I don’t remember Ardelia Baker, but I do remember speaking with Hazel Dennis.

See my link to the 1964 Caldwell Commentator pages 10 and 11:

There were a couple of other black males that were in our neighborhood. i used to play handball with one of then them at Caldwell the summer after we graduated. I got along with them without issue.

At Bowen that was an integrated school and I had friends from probably every ethnicity in that school. It was a great four years there.

When I was an Illinois Bell Telephone Installer, my first 18 months was in the South Chicago district including our old neighborhood. Back then that district was moving out whites and moving in blacks. That was a very educational period for me. I found most everyone is about the same, it was enlightening.

My last two years were in the Hyde Park district and the distinction between the establish black neighborhoods and the predominantly white U. of Chicago area were stark. I found out how terrible most of the inner-city living conditions were. Most of the people were polite and it saddened me to know they had to endure a totally different lifestyle than I did.

When I look back over the years of growing up in Chicago from the Civil Rights Awareness years until I married in 1973, I’m glad I had to see Americans of various races, religions, and philosophies so that I could better fit-in the years that followed.

-Don

I grew up in a prosperous Jewish family in the Jim Crow South. As a child, my only contact with “Negroes” (then the appropriate word) was in their role as servants. But I was blessed. “Our girl” Ethel was a middle-aged African-American and former teacher who made more money as a house servant than as a teacher in a segregated school. She was brilliant (no exaggeration as I later discovered) and well-read. She not only read poems and stories to me, and enchanted me with her own stories, she taught me deep in my bones that racial prejudice was utterly senseless. Ethel was the perfect counter-argument to the racism that lie at the core of my world. Tragically, and this is another story, the world was too hard for her in the end.

I don’t know a thing about that person. I’m glad he helped you when you needed help against the Chicago System.

Don