I am Annetta Allen. I was born in Greenville, Mississippi, in January 1948. My mother became very ill with epilepsy after I was born, so my father took over raising my brother and three sisters. My mother’s sister-in-law Willette raised me. In 1957 we moved to Sycamore, Illinois, to live with her brother. Sycamore was a mostly white town. A white family lived on one side of our house and a white family lived on the other. The neighborhood was nice, clean. Lawns were manicured. It was beautiful. I played with white kids and spent the night at their homes. Even a white teacher of mine had me stay overnight at her house a few times. No one ever called me a racial name. There were no barriers.
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When I first got to the city, I couldn’t believe how much racial segregation there was here. It’s all just like plantations of people, separated. I saw it every day on the bus. First all ethnic people is on the bus, then all of a sudden you look around and there’s nobody but blacks on the bus. One day I was with my cousins on a bus full of black people. My cousins got off the bus and I was trailing behind. I hollered at them to wait up for me. All of a sudden everybody on the bus started laughing. I asked one of my cousins why they were laughing, and she said it was because my accent sounded more white than black. It’s so crazy how things is. You live one way, then you find yourself having to live another way.
My sister-in-law was a registered nurse at Rush-Presbyterian hospital. She got me on in medical records there about a month after I arrived to the city. I earned my nurse’s assistant certification about a year later, and I began working with the elderly. Rush wasn’t the best place. I didn’t like the way the doctors talked to the staff. You felt like you were being talked down to a lot of times. I had a run-in with a supervisor because she thought I didn’t work fast enough. I guess because I grew up in a small town I worked at a slower pace than people in Chicago, and that became a problem. In De Kalb I could take the time to make sure my patients were comfortable, but I couldn’t do that here. I remember something else: my supervisor told me to wear a net over my Afro, but she didn’t ask the white women to wear nets. I felt like I was being picked on. I just felt that blacks were being treated different. Around this time I was becoming aware of racism in the country. I was really getting into Stokely Carmichael and Julian Bond. I was reading civil rights literature and listening to the news. I was also beginning to realize that my aunt and her brother had never really talked about civil rights. Maybe they felt I was too young to deal with it.
After we moved over here it seemed like the bubble just burst. Everything went really crazy. I remember looking in my mailbox one day and finding a piece of paper that said “one-way ticket to Africa.” I remember a billboard on 71st and Western said something like, “No niggers allowed.” I’d never seen anything like this. The Ku Klux Klan’s headquarters was nearby. Some whites smoke-bombed the house of a black woman who lived a block over from us. I remember a bunch of white women chanted “Nigger go home” to a little girl who wanted to attend Marquette School. I saw whites marching in Marquette Park against blacks moving into the neighborhood. I remember one day getting off the bus at Western and this white guy threw a cup of ice at me. I got ice water all on the back of me and I didn’t say anything. A white guy shot a black neighbor’s son at a White Castle on 69th and Western. He had about three bullets in him. It’s amazing he did not die.
My block club helped expose Operation Silver Shovel. The corner of 63rd and Hamilton was a dump site. We took pictures of license plates and gave some of them to the newspapers, and the alderman, and Streets and Sanitation. Whatever was necessary. One day I confronted someone dumping and he said he had permission from a politician to dump. I don’t remember the politician’s name. I called a newspaper reporter with the tip and he came over and did a story. All the dump sites came to light and they were exposed. I guess that exposed our alderman, Virgil Jones, who wound up going to jail.
