There Are No Children Here Read Online Free PDF Page A

moved into the Henry Horner Homes. It was October 15, 1956, a Monday.
    The complex was so new that some of the buildings had yet to be completed. Thick paths of mud ran where the sidewalks should have been. A thin, warped plank of wood substituted for the unbuilt steps.
    But to LaJoe and her brothers and sisters, it all looked dazzling. The building’s brand-new bricks were a deep and lusciousred, and they were smooth and solid to the touch. The clean windows reflected the day’s movements with a shimmering clarity that gave the building an almost magical quality. Even the two unfinished buildings, one to the west and one to the south, their concrete frames still exposed, appeared stately.
    It was quiet and peaceful; there were not even any passersby. On this unusually warm fall day—the temperature topped 70 degrees by noon—LaJoe could even hear the shrill songs of the sparrows. The building, 1920 West Washington, stood empty. They were to be the first family to occupy one of its sixty-five apartments.
    LaJoe’s father, Roy Anderson, pulled the car and its trailer up to the building’s back entrance. He was a ruggedly handsome man whose steely stare belied his affable nature and his affection for children. He and his wife, Lelia Mae, had been eagerly awaiting this move. They and their thirteen children, including three sets of twins, had been living in a spacious five-bedroom apartment, but the coal-heated flat got so cold in the winter that the pipes frequently froze. On those days they fetched their water from a fire hydrant. The apartment was above a Baptist church, and there were times when the rooms overflowed with the wailings of funerals or the joyful songs accompanying baptisms. And the building canted to the east, so whenever a truck passed, the floors and walls shook vigorously, sometimes scaring the children into thinking the entire structure might collapse.
    For Lelia Mae and Roy their south side apartment seemed adequate enough. Both had come from the shacks and the shanties of the South. Lelia Mae had left Charleston, West Virginia, at the age of twenty in 1937. Her father had been a coal miner and a part-time preacher for the Ebenezer Baptist Church. She headed for Chicago, where she’d been told she could make good money. Her older sister, who had moved to Chicago a few years earlier, promised Lelia Mae to get her a job in the laundry where she worked. Once in Chicago, Lelia Mae, already divorced and with one child, met her second husband, Roy, who worked in one of the city’s numerous steel mills. Roy hailed from Camden, Arkansas, where his father had been the deacon of a Baptist church. Roy was a spiffy dresser whose trademark was a small Stetson; it balanced with astounding ease on his large, dignified head.
    The two had raised their family in the second-floor Chicago apartment above the church, but their home was to be demolished to make way for a university building, part of the new Illinois Institute of Technology, and they had to move. They were given the opportunity to move into public housing, the grand castles being built for the nation’s urban poor.
    In the middle and late 1950s, publicly financed high-rise complexes sprang up across the country like dandelions in a rainy spring. In 1949, Congress, in addressing a postwar housing crisis, had authorized loans and subsidies to construct 810,000 units of low-rent housing units nationwide. At the time, it was viewed as an impressive effort to provide shelter for the less fortunate.
    But the program’s controversial beginnings were an ominous sign of what lay ahead. White politicians wanted neither poor nor black families in their communities, and they resisted the publicly financed housing. In over seventy communities, public housing opponents brought the issue before the electorate in referenda. In California, voters amended the state constitution so that all public housing projects required their approval. In Detroit, a 14,350-unit public