Historian Blanche Suggs-Killingsworth Gives us a Tour of Martin Luther King Jr.'s North Lawndale

by Suzanne Hanney

Traveling up from the South alone at 10 years old in 1962 was the hard part for North Lawndale historian Blanche SuggsKillingsworth.

Her grandmother put her on an Illinois Central (IC) train headed north from Mississippi with her mother’s Chicago address pinned on a tag inside her coat. The train was so segregated that Killingsworth couldn’t move up to the front until it reached Kentucky.

When the train pulled into 63rd Street, Killingsworth figured she was in Chicago, so she got off. But her mother wasn’t there. She was instead waiting at the IC’s 12th Street terminus.

“A policeman approached me and I thought I was in trouble. In the South, when they approached you, it was because you did something wrong,” said Killingsworth, 70, the president and co-founder of the North Lawndale Historical and Cultural Society, in a Zoom interview along with Peter T. Alter, chief historian and director of the Studs Terkel Center for Oral History at the Chicago History Museum.

Killingsworth showed him the tag inside her coat. He told her she had gotten off at the wrong stop and took her to the 63rd Street police station until her mother could pick her up there. Together, they went home to 3134 W. 15th St., a greystone two-flat owned by an African American. In the years leading up to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s stay there in 1966, the West Side became home to many African Americans in the second wave of the Great Migration. Killingsworth lived at that address until she was 18 and left home; her mother stayed there until she died in 1983.

Killingsworth’s parents had separated when she was small. Her mother came up to Chicago first with her baby daughter and stayed on 63rd Street with her sister, Killingsworth’s aunt. Her mother worked as a maid in Skokie and had to be on the job at 6 a.m. “We got ourselves together to go to school. She laid our clothes out. She had cooked us breakfast. When we came home, we knew what we were supposed to do.” Killingsworth’s older sister came North next and then it was her turn.

“I had to come up here as I was about to get killed in Hazlehurst for racism. I was not about to say ‘Yes, ma’am and no ma’am' to anybody." Her Mississippi town was about 60 miles from where 14-year-old Emmett Till had been lynched in 1955. Her baby brother remained in the South, near his father.

Suggs-Killingsworth

Was she better off in Chicago?

“Yes, because in the South it was very racist. There was racism in Chicago, but it had a cover over it. When I was in the South you had a place. Whites lived on the North Side, Blacks on the South Side. You knew you didn’t go to the same school; we had one school, they had two. We didn’t have a swimming pool. You didn’t drink from the same fountain, go to the same restaurants. You didn’t go to the show and sit downstairs. When I went to the Central Park Theater and was able to sit downstairs, that was a big thing for me.”

As a founder and now head of the North Lawndale Historical and Cultural Society (NLHCS), Killingsworth describes in a Facebook video how she carries pictures of the theater on her cellphone and shows them to people around the U.S. “Look at what’s in North Lawndale.”

Opened in 1917, the Central Park Theater at 3531 W. Roosevelt Road was designed by the architectural firm of Rapp & Rapp for the Balaban & Katz cinema chain. It was their first collaboration, which was followed by the Uptown, Riviera, Chicago and Oriental (now Nederlander) movie palaces. During one of its Jazz Nights in 1921, the famed bandleader and composer of seven decades Benny Goodman (1909-86) made his professional debut there playing the clarinet – when he was just 12 years old. The Goodman family had settled at 1125 S. Francisco Ave. when Benny was 8, and had taken music lessons at Hull House and Kehelah Jacob Synagogue.

The theater retains its chandeliers, tiles and other fixtures from its 1920s-1940s heyday, according to the Rev. Robert Marshall, who since 2016 has been pastor of the House of Prayer, Church of God in Christ. In 1971, the House of Prayer purchased the 1,800-seat theater, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It became known as the gospel headquarters of Chicago as it hosted singers like Shirley Caesar and the Mighty Clouds of Joy, and others.

