DIVISION STREET REVISITED EPISODE 6: LEON  BEVERLY: Mr. Beverly, Can You Help? Back in the 1960s, Leon Beverly was known around certain parts of Chicago as a man who could fix problems. He was a union man, tall and muscular, with a hearty laugh and calluses on his hands from wrangling hogs in the stockyards. He lived on the city’s West Side, in one of those classic Chicago two-flats—red brick, a bunch of relatives upstairs, his family downstairs. My door is always open, he told people, and so, with their troubles in tow, they came knocking. On summer days, they might find him on his porch, smoking a cigarette, listening to baseball on the radio… [BASEBALL CHATTER] On other days, they might find him in the basement… Playing the piano… [PIANO RISES] Or sitting at a long table cluttered with yellow legal pads, doing business for his packinghouse union. “Mr. Beverly, I just got laid off.” “Mr. Beverly, they’re gonna repossess my car.” “Mr. Beverly, what are we going to do about all these folks tossing empty bottles in the yards?”  One day in 1965, a famous man joined the parade that traipsed up the wooden stairs to the front door. Studs Terkel. STUDS: Sitting here with Leon Beverly in his flat on 1807 South Harding, Leon Beverly, who's working for the Packinghouse Workers… Studs was a popular Chicago radio host who’d recently turned his love of talk into something new.  He was interviewing ordinary Chicagoans about their hopes and fears, and collecting those interviews for a book.  STUDS: We're thinking as we sit here on this spring evening, beginnings, how it all began with you, Leon…When did you come to Chicago? Where'd you come from? The book Studs was putting together was called Division Street America and Leon Beverly was in it, under the pseudonym Lew Gibson. LEON: I came from Jackson, Mississippi. My family brought us here to escape the problems of the Negroes in the South. Division Street was published in 1967. It became a bestseller, praised for creating a portrait of the country through the eyes of regular people.  But what happened to those people? To their dreams? To their children and grandchildren? I’m Mary Schmich. And this is Division Street Revisited, a show in which we set out to answer those questions about seven people Studs interviewed in the 1960s. x Today, the story of Leon Beverly, a man with big dreams. He had dreams for the working class of America: LEON: I was never exposed to opera. I was never exposed to yachts. If we would expose the average worker to these things,  think we would cut down on crime. He had dreams that civil rights leaders and union leaders and ministers would get out of their fancy cars and work harder to connect with the deeply poor: LEON: We got to get down these poor people, these people who’s given up. These are the people you got to get to. These are the people we don’t have. And he had dreams for his children: LEON: I don’t want them to look to the packinghouse, the steel mills. I want them to look farther than that. I’d like to see them atomic scientists, teachers, professors. In short, this is the story of a man who devoted his life to helping people solve their problems—even as he struggled to solve his own. [TRAIN] Let’s go back in time for a moment. To 1918. One day in Jackson, Mississippi, a  woman hustles her three children onto a train bound for the faraway city of Chicago. She’s traveling with no husband. Next-to-no money. One of her children is a four-year-old boy named Leon. The woman’s name is Betty, and she’s in the first wave of an astonishing movement of Black Southerners to the North, eventually more than a million people who leave their homes in search of jobs and schools and freedom from oppressive Southern laws. Many years later, historians give this exodus a name: The Great Migration. But Betty doesn’t know she’s making history. She’s just a single mother from the backwoods, striking out on her own. In Chicago, she furnishes her apartment with cheap beach chairs and milk crates. She gets a job at a laundry. She loses that job. When the family goes on relief—meaning welfare—little Leon feels the humiliation. LEON: All children have pride and I was always afraid that the people in the school would find that we was on relief and we might be evicted… Sure enough, one day the sheriff’s truck shows up at young Leon’s door. LEON: They came to our house, we saw them coming and the rent was behind and our grandmother was living with us, so…We decided to put her in the bed. She was sick already, but she wasn't that sick. But we put her in the bed and we put a rag around her head and we doused it in water and we begged them not to put us out. So they had a conference and said, "Well, we'll be back. We can't put you out today." Through the years, the family moves from home to home. Leon grows up. His ambitions grow too. LEON: I wanted to be a doctor and I knew my family wasn't able, but I felt that through my church work, that I would get a job. My pastor gave me a letter to one of the big stores downtown…When I went with my graduation ribbons on with my letter, I was almost physically thrown out of the store. Said, "We don't hire your kind." And I don't want to use the name what they called me. "We don't hire you people here.” So, at the age of 19, he applies for a job in a place he figures he will be welcome. The Chicago stockyards. In those days—the 1930s—the stockyards are vast, practically a city within the city.  