Apartheid. USA 1988

September 14, 1987:

The teachers of Chicago's public school system are on strike and no one knows when the 430 000 students will go back to class. The emergency food program is running out of money. And the Federal Government is fighting to take over the city's crumbling public housing system. ‘But the hottest issue at City Hall,’ wrote the Times, ‘is whether Chicago should spend upward of one million dollars to change the municipal seal, the 150-year-old emblem that is embossed on everything from city stationery to the sides of city dump trucks.’

Black Mayor Harold Washington and a group of black aldermen say the seal is racist, because it includes a depiction of a high-masted sailing ship that city documents once described as ‘emblematic of the approach of white man's civilization and commerce’ back in the 17th century. ‘The ship represents institutionalized racism in this country,’ said Alderman Robert Shaw, who also believes the vessel bears a resemblance to the slave ships that plied the coast of Africa. As a result, Alderman Shaw, joined by Alderman Allan Streeter asked the City Council to alter the seal by replacing the ship with a likeness of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a black, who was a fur trader in 1779 and became the first permanent non-Indian settler of Chicago.

Until now, few of Chicago's 3 million residents, more than 40 percent of whom are black, had ever paid much attention to the seal, which depicts not only the ship, its

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sails billowing, but also an Indian peering from a nearby shore; an open sea shell, in which a baby reclines; a shock of wheat, and the city's Latin motto, ‘Urbs in Horto’, or ‘City in a Garden.’ Alderman Edward M Burke called the new suggestion ‘preposterous’ and said the city would have to come up with 352 000 dollars just to change fire and policemen's badges, which bear the seal.^143.

143. The New York Times, from a report by William E Schmidt