Feb. 27--A Chicago Tribune photo that has emerged of a young Bernie Sanders being arrested at a 1963 South Side protest has created a buzz nationally -- and even worldwide. At the center of that protest was something that long ago became synonymous with Chicago's struggles with segregation: Willis wagons.
That was the name for portable classroom trailers set up to keep black children from attending white schools.
Benjamin C. Willis, the controversial Chicago Public Schools superintendent from 1953 to 1966, decided that setting up the 20-foot by 36-foot aluminum trailers in black neighborhoods was the best way to ease overcrowding and keep school segregation intact.
The modular units were put in vacant lots and on existing school grounds in neighborhoods such as Englewood, where the African-American school population was soaring in the early 1960s.
Sanders, now a Democratic presidential candidate, was then a student at the University of Chicago who joined black parents, civil rights leaders and others to protest institutionalized segregation in Chicago.
In 1979, the U.S. Office for Civil Rights charged that the Chicago Board of Education had systematically contained black students in overcrowded, segregated schools, primarily through the use of mobile classrooms.
That led to the creation of magnet schools and other programs designed to draw students from across the city.
The Willis wagons, however, remained a fixture in the public schools until the 1990s, when many were dismantled because of safety concerns.
dglanton@tribpub.com
