Basic Information
- Type of Place
- Independent City or Town
- Metro Area
- W. Chicago
- Politics c. 1860?
- Unions, Organized Labor?
Sundown Town Status
- Sundown Town in the Past?
- Surely
- Was there an ordinance?
- Sign?
- Year of Greatest Interest
- Still Sundown?
- Probably
Census Information
| Total | White | Black | Asian | Native | Hispanic | Other | BHshld | |
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| 2020 |
Method of Exclusion
Main Ethnic Group(s)
Group(s) Excluded
Comments
At Cicero, IL, police at first prevented Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Clark from moving into an apartment building occupied by whites. When a Federal court intervened, a white mob formed and reduced the interior of the building to a shambles. Of the 120 mobsters arrested, two were convicted and fined 10 dollars each. A grand jury proceeded to indict the owner of the building, the rental agent, and the attorney of the victim. A year later, Cicero’s Chief of Police and two policemen were fined from 250 to 2,000 dollars, but the fines were rescinded another year later by the U.S. Court of Appeals. Eventually, the owner of the building, Mrs. Camille Derose, sued the Clarks and eleven other Negroes for $1,000,000, charging that they had conspired to defraud her and send her to prison and a mental institution (she was admitted to the latter). On 9/18/1951, a Cook County grand jury indicted the NAACP attorney defending the black family trying to move into Cicero, the landlady, and her rental agent, not the mob!
After the 1951 riot, Cicero whites were outraged that Gov Adlai Stevenson had called out the National Guard, so the town flipped and voted for Ike in 1952, has been Republican ever since.
In Cicero during an MLK march, in 1966, white counter-protestors physically assaulted King.
Cicero, Illinois: racially exclusionary policies made headlines during the Civil Rights Movement and were not amended as late as 1981. still the center of controversy over non white residents in 2000.