“As I told the previous alderman, if it’s the last thing I do, this theater will not go away,” Killingsworth said in a video.

Last November, Block Club reported that the NLHCS and the House of Prayer church had joined with the Jewish Community Relations Council of Chicago, Preservation Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Office of Engagement, and Future Firm to form the Central Park Theater Restoration Committee.

Central Park Theater

Tom Harris photo

Another favorite hangout for Killingsworth was St. Agatha’s Church, 3147 W. Douglass Blvd. Killingsworth and her mom lived behind the church, which fronted on Douglass Park. John Barlow and Dan Mallette, both of whom marched with Dr. King from Selma to Birmingham, AL, in March 1965, were the priests there; in 1972, Barlow protested in front of Cardinal John Cody’s house when the archdiocese closed an education program at St. Agatha for high school dropouts. Former Chicago Board of Education President Michael Scott lived down the street. “We kind of grew up together.

“What I loved about St. Agatha’s was that I had my first job there in the NYC: Neighborhood Youth Corps, sort of like After School Matters. I worked there as a young lady. I used to love to dance, so I had an [African] dance class there.

“Sears used to donate their floor samples to St. Agatha’s and St. Agatha’s would turn around and sell them at a real low price to get funds to run their programs.”

A postcard shows the interior of St. Agatha's as it once was

John A. Mallin collection

Killingsworth was in 4th grade when she moved to North Lawndale. She attended Holland School on 16th Street while James Weldon Johnson School at 1420 S. Albany was under construction and then continued through 6th grade there. Her principal at Johnson was Sadie Nesbitt, whom Killingsworth said she truly loved and admired.

“She used to tell us ‘you got to know who you are so you know where you are going.’” There was a belief that Blacks were incapable of learning alongside whites, a concept that Nesbitt, along with both Booker T. Washington and Sears founder Julius Rosenwald, who endowed schools in the South, sought to disprove.

The experimental Johnson School had classrooms separated by collapsible walls so faculty could team-teach. “Everything we did was very competitive.” For every graduating class, a tree was planted to show the students were growing in the community.

Junior high – 7th and 8th grade – was spent at Hess Upper Grade Center, 3500 W. Douglass Blvd. “I had a very challenging and radical teacher there in 8th grade. He would tell the principal we were going to the zoo and instead take us to the Black Topographical Library: a group of brothas researching and showing the plans for the African American community.”

Just before Killingsworth’s time at Hess, Al Raby had taught 7th grade English there and talked about the dilapidated housing in Lawndale, Killingsworth said. North Lawndale had been annexed into the City of Chicago in 1869 – more than 150 years ago – but experienced real growth in the 1910s, as the Eastern European Jewish community around Maxwell and Halsted streets grew, prospered, and moved west. Chicago’s Jewish population grew from just 10,000 in 1880 to nearly 250,000 in 1920, mostly from Eastern Europe.

As restrictive covenants against Jews ended after World War II, many were moving to Rogers Park and Skokie. The second wave of the Great Migration was occurring simultaneously: North Lawndale was 90 percent African American by 1960.

Raby was most well-known as the leader of the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), which invited Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference to Chicago as an urban, Northern continuation of its civil rights work in the South. Raby and Dr. King co-chaired the Chicago Freedom Movement throughout 1966. The movement held rallies, marches, boycotts and other nonviolent action to protest segregated, slum housing, as well as racial disparities in employment, education, health and income.

Raby had been raised in Woodlawn. He dropped out of 7th grade to do odd jobs like shoe shiner and night club photographer at Club DeLisa before he entered the Army at age 20, rose to the rank of corporal, earned his GED and then graduated from Wilson Junior College in 1957 and Chicago Teachers College in 1960.

