Catholic school owned by lay people! - Hales High School, Chicago, Illinois - Cover Story

Commonweal, April 8, 1994 by Jim Bowman

The plan was to make those regents trustees of their own institution, and that' s what happened in July 1993. Enrollment is up, to almost 400 boys. Tuition is $2,800, 60 percent of the going rate in today' s market. It can't go any higher because the students' "socioeconomic" profile, to use Hubert's word, sets a limit. You can price yourself out of the market Hales has a niche in, rather a comer on, as quickly as you could end up on the wrong side of the law if you grew up at 63rd and Ellis.

He's on the law side of the law now, smiling and outgoing, with associates working busily in his law office. He's dressed for the Daley Center courtrooms, a few blocks away, and leaves the interview for a while to make a necessary appearance.

Yes, he does feel about being African-American, Catholic, and a responsible citizen, he said when he returned, as he felt a few years earlier, when he had expatiated on those issues in the same tidy office for the same writer. At the time, he had recently visited Ghana's Accra castle, where he'd seen the holding pens for blacks before being loaded into the holds of slave ships, "like Jews going to Auschwitz." It was a shocker for him. And it was not so long ago at that, two hundred years or so. Two hundred years to catch on to European ways? Not much time, when you consider it. The pushy ones were muzzled, literally, with contraptions on display at Accra castle. You were an up-and-comer, you got muzzled. Not a formula for success.

But "we can't cry in our milk," he says. "We have to develop a family system and values and get the best education possible." We have to make the institutions in our neighborhoods reflect those values. I ask myself what I can do to make other African-Americans strong." Among other projects, he works with black lawyers who are sometimes loaded down with "nickel-and-dime" cases which they neglect. It' s no way to make a living or a career. He tells them that.

"I have paid my dues," he said, taking another tack. "But American society never really accepted us as full dues-paying members."

Another: "We [blacks] live in a society that' s color blind but we are not ready to take advantage of it. In many organizations, I'm the only black. Black men in such groups are neglected. It' s not that simple, to take advantage of the opportunity.

"No millions were spent for education of freed slave kids. How then do whites expect us to have their values?"

So look to black institutions. "But when black institutions grow strong, they move to mainstream culture," leaving other blacks behind. "Hales once had 550 students. They needed a trailer in the school yard to handle the overflow. The whites moved to the suburbs, athletics got bigger, and blacks were recruited by white high schools."

The issue? "What whites take for granted is not there for blacks--an educated populace where the family is the central unit. At Hales we isolate the boys, we tell them they count, we say they can make it. They come from an environment that says they can't make it. We tell them different."