a family,” said Washington, 59, who lives in Duluth, Minn.

For some years, Bearskin lived with the Washington family. Robin Washington recalled a story that his mother often told about Bearskin during the sit-in at the Board of Education.

“An attempt was made to starve us. None of us could go in or out of the building,” Washington said. “But Sibylle managed to slip out through a window and … dropped hamburgers down to us using film from a TV camera.”

In 1979, the U.S. Office for Civil Rights charged that the board had systematically contained black students in overcrowded, segregated schools, primarily through the use of mobile units. That led to the creation of magnet schools and other programs designed to draw students from across the city.

The Willis wagons, however, remained a fixture in the public schools until the 1990s, when many were dismantled because of safety concerns.

Willis wagons were the catalyst for a full-fledged civil rights movement that addressed housing, jobs and other areas of education. Several groups grew out of the movement, including the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, which led the fight against housing discrimination.

Before long, it drew the attention of King. In 1966, the civil rights leader brought his campaign to Chicago, leading marches and renting an apartment on the West Side to end housing discrimination.

“When King decided he wanted to move to a northern city, he chose Chicago because there was a strong organization in place here,” said McKersie, now a professor emeritus at MIT and author of “A Decisive Decade: An Insider’s View of the Chicago Civil Rights Movement During the 1960s.”

“They had been able to mobilize thousands of people for marches and school boycotts. The demonstrations set the stage for Chicago to be seen as a place where the civil rights movement was organized and making a difference,” he said.

Simpson, who later went to work in investigations for the Illinois Department of Human Rights, said Chicago is facing worse problems more than a half century later.

In 1963, she said, many people were out of jobs, as they are now, and children were paying the price for segregation. The difference, she said, is that parents took charge and stood up for their children.

“The school system is in worse shape today,” Simpson said. “The problems that we have now, the community has to stand up and fight. We have to take control of what is going on. We have the answers. We just have to look to our own communities.”

The story included the wrong name of witness Robin Washington’s mother. His mother’s name was Jean Birkenstein Washington, and the story has been corrected.

dglanton@tribpub.com