On that noisy, stinking terrain, hogs and cattle are slaughtered and sliced, then packaged and shipped off to a country hungry for steak and bacon. At the stockyards, one of the bosses gives Leon’s muscles a squeeze. Declares him fit. And offers him a coveted job—as a butcher. LEON: But I made one mistake. I joined the union the first day and put my button on. And once the boss saw you with the button on, well, you was a marked guy. They didn't fire me, but they took me off my job and put me on the most menial job for two years. STUDS: What was that job? LEON: The job was driving hogs. The company gives Leon a uniform—meaning a raincoat, a rain hat and high boots. Also, a paddle, which he uses to chase hogs to the killing floor as he splashes through pools of hog excrement. [SQUEALING AND SPLASHING SOUNDS] Leon was married by then, and one day he complained to his wife—Alice—about the working conditions, said the union wasn’t stepping up to help. Her reply: Then why don’t you step up to help the union? Before long, Leon Beverly was a union steward for the United Packinghouse Workers of America. Within a few years, he was president of the union local. It was a big union. with more white members than Black.  And it was a huge job, which Leon did on top of his work in the hog kill department. He organized strikes. He got fired several times, then reinstated.  He traveled to the state capital to lobby. To Washington, D.C., to protest. When the union was accused of links to communism, Leon was subpoenaed to testify before the United States Congress.  It’s important to note that Leon and his union were working for more than better wages and working conditions.  They were demanding equal pay—equal opportunity—for Black people and for women.  And they were doing it before Martin Luther King was on the scene.  Leon’s work–the work of the union–helped pave the way for the Civil Rights Movement.  [STRIKE/PROTEST SOUNDS/MUSIC] Every now and then, Leon shows up in the newspapers. Even today, you can Google the name “Leon Beverly” and find a 1948 news photo of Leon and his wife on a picket line. He’s wearing a dark overcoat and a white union apron, along with a fedora, a well-trimmed mustache and a worried look. He’s holding his baby son. But by the early 1950s, Leon’s marriage is over. He marries again, to a woman he meets on another picket line. Her name is Carrie.  Carrie ignores his overtures at first, but then he shows up at her mother’s house with a big, fresh ham and the courtship is on. In the next few years, Leon and Carrie have three children. They’re offered the chance to move into one of the new Chicago public housing projects where Black people are being concentrated in the name of “urban renewal.” Leon thinks those high-rises are discriminatory and dangerous. LEON: I wouldn't want to be in these projects that they got now….You see my two children, you see two of them here, I would hate to see them on the 17th floor. So he and Carrie scrape together money for a mortgage in a neighborhood that white people are abandoning as Black people move in. And that’s where Studs Terkel comes to visit, carting his big reel-to-reel tape recorder. Gilbert Beverly was 11 years old the day Studs came to interview his dad.  GIL: I didn’t know who he was. But when he brought that big thing in, I said, ‘This is serious. I’m not sure what’s going on, but this is serious.” He’s in his early 70s now, and my colleague Bill and I have come to see him at his home in Rochester, N.Y. Gil lives in a quiet neighborhood of single-story houses. We sit down at his dining table and he promptly warns us… GIL: I guess I should throw this in now. I get emotional. I’m doing it now. Why? No clue. His wife, Debbie, hands him a box of Kleenex. When we started our search for the descendants of people in Division Street, we had no idea who we’d find, or how they’d feel about revisiting the past in this way. And at first, Gil was hesitant. For reasons that became clearer as we talked. But today, he’s excited to be remembering his dad and Studs. GIL: I'm telling you, I can't believe this. I mean, I was there when he brought that big box into our house…And now, in my house, us talking about it, again….I’m talking about it. Whatever you call, the the weirdness of the world. How does that happen? How in the heck does that happen? Gil’s retired now, after years of teaching computer graphics to deaf students at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Professor Beverly. It was exactly the kind of job Leon dreamed of for his kids.  GIL: And I wish I could tell him As he talks about his father, Gil sometimes crosses his arms over his chest, closes his eyes and smiles, as if he’s floating in warm memories. GIL: He would take us on those Sunday meetings to the union hall…I loved those…We were cute little kids. We were Leon's kid s. "You want a candy bar?" Heck yeah. "You want a soda?" Yeah! He talks proudly of his dad’s leadership, in the union and in the neighborhood. He wishes the family hadn’t lost that photo of Leon with Martin Luther King. But we haven’t been talking long when Gil shifts the conversation to something that’s harder to discuss. GIL: He was a quiet alcoholic. I mean, he wasn’t destructive, I guess, other than to himself. As an adult, Gil sees the dark side of those union meetings. GIL: When my dad’d go to these meetings and he’s organizing people, well you know, when they’d get finished with the meeting, go to the bar. And I figured this out later. It messed him up. He couldn’t be what he wasn’t that person anymore. That alcoholism kept him from being the strong person that he used to be. Yet, for a while, even when he was on the decline, Leon found hope in helping people. And in his piano. We’ll continue after the break. [BREAK] I’m Mary Schmich and you’re listening to Division Street Revisited. By the time of his interview with Studs Terkel, Leon Beverly was 50 years old.  