The Biography of the Honorable Jesse White.

Jesse Clark White was born in Alton, Illinois, on June 23, 1934. He moved to Chicago with his parents and attended Schiller Elementary School In 1943. He attended Waller High School, where he was active in school athletics, being named All-City in basketball and baseball. He also excelled at tumbling and hoped to play professional baseball after graduation, fielding offers from the St. Louis Browns and the Pittsburgh Pirates. However, White's father insisted that he first go to college. White enrolled at Alabama State College, majoring in physical education. He played baseball and basketball, earning All-Conference honors in both sports. 

Upon graduation, White signed with the Chicago Cubs organization. However, four days before leaving for spring training, he was drafted by the United States Army, where he attended jump school and was trained as a paratrooper. White was soon assigned to the 101st Airborne Division. After his discharge in 1959, White returned to Chicago, where he finally began his professional baseball career, playing for several seasons with the Chicago Cubs organization. 

When Secretary of State Jesse White was a young Chicago Cubs prospect in the early 1960s, legendary slugger Ernie Banks would hold court at spring training dinners with other black players. White says Banks was "our godfather," a player "who we rallied around. And we would meet at this restaurant, and we'd talk baseball. And he'd give us guidance about how to conduct ourselves." The Cubs' playoff run means a little more to the 24-year government officeholder, who played from 1959 to 1966 in the Cubs' farm system. He made it close to the major leagues but never got that coveted call. Still, the advice White says Banks relayed about hard work and moving up in the world could apply as neatly to politics as to baseball. "You cannot just expect a promotion from the sky," White said.

He says the only time he played at Wrigley Field besides a softball game among lawmakers was at a tryout in 1956, 11 years after the team's last World Series appearance. After that tryout, he was signed by the Cubs organization but would be drafted by the Army shortly afterward. "Instead of going to spring training, I went to basic training," White said. White started playing for the low-level Potashers of Carlsbad, New Mexico, in 1959. He eventually made it to the highest levels of the minor leagues, playing a couple of years for the AAA Salt Lake City Bees in the early 1960s.

Jesse White played for the Cubs' AAA team, the Salt Lake City Bees, in the early 1960s. 

He finished with a lifetime .291 batting average, but the game is different now. "I think there's more enthusiasm for the game today, especially here in Chicago, than ever before," he said. "I cannot ever remember this enthusiasm for the Cubs. The players are a lot younger. They're a lot faster. And they pitch the ball a lot faster. "But we played... for the love of the game and not so much for the money involved because we didn't get paid that much."

Off-season, White also worked as a physical education instructor at Schiller Elementary School, the school he attended as a child, and the Chicago Park District. In December 1959, White was asked to organize a gym show at the Rockwell Garden Housing Project. This show laid the foundation for what would become known worldwide as the "Jesse White Tumblers." Team members must stay away from gangs, drugs, and alcohol, stay in school, and maintain a minimum "C" average. The team consists of male and female participants as young as age 6.

With 7 units, the team gives more than 1,500 performances each year at major sporting events and community, business, and charity functions. The Jesse White Tumblers attract national and international attention and have performed throughout the United States in all 50 states and the Countries of Belize, Bermuda, Canada, China, Croatia, Israel, Japan, and others. The team has also been featured in commercials, national television shows, and motion pictures.

Because the organization requires its student-athletes to maintain at least a "C" average, team members and trainees who fall below this standard must attend tutoring classes or show proof that they are enrolled in a tutoring program. Our program assists with homework, encourages independent reading, improves writing skills, spelling and handwriting, and practices basic math facts. The program also helps improve science and social studies grades through study skills and develops higher thinking skills through group and individual work. So far, the Tumblers have served as a positive alternative for over 16,500 underprivileged Chicago children. 

As White continued to juggle teaching and tumbling, he was approached to run for a seat in the state legislature, replacing Robert Thompson, who was retiring. In 1974, he was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives, where he served on the Committees on Aging, Elementary & Secondary Education, and Public Utilities and chaired the Committee on Children and Human Services. Among the bills proposed by White in the House was the Good Samaritan Bill, which allowed hotels to offer leftover food to soup kitchens without threat of liability. 

Except for the 1977-79 term, White served in the Illinois General Assembly until 1992, when he was elected Cook County Recorder of Deeds. In 1996, he was reelected to the same office and served until 1998, when he made history by being the first Black elected Secretary of State for Illinois.

Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White. 

The Secretary of State's office is responsible for issuing license plates and titles, maintaining driver records, and overseeing the State Library, State Archives, and the organ and tissue donor program.

In May 1995, White was inducted into the Southwestern Athletic Conference Hall of Fame. He was an all-city baseball and basketball star at Chicago's Waller High School (now Lincoln Park Academy). He was inducted into the Chicago Public League Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame in June 1995.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D. 

Beginning January 1, 2019, State law mandates black history courses at public colleges in Illinois.

Public colleges and universities throughout the state of Illinois must now offer a course studying black history.

May 3, 1968, black students occupied Northwestern University's bursar’s office, alleging that NU hadn’t confronted Evanston’s segregated housing. Among their demands was a greater presence of minorities at the university, where there were about 45 to 50 blacks among 6,500 undergraduates. 

In 1981, a state law was passed to make sure that all public schools in Illinois teach black history. And in 2016, Chicago Public Schools history teachers believed that CPS didn’t do enough to implement black history classes into its curriculum.

The fact that the existing state mandates weren’t always followed is one reason state Rep. La Shawn K. Ford co-sponsored the bill. “We’re going to have an audit on every school district in the state. In today’s times, where we have so much racial tension, we need to know each others’ culture,” Ford said. “You can’t have institutional learning that’s not complete.”

South Side native Joshua Adams, an assistant professor of media and communications at Salem State University, believes the legislation is a step in the right direction since most students never take a black history course until college. “The way American history is taught around the country often leaves most students unequipped to know about and think critically about where we came from as a country and where we are going,” Adams said.

Elizabeth Todd-Breland, Ph.D. an assistant professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of “A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago since the 1960s,” believes oversight of the law is paramount.

“Given the way that black history has been ignored or distorted—particularly the history of slavery in some secondary textbooks and curriculum—I think requiring black history to be offered at the post-secondary level is important,” Todd-Breland said. “It will also be important to monitor the implementation of this to make sure these courses are not marginalized among other requirements.”

By Evan F. Moore, Chicago Sun Times
Edited by Neil Gale, Ph.D.

The Morgan Park Community is home to Chicago's pioneer Negro settlement, dating back to the 1880s.

The earliest days of Morgan Park included a small settlement of Negroes, some of whom were former slaves and others descended from Southern slave families who migrated north after the Civil War. 

French immigrants also settled in Morgan Park. They settled east of Vincennes Avenue, near the main line of the Rock Island railroad.

Map of Morgan Park, Illinois, as laid out by Thomas F. Nichols for the Blue Island Land and Building Company, 1870.

Morgan Park is 13 miles south of the Loop and is one of the city's 77 official community areas. It was laid out in the 1870s by Thomas F. Nichols, so Morgan Park's winding streets, small parks, and roundabouts evoke images of an English country town. In 1869, the Blue Island Land and Building Company purchased property from the heirs of Thomas Morgan, an early English settler, and subdivided the area from Western Avenue to Vincennes Avenue that falls within the present community area. Although the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad laid tracks through the area in 1852, regular commuter service to downtown was established in the suburban line opened in 1888.

They established their own churches, beginning with Beth Eden in 1891 which was the first of more than 19 churches organized by Negro families who lived in the segregated district east of Vincennes, near the main line of the Rock Island railroad. Public institutions such as the Walker Branch Library (founded in 1890) and the Morgan Park High School (built in 1916) were always integrated.

On the other side of the tracks near 117th Street, French Roman Catholics who worked in the local Purington brickyard established Sacred Heart Church (1904).

The battle over annexation to Chicago in 1911, which sharply divided the community, dragged on in court until 1914.

By 1920, 674 of Morgan Park's 7,780 residents were Negroes (11.5%). The official report published in the wake of the city's 1919 Race Riot (aka Red Summer) noted that, while whites and blacks in Morgan Park "maintain a friendly attitude," nevertheless, "there seems to be a common understanding that Negroes must not live west of Vincennes Road, which bisects the town from northeast to southwest

Second grade at Holy Name of Mary School. 1955

Reflecting the reality of urban segregation, black Catholics established Holy Name of Mary (1940) at the east end of the community. Racial integration in the larger Morgan Park area did not occur on a large scale until the late 1960s. By then, however, the west leg of Interstate 57 had effectively isolated the older black settlement east of Vincennes.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.