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What were the 'Willis wagons' that Bernie Sanders protested, got arrested for in 1963?
(snip)
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.
(snip)
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-willis-wagons-explainer-20160223-story.html
14 replies
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Although Sanders did attend the 1963 March on Washington, at which Lewis spoke, most of his work was in and around Hyde Park, where he became involved with the campus chapter of CORE shortly after transferring from Brooklyn College in 1961. During Sanders' first year in Chicago, a group of apartment-hunting white and black students had discovered that off-campus buildings owned by the university were refusing to rent to black students, in violation of the school's policies. CORE organized a 15-day sit-in at the administration building, which Sanders helped lead. (James Farmer, who co-founded CORE and had been a Freedom Rider with Lewis, came to the University of Chicago that winter to praise the activists' work.) The protest ended when George Beadle, the university's president, agreed to form a commission to study the school's housing policies.
Sanders was one of two students from CORE appointed to the commission, which included the neighborhood's alderman and state representative, in addition to members of the administration. But not long afterward, Sanders blew up at the administration, accusing Beadle of reneging on his promise and refusing to answer questions from students on its integration plan. In an open letter in the student newspaper, the Chicago Maroon, Sanders vented about the double-cross:
That spring, with Sanders as its chairman, the university chapter of CORE merged with the university chapter of SNCC. Sanders announced plans to take the fight to the city of Chicago, and in the fall of 1962 he followed through, organizing picketers at a Howard Johnson in Cicero. Sanders told the Chicago Maroon, the student newspaper, that he wanted to keep the pressure on the restaurant chain after the arrest of 12 CORE demonstrators in North Carolina for trying to eat at a Howard Johnson there:
Sanders left his leadership role at the organization not long afterward; his grades suffered so much from his activism that a dean asked him to take some time off from school. (He didn't take much interest in his studies, anyway.) But he continued his activism with CORE and SNCC. In August of 1963, not long after returning to Chicago from the March on Washington, Sanders was charged with resisting arrest after protesting segregation at a school on the city's South Side. He was later fined $25, according to the Chicago Tribune:
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2016/02/bernie-sanders-core-university-chicago
became a teacher in NC after leaving NY and they told me that she had to teach children in trailers because of lack of resources............ 
