In 1962, Richard Pryor left Peoria to try his fortune on “the road,” hoping to catch a break as an entertainer. Seven years later, in 1969, he returned to Peoria to perform there for the first time since his departure \u2014 and landed in a city that had been transformed in the interim. More dramatically than ever before, black Peorians had organized to make vocal demands on the city’s political structure, school system, and business establishment.<\/p>\n
Peoria\u2019s Civil Rights Movement coalesced in the summer of 1963, the summer of the famed March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Peoria\u2019s movement was particularly focused on the \u201cjobs\u201d side of the equation: the local NAACP chapter\u00a0demanded<\/a>\u00a0that Peoria\u2019s City Hall open up more positions to blacks;\u00a0picketed the power company<\/a>\u00a0for having only two black employees on a payroll of 600; and spearheaded a\u00a0bus boycott<\/a>\u00a0aimed at forcing the bus company to hire black drivers. A year later, the\u00a0Peoria Journal Star\u00a0<\/em>opined that, after the activist wave of 1963, \u201cbusiness and industrial leaders themselves\u201d had worked \u201cto open up job opportunities for Negroes\u201d and that the efforts had\u00a0\u201csucceeded beyond all expectation.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Activists in the movement were not so easily satisfied. The NAACP turned increasingly in the mid-to-late-\u201860s to the problem of inequality in Peoria public schools. Here\u00a0the demands\u00a0<\/a>were employment-related (more black administrators, teachers, custodians) as well as curricular (replacement of \u201cbiased, stereotyped school books\u201d, the teaching of African-American history). By shifting to the issue of education reform, the NAACP began involving young blacks as never before. Students at Manual High School staged a\u00a0mass walk-out<\/a>, part of a wave of activism that led Peoria\u2019s school system to embark on a\u00a0voluntary plan of desegregation through busing<\/a>.<\/p>\n By the time Richard Pryor returned to Peoria in March 1969\u00a0to headline a benefit<\/a>\u00a0for the Afro-American Black Peoples Federation, a group that advocated for community development, the local civil rights movement was pushing on several fronts at once.<\/p>\n Activists had raised the issue of police harassment and brutality, and city leaders had responded by scheduling the\u00a0“Together in Peoria” program<\/a>, where businessmen, police and black citizens would retreat for three days to work through the problem. At Bradley University, student activists had pressed, successfully, for an\u00a0Afro-American Studies program and a black culture theme house<\/a>. Employment remained a major concern, with black leaders targeting the building trades for refusing to\u00a0open up construction jobs<\/a>\u00a0to blacks.<\/p>\n The NAACP remained the backbone of Peoria’s Civil Rights Movement, but other black organizations, geared to community self-help and self-defense, proliferated in the period. The Nation of Islam\u00a0opened a temple\u00a0<\/a>on the South Side. A group of twelve men founded the\u00a0Afro-American Service Patrol<\/a>\u00a0to control crime in the community, and were given special police credentials to carry weapons and patrol black neighborhoods. Less successfully, Juliette Whittaker prot\u00e9g\u00e9 Mark Clark\u00a0tried to establish a chapter of the Black Panthers<\/a>. He was visiting Chicago Panther leader Fred Hampton to get recruiting advice when police raided Hampton’s apartment and killed Hampton and Clark both.<\/p>\n During Richard Pryor’s childhood, the main operators of Peoria’s “Sin City” had been well-known businessmen. By the mid-1960s, there were few main operators left, and prostitution in particular was targeted by federal and city officials. The case of Elmer Poos<\/a>\u2014one of several Peorians caught in a FBI prostitution sting and convicted on federal felony charges\u2014spoke to the embattled predicament of those who continued to work the trade.<\/p>\n Richard Pryor’s stepmother Ann and father Buck, involved in prostitution since the 1940s, were suddenly the target of repeated<\/a> raids<\/a> on their Aiken Avenue establishment. They were isolated, shunted to Peoria’s margins: after Ann testified at her trial that she was enrolled at a local vocational school as a sign of her character, the head of the school announced that he was removing her from the rolls<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In 1962, Richard Pryor left Peoria to try his fortune on “the road,” hoping to catch a break as an entertainer. Seven years later, in 1969, he returned to Peoria to perform there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":57,"menu_order":50,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"categories-test.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-278","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278"}],"version-history":[{"count":42,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6344,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/278\/revisions\/6344"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/57"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A Movement with Many Faces<\/h3>\n
Sin City on the Run<\/h3>\n