An Illinois documentary filmmaker’s focus on one Chicago woman’s advocacy over 50 years is screening at the East Moline Public Library this week.
Craig Dudnick of Evanston, Illinois, directed “Alice’s Ordinary People,” a 2012 documentary on Alice Tregay, a civil rights activist.
Dudnick’s journey to Alice began when he attended Northwestern University in the late 1970’s, where he met Viola Hillsman, a 76-year-old cook in his fraternity house, and began a decades-long friendship. He ended up caring for Viola when she was facing dementia for 20 years.
“I actually did this story for an NPR program called The Story with Dick Gordon, where I told of her impact as an African American woman. And I'd had a difficult time when I first came to college, and interaction with her really, I want to say, changed my life. It wasn't anything specific. It was her approach to life, how she treated people. This had a big effect on me,” Dudnick said in an interview with WVIK.
When Viola passed away at age 100, he made a documentary called “Evanston’s Living History”, focusing on her community and their struggles fighting racism.
“And one of the people who liked the film was Mrs. Alice Tregay. Her brother, Sam Hicks, was Evanston's first Black firefighter in 1950, but he couldn't eat with the other firefighters, separate silverware,” Dudnick said. “So these are the sort of things that I documented in the film. And Alice liked the film, and she liked that I focused on what she called the ordinary people. There was nothing ordinary about them, but people like the firefighters and the policemen and their struggles on the front line against racism.”
Tregay asked Dudnick to work on a documentary about Chicago’s Freedom Movement. He didn’t realize at the time how integral she was to the movement.
The documentary covers Tregay’s start in activism, beginning in the late 1960’s, when the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, an umbrella group of Civil Rights organizations, invited Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to protest the city’s Superintendent Benjamin Willis’ new policy. Willis answer to overcrowding in Black schools was to build shed additions without heat or air conditioning. Dudnick says there was plenty of room in the white schools at the time. These were known as “Willis Wagons”.
“And Dr. King moves with his family into an apartment in what they call then the slum section of the west side, North Lawndale. And the CCCO joins with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to form the Chicago Freedom Movement. And in the spring and summer, when they march into segregated communities, because the Chicago movement is about desegregating the housing and the schools that are linked to the segregated housing. In other words, there was no formal segregation, but if you have segregated housing, you have segregated schools that are linked to the segregated housing,” Dudnick said.
Hundreds of thousands of people were protesting in the streets, including Tregay.
“[T]hey encounter mobs of people more vicious than anything they'd seen in the South,” Dudnick said. “And Dr. King, he didn't say fear for his life. He said he surrendered to the possibility that he might be killed twice. Once was Mississippi, when they couldn't get a clear shot. [The] other time was Chicago in Marquette Park, a rock hit him in the back of the head that knocked him to his knees.”
Two years later, Dr. King would be assassinated in Tennessee while he was assisting sanitation workers on strike, picketing for non-starvation wages. While in Chicago, Tregay met Dr. King and shared her experience with Dudnick.
“And she said, ‘he made you feel like you were the most important person.’ I said, what do you think of all the things named after him? And she said, ‘he never would have believed that because, oh, boy, for his stance on Vietnam... It was a very difficult period.’ And then she said, ‘But don't make a God out of him.’ My understanding was by her saying “don’t make a God out of him,” was that this was a movement of “ordinary people,” which is why we called the film Alice’s Ordinary People (a title she suggested).”
Tregay didn’t stop at protesting in the streets; she started a political education class for Black Americans.
“Teaching people how to run for office as part of the civil rights movement. And her first class had 25 people, and that turns into 5,000,” Dudnick said. “And these people become active in Chicago campaigns and will eventually lead to the election of our friend Harold Washington, becoming Chicago's first African American mayor.”
These initiatives were created during Operation Breadbasket, an economic justice campaign from 1966 to 1971 that aimed to desegregate the city and expand job opportunities for Black Americans, who made up 30% of the population. Tregay moved from teaching to running Ralph Metcalfe's Illinois House Congressional campaign in 1972 (1st Congressional District seat). It was an uphill battle before the primary as Metcalfe broke with Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley over police brutality.
“It looks like his political career is over. And then he has an independent campaign run by women with Alice in charge,” Dudnick said. “But Metcalf doesn't believe that she knows what she's doing. He makes it so hard for her that she almost quits. Alice said they hit every door, every door in 11 wards, and Metcalf won with 70% of the vote. The pride in the community that they had organized and had done this.”
Later, Tregay watched Michigan pass a bill that expanded voter registration from precincts to schools and libraries, and she asked her state assembly to do the same, leading to an additional 150,000 voters that aided Harold Washington’s campaign for mayor. He won by 46,000 votes.
The image of Dr. King bleeding in Marquette Park in 1966 stuck with then 16-year-old Carol Moseley Braun, who decided to run for the U.S. Senate in 1992. And who assisted Braun…well, Alice Tregay.
“Alice helped her with the campaigning and all that. She becomes Illinois... well, the first African American woman in the United States Senate, our [Illinois] first Black senator from 1992. Barack Obama was our second Black senator in 2005,” Dudnick said. “So there's so much happening with her, and that she's also at home, and when her mother gets sick, she takes care of her mother and her family. I mean, she's doing all this at once. So I just thought, ‘what a remarkable person.’”
The documentary was completed and screened in 2012. Dudnick said Tregay would travel with him to showings, and she advocated for social justice up until her death in 2015.
“What would I have done if I didn't come across Alice? What would I [have] missed in my life? And just through this program to understand. That's why I'm saying it's partly civil rights, partly,” Dudnick said. “But it's partly about becoming full people. It's a very deep movement. And it's political, but also strengthens people's character. So they become fuller people and fuller citizens. It's the whole thing. That's the thing that as I got into this and learned about it, I found the most interesting, if that's the word, overwhelming, eye-opening. You see what they're really doing, and it's really something great.”
“Alice’s Ordinary People” is screening at the East Moline Public Library, 745 16th Avenue, on Friday, February 6th, starting at 6 p.m. Dudnick will be in attendance for a Q&A session following the screening. Dudnick’s work can be found here.
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