Scholar Story: Leslie Richards

As I asked strangers for directions from what I learned was 57^th Street, I passed a playground in the University of Chicago /Hyde Park area. There were no public buses in the area, even if I had the money. The homes were sturdy, neat and clean. I passed a playground where I saw children playing on swings and seesaws, and sliding boards. What was most amazing to me was that there was green grass. You see, where I lived there was no green grass, no playground, other than at Fuller school where I attended. The playground had rocks and broken glass. Sometime when we played tag on the school playground, I would fall and cut my knees. Many of us carried scars on our knees throughout childhood. It was seeing this playground that I realized there were “white” people who lived so near to us and yet lived such different lives. I felt like I was in the: ”Twilight Zone.” Who were these people? Why didn’t I know about this and why was childhood so different in these two close neighborhoods?

Later that summer, 1955, Emmitt Till, who was from Chicago like me, was killed in Mississippi. As a child I asked my mother why he had been killed, and my mother for the first time having to explain race, said: “White people don’t like us!” I said: “but why, what did we do to them, why don’t they like us?” Her anguished response was that we didn’t do anything to them, they did something to us; “they just don’t like us.” Of course that left me even more confused. Thus, thinking as a child I thought: “They don’t live near us, so they just don’t know us. Once they know us they would like us.” I rightly or wrongly assumed that once they knew us, they would like us. This idea has perhaps guided my sense of wanting to understand how different groups interact. I had a school writing assignment that at twelve was published in the Chicago Sun Times. I was trying to say to the world that my neighborhood was good and had good people in it. In that paper I began to focus more on ethnicity, especially since I had grown up with Gypsy children, Japanese and a few whites. So I kept trying to make sense out of this world so close and yet living such different experiences. I saw local businesses begin to leave the neighborhood, leaving us without good places to shop. There had been Jewish merchants in my neighborhood who extended my parents credit so that they could feed our large family, now those relationships were ending.