Jack Jennings sat down with us to discuss the changes he witnessed in 1960s Chicago as part of the oral history project for Beyond Belief. Born into an Irish Catholic family in the 1940s, Jack explained that Catholicism defined much of the culture of his tight-knit neighborhood and the city. “Catholic parishes were societies," he recalled. “And so, if somebody came into the city and they said to somebody, ‘Where do you live?’ They’d say, ‘St. Fisher.’” They “named the parish because there were so many Catholics that people knew what parish, what kind of people were in each parish, whether they were middle class or their fireman.” Priests claimed a particular niche in this world. Jack recalled that while the priesthood allowed some individuals to use their authority to support positive social change in Chicago, some priests took advantage of the power their position gave them. “In my time, a priest showed his collar to a policeman—he didn't get a ticket. The Church was that strong,” Jack explained.
The neighborhood was also a white neighborhood. Jack’s grandparents had immigrated from Ireland to Chicago, although not all of the neighborhood’s residents were Irish or Irish-American. During his very early childhood in the mid-1940s, Jack recalled that two blocks across from his family’s house were developed into housing for “displaced persons” from Eastern Europe. “They were people from Poland, all those countries in Eastern Europe who were attacked by Russians,” Jack remembered. Trying to escape the long and deadly conflicts in Eastern Europe, these groups sought shelter in the United States. In his memory, “they helped transform those areas” of the neighborhood.
Jack had four siblings. His father was a police officer and his mother was a homemaker. Education was of the utmost importance for families, he remembers. His mother “taught all of us reading right before we went to school, which was very good.” Like almost all families in the area, Jack said, he and his siblings attended private Catholic schools, like St. Joseph’s and St. Clare’s. Jack expressed a sense of pride in the values that he believes his Catholic education instilled in him at a young age. The nuns at his schools, he explained, taught respect for others as one of their “core beliefs.” At times, the expression of these values could cause conflict between generations of his family. “One of my uncles used the N word and I was 12 years old,” Jack remembered, “and I said, ‘Uncle Joe, you shouldn't use that word. It's not a good word to use.’ And he exploded. But it [was] from the schools. Catholic schools taught us to respect people.”
Entering young adulthood, Jack originally wanted to be a priest. “To become a priest mostly meant to help people. That's what I wanted to do,” he explained. Becoming a priest would also satisfy his mother’s hope for one of her sons to enter the priesthood—a common aspiration for Catholic parents in midcentury United States. But the priesthood was not a good fit for Jack. He spent five years at Quigley Preparatory Seminary before deciding it was “not my bag.” Instead, as a young man he turned to studying the law. He finished a degree at Loyola University and then went to law school at Northwestern University. There, he became active in the College of Young Democrats and met local politicians like Roman Pucinski. Politics became the avenue through which Jack tried to help people for the rest of his life. He and allied Democrats shared the same philosophy, he said. “It was a philosophy at the time that government should help people who are left behind, that people need a chance.”
Jack explained that during law school Martin Luther King Jr. asked him to be a precinct captain for his home precinct. “And I did,” he recalled. “And I went door to door. I didn’t [just] go to Democrats. I went to everybody.” Sometimes residents slammed the door in Jack’s face or wouldn’t open their doors, but overall, Jack believed, he helped his precinct become “more democratic” through his persistence and willingness to sit down at kitchen tables and listen to families. At the same time, Jack realized the intensity of pushback against the Civil Rights movement and how deeply rooted was racism in Chicago. “I was surprised at how vehemently people were against [Martin Luther King Jr.], yelling at him, bullying him. And I thought it was rather dangerous and made me keenly aware that people [who] are friendly to me, are not friendly to everyone,” Jack said.
To Jack, the “high point” of the 1960s was when “civil rights leaders lined up walking down the street with people behind them” and when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The early fight for civil rights seemed somewhat straightforward to Jack at the time. “It’s relatively easy to march in the first civil rights march. That’s why you have rabbis and Catholic priests and Protestant ministers” working together, he explained. This unity, Jack believes, came to define much of what people remember of 1960s Chicago.
But this unity, according to Jack, soon broke down. He explained that as the 1960s continued, housing integration and desegregation busing became points of contention and challenged much of the earlier unity. To Jack, almost all of the blame for these growing divisions in the mid- to late 1960s was due to real estate agents fomenting panic around housing integration. Agents “were going block by block, scaring the whites and telling the Blacks they could come in and find good neighborhoods.” He added that some agents pleaded to the white community’s “worst fears.” “They stoked the prejudices and then they ran away with the money. It was evil,” he recalled. Jack explained that his family was the last white family in their neighborhood, but eventually felt pressured to leave. The white Catholic communities that Jack grew up in scattered across the city. “They lost some equity. They lost their neighborhoods. They lost their communities. And they came away with a bitter feeling,” he said. The Catholic churches that had been supported by their local communities began emptying as a result of the white flight, Jack shared, and began to lose the cultural power they had held during Jack’s childhood.
Reflecting on this chain of events, Jack wonders how integration might have been more peaceful and successful. “I had to think, can't there be a better way? Doesn't mean it's a zero-sum game that somebody wins and somebody loses,” he ponders. At the time, Jack noticed that desegregation busing caused conflict. Some whites “went from supporting civil rights to being opposed to busing… People turned very hard against busing.” Jack was disappointed that so many of the Democratic politicians failed to fight for busing, for fear of losing the support of their constituents. “There was quite a lesson to me,” Jack recalled, “that you can say things, but then the pressure comes, maybe you give in. So, politics tolerate the weak.”
Despite his frustrations with changes that Chicago underwent during the 1960s and the failure of the city’s diverse people to work together to find solutions that would work for all citizens, Jack continued to be optimistic about the future. He moved to Washington DC in the 1970s with his partner, Steve, to enjoy a long career in the nation’s capital as a political “unifier” and an advocate for education reform.
Today, Jack welcomes the growing diversity of his alma mater, Chicago communities, and his family. “I don’t hear cracks in my family,” he explained, referring an interracial marriage that they recently celebrated. “They accept it as a part of life. They wouldn’t in the ‘60s, but some things have changed. Not as fast as we want, but they have changed. They have changed for the better.” Jack continues on this note of optimism as we wind down our interview. “There is hope. But you can’t be unaware. You have to be aware of the past; why things happen.”
Jan Michael is a doctoral student in History at Northwestern University and a Chabraja Center Summer Intern for the Beyond Belief initiative.