Resident recalls growing up in a segregated Illinois town

GALESBURG, Ill. (AP) - Ellis Bunch’s mother received a call one day about the behavior of her junior high son at a square dance the previous evening.

The phone call was from the mother of a white girl who was also at the dance at the Do-Si-Do Club near Lake Bracken, as Ellis tells the story.

“That little Black SOB is flirting with my daughter!” the girl’s mother said. “I don’t want your son touching my daughter.”

Ellis’ mom told him about the call when he got home from school that day. Ellis said his mom wasn’t angry. She expected as much.

“You’re growing up in a white world and some day this is going to end,” his mother told him.

“The girl and I, we remained friends,” said Ellis, “so I know it wasn’t her fault. It was older people. It was their doing, more or less.”

The white world Ellis’ mother spoke of was the north side of Galesburg in the early 1950s. Living in the 100 block of Laurel Avenue put the Bunch family a half a block north of North Street, which was acknowledged as a racial dividing line.

“In those days you couldn’t buy a house north of North Street if you were Black,” Ellis said. “Maybe you could rent one.”

Living on Laurel Avenue meant Ellis and his brother Rodney attended schools on the north side.

Ellis was the only Black student at Bateman Elementary School until his brother joined two years later. It was the same at Hitchcock school when Ellis attended junior high.

At Hitchcock, Ellis became friends with white students, many of whom came from affluent families. His mother did her best to help her boys fit in.

“Mom always made sure we had the best of clothes,” Ellis said.

But Galesburg, a city founded by abolitionists, was segregated. Blacks were not allowed in many of the businesses and in certain areas of town, such as the north beach of Lake Storey.

Ellis’ mother had warned him that even though he had white friends, he wasn’t one of them.

“You’re going to have a rude awakening one day,” she told him.

And that day did come.

About four or five of his friends went downtown to Brad’s Pool Hall one afternoon with Ellis.

“They (the pool hall) said I couldn’t come in,” Ellis said. “My friends said if I couldn’t go in then they would leave, too.”

And so they did.

At the time, Ellis said he laughed it off.

“I knew there were certain places I couldn’t go.”

His friends stuck by him on other occasions as well when racial boundaries were imposed.

When he was in ninth grade, friends invited him to a party at the Galesburg Club in the 100 block of E. Ferris Street.

When he told his mom about the invitation, Ellis remembers his mom saying, “You’re not allowed in there.”

But Ellis disagreed. He’d been invited. He said his mom finally decided to teach him a lesson, so that evening she took off work to take Ellis to the party.

When they arrived, his mother explained at the entrance that her son had been invited to the party there.

“I don’t think so,” the attendant said.

Ellis’ mom asked the worker to go get Helen Jo West, the mother of the girl, Carol, who was having the party. The worker told them to wait at the door. Ellis and Carol had been born on the same day at Cottage Hospital and their mothers had become good friends.

So Mrs. West was not pleased when she came to the entrance and saw the worker was not going to allow Ellis into the club because he was Black.

“That woman ate that guy’s behind out!” Ellis recalls. “She said, ‘Who do you think you are?’ ”

He was allowed to stay at the party despite his race.

Ellis explained that Black people went to Black businesses, mostly located on the south part of town.

There was an area near the current Knox College baseball field called Five Points, where five streets came together. There was a hotel and restaurants and taverns there.

One of the establishments was a social club on South Prairie Street. Ellis said white people would go to that club late at night to hear the jazz.

“There were only two taverns you could go to in Galesburg,” Ellis said, “and about three restaurants.”

HIs parents Ellis Sr. and Lorrel (Thierry) Bunch divorced when Ellis was 12. Ellis, his mother and brother lived with his grandmother, who worked as a maid. Lorrel was a coat check attendant at Harbor Lights Supper Club for 27 years.

Actually, she started as a bathroom attendant, Ellis said, but applied for the coat check job when the white person who held it left.

Ellis said they didn’t want a Black woman to be the first person customers would see coming into the club, but they gave his mother the job. There was no salary; she worked for tips. Lorrel developed a system, Ellis said. She wouldn’t use tickets or numbers. She would remember something about each person and connect that to their coats and hats.

“When you left, she’d have your hat and coat waiting,” recalls Ellis. “When she retired, The Register-Mail did a big article on her. Everybody knew my mom.”