He still worked for the union. But in the stockyards, machines were replacing humans. His packinghouse had closed. Leon worried about all the people left in the lurch by the automation of work. But for himself, he saw freedom. LEON: if the government had a project where I could go out with a piano, portable piano, and go in various neighborhoods and show the kids how they could learn how to play music and then not only play music for engagements at the Palmer House, but play it for the community, I think it would cut down crime. To Leon, music—like the union—was a way to solve problems. He fell in love with the piano in high school, when he heard the jazz pianist Earl Hines on the radio. He taught himself chords. Earned a little money playing.  LEON: I wanted a cigarette. I might wanted a drink in those days when I was growing up. Well, I’d play a few numbers on the piano and I would get these things. It’d say, OK, this is hope, a ray of hope. He loved jazz and boogie-woogie. And the Chicago gospel legend Mahalia Jackson. [MUSIC] LEON: She’s a typical example of what I’m trying to say. Like when my mother died, her music, it made me cry, but it gave me hope. After his packinghouse closed, Leon bought two big things with his severance pay. One was a set of World Book encyclopedias for his kids. The other: a piano for himself. And for years, people who came to the Beverly house to talk problems and politics would wind up around Leon’s piano. Gil — who plays drums in a band, by the way — is especially fond of one song his dad loved to play. “The Little Red Dress." GIL: Duh doo duh doo duh doo….Leon, Leon, play the whatever…my dad’s feeling good about this time….He’d be in his happy place and duh doo duh doo duh doo…Oh, Leon! The little red dress that Mary used to wear…I can’t believe I got that… Gil smiles as he taps out the beat on the dining table, remembering his father’s happy place. [PAUSE/MUSIC] In April of 1968, three years after Studs interviewed Leon, Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee. Riots exploded not far from Leon’s home. [RIOT NOISE] Leon had always worried about the neighborhood’s decline. LEON: Everybody in the block has got a car. And the cars, they're symbols. Most of them is not paid for, I know that, including mine. And on a good warm day, they'll be out, they'll wash the car, they'll polish it, but they won't take a broom and sweep up. He and his wife created a block club and encouraged their neighbors to pick up the empty bottles, plant some grass, show their pride. And even though by the mid-’60s, only one white person was left on Leon’s block — a Mrs. Ramsey — the white shopkeepers in the neighborhood had stayed. GIL: We used to just go up the street, around the corner, to the local stores. And most of them was owned by white people, but they knew us, we knew them. We bought our clothes. It was cool. Riots came and we burnt everything down. I remember thinking: I know you’re mad, but now I don’t have any place to shop. Leon’s house and block survived the riots, but the neighborhood never fully recovered. CARRENE: So, I know the neighborhood has changed and it’s a lot more transient, but it was beautiful and it’s still somewhat beautiful. It’s a sunny autumn day and we’ve come to the old block on South Harding Street with Gil’s sister, Carrene Beverly-Bass. CARRENE: And at night in the summer we would just play here, jump rope, chalk up the hopscotch, right here and my parents would sit on the porch and all the grownups were having conversations. I think about the times. I think I can name some of the people. The Archies lived at 1846. Wow! It’s been a while.  Carrene is in her 60s. She’s a warm woman with a lively laugh. One of her jangly bracelets is inscribed with the Biblical words, “Be anxious for nothing.” She lives with her husband and another of her brothers — Nelson — in a diverse neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side. Five days a week, she commutes back to the West Side to teach at a public school where almost all the kids are Black, and poor, and violence is stitched into the fabric of life. Now Carrene strolls her old block.  In front of one of the vacant lots, she stops. CARRENE: But that right there is my life, my entire life, with my mom and dad, and all my values were put into me here. She’s looking beyond the dirt and weeds. In her mind’s eye, she sees her old brick house, the wooden stairs, the two chairs on the porch, all those visitors who came to talk. [MUSIC/TALKING] CARRENE: Our house was the house in the family and the house in the neighborhood, that everybody came to. And it was just always, you know, joy. In that house, Carrene learned the values that led her to become a leader in the Chicago Teachers Union.  