Unrest on Division Street
A 1966 police shooting was a tipping point for Puerto Rican Chicagoans
On a June day 55 years ago, a pair of Chicago cops were routinely patrolling the Humboldt Park neighborhood, unaware that they would soon set off a clash that would prove pivotal to Chicago and U.S. history. The conflict was years in the making, one resident said.
From their squad car, the patrol officers reportedly saw a fight happening at the mouth of an alley near the intersection of Damen Avenue and Division Street. They jumped out of their cruiser, and Officer Thomas Munyon found himself feet away from Arcelis Cruz.
Munyon said he fired his service weapon when he saw Cruz reach for something from his belt. “I shot him in the left leg and he started to run,” he later told a Tribune reporter. A bystander said he also saw Cruz with a gun.
The confrontation quickly became a tipping point for longtime tensions.
Before the shooting, the mood was celebratory in Humboldt Park, a neighborhood that had grown into a Puerto Rican enclave.
Mayor Richard J. Daley had proclaimed the first week of June “Puerto Rican Week.” There was a Puerto Rican parade on State Street downtown and cookouts in Humboldt Park on June 12. Volunteer Mirta Ramirez was running a food stand at the park when word spread of a disturbance.
“One of the parade organizers came in and told us to shut down because there was a riot,” Ramirez recalled for a 1997 retrospective published by DePaul University’s Center for Latino Research.
An angry crowd was facing off with Munyon, his partner and hundreds more cops. As the first eruption of mass unrest on the U.S. mainland by Puerto Ricans, who are U.S. citizens, pundits and politicians have debated its meaning ever since.
To Roberto Medina, who witnessed the unrest as a teenager, it was complicated.
“Some people thought that it was a bunch of yahoos within the community, criminals that started the whole thing. That wasn’t true,” Medina told DePaul researchers.
Medina faulted the police and not just for their actions during the clashes.
“Housing discrimination and police brutality were rampant at that time. If the police saw you in a car — I have my own personal experiences about this — they would pull you out and ask if you were a ‘wetback,’ ” he said, citing a slur that is used to dehumanize immigrants from Mexico.
The Tribune’s editorial board saw the events in Humboldt Park through jaundiced eyes:
“The usual sentimental drivel is coming forth in an effort to excuse the rioters who for two successive nights engaged in shooting, looting, burning, and fighting with the police on the near northwest side.”
One thing is for sure: The authorities didn’t see it coming. O.W. Wilson, Chicago’s reform-minded police superintendent, had ordered a report on racial tensions in the city’s Spanish-speaking communities. It said it found none. So, too, did the head of the Chicago Commission on Human Relations.
A veteran social worker told a reporter: “With all my knowledge of the area, I had no idea there were that many people living there. And I would have said there was no danger of any riot.”
Donald Headly, a Catholic priest, watched clashes play out from atop a squad car that was being targeted, as he told DePaul’s researchers:
“I was trying to point out to (the people intent on burning the car): ‘There is something going on here that we don’t understand, just be careful and know what you are doing.’ ”
To Mayor Daley, the statistics told the story. On the first day of unrest, the Tribune reported, three squad cars were burned, 35 people were arrested and 19 people were injured. Stores along Division Street were looted and set on fire. A firebomb was thrown into Schley Elementary School.
Firefighters had a hose wrested from their hands as they tried to extinguish the flames of a burning police car. A Tribune photographer was robbed of his camera, beaten and kicked, until neighborhood residents rescued him. The nearby St. Mary’s Hospital treated both civilians and police officers.
Daley urged Chicagoans to keep their children off the streets “in areas where unthinking and irresponsible individuals and gangs are seeking a climate of violence and uncertainty that threatens lives and property.”
At one point, police brought a patrol dog into the crowd, and a young man was bitten.
“Members of the crowd picked the youth up and carried him up and down Damen Avenue so the others could see him,” according to Tribune reporting of a witness’s account. “Then he was put into a squad car and taken to a hospital.”
As the unrest ended on June 14, Officer Munyon asked to be transferred to another district. His partner, Officer Raymond Howard, also was reassigned. Asked why, Superintendent Wilson replied: “Because he is unlucky. So if he’s going to be unlucky, let him be unlucky in a district where we haven’t racial tensions.” Howard resigned instead.
By scholarly consensus, the unrest can be explained as a cry for help fueled by pent-up anger at being excluded from the mainstream.
“For a Puerto Rican youngster growing up in the Division Street Area the gates of life clang shut at a terrifyingly early age,” Felix Padilla wrote in “Puerto Rican Chicago.”
Many Puerto Rican residents could only watch as other Chicagoans enjoyed the good life. They lived on the edge of Old Town while to the east were young professionals attracted by the neighborhood’s proximity to the lakefront and the charm of its Victorian architecture. Puerto Rican families were crowded into small, rundown apartments.
As the line of gentrification moved west, Puerto Rican residents were squeezed out. Urban renewal projects reduced the number of neighborhoods that they could afford, forcing them to become nomads.
But after the unrest on Division Street, that began to change. A Puerto Rican resident interviewed a few years later by a local reporter gave voice to that shift in perspective:
“Where would we go if we have to leave, and why should we have to keep moving while other people stay?”
Community leaders were loath to confront Chicago’s movers and shakers. In the aftermath of the unrest, more than a dozen organizations came out against a march to City Hall planned in late June 1966 to push for change.
Still, more than 200 people walked together from Humboldt Park to City Hall carrying signs saying: “Stop police violence” and “Develop local leadership.” The energy of the moment gave birth to numerous organization and a new generation of Puerto Rican leaders.
Just like her neighbors, Ramirez, the food stand volunteer, realized something significant following the outbreak of unrest on June 12:
“We didn’t know how many of us were here and all of a sudden, as a result of the riot, we find that we’re a good number.”