On Saturday afternoon, in an echoey old South Side gym, two centers for 5th-grade basketball teams will jump for a ball and start the season for St. Sabina, the first time the all-black team will be playing in a mostly white league.
Besides the kids, nobody will pay much attention to who wins or loses. What will matter to most people is that the teams are playing at all, the result of compromises and sometimes reluctant agreements that opened the doors of the Southside Catholic Conference to St. Sabina’s 5th through 8th graders.
From the sidelines, two men will be especially aware that this is just the first game in a long season, and how that season unfolds will be seen–rightly or wrongly–to say much about race relations in Chicago.
Christopher Mallette, St. Sabina’s athletic director, and Michael Phelan, chairman of the conference, find themselves not just coaching kids, but navigating issues of race, class and safety.
Mallette, who is African-American, is a 30-year-old graduate of Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He was reared in an Irish-Catholic and working-class neighborhood in New Jersey and came to St. Sabina initially to worship but eventually was hired as legal counsel and executive director of its youth program, the ARK.
Phelan, who is white, is a self-proclaimed “South Side, Irish-Catholic, Democrat and White Sox fan.” A longtime coach known for his “tell-it-like-it-is” style, Phelan, 64, became conference chairman in August, four months after St. Sabina applied to the league.
As the games get under way Saturday–St. Alexander of Palos Heights is scheduled to play the Saints at St. Sabina’s–both men say they want the conference to succeed.
For Mallette, the experience will be successful if children of different races learn to understand one another better. It’s the next obvious step following four months during which league and St. Sabina officials bickered over whether a concern of safety was simply a euphemistic way to get around issues of race.
“So far we’ve blown an awesome opportunity to let the church be the leader in admitting that racism is a problem,” said Mallette, who views his work at St. Sabina’s as a personal ministry. “And now let’s actively work to eradicate it. I don’t think our children should have to take out garbage we as adults refuse to take out.”
Sports and bridge-building
Phelan said he’s not sure that sports can bridge deep divisions. Some stem back to when neighborhoods such as St. Sabina’s Auburn-Gresham changed from white to black as whites moved to Beverly and to suburbs such as Oak Lawn and Evergreen Park.
“There are people who are trying to use this as a big race model,” Phelan said. “Maybe we can make some strides. Most likely, we won’t. Maybe we can simply prove we can get along and play together. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.”
When Mallette, a former college linebacker with an Ivy League championship ring, took over at the ARK Youth and Family Resource Center four years ago, he had recently left a job as a prosecutor for the city.
His new digs were impressive. The gym, at about 135 feet by 70 feet, seats roughly 500 onlookers, making it one of the largest grammar school gyms in the city. The shiny brown parquet floor is nearly a century old and resists scuffs. Two electronic Coca-Cola scoreboards are state of the art.
But the children were even more impressive, said Mallette. “These are smart kids who don’t curse, who come to games with their jerseys tucked in properly. They respect the refs.”
As the Saints scrimmaged this week in preparation for Saturday’s game, Mallette scanned the court and his players with both pride and trepidation.
“I have parents who are worried about whether their kids will be subjected to taunts or jeers when they play in other neighborhoods,” he said. “I have a lot of faith in God, but my concern is for these kids too.”
Good experience for kids
Mallette said he wanted to join the conference because he grew up playing sports with athletes of different races and wanted these kids to have a similar experience. He knew it wouldn’t be easy, clearly remembering being called disparaging names. Still, he hoped the experience would help the students mature as athletes and as people.
He said he never anticipated that the conference would initially reject St. Sabina’s application, saying some conference members feared they wouldn’t be safe playing games in the Auburn-Gresham community; or that the Archdiocese of Chicago would have to step in and help hammer out a deal on racial taunting and safety concerns.
“Yes, we’re going to play, but there’s still a lot of hurt involved,” Mallette said. “We were disrespected. The church was disrespected and so was the black community here.”
There’s no question that parts of Auburn-Gresham have had trouble with gangs and drugs. Rev. Michael Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina’s, has led protests against both. But the area surrounding St. Sabina’s, with its storefront churches and grocery stores, bungalows and apartment buildings, has been safe, said Mallette.
However, he doesn’t believe the controversy was ever really about safety. “This was about people’s stereotypes of a black neighborhood,” he said. “Plain and simple.”
Issue’s roots are deep
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“Whoever questions why this was an issue, just doesn’t know the Southwest Side,” said Phelan.
In the early 1960s, before Auburn-Gresham changed from white to black, St. Sabina’s gym was a hangout for Phelan and his friends. But it wasn’t sports that drew them to the gym. It was the Sunday night sock hops.
The lights were dimmed. The basketball hoops and frames raised out of the way. And music from the record player blared over loud speakers, offering an array of tunes from the Beatles to the Rolling Stones.
“We’d be meeting girls until the fights broke out,” said Phelan, who was a halfback for Brother Rice’s football team. “Some guy from, say, St. Rita’s would start hitting some guy from, say, Leo and it would be time to leave.”
Families defined by parish
He said back then, race wasn’t an issue. These were young Irish Catholics, defined more by the church and their parish than the color of their skin.
“So many of our parents (in the conference) grew up in the St. Sabina’s, St. Leo (the Great), and St. Rita parishes and they have fond memories of those places,” said Phelan, who has attended Holy Redeemer Catholic Church since he was a child.
Phelan said that when African-Americans started moving into the St. Sabina parish in the 1960s, many of the white families migrated southwest to the Beverly neighborhood or to nearby, middle-class suburbs.
“What happened there was white flight, if you want to call it that,” he said. “You were baptized in the church, you were educated there. Your social life and most of your athletic programs revolved around the church. And you lived within a four- or five-block radius of the church.”
Everybody knew everybody. The children played together. It was comfortable, idyllic in a sense.
Phelan observed the dynamic: “The feeling is that kids grow up and they don’t move that far away and that next generation gets to experience what we experienced. But then when blacks moved in, there was some resentment (among the whites) because they felt like that land was taken from them.”
Even though people chose to move, he said, there is the feeling of being forced to leave homes, neighborhoods where people struggled to buy into and to build.
There is this inability for Chicago whites and blacks to live in the same place at the same time and to be friends and be a part of each other’s lives,” he said, frustration in his voice. “It’s sad, but that’s the way it’s been in this city.”
Players can make it a go
Still, Phelan said he’s hopeful that the conference players will make the season a success.
“I think that those of us who want it to succeed will find ways to make that happen,” he said. “And for those who don’t want it to succeed, we’ll have to find ways to overcome those people.”
Mallette said he’s still concerned that some parts of the original agreement haven’t been carried out. A forfeiture policy, which prohibited teams from not showing up at games, was hammered out but never signed. And more importantly, forums on race were never held.
“This isn’t about simply being on the court and playing games,” Mallette said. “We’re God’s people and inasmuch, we have to set an example and get to the root of racism.”