THE CHICAGO POLICE OFFICERS KILLED IN ’68
On its back side, the old and crinkled glossy print bears a smudged time stamp, “March 26, 1969,” and tersely notes that the photograph was taken at “1121 State — police building.” The picture on the other side tells one chapter of a story without limitations of time and place: For as long as there are cops and criminals, a police officer’s spouse can never be sure his or her partner will come home from work.
In 1968, five Chicago police officers were killed in the line of duty. That Tribune photograph captured four of their wives. They resolutely stare at the superintendent of Chicago’s Police Department, who is out of the frame but has just handed them the awards for valor given their slain husbands.
His words appear to have transported each of the women back to the terrible moment she learned that her patrolman or detective husband had died in “a hail of bullets,” as the Tribune reported in the crime-story language of the era.
The women’s emotional journey also was captured in other photos in a file folder that anonymously rested in the Tribune’s archives for half a century.
Mamie Robinson is standing at a nurses station in Henrotin Hospital on Oct. 25, 1968. Alongside her is a priest. A telephone in her hand, she is telling family members that doctors couldn’t save her husband, Clayton Robinson, who had been shot in the head by a suspect he’d stopped to question on the Near North Side.
In an Oct. 9, 1968, photo, Regina Tucker is crying inconsolably as the Hundred Club, a police support group, presents her with a $1,000 check. The previous day her husband, John Tucker, was killed by a bank robber, and the instant the camera’s shutter clicked, she fainted.
In 1968, U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy was murdered on the campaign trail. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and Chicago’s West Side exploded in rioting, as did black communities elsewhere. In the standard narrative of that violent year, Chicago’s police are chiefly remembered for their clashes with anti-war demonstrators during the Democratic National Convention.
But behind the front-page headlines, the Tribune printed tales of cops performing routine, unglamorous police work, the dangers that work exposed them to and the tragedies some of their families suffered.
Of the five officers killed that year, only one figured in a big story. On June 5, Henry Peeler got out of his patrol car to question three men lying on the ground on South Morgan Avenue eating potato chips.
Patrolman Peeler didn’t know they belonged to a violent faction of the black power movement and were hiding out in Chicago after allegedly murdering a railroad police officer in East St. Louis. One fled into an adjacent gangway and then fatally shot Peeler.
On Dec. 27, 1968, Tanya Ferguson’s husband questioned three men on South Indiana Avenue. A gunbattle ensued and patrolman Joseph Ferguson was killed.
On May 4, 1968, Celine Hobson’s husband was off duty and in a South Halsted Street bar when he asked a patron if he had a license for the pistol tucked into his belt. The man shot Detective Young Hobson five times, killing him.
Each of the slain police officers certainly carried a dream to his grave. Tucker was making a $20 deposit in the Standard Bank and Trust on South Ashland Avenue when he was killed. He moonlighted as a country singer in neighborhood bars and was saving his earnings to buy a home for his family.