![]() The local offered CTW members some newly created management posts, but these were rejected as tokenism. Hill walked out, ignoring the verbal ultimatum to come back.Īs a result the CTW staged a five-day strike that ended only when Mayor Daley promised to address issues of bus maintenance and cleanliness. The final straw came in early July when the local rejected the CTW’s petition to eliminate the retirees’ voting privileges and adjourned. According to Willis, younger members began pressing the issue of retiree voting during the spring of 1968, but if they pressed too hard, a white member would move to adjourn the meeting, and the motion would be swiftly seconded and carried. But under its bylaws, retired members–nearly all of whom were white–retained their voting privileges, and as a result the white membership controlled the ballot box, even though by 1968 the black drivers outnumbered the white drivers. The CTA had begun hiring blacks in 1945, and Local 241 of the Amalgamated Transit Union was integrated. Considering that nobody had any prior training, we did pretty well.”īut the organization’s plans to work from inside the union local were foiled by its president, James J. Our leaders couldn’t move without getting guidance from our guys. “Anytime a decision was made, we always had a mass meeting where people could hear and express. “The way we operated was a great model in terms of trade union democracy,” says Willis. As interest grew, the meetings were moved to churches and schools, representatives were chosen, and the black drivers, organizing under the name Concerned Transit Workers, drew up a list of demands to present to the union and the CTA. So we just handled it ourselves.”ĭrivers from other stations heard about the “sick day” and contacted Willis, who began holding meetings in the kitchen of his west-side apartment. “It had little to do with the union, except we felt we couldn’t take it to them to get satisfaction. “It gave us a sense of empowerment, that we could force management to do something,” remembers Willis. The year before the strike, two black drivers had been fired for quarreling with a pair of white CTA police officers Willis had helped organize a one-day protest at the Kedzie-Van Buren station, and after a critical mass of drivers called in sick on the same day, the fired employees were reinstated. He’d grown up on the west side and served in the air force before hiring on at the CTA at 27 he was a husband, a father, and a student at Crane College, which he and other members of the black student alliance were urging the city to rename Malcolm X College. Standish Willis was one of the drivers who operated out of the predominantly black shed at Kedzie and Van Buren. At 12:01 on the night of August 25, 1968, the black drivers turned off the lights on their vehicles and headed back to the CTA bus barns, beginning a two-week strike that shut down 52 of the city’s 128 bus routes and effectively paralyzed the south and west sides. More than half of the CTA’s bus drivers were African-American, and for weeks they had been fighting what they considered unfair union representation. ![]() Daley was preparing to host the Democratic National Convention, a large sector of the City That Works stopped working. “It’s time for us to really start digging deep and invest in these communities and give the younger generation some other alternatives other than looking to violence or running with a bad crowd.Almost 30 years ago, as Richard J. “There’s nothing in the communities for anybody to do anymore,” Hill said. He also acknowledged the issues driving the violence are deep seeded. He said the CTA agreed to do this months ago but has yet to implement the change. Hill said one thing that would help is to more fully enclose the driver’s area. Some drivers carry weapons, even though it’s agains the rules, acknowledged one driver. It’s sad,” she said, adding onboard security cameras don’t seem to deter crime. “It’s like ever since the pandemic it looks like everybody is just losing their mind. ![]() And we’re trying to defuse situations, but we’re not a therapist out there,” she said, noting that unaddressed mental illness seems to play a large role in some encounters. “We’re doing our job, requesting a fare one time. Rear boarding resulted in many free rides.
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