Pioneer Press obituary

Jaime McClendon influenced a generation of students.

His magic was in the way he could instill critical thinking, boost his students’ confidence and present them with a different world view. A Renaissance man of sorts, McClendon was a pioneering Black educator at both Waukegan and New Trier High Schools. McClendon died Feb. 12 in Colorado at age 96.

McClendon may be best remembered on the North Shore for developing and leading a unique program at New Trier High School starting in 1965 called Summer Seminar in Community Affairs. Students — 20 from New Trier and 20 from Crane, DuSable, Harlan, Hirsch and Hyde Park High Schools in Chicago — would spend the summer together learning about the city, suburbs and each other.

I was one of those of those students in 1969. And Chicago was our classroom.

The students from the North Shore and those from the city had this in common: the world was tumultuous. We had just lived through the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. We had witnessed Mayor Richard J. Daley give an order to “shoot to kill” during riots and the Vietnam War was in full force. Civil rights legislation prohibiting racial discrimination was only five years old.

McClendon grew up first in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and then in Waukegan. He often talked about his grandparents who descended from slaves and lived on a plantation. He received his bachelor’s degree and master’s degree at Colorado State. Later, he studied for his doctorate in Urban Studies at the University of Chicago under Richard Wade, author of “The Urban Frontier” and known to be a pioneer in the study of cities.

It was his dream to teach at his alma mater, Waukegan High School, said his daughter Nalani McClendon. He applied in 1952 and despite his impressive credentials, was denied employment because he was Black, his daughter Nalani McClendon said.

McClendon instead took a job at a meatpacking plant in Back of the Yards, an experience that instilled in him a lifelong hatred of hot dogs. He then worked at a wire mill. That was until a Black Waukegan High School board member who was married to McClendon’s physician made it her mission to get him hired. He eventually was hired and taught there for 13 years.

In 1965, he was hired at New Trier High School. He taught at the school until 1976. Initially, he commuted from Waukegan but a year later bought a home closer and moved his family — wife Doris, and children Nalani, Malia, Roderick, Maile and Arawa to Glencoe.

The move was not without incident. When neighbors in Glencoe heard that McClendon wanted to purchase near them, an uproar began. There were community meetings, a proposal by a group of residents to purchase the home so McClendon could not and suggestions that the McClendons find a home in south Glencoe, known at the time as “the Black neighborhood.”

Rabbi Harold Kudan, who was then at North Shore Congregation Israel in Glencoe, remembers that the homeowner who was about to sell to the McClendons was told by neighbors that it would be “immoral” to sell the house to a Black family.

“I asked, did the McClendons offer the price asked?” Kudan said, “the answer was yes, and I said it would be immoral not to sell him the house.”

Nalani McClendon remembers many times when her parents went out and people would throw eggs at their house.

Kudan visited the family and facilitated a better relationship with neighbors. Eventually, members of the synagogue would stop by with cookies and meals to welcome the McClendons.

When Kudan asked what else he could do, McClendon, known for thinking outside the box, asked that his son Rod be allowed to go to Hebrew school at North Shore Congregation Israel.

“It was so unusual to have someone who wanted to attend Hebrew school,“ Kudan said.

Many of us who participated in the summer seminar credit that experience, and McClendon’s influence, as life changing. We recall the way he would challenge us. He would ask a difficult question and just sit back with this wry smile (and often a pipe) and wait for us to figure out the answer.

The seminar’s first day on the bus was memorable. The white students on one side. The Black students on the other. We were taken to a park in the city where we role played and got to know each other.

Every day we visited a different neighborhood. We built a playground in Uptown where neighborhood kids stared and laughed and eventually helped us. We spent time at Operation Breadbasket with Jesse Jackson and sat in on the Chicago City Council. An all-night tour that began at 4 p.m. and ended at 10 a.m. included the garbage dump, a homeless shelter, Cook County Hospital, and the Night Pastor on Rush Street. Stereotypes of city kids and their stereotypes of us fell away as the days went on. We became friends.

McClendon had a way of teaching us to look at the world with a critical eye. It was because of him that I became a journalist.

Jackie Wolf, of Winnetka, participated in Summer Seminar in 1968. She remembers that the last week of the summer, the city students stayed at homes with the North Shore students. Two Black students stayed at her house and she remembers taking them for a walk around her neighborhood. Within a couple of minutes, a police cruiser stopped them to ask what they were doing.

“It was a visual manifestation of everything we learned that summer. In seven years, I had never seen a police car in my neighborhood. It was so shocking. And exactly what Jaime had been teaching us,” she recalled.

Today, Wolf is a professor of social medicine at Ohio University. This summer she will lead a class called History of Racism in the United States that was designed at the request of the local police chief, for all officers of the Athens, Ohio Police Department and the Ohio University Police Department.

“He led to my career,” Wolf said. “He taught me that history is dynamic and can be used in a very practical way to achieve justice and to change practices that might be inequitable. His influence was profound. I’m deeply sad I didn’t tell him that.”

Sophia Polakowski Peron of Wilmette participated in Summer Seminar in 1967.

“The seminar was magical,” Peron said. “We were like family and living in 1967 there was a lot of frustration, a lot to be done. Jaime was an inspiration. I remember he had a beautiful voice. It was a learning experience for everyone.”

Peron became a lifelong community activist living in what she describes as “the pocket of poverty” in New Mexico.

Edward Zwick, the award-winning movie director who grew up in Winnetka, said McClendon pushed him to a place he had never gone before. McClendon was his home room advisor for four years. He encouraged critical thinking and not to just accept what was in a textbook but to “look at what’s in front of you.”

He encouraged students to read Richard Wright and James Baldwin and showed us a world beyond the North Shore.

Zwick and I remember a moratorium we participated in at New Trier — in the courtyard at New Trier West to protest bombings in Vietnam. The administration planned to suspend us all. That is, until McClendon stood up for us and the administration backed down.

During that time, Zwick said he traveled to Washington D.C. and visited a couple of Civil War battlefields. Twenty years later he came across a manuscript about the first 54th Massachusetts, the U.S. Civil War’s first all-Black volunteer regiment.

Zwick is convinced that McClendon’s guidance and insistence to look at alternate sides of history led to his making of the movie “Glory.”

Zwick brought the movie premier to Chicago in 1989 at the Chicago Historical Society and invited McClendon. Looking out at the audience he assumed McClendon could not make it.

At the end of the movie an explanation appears on screen explaining that the 54th Massachusetts lost over half of their troops in the assault on Fort Wagner.

On the screen: “As word of their bravery spread, Congress at last authorized the raising of Black troops throughout the Union. Over 180,000 volunteered. President Lincoln credited these men of color with helping turn the tide of the war.”

When the movie ended, Zwick looked out at the audience. There was McClendon, his face wet with tears.

“He came up to me and hugged me in a way that I remember to this day,” Zwick said. “It gave me closure, a way of letting him know what he meant to me.”

Susan Berger is a freelance reporter.

Photo below from Summer Seminar in Community Affairs led by Jaime McClendon.