Upon graduating high school, Ellis knew he needed to leave town.

“A week after I graduated, I joined the Army.” He thought “I got to get out of Galesburg.”

It was the mid-1950s. Ellis estimates “Ninety percent of Black males from Galesburg went into the Air Force or Army.”

“All Black people would tell you, in order to achieve something you have to leave Galesburg.”

Ellis saw the world outside Galesburg. He was stationed throughout Europe during his nine years in the service.

For a time he was in France where he would take the train to Paris.

“I’d walk by the Louvre every day and didn’t know what it was,” he said.

One day he was walking along the French Riviera and saw a private beach. He saw a commotion and climbed the fence to find a crowd of people. As he got closer he saw the actress and sex symbol Brigitte Bardot in a swimming suit signing autographs.

“It was exciting to me, I was only 19 or 20,” Ellis said.

But some of the world was not so pretty.

“I was stationed in Georgia and Alabama (in the early 1960s), so I know what segregation was like. Little kids could come up to you and call you a name and you couldn’t do anything about it.”

After the Army, Ellis got married and returned to Galesburg, where he and his wife Shirley had a daughter, Tara.

“I came back because I really didn’t know where I wanted to live. My Mom was here, so I came here and lived with my Mom. I could take time to make up my mind.

“Some job opportunities opened up, and so I just stayed.”

Ellis worked a variety of jobs before getting hired at Illinois Power, where he worked for 30 years before retiring.

He and his wife split up 40 years ago, and Tara now lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

These days Ellis lives on five acres northwest of Galesburg, where he keeps busy developing and maintaining the property. He added a pond and has planted 58 blue spruce and arborvitae trees.

He recently dug a trench around the patio on the north side of the house, where he plans to add some brick landscaping.

He has researched the land and is eager tell its history. His property and the area around it was part of a former village named Utah that was settled in 1838. The graves of its settlers are located at nearby Hope Cemetery.

“Everybody in this area is related except me,” Ellis said.

Ellis said there are a lot of decent people living in Galesburg.

“There is some compassion in this city. A lot of people have helped me over the years.”

He tells of how his eighth grade science teacher and Boy Scout Troop leader Elroy Smith took his side when the First United Methodist Church didn’t want to accept Ellis into the troop because of his skin color.

“Elroy Smith told them, ‘If you don’t want him, you don’t want me.’ ” The Troop let him in.

Today, Ellis goes wherever he wants in Galesburg, but he believes one aspect of the city hasn’t changed.

“A Black man needs to leave Galesburg to prosper,” Ellis said.

“Galesburg is behind the times,” he said. “Black lives don’t matter in Galesburg because they don’t hire people of color.”

He said if you walk the businesses of Main Street you’ll find few people of color working in the stores and banks.

His biggest issue, though, is with the city.

The city street department, for example, is all white, he said.

The city currently has 14 full-time employees in the street department, 13 of which are white and one is Hispanic.

“White kids graduate here and get hired by the city. What’s going on here? It’s easy to see,” Ellis said.

“People of color see things differently than white people because they have to go through more.”

Ellis points to a recent situation at City Hall, in which office worker Lisa Wilson sued former human resources director David Jones. Wilson won a $100,000 judgment in federal court for discrimination, alleging, among other things, that Jones made her take a drug test and constantly referred to her as ’Black Lisa” to differentiate her from another Lisa at City Hall.

The suit was filed in 2016, Jones resigned in 2017, and a the court judgment in the case was rendered in 2019. The city paid $107,412 for Jones’ defense.

In 2019, WIlson told The Register-Mail: “I went to the city manager. I went before the City Council. But I had to go to federal court for people to listen to me.”

“It’s a good ol’ boy network here,” Ellis said.

He would like to see the city create a program to train young people of color to do city jobs.

That would send a message, he said, that “We want you to be a part of our community. We want to get rid of this indifference.”

With regard to race relations in Galesburg, he urges people to take some interest in our community and find out what’s going on.

Ellis does have some regrets about staying in the Galesburg area.

“I wish I could have went somewhere else. Always thought I’d like to live in Chicago.”

But he likes his home.

“I have a lot of good friends here. Good neighbors. My life is pretty content.”

And he feels he knows what matters.

“It’s how you treat people that means a lot.”