She’s on the union’s Executive Board. A few years ago, she was arrested during a sit-in outside the Mayor’s office. In the past year, she traveled to Springfield, the state capital, to lobby for more money for public schools. Money for school nurses. For school libraries. Things her school doesn’t have. To Carrene, the decline of public education is the civil rights issue of our time. MARY: What are the similarities between your father’s union work and what you’re working for through the teachers union? CARENE: Oh my goodness! Some people feel like unions, we should just be dealing with wages and benefits. And I think I’ve learned through my father’s work that so many things affect everything else. Like if you’re trying to have a child develop — the whole child — if he doesn’t have housing, it’s hard to have stability and teach those children. So our union fights for those things, even though that’s not fighting for books and pencils, so we deal with the social ills, so similarities, I would say we both dealt with many of the social things versus just benefits, pay and salary. Those were important but I think we understood we gotta deal with the social situations as well. But on this sunny day, there’s a shadow on Carrene’s memories.  Around the time she was in eighth grade, when Leon was in his mid-50s, she sensed a change in her father. He stopped going to union meetings. People stopped coming to the house. He didn’t play piano so much anymore. His drinking got worse. And then came the day that changed everything. Before I go on, I want to pause. The next part of Leon’s story will be hard to hear. CARRENE: It was a Saturday. And that was a morning that was just like any other morning. Carrene was 19 by then, and her brother Nelson was going to drive her to her job at a department store. She planned to buy her dad some house shoes.  CARRENE: And I remember leaving, my mom was working in the front yard…I remember getting in the car and just saying, “See you later, Mom.” It was just gonna be a regular Saturday. GIL: I got the call from my brother and he said, "Gil, you got to come home." "Nelson, what's going on?" "Just come home.” On that Saturday in 1979, at the age of 64, Leon Beverly hung himself, in his bedroom. His wife, Carrie, found him. A few minutes later, Carrie — his partner, his protector — died of a heart attack. [PAUSE] When Carrene told us this story, she said that in her whole life she’s told only a few people. She held up 10 fingers to show how many. CARRENE: He had so much pride and we had pride for him. I don’t know if that was selfish. We just wanted to protect him and let him know that he was okay. She still wonders about the heartache that led her father to take his life, and how his family might have helped him through his despair. But she and Gil decided they wanted to share his story. Because despite his struggles, he made the world better. [PAUSE] Leon Beverly’s dreams for himself were never extravagant. LEON: I’d like to be able to come home and play music, get the latest records, look at the ballgame…and meet the neighbors and go out in the backyard and talk with the guys, without all of these economic things hanging over my head…my own personal, that would be heaven to me. For his children, he dreamed bigger.  LEON: I don’t want them to look to the packinghouse, the steel mills. I want them to look farther than that. I’d like to see them atomic scientists, teachers, professors. And those dreams came true.    His kids went to college, got good jobs. Their children went to college, got good jobs. MARY: What are you afraid of for the country right now, for your children, your grandchildren? GIL: That we not going to figure out how to all live together. That we not gonna do it. I mean I don’t understand. We can put people on the freaking moon. We can do all this stuff, but we can’t figure out how to get along. We just can not seem to love. But Leon Beverly taught his children to love.  To care for people who have less than they do.  That is his legacy. MARY: What’s the central lesson of his life? CARRENE: Your hard work of helping others is not in vain. And no matter how hard it is, the fight is  important. When it succeeds or if it doesn’t succeed, the fight is important. [BOOGIE-WOOGIE PIANO INTO WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN] Division Street Revisited is the brainchild of Executive Producer Melissa Harris. Bill Healy produced this podcast. Cate Cahan and Mark Jacob were our editors. Sound Design and Mixing by Libby Lussenhop. Our Associate Producer is Chijioke Williams. The show features original music by Chris Walz. Special thanks to Gerald Beverly and to the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Archives at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. Thanks also to the Roosevelt University Archives. Additional music from Mahalia Jackson and Epidemic Sound. Major funding for this podcast comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Additional funders include M. Harris & Co., the Field Foundation of Illinois, the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, the Susan H. Schwartz Charitable Trust, Debra Schwartz, and Julia Stasch. Archival audio comes from the Studs Terkel Radio Archive at WFMT, and the Chicago History Museum. It was digitized by the Library of Congress. Division Street Revisited is distributed by PRX. Our theme song is “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” one of Studs’ favorites. I’m Mary Schmich.