In 1963, controversial Chicago Public Schools Superintendent Benjamin C. Willis decided that placing aluminum trailers in black neighborhoods was the best way to ease overcrowding and keep school segregation intact. The modular units were put in vacant lots and on existing school grounds in neighborhoods such as Englewood, where the African-American school population was soaring in the early 1960s. Picketing, school boycotts and sit-ins ensued as the black community voiced outrage at the discrimination.

(Chicago Tribune)