The True Story about the 1948 Chicago Yard Sign; "4 Children for Sale," and the Consequences for Some of these Children.

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In historical writing and analysis, PRESENTISM introduces present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. Presentism is a form of cultural bias that creates a distorted understanding of the subject matter. Reading modern notions of morality into the past is committing the error of presentism. Historical accounts are written by people and can be slanted, so I try my hardest to present fact-based and well-researched articles.

Facts don't require one's approval or acceptance.

I present [PG-13] articles without regard to race, color, political party, or religious beliefs, including Atheism, national origin, citizenship status, gender, LGBTQ+ status, disability, military status, or educational level. What I present are facts — NOT Alternative Facts — about the subject. You won't find articles or readers' comments that spread rumors, lies, hateful statements, and people instigating arguments or fights.

FOR HISTORICAL CLARITY

When I write about the INDIGENOUS PEOPLE, I follow this historical terminology:

• The use of old commonly used terms, disrespectful today, i.e., REDMAN or REDMEN, SAVAGES, and HALF-BREED are explained in this article.

Writing about AFRICAN-AMERICAN history, I follow these race terms:

• "NEGRO" was the term used until the mid-1960s.
• "BLACK" started being used in the mid-1960s.
• "AFRICAN-AMERICAN" [Afro-American] began usage in the late 1980s.

— PLEASE PRACTICE HISTORICISM —

THE INTERPRETATION OF THE PAST IN ITS OWN CONTEXT.

 

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Family members accused the mother of being paid to stage the photo, which may have been part of the story, but unfortunately, she was dead serious about selling her children. No one knows how long the sign stood in the yard, whether it was long enough for the camera to take the picture or whether it was years. Within two years, all of the children pictured and the baby she was carrying at the time were sold off to different homes. 

Before being picked up for national newspapers, the photo first appeared in The Chicago Herald-American Newspaper - on August 4, 1948. The children looked posed and a bit confused as their pregnant mother hid her face from the photographer.

Original caption from the Chicago Herald-American Newspaper - August 4, 1948, Chicago, Illinois: "They're on the auction block. These small children of Mr. and Mrs. Ray Chalifoux of Chicago, Illinois. For long months 40-year-old Ray and his wife, Lucille, 24, waged a desperate but losing battle to keep food in their mouth and a roof over their heads. Now jobless and facing eviction from their near barren flat, the Chalifoux has surrendered to their heartbreaking decision. The photo shows the mother sobbing as the children pose wonderingly on the steps. Left to right: Lana, 6; RaeAnn, 5; Milton, 4; Sue Ellen, 2 years old." — Image by Bettmann.

NOTE: The Vidette-Messenger of Valparaiso, Indiana is usually given credit for publishing this picture first on August 5, 1948, but on August 5th thru the 10th, dozens of newspapers around the country published this picture with nearly the same caption.

According to the New York Post Newspaper, several days after the sad photo and its caption ran in a newspaper called the Chicago Heights Star, A Chicago Heights woman offered to open her home to the children. Offers of jobs, apartments, houses and financial assistance poured in. However, it's unclear if and where the financial aid was distributed or whether funds were held by the family for a couple years before all the children were sold off.

Sometime later, Lucille Chalifoux had four more children — this time, she kept them.

THE RESULTS OF BEING SOLD AS A CHILD
In 2013, the scattered siblings tried to find each other, and their stories are of raw survival and heartbreaking.

"No one believes it," Lance Gray said about his mother RaeAnn's horrific and dramatic life story. In 2013 the then 70-year-old RaeAnn Mills reunited with her 67-year-old sister Sue Ellen Chalifoux for the first time since they were seven and four. By the time of their reunion, Sue Ellen was dying of lung cancer, but RaeAnn was grateful for the brief, bittersweet reunion. "It's one of the happiest days of my life," RaeAnn said of the trip she took with her son to visit Sue Ellen a few months before she passed away. Sue Ellen could no longer speak when they met, but she could write. "It's fabulous. I love her," she wrote of her sister RaeAnn, but minced no words about her birth mother: "She needs to be in hell burning."

David McDaniel, who was in his mother's womb at the time of the photograph, never got to meet Sue Ellen before she passed away or their older sister Lana, who died before the siblings started reconnecting.

According to RaeAnn, she was sold for $2 ($22 today) to farmers John and Ruth Zoeteman on August 27, 1950. Her brother Milton was crying nearby during the transaction, so the Zoetemans took Milton for another $2.

RaeAnn Mills left, and her brother Milton was sold to the Zoeteman family.

Their names were changed to Beverly and Kenneth, and although their birth mother's dire situation, their new home wasn't much salvation. They were often chained up in a barn and forced to work long hours in the field. Milton remembers being called a "slave" by his new father figure, a label he accepted because he didn't understand what it meant.

