A Short History of Englewood
Portrait of Black Chicago
Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration
Copyright 2004
Englewood Today
The plight of housing for African Americans in Chicago attracted the attention of Martin Luther King Jr. and he brought his Southern Leadership Conference to Chicago. On July 24, 1966 he marched with three hundred black and white marchers through Englewood. Crowds pelted them with bricks, bottles and cherry bombs. But this time the violence created sympathy for the marchers. Four hundred and fifty marchers joined King in his march in Marquette Park in the Gage Park neighborhood five days later. A scheduled hour and a half march took almost four hours to complete as marchers wandered through the neighborhood cut off from their cars by the mobs. Dr. King was hit by a rock thrown by a ten year old girl.
In 1964, Rev. John R. Porter, pastor of the Christ United Methodist Church in Englewood, was appointed to head a branch of Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Chicago. Rev. Porter had made a name for himself in the beginning of Chicago's civil rights movement because his church started one of the first “Freedom Schools,” boycotting public schools in response to overcrowding.
The SCLC's membership swelled from 100 to 1,000 in two years. Fifteen-percent of the members were white; traveling from all over to attend the meeting in Porter's church on 6401 S. Sangamon St. Rev. King was there twice. Several thousand came to hear him speak. He also spoke once in the historic Ogden Park area. “There were 10,000 people in the park and King stood on top of a flatbed truck because people were crowding around him,” Porter remembered. “Chicago had a rebellion from 1962 to 1970. There was at least one riot every year. The expectations of black people were so high; they expected the nation to deliver on all its promises.”
Englewood continues to make the news. In the past decade more than 700 people have been murdered there. The magnificent brick houses built after the Great Chicago Fire, built to last for ever, are falling down. There are 2473 vacant buildings and 215 empty lots in Englewood. Forty-three percent of Englewood's population lives below the poverty line. Gangs fight for territory and drugs while Englewood's residents hide behind closed doors and worry and wait.
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