Then it was off to a rally alongside Congressman Henry Hyde in Cicero, Illinois, a white ethnic working-class suburb of Chicago whose history of racist violence rivaled South Boston’s. The last time a Black person tried to live there was 1951; the ensuing riot warned anyone against trying again for decades. A little more than a dozen years before Reagan’s visit, a Black kid was beaten to death just for crossing into Cicero to look for a job, and Martin Luther King Jr. gave up on a plan for a housing march there after the Cook County sheriff called it “awfully close to a suicidal act.”