Although it seems that RaeAnn and Milton were never officially adopted by their abusers, their brother David (born Bedford Chalifoux) was legally adopted by Harry and Luella McDaniel, who only lived a few miles away. David was given away at two years of age. When his adoptive family, the McDaniels, received him, he had bed bug bites all over his body. They raised him strictly religiously, but their proximity to his siblings RaeAnn and Milton allowed him to visit them at the farm on which they lived. He remembers untying them in the barn.

David, who says his adoptive parents were strict but loving and supportive, remembers riding out on his bike to see his siblings and unchaining them before returning home.

RaeAnn left home at 17, shortly after undergoing a brutally traumatic situation. As a young teen, she was kidnapped and raped, which resulted in a pregnancy. She was sent away to a home for pregnant girls and had her baby adopted when she returned.

As Milton grew older, he reacted to the beatings, starvation, and other abuses with violent rages. A judge deemed him a menace to society. He spent several years in a mental hospital after being forced to choose between that and a reformatory (a juvenile detention center.)

The woman in the photograph remarried after selling/giving away her five children and had four more daughters. When her other children eventually came to see her, she's described as entirely lacking love for her estranged children or having any regret for letting them go.

David McDaniel defended his mother's coldness as evidence of a different, hardscrabble world. "As soon as my mom saw me, she said, 'You look just like your father,'" McDaniel said. "She never apologized. Back then, it was survival. Who are we to judge? We're all human beings, and we all make mistakes. She could've thought about the children and didn't want them to die." He also met her four daughters during a later marriage: the children she kept. 

Milton had a different perspective on the situation: "My birth mother never did love me, and she didn't apologize for selling me and hated me so much that she didn't care."

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

The Jack Spratt Coffee House Civil Rights Sit-In on May 15, 1943, Chicago.

The Jack Spratt Coffee House in the Kenwood neighborhood on Chicago's South Side played an early, unsung role in the civil rights movement.

THE INCIDENT 
One afternoon in 1942, after a Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) meeting, a few members decided to continue their discussion at a local coffee shop called Jack Spratt's. Upon entering, James Farmer was refused service by the manager for being Negro. Fellow white CORE member Jimmy Robinson calmly but sternly explained to the manager that he violated the Illinois Civil Rights Act of 1885. The manager reluctantly served both men. The CORE group returned two days later to further test Jack Spratt's policy. The members were served without incident. They left their payment on the table and exited. Moments later, the manager ran out, threw their money into the street, and screamed, "Take your money and get out! We don't want it!" In reaction to these encounters, CORE decided that Jack Spratt's should be the site of their first nonviolent direct action campaign. As part of their "Action Discipline" method (modified Gandhian methods by which the CORE operated), Farmer sought to negotiate with the manager, first by phone and then via letter. Both attempts were fruitless. 

Thus, on May 15, 1943, at 4:30 PM, Chicago CORE conducted one of American history's earliest civil rights sit-ins. Twenty-eight people entered Jack Spratt's in groups of 2, 3, or 4. Each group had at least one Negro person. In each group, the whites were served while the negroes were refused service. The whites would either pass their food to the negroes in their group or would refuse to eat until everyone in the group was served. Other customers in the coffee house also joined the sit-in.

Eventually, the manager told Jimmy Robinson (speaking only to the white guy) that if the "colored people" would move to the basement, they could be served there. James Farmer replied that they would not eat in the basement. The manager told Robinson (again ignoring Farmer) that they could serve the blacks in the back corner. Again, Farmer politely refused. The manager then called the police.

Jack Spratt Coffee House Exterior. 
Photograph by Hedrich-Blessing, March 28, 1941.

Jack Spratt Coffee House Interior. 
Photograph by Hedrich-Blessing, March 28, 1941.

Unbeknownst to the manager, the group had already informed the police of their plans. Though the police did arrive, they refused to do anything and told the manager that she would either have to serve the patrons or find another acceptable solution as no laws were broken. Everyone ended up being served, albeit hours after they first arrived. Subsequent test visits over the next several weeks confirmed that the CORE sit-in had successfully changed Jack Spratt's policy.

Farmer explains what happened in his own words:

"We went in with a group of about twenty-five—this was a small place that seats thirty or thirty-five comfortably at the counter and in the booths—and occupied just about all of the available seats and waited for service. The woman was in charge again [the manager they had encountered on a previous visit]. She ordered the waitress to serve two whites who were seated at the counter, and she served them. Then she told the blacks, ‘I'm sorry, we can't serve you, you'll have to leave.’ And they, of course, declined to leave and continued to sit there. By this time the other customers who were in there were aware of what was going on and were watching, and most of these were university people, University of Chicago, who were more or less sympathetic with us. And they stopped eating and the two people at the counter she had served and those whites in the booth she had served were not eating. There was no turnover. People were coming in and standing around for a few minutes and walking out. There were no seats available."

