The Chicago Memoirs:
Our Redeemer Lutheran Church, 1967-1972

Chicago, South Side, 1968 (Part Five)
“I was invited to conduct a daily chapel service at Luther High School South where a couple of our teens attended classes. I spoke about our unity in Christ, that as baptized Christians we have an identity that transcends race. That was the last time I was ever invited out to the southwest-side school to speak at chapel.”

— Joel Nickel, The Chicago Memoirs

The transiency of the neighborhood continued at an alarming rate. Every week some moving van or dilapidated pickup truck was parked in front of one of the apartment buildings. Middle-class black families were leaving, seeking safer neighborhoods for their families and better housing. Landlords became reluctant to invest money in their buildings for necessary repairs, figuring that the neighborhood was in an unchecked decline. It added up to a sentence of condemnation. There was a fire in one of the basement apartments next to the church. We helped resettle the family, but their apartment was never repaired by the absentee landlord, and that was a signal to the rest of the tenants that the owner was going to let the building go, and if possible, collect on his insurance policy, which was a dangerous message to send. I talked with people in that apartment, just outside the door of the church sacristy. Some of them had lived there for 12 years and more, but when the roots of the tree rot, the whole tree dies too.

Looking north on the 6400 block of South Harvard
The parsonage is the first house north of the church, with the VW van parked in the driveway.

This building went through what became a pattern for most of the buildings on the block around the church: The good responsible tenants moved out because the absentee landlord didn’t maintain the property. Vacancy invited vagrants. Rents were lowered and large families moved in with a transient clientele. Landlords couldn’t screen prospective tenants if they wanted to keep their building full, and when conditions became overcrowded or a fire hit, people moved out and buildings stood vacant. Vacant buildings invited the homeless to move in and scavengers began to vandalize the building, carting off whatever had resale value (cast iron radiators, copper flashings, window casing, appliances, lead window sashes, etc.). Over a period of 18 months this process reduced a once secure and stable building to an abandoned hulk that turned Harvard Avenue into the streets of Berlin after WWII (I know; I visited Berlin in 1962 when the Wall went up. There were close similarities).

So why should anyone attend an inconvenient church in such an environment? Many of our members truly struggled with this question, and some even found new purpose in the mission of Our Redeemer. That Pentecost we confirmed 17 teenagers in their Christian faith, and our spirits were renewed by the Spirit of Christ.

In June congregational dissatisfaction with Barbara O’Banion began to grow, led by some of our middle-class black families. They feared that the importance of faith nurturing was being supplanted by the push for social change. I was caught in the middle, and while I respected and trusted Barbara, it was more important to keep the community program alive than to retain the director. I tried to support Barbara best as I could, but she had grown out of favor with our Social Ministry Board, an instance of moving too far too fast without bringing the Board along and nurturing their support. In a situation of “black on black” conflict it was best for me to step aside and let the church leaders make their own decision. We would luckily soon find a leader trained by Bill Griffen’s Black Deaconate Program.

After school was out in June a young teen from the congregation, Kenneth Mitchell, came to live with us in the parsonage for a week. He had been threatened and roughed up by the D’s hell-bent on their recruitment drive. They chased Kenneth to his home and invaded the first-floor Mitchell apartment, threatening the whole family. His mother was frantic and called me over to their home. When the death threats didn’t let up and Ken’s life was in danger, he moved in with us and went into hiding. My very pregnant wife turned the “maid’s room” into Ken’s sanctuary and he marveled that this was the first time he had his own bathroom all to himself. He was very quiet, even at mealtime, but he had a good appetite.

The gang kept coming to the Mitchell home, looking for Kenneth, keeping the building under surveillance. It was a relief to Ken’s mother when the people of Our Redeemer took up a collection the next Sunday to purchase a ticket on the Super Chief so he could travel west and join family members in Los Angeles. His mother, visibly shaken by worry and anxious for her son’s safety, drove with us in the VW van downtown to the Polk Street Station to catch the Santa Fe streamliner. I tipped a porter to look after him, and he rode in the dome car all the way to LA where he was taken in by relatives. That fall the entire family followed Kenneth to California.

It was a bad summer for gang activity. But there is a footnote to this story. Years later in the mid-’70s, Rick Gaugert, a friend of my brother Jim’s, greeted a Washington University college student after a Sunday service at a Lutheran church near Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. The student stood out, in part because he was young and black. Rick inquired why the student sought out this Lutheran church at which to worship. And he replied, “It’s because my older brother, when he was in danger of being shot by a gang in Chicago, was taken in and protected by a Lutheran pastor and his church.” This was Kenneth’s younger brother.

About this same time a free medical clinic opened at the Salvation Army Center at 62nd and Wentworth. The push for such a facility was initiated the previous summer by a Student Health Organization survey of the health needs of Englewood. The statistics they gathered were astounding: There was one doctor for every 15,000 people; the two hospitals in Englewood regularly turned away poor people on welfare and sent them to Cook County Hospital, an hour’s ride on the “L.” Betty Armstrong, June Feipel (members of Our Redeemer), and I were part of a community group that planned for the new clinic. It was also the start of our continuing pressure on St. Bernard Hospital, located a short half block from the parsonage, directed by a group of nuns but really run by a clique of doctors, to improve patient care for the poor.

I had some first-hand experiences with the type of care the hospital offered. One night as I was meeting with the Parker students, one of the students accidentally cut his forehead and the wound required stitches. I stopped at home to get my checkbook, and we walked over to St. Bernard’s. Before anyone would look at the patient, I had to pay $15 up front, even though he carried an insurance card from the Penn Central Railroad where his father worked. While in the emergency room, I happened to see a mother in the admitting office slapping her 18-month-old child across the face. There was a look of desperation on her face. I stepped into the room to ask what was wrong. The clerk had left, taking his sweet time getting a case history. The woman told me that the child had swallowed some pills and was falling asleep. I yelled at the clerk to get the child into the emergency section and start pumping his stomach. I paid another $15 to speed up the action, and ended up driving the grandmother (there was good maternal care in extended black families) back to their apartment to get the empty pill bottle so that the doctor would know how serious the incident was.

Months later when I had to carry Philip to the same emergency room to have a cut in his scalp stitched up, the doctor asked me what I was doing in that neighborhood. I told him that I lived here and served as pastor of the church just half a block away. “Well, then its a good thing I did a good job on the stitches, isn’t it?” he asked an attending nurse. Then turning to me, he asked, “Say, you aren’t one of those people who have been giving the hospital a hard time, are you?” I just smiled, picked up Philip, and walked home. When Sue took Philip to our pediatrician to have the stitches removed, he remarked that the job had been well done, and asked where we had taken our son. He could barely believe us, because he claimed to have seen many infected scars that came out of St. Bernard’s emergency room.

Next:  The Chicago Memoirs of 1968 (Part Six)