Chicago The Town that Works

I lived there (Berwyn mostly) from 55 to 77. Saw the race riots and the 68 Democratic debacle. But I like the place. Newspapers have new owners. Did you read Obama's book about the years he organized in Altgeld Gardens?

There was a group in the early 70s on the west side of Chicago, near the old Sears headquarters, which was called the Ecumenical Institute. Four recent seminary graduates and their wives lived there and conducted seminars, during the week for clergy and on the weekend for laity. The courses were very intense. Method of study was Gestalt. Costs were minimal and accommodations were adequate. Fees were reasonable. Their building was in a former Catholic Seminary. They called themselves Fifth City because the area they worked with was five sided. Sears was at Abington if I remember.

The work involved all age groups. Womb to tomb, they said. In classes, we studied writings by such thinkers as Tillich, Bonhoeffer and Weber. In lab sessions we emphasized tactics and strategies. All of us participated. It was not in the fashionable sensitivity training mode.

Being curious to find out what had happened to the experiment, I wrote them in the late Nineties. They answered that the Fifth City preschool still thrives. Under the name of the Institute of Cultural Affairs, they operate in a former insurance building in the Uptown community, where 83 languages are spoken, according to their literature. The focus is on international leadership. Methods seem to be consistent with earlier times. Persons trained are likely to seek private, maybe volunteer, roles in the United States or abroad.
One tenet of the Ecumenical Institute which impressed me was the need for a local base, a parish, a neighborhood. Another was the need for full-time involvement of persons of all ages. No eleventh-hour solutions! No chosen leader crusades! The grass roots of empowerment worked, at least as I knew it then.

Back to boldface for current comments. The above was what I extracted from notes I have. The point of telling you this is because I thought some of your fellow students might be interested in writing about it. I can understand you're pretty busy. To understand Chicago back then, it helps to have read Taylor Branch's trilogy on the King Years, especially the second volume.

Even after Dr. King's death (and that brought bragging rights for Fifth City since it was the only part of the West Side which wasn't in turmoil) and the Democratic convention there were a lot of protests. The Weathermen for example. And the famous trial with Tom Hayden and Abbie Hoffman, et al.

by Margaret Bassett (31 articles, 1969 quicklinks, 30 diaries, 1282 comments) on Monday, February 11, 2008 at 10:28:16 PM