Raby was a founding member of Teachers for Integrated Schools (TFIS), formed after the Chicago Board of Education fired a nontenured teacher for supporting a student boycott in October 1961. Raby and other teachers boycotted schools in protest against “Willis Wagons,” a pejorative term for trailers that Chicago Schools Supt. Benjamin Willis and the School Board allocated for Blacks in crowded schools where the regular facilities were occupied by whites. Through his work with TFIS, Raby rose to become head of the CCCO.

“His role in the school desegregation movement shows how the different worlds of blue-collar work, labor organizing, public school teaching, and civil rights activism converged in Chicago in the 1960s,” according to findingaids.library.uic. edu.

Dr. King and his family moved into an apartment at 1550 S. Hamlin Ave. The pastor of Stone Temple Baptist Church, just a few blocks north at 3620 W. Douglass Blvd., found the unit for them, according to Stone Temple’s City of Chicago landmark designation report.

Because Killingsworth was so young – still in grade school –she never got to go to Stone Temple to hear Dr. King preach. “My mom was very protective of where we could go and not go.”

Stone Temple had been built in 1925-26 for the First Roumanian Congregation, also known as Anshe Roumania Shaari Shomayim. They were Jewish immigrants who escaped pogroms in their native Romania in 1899, settled around Roosevelt Road and Clinton, and continued to advocate for Jews through WWII and postwar reconstruction from their base in North Lawndale, which had become known as “Chicago’s Jerusalem.” As the neighborhood changed from Eastern European Jewish to African American, the Romanesque/Classical/Moorish-style building at Douglass Boulevard and Millard Avenue was sold to an African American congregation led by the Rev. James Marcellus Stone in 1954.

Rev. Stone had been born in Georgia in 1906 and come to Chicago during the Great Depression to earn money to bring his family to the North. Working in a factory by day, he earned his divinity degree in 1933 and led a congregation in Bronzeville.

Rev. Stone was a friend of Dr. King’s father, so Martin Luther King Jr. first spoke at Stone Temple in 1959, to explain the Montgomery, AL bus boycott he was leading at the time. Dr. King returned there in 1960 when Chicago hosted the Republican National Convention at the International Amphitheater near the Union Stockyards; he sought to urge GOP delegates to adopt a civil rights plank in the party platform and to repudiate segregationists (he delivered the same message to the Democratic Party convention in Atlanta). Stone Temple hosted a rally supporting a school boycott to protest school segregation and participated in a rally to remove controversial school Supt. Willis. The Chicago Freedom Movement designated the Baptist Church its West Side “Action Center.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. at Stone Temple Baptist Church with Reverend James Marcellus Stone on the left. Reverend Stone led his congregation to support the civil rights movement and Stone Temple provided a forum for preaching and programs led by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and others in the national struggle for racial equality.

Courtesy of Stone Temple Baptist Church

Stone Temple Baptist Church

Eric Allix Rogers phote

Castle Car Wash

Suzanne Hanney photo

Killingsworth also recalls that Dr. King played pool at the Black-owned Moore’s Pool Hall, at 16th and Millard, three blocks east of his apartment.

“Dr. King didn’t come from no rich community. He came from a town like mine. He knew on what side of town you were supposed to be. You can understand where he would say, ‘Oh, I am going to fight with you,’” she said.

On April 4, 1968, when Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis, Killingsworth was a freshman at Harrison High School, 2850 W. 24th St. Students were dismissed early and kids from Farragut High School, 2345 S. Christiana Ave., came marching nearly a mile east to her school. Together, they proceeded north past St. Anthony Hospital at 19th Street and continued through Douglass Park.

“We ran into gang bangers who were upset Dr. King had been killed. I can understand. Here’s a man who was willing to come into your neighborhood and speak up for you. Who looked like you. You had hope, like Barack Obama. Then boom! It’s destroyed. There’s nobody to speak up for you.”

In the days that followed, there were fires and looting that destroyed neighborhood businesses and homes – many of them set by outsiders, Killingsworth said.

Looking out her second-floor window, she was frightened to watch troops in uniforms like she had only seen on TV, marching the wrong way up her one-way street.

