CHICAGO'S LAST HOPE

By Kevin Fedarko

When Lenard Clark's father enrolled his son in a martial-arts class, he wanted his 13-year-old boy to know that "the world isn't always kind" and to "be prepared for the bully that may be coming, because kids can be monsters." But Clark had no way of anticipating that when the world turned ugly for his son on the evening of March 21, there would be three bullies, not one. Nor did he know that they would be so monstrous: slamming Lenard's head against a wall, beating him into a coma and leaving him lying in an alley before going home to brag how they had taken care of the "niggers" in their neighborhood. When Lenard's father arrived at Chicago's Cook County Hospital, his boy "looked like how soldiers look after they get bombed--he looked like he fought for his life."

And he is still fighting. By last Friday, a week after the attack, Lenard had yet to regain full consciousness. While a parade of politicians and community leaders filed past his hospital bed to pay their respects, the rest of the city wrestled with feelings of profound disgust, anger and shame evoked by a crime with unusual symbolic weight. The suspects in the attack, Michael Kwidzinski, 19, Victor Jasas, 17, and Frank Caruso, 18, live in Bridgeport, a neighborhood near Chicago's old stockyards that has given the city five of its last eight mayors, including Richard M. Daley, who grew up in Bridgeport and attended the same Roman Catholic high school as the suspects. But in addition to its political pedigree, Bridgeport is also renowned for intolerance and bigotry. Over the years, it has become synonymous with the sort of racial enmity that much of Chicago once embraced and that, as Clark's beating demonstrated last week, the city still has not completely succeeded in putting behind it.

On the evening of his brutal encounter, Lenard and two friends pedaled from the Stateway Garden public housing projects to the edge of Bridgeport, where they hoped to get some free air for their bikes and snatch a quick game of basketball on a court that sits in the shadows of Comiskey Park. After the game, Lenard was surrounded and attacked by several teenagers. Within 48 hours, three suspects had been arrested. Freed on bail, all have denied involvement in the incident. But the fact that police were led to them by Bridgeport residents, several of whom are white, bespeaks an outrage that at least some members of the community feel over what happened.

For those who live there, Bridgeport is a close-knit working-class neighborhood redolent of the 1950s. Plaster madonnas adorn people's front lawns, plastic Easter bunnies perch in picture windows at this time of year, and on Sundays families attend Mass at the Irish, Italian and Croatian churches where their grandparents were married. Bridgeport is a place where one can still see precinct captains and aldermen of the 11th Ward drinking at Schaller's Pump, and where sauerkraut soup is still served at a diner not far from the home of Chicago's legendary Boss, Richard J. Daley, and the funeral home where he was laid out. But Bridgeport is also the sort of community where a Mexican grocer can find his tires slashed, where a Chinese housewife can discover that someone has set her garbage cans on fire, and where a black mailman who had the temerity to walk into a bar on a June afternoon in 1993 to ask for a drink of water was beaten by two white men with a pool cue.

This is nothing new for a neighborhood where Irish and German gangs fought pitched battles in the streets during the 1850s. But the intolerance has roots in the present as well as the past. Since 1980, when low real estate prices began drawing Chinese and Mexicans into Bridgeport, the ethnic texture of the place has changed dramatically. Today Halsted Street, Bridgeport's commercial artery, is a bustling carnival of whites, Mexicans, Asians and blacks who mingle in the bakeries, the grocery stores and the luncheonettes.

Bridgeport whites began to feel abandoned when Mayor Daley departed the family seat in 1993 and purchased a new home on the city's tony South Loop. "You can feel a lot of fear going through the neighborhood," says Dominic A. Pacyga, a historian at Columbia College who grew up near Bridgeport. "People say to themselves, 'Is this another nail in the coffin?' They feel that it's not home anymore."

Some whites are determined to protect their dwindling enclave with an unwritten set of rules governing which avenues minority residents can walk on, which parks their children may play in and what time they must be off the streets. The rules are enforced subtly--steely glares, selective ticketing of cars, storekeepers who follow shoppers from aisle to aisle--and in more brutal fashion: racial epithets, trash thrown on lawns, windows shattered and beatings of the sort administered to Lenard Clark. "Here the No. 1 issue is color," says Curly Cohen, director of the Bridgeport Volunteer Center. "If you don't learn the rules fast, you could be dead."

Reggie Miller, 15, has been studying the rules ever since his family became one of the few black families to move to Bridgeport in 1994. Even so, he has been spit upon, chased, beaten up "dozens of times," called "nigger" and had a beer bottle broken over his head. "I feel like we don't belong in our own home," he says. Which seems fine by those whites in Bridgeport whose greatest fear is encroachment from the Stateway projects, part of a stretch of high-rise ghettos on Chicago's South Side where the porches are caged in steel mesh, 70% of the residents are under the age of 17, and, in the words of Sarah Johnson, a 19-year-old mother, "You just keep the little kids inside the house and pray."

That ghetto is what Reggie Miller's family moved up from when they came to Bridgeport. It is what Lenard Clark may return to, if and when he recovers from the treatment he received in Bridgeport. And it is what most terrifies those who terrorize others--not only within Bridgeport but throughout Chicago and in other parts of the country as well. "That's part of the tragedy of this event," declares Pacyga. "This isn't a Bridgeport problem. It's an American problem. And if we don't solve these problems on the South Side of Chicago, we're not going to solve them anywhere."

--Reported by Julie Grace/Chicago

With reporting by Julie Grace/Chicago