Division Lesson

Along Chicago's volatile Northwest Side, boredom pangs were as palpable as the prickling humidity. On Division Street, main stem of the barrio that holds the majority of Chicago's Puerto Rican population, people drooped languidly from tenement windows and crowded the front stoops, ducking for cover during thundershowers that drenched the area off and on all day. In any other minority neighborhood, the cop on the beat might have been nervous, for the day (it was Sunday), the mood and the weather afforded the classic setting for a racial explosion. But Division Street, as always, had been relatively quiet. Only the day before, the police band had joined in a parade through the area to celebrate "Puerto Rican Week."

Amity was short lived. Checking on a disturbance a few doors north of Division on Damen Avenue, a patrolman shot and wounded a youth who pulled a revolver--but word spread that the boy had been unarmed. An emotional crowd gathered and soon raged out of control. When carloads of police arrived with dogs, the mob ignited in fury.

Two Nights. In the hours that followed, two police cars were set afire. The neighborhood was laced by a withering crossfire of bullets, rocks and bottles. The blue-helmeted riot squad--euphemistically called the "Task Force" --was pelted with Molotov cocktails from roofs and windows.

Next day Puerto Rican community leaders requested that all uniformed policemen be kept out of the area until the fever subsided, promising to do everything in their power to keep order. The police agreed, and the stratagem worked--for a while. Then a squad car squealed through the area in response to a burglar alarm, and the leaders' spell was broken; mayhem erupted for the second night. By midweek the police, now under the command of the department's chief troubleshooter, Captain James Holzman, were quick to disperse any sizable gathering. Miraculously, the reign of hate left only one Chicagoan, a 21-year-old Puerto Rican, seriously injured.

Mayor Richard Daley's administration, which has been eying the Negro ghettos apprehensively for the past three summers, was astonished that the season's first serious outburst had occurred in the Puerto Rican district. Yet, beneath its quiet workaday surface, Division Street had long been simmering with discontent. Proud and hardworking, yet insecure and frustrated in a strange land, the Puerto Ricans have been all but ignored by city hall, which cannot even say with any degree of accuracy how many Puerto Ricans live in the city's boundaries. (Estimates range all the way from 45,000 to 65,000.)

Words & Action. While Police Superintendent Orlando Wilson has earned nationwide acclaim for his success in reforming a force long noted for corruption, he has found it no easy task to instill the cop on the beat with a respect for minorities. "There is very, very big resentment of the police out there," says the Rev. Donald Headley, head of the Cardinal's Committee for the Spanish Speaking in Chicago.* "The attitude of the policeman to the Puerto Ricans has been very bad."

Superintendent Wilson, former dean of the University of California School of Criminology in Berkeley, moved swiftly to meet minority groups' complaints. Even as Mayor Daley fulminated darkly against "outsiders" who had stirred up the trouble, Wilson called on more Puerto Ricans to join the department, appointed a Negro commander to oversee a prime Negro trouble spot, and ordered the immediate integration of all two-man patrol cars.

Henceforth, Wilson decreed, patrols must be mixed to reflect Chicago's own -diverse ethnic makeup, pairing as best as possible the traditional Irish and Italian cops with Negroes, Puerto Ricans and Latin Americans. The dogs, Wilson indicated with refreshing candor, had been a mistake and in all probability would not be used again to head off riots. City hall, rather belatedly, took note of the tensions along Division Street and promised a conference to discuss Puerto Rican problems.

-- A Roman Catholic committee founded by Samuel Cardinal Stritch in 1954 to integrate Spanish-speaking Chicagoans into the religious and social life of the city.

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