“Then [Mayor Richard J.] Daley issued that order [shoot to kill looters]. How do you know who’s a looter and who’s not, if everyone is carrying something? I could be carrying something from my girlfriend’s house. I knew I was glad when my mama got home.

“After the [King] funeral all that devastation happened. Nobody put any investment in North Lawndale. No INVEST South/West [a Lori Lightfoot administration plan to consolidate public and private infrastructure work in order to build up commercial strips in underserved neighborhoods]. They left the neighborhood as it was. There were a lot of vacant lots, lots of businesses gone. You couldn’t go to the Buddy Bear or Raggedy Ann [grocery stores] anymore.

“I always tell people it is a mistaken story the Jewish people ran away from the Blacks. No, we got along. A lot of Jewish people had businesses on Maxwell Street. A lot of those people were working for them down there.”

The draw of Skokie, she said, was large, detached homes with land around them: the same kind of housing she had known in the South.

At 16, Killingsworth was old enough to get a work permit, so she got a job selling needles, thread and thimbles in the basement sewing center of the Sears store at 925 S. Homan Ave. During the 1960s, Sears was the largest retailer in the world and its corporate headquarters and mail order center extended for 2½ blocks. “The store wrapped the tower and was connected. If you went from Homan Avenue, you went into the offices. If you got on an elevator, the back door would take you into the store.

“We had to open up a bank account. We didn’t have no [plastic debit] cards. We had a passbook for Lawndale Bank there on Polk and Homan. I was determined to save money, show my mom when we got ready to go back to school, I could handle myself. I had saved $125 and I said, ‘Mom, I am going to buy all my school clothes.’ And she said, ‘Yes, you did a good job saving.’”

Besides her middle school principal, Mrs. Nesbitt, Killingsworth continued to emulate strong women: Nancy Jefferson, who later protested a lack of affordable housing at federally-subsidized Presidential Towers; Earlean Collins, the first African American elected to the Illinois Senate; and Geneva Bay, an activist from the West Side K-town neighborhood.

“Coming up as a young lady, I watched those ladies, followed them around. They were speaking out and I liked that. If you said we was marching, I was there. At 18 or 19 years old, I joined this radical group associated with the Panther Party: Black Sisters United for Revolutionary Defense. You had to rub your skin off with an eraser, join with a drop of blood so you would be sisters for life. I started not oiling my hair.

“My mother said, ‘You’re going to go to jail and I’m not going to get you!’”

“I responded, ‘Power to the People!’" she recalled, laughing hard.

“I was nearly 6-feet-2. My mom was 5-feet-4. She would say, ‘I am going to get up in this chair and knock you out!’”

Killingsworth’s mom ultimately stopped working full-time as a maid in Skokie and only temped at the household for parties. Her full-time job was at the Leaf Candy Factory at 1155 N. Cicero Ave. (south of Division Street). That’s where Marshmallow Peeps were invented, Alter said during the Zoom interview. Working at the candy factory was a better job, because she could build up Social Security benefits – and get free candy—Killingsworth said.

Her mom had only an 8th grade education when she moved North, but she began to volunteer at her daughter’s school; through a Board of Education program for parents who wanted to become teachers, she obtained the equivalent of a GED and then her bachelor’s degree. She had been teaching for a year when she died of a massive heart attack at age 54.

“No one expected us to live this long,” Killingsworth says at age 70. But she takes care of herself, eats only home-cooked food, plenty of vegetables. Besides the Central Park Theater, she points out Castle Car Wash on Ogden Avenue – the original Route 66 out of Chicago to the West Coast; and North Lawndale favorite sons Adm. Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear U.S. Navy; and Cornelius Coffey, the first Black to hold both an airplane pilot’s and mechanic’s license.

“North Lawndale is going to come back, if I have anything to say about it. I want that beacon of light to be shown on North Lawndale.”