Going to Kensoha

 "I grew up in Kenosha on the edge of a forest.  It wasn’t a big forest, but it was enough.  When you’re a kid, it feels gigantic.” Mark Ruffalo

POTUS made a brief trip to Kenosha, Wisconsin, in the wake of the police shooting of 29-year-old Jacob Blake (seven times in the back) and resulting protests.  Defying pleas from state and local officials, he fanned the flames of discord by refusing to meet with Blake, paralyzed from the waist down, or members of his family.   He compared the tragedy to a golfer choking on a three-foot putt and failed to criticize the 17-year-old vigilante who killed two demonstrators and wounded a third.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Blake’s grandfather, Reverend Jacob Blake, was a Gary steelworker and Indiana University graduate who was arrested in 1948 for making a speech outside Gary Works in support of Progressive Party candidate for President Henry Wallace. In the late 1950s he became youth pastor at First African Episcopal Methodist Church in Gary’s segregated Midtown district. Reverend Blake worked for churches in East Chicago and Chicago prior to moving to Evanston in 1967 and becoming pastor at Ebenezer AME Church, taking part in fair housing struggles. Reverend Blake’s widow, Patricia Goudeau Blake, is still living in Park Manor; her father, L’Ouveture Goudeau was a union activist who worked with A. Philip Randolph and an air force pilot who during Aorld War II instructed Tuskegee Airmen. Patricia told Chicago Tribune reporter William Lee that her grandson helped feed homeless people at a mosque, that older folks loved him, and that “he had a magnetism.”

Paul Kern

When I spotted the Northwest Indiana Times headline “Trump Goes to Kenosha,” it reminded me of this anecdote that IU Northwest student Dave Malham told about history professor Paul Kern; it appears in Kern and my history of the university:

    Paul Kern was a born storyteller, combining passion with the delivery of an actor.  At the podium sometimes his eyes would narrow or his teeth clench. He had a slight lisp, and his s’s would sound like sh.  His account of a power struggle between a Holy Roman Emperor and Pope Gregory mentioned how in order to get back into the pope’s good graces the emperor humbled himself by going to Canossa as a penitent. Centuries later, when Chancellor Bismarck was involved in a similar power struggle, he uttered the symbolic line, “I will not go to Canossa.” Meaning, “I will not submit to this.” When Kern uttered the line, it sounded like Kenosha, like in Kenosha, Wisconsin. I though to myself, “Shit, I wouldn’t go to Kenosha either.” But the sh in Canossa did not mar from Kern’s power as a storyteller. He knew how to deliver a line. 

Today Joe Biden went to Kenosha, visited Jacob Blake in the hospital, and met with his family, doing what he does best, empathizing with those suffering.


Valparaiso resident and former Post-Tribune sports reporter John Mutka wrote;

    Trump's unwanted visit to Kenosha was nothing more than a cynical attempt to foster divisiveness, spread his not so subtle message to white privilege at the expense of African Americans, whose pleas for equality he continues to ignore. Instead of being presidential he is campaigning for reelection when he should be healing a nation he has recklessly divided. This man is a fear monger, trying to frighten people into voting for him by blaming Democrats for all the problems he has created during his four years of mismanagement.

 

After Miller historian Cullen Ben-Daniel somewhat facetiously called Valparaiso a suburb of Gary, Liz Wuerffel, co-director of the VU Welcome Center’s Flight Paths Project, replied, “Kind of, but not in the same way as Merrillville.  Not to say there weren’t many people who lived in Valpo and worked in the mills – certainly there were and still are. But I’m guessing it was much more a center for rural Porter County than a commuter town for people who worked in Gary.  I’d be curious what percentage of Valpo residents commuted to Gary back in the 60s and 70s and the percentage that commute to Chicago today. Chicago commuters seem to be increasing pretty rapidly.”  Liz is correct in the sense that many more Gary residents moved to Merrillville than to Valpo, first so-called white flight and then middle-class black flight.  The motivation in both cases was both push and pull factors - a safer environment, better schools, lower tax base and insurance rates, and the like. Linda Hazelton interjected: “When I graduated from VHS, it was common for people who weren’t headed to college to go to work at the mills.  They could support their families well without a college degree. I think it was the late 60s, early 70s, when “outsiders” started moving into Porter County from Pittsburgh and Baltimore to take management positions in the mills.”  

Mets Hall of Famer Tom Seaver, known as “The Franshise” and “Tom Terrific,” died at age 75.  In the mid-1980s I saw Seaver pitch seven shutout innings for the Chicago White Sox at age 40.  His catcher was Carlton “Pudge” Fisk, another Hall of Famer.