“It was simply beautiful, kind of like the North Side and Michigan Avenue, just simply beautiful. There were furniture stores, places you could shop, theaters, you name it. That is Aaron Johnson’s description of West Madison Avenue before the riots
At the time, Johnson lived on the 1400 block of Kostner Avenue in the Lawndale community, an area he said was full of middle class Blacks who moved in area after a wave of white flight. Today Lawndale is one of the Chicago Police Department’s “hot spots,” a community ravaged by gangs, guns and drugs.
Johnson, who still lives in his Kostner Avenue home, said that it all began with the riots. “I was working at the post office on Canal and Van Buren Street in the Loop, and from the ninth floor window of the post office building, we could see the flames all the way on the West Side. The West Side was on fire, just burning up.
There were all kinds of businesses on Kedzie Avenue, and people were looting, dragging stuff all up and down the streets; sofas, television sets, whatever they could steal. “You could hear the noise all through the night, people looting and dragging merchandise,” he recalled. To deflect arson and looting, Johnson recalled that Black business had signs in the window saying “Soul Brother.”
Those businesses were spared. “The rioters were [concerned with] taking merchandise from the white man. At that time, whites had ownership of almost all of the business in the area. And [Black] folks were either just fronting or working for the man.
“They weren’t pleased with the system, but wouldn’t do anything about it. So, now they had a chance to take the white man’s merchandise,” Johnson remembered. But it was a rationale with devastating consequences. Many of the businessesnever returned to the community.
West Side residents were forced to go outside of their community for basic needs, eroding the tax base and ushering in poverty. “Right now, we’re poor Black folks who have nowhere to shop. We have to go out into suburban areas to shop so our taxes are going out into suburban areas.
And you don’t get [that money] back. It won’t come back into our community,” Johnson lamented The situation was compounded by then-Mayor Richard J. Daley, who, Johnson said, was indifferent. He had resented King’s exposure of racial inequalities in Chicago and was not sympathetic towards his followers.
Larry Kennon, a civil rights lawyer who was active in King’s Chicago operation, agreed. “Of course, the mayor retaliated. He made sure there was no money put into the West Side. It should have been rebuilt. After all these years, you go back there and it’s like you’re out in the desert, with a little cement around,” Kennon said.
“There’s nothing there.” Both Kennon and Johnson admit that recently, the West Side has seen some development, but the depression is far from over. “That was a kind of mini-Katrina, as I think about it,” Kennon reflected.
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