THE REST OF THE STORY
Farmer changed how Jack Spratt did business – almost twenty years before the famed lunch counter sit-ins of the civil rights era focused the nation's attention on racial discrimination.

At the time, the world took little notice. "If we were lucky, there might be a small paragraph on a back page of the Chicago Tribune saying, in effect, that a few nuts and crackpots sat in a restaurant until they were served, or thrown out, or the place closed for the night — whichever came first," James Farmer recalled in his 1985 memoir, "Lay Bare the Heart."

Farmer was an organizer for the Fellowship of Reconciliation with a hunch that the organization's pacifist commitment to turning a cheek in the face of violence could be a weapon with which to combat segregation. The U.S. said it was fighting World War II to save democracy abroad, even as Negroes were denied equal rights at home by Southern laws and Northern customs.

To test his idea, Farmer and 27 others, many of whom lived around the University of Chicago campus, went to the nearby Jack Spratt Coffee House, known to be unfriendly to Negroes. As expected, whites were served, and Negros were not. All rejected the management's proposal that they dine in the basement. The police refused to remove Farmer and his friends, saying they hadn't broken any Illinois laws. Jack Spratt quietly dropped its anti-Negro policies afterward.

Eighteen years later, a group of college students struggling to desegregate a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., sought advice from CORE, born during the civil rights campaign on 47th Street. In the South in 1960, police and whites were hardly the nonpartisan bystanders their Chicago counterparts had been. Food was dumped on protesters, who were also beaten and arrested.

But the students persevered, and their tactics quickly spread to other cities. In August, student leaders came to Chicago to explain their motivation to an audience at the Corpus Christi Center in the South Side ghetto.

"Down there, you felt all alone," said Ezell Blair, who participated in one of the first Greensboro sit-ins. "You feel very timid. But it is just about the time that you think you are going to break that you say to yourself, 'No, I'll stay right here.'"

Between the time of the Chicago sit-in and the one in Greensboro, Negroes won a milestone victory with 1954's Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling that separate schools for whites and Negroes were unconstitutional. But with many states stalling on actually desegregating, Negroes were frustrated with the lawsuit route to equality. Farmer and his Chicago friends had come to that conclusion long before.

Along with their campaign to desegregate restaurants, CORE members in 1949 confronted White City Roller Skating Rink, a remnant of the famous 63rd Street amusement park, which was off-limits to Negroes. After being repeatedly turned away — always with the explanation that there was a private party — Farmer filed complaints against several employees. But at the trial, an assistant state's attorney entered the tank. In summation, he said: "We have failed to prove that they discriminated, and as a prosecutor for the state, I can make but one recommendation, namely that you find these defendants from the White City Roller Skating Rink not guilty." The judge reluctantly complied.

In the aftermath of the North Carolina sit-ins, CORE's Chicago experience and the eagerness of Southern students to combat Jim Crow came together with the civil rights movement's adoption of Farmer's brainchild: nonviolent resistance. The tactic gained a national audience during the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott thanks to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. "No longer did we have to explain nonviolence to people," Farmer said. "Thanks to Martin Luther King, it was a household word."

In 1961, with Farmer as its director, CORE sent Freedom Riders to integrate buses in Dixie. Again, there was violence and arrests. Attorney General Robert Kennedy wanted the Freedom Rides halted. As it often did during this time, the Tribune attributed the demand for change to subversives with a headline "Freedom Rides Traced To Red Inspired Plot." But it also reported how volunteers from Illinois were screened according to the protocol set during the early Chicago sit-ins. "We look for persons who sincerely want to improve race relations — persons who want to abide by dictates of passive resistance rather than those who want to fight back," a CORE recruiter told a Trib reporter.

James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

A federal judge in Alabama ordered the Freedom Rides and attendant violence to stop. "If there are any more occurrences of this sort of thing, I am going to put some Klansmen, city officials, policemen, and Negro preachers in the penitentiary," the judge said, according to the Trib's account. Yet the Freedom Riders kept coming, and in September, the Interstate Commerce Commission ordered an end to segregated transportation.

In the years that followed, Farmer split with CORE, which had tilted toward Negro separatism and militant philosophy incompatible with Farmer's pacifism. "Negroes and whites have contributed too much to CORE for it to degenerate like this," he told the Tribune in 1978.

He briefly joined the Nixon administration in 1969. Farmer, who, with King, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, A. Philip Randolph, and John Lewis, was considered a significant force in the civil rights movement — had been largely forgotten when President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998, a year before he died.

He left a bittersweet evaluation of the faith that inspired that sit-in on 47th Street.

"We too, in the early years of CORE, believed that truth alone, the transparent justice of our demands, would convert the segregationists," he wrote in 1965 in "Freedom — When?" "We were very young and idealistic."

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.