The image is etched in my mind as if it were yesterday. It was January 2, 1996, just a week after Christmas. The Steelworkers Hall at 92nd and South Chicago Ave was packed. In the dim overhead incandescent lighting, the former Wisconsin Steel workers, including Blacks who had come to Chicago through the Great Migration, Mexicans whose families had immigrated from Mexico and the Southwest and immigrants from Central Europe created a surreal mosaic sandwiched between the dark tiled floor and the dusty, flickering lighting overhead. Frank Lumpkin, the founder of the group responsible for the meeting, Save Our Jobs was the moderator that evening and sat on the stage with fellow steel workers. It had been more than fifteen long years since the new owners of Wisconsin Steel had closed the mill, greeting workers coming to work that fateful Friday in March 1980 with chained gates, never to be opened again. Save Our Jobs had provided a thin thread of hope for the workers after their union failed to gain any benefits from the company for the displaced workers.

The historical epoch designated by the term “de-industrialization” was in full swing by the time Wisconsin Steel Mills closed. Well documented in books such as Rusted Dreams by David Bauman and Roberta Lynch and Blue Collar Community by William Kornblum, Wisconsin Steel was merely the latest example of the movement of industrial, blue collar and in particular union jobs to the non-unionized South and more significantly overseas. Industry, including steel making had lured 19th century European immigrants to the city of big shoulders before Blacks and Latinos, for whom these union jobs represented a form of economic freedom previously unknown followed. The latter groups were some of those hardest hit. It was these men who became the core of the surrogate union which took on the plight of the men whose lives had been upended in the mill’s closing.

The law offices of Leon Despres, Schwartz and Geoghegan had won a lawsuit on behalf of Save Our Jobs (the organization that sprang up after the Progressive Steel Workers Union collapsed), against International Harvester and Envirodyne, an equity firm that had subsequently purchased the mill. A settlement for the 2800 plus displaced workers had been won although it was unclear to the workers just what the settlement entailed. The promised payout had been dragging on for more than ten years with some older workers dying in the meantime and others hanging onto the hope that there would finally be restitution. Every several months a meeting would be called to update the workers on progress and an expected payout date. Workers had become frustrated and restless as the promised date continued to be pushed forward. Part of Frank’s job was to keep the hope alive and to quell the anger that was being expressed more vocally at each gathering. Frank had refused to accept the fate Harvester had dealt the workers and after the union failed, his activism led to the creation of Save Our Jobs. His story is told by his wife, Bea Lumpkin in the book, Always Bring A Crowd.

Some 800 workers, like Frank himself were on the verge of retirement and had 30 or more years of service when the mill closed. Frank, who was African American had emigrated to Chicago from Buffalo, New York where he had gotten his start in the steel mills and where he met his activist wife, Bea. The retirement pension promised to the workers by Harvester, and subsequently by Envirodyne, the new owners never came. Others who had had the misfortune of taking their vacation time the week the mill closed were still waiting for the promised vacation pay. Some went immediately to the bank with their paychecks that fateful Friday only to learn that the company had declared bankruptcy and the checks they tried to cash were worth less than the paper they were printed on. The men soon learned that there would be no compensation for the work already done and nor for any wages owed. Imagine the betrayal and the chaos for those who had entrusted their entire livelihood to the mill.

I, along with two other colleagues had been attending informal meetings in Frank’s office at the Union Hall for more than three years. As sociologists we had become interested in the struggle of Frank and Save Our Jobs to reach a settlement for those deserving of retirement benefits. A small group of former workers, the core of Save Our Jobs had met almost weekly at the USW Union Hall since the day the mill closed. I along with my colleagues (both sociologists) often joined the group and participated in the banter, the nostalgia and the individual experiences of those attending. We were hoping to get an article or book and eventually began to interview those who attended regularly. Frank’s presence was the stabilizing glue that held the group together. Those who were most loyal to meeting such as Thompson and Jose were Black and Latino and had put in 25 plus years. Most white workers seemed to have found new avenues to replace the loss from the mill and were infrequent attendees. One worker I recall, Tony had taken a job with a laundry service and was making a small percentage of the wages he enjoyed at the mill. The group of six to eight that met regularly were representative of the larger group and maintained a basis of mutual support while waiting for the promised settlement.

Information meetings were scheduled at various intervals and invitations went out to all those workers affected by the closing. The large union hall served as the venue for these meetings. Anywhere from 200-300 would show up at the meetings hoping for some concrete information on the settlement. Mexican families brought tamales and tacos which they shared with those in attendance. At the October meeting hope was raised that the payout would come before Christmas that year as a kind of present enabling the affected workers to finally spend more freely on Christmas gifts for friends and families. The original settlement of 14 million had been whittled down to less than a third of that by the owners’ filing of bankruptcy, causing increased frustration for both the lawyers and the workers. Thanksgiving came and went and still the workers waited while growing more frustrated. At the previous meeting I had attended there were vocal disagreements and Frank struggled to maintain decorum among those who had reached the limit of their patience. There was an uneasiness as the hall filled once again with those whose entire livelihoods had been upended by the mill closing. Would this meeting be any different? Would there be more empty promises?

Several years earlier, with the settlement still in limbo, Geoghegan had devoted a chapter in his book, Which Side Are You On to the suit by Save Our Jobs and the plight of the Wisconsin Steelworkers. He recounts in the chapter that the workers had become difficult to convince after so many promises and disappointments. Over time he developed an empathy for the workers and their impatience and anger even as his personal circumstance became ever farther removed from their situation. His trips from the North Shore back to South Chicago taxed his ability to relate as he continued to move further north along the lakefront and into communities which had no comprehension of the plight of those whose case he had taken up. Despres’ firm had taken on the fight without the financial arrangement a legal suit would normally involve. While not pro bono, the financial arrangement was designed to cover expenses and 7% of the proceeds.

At the January meeting, I took a seat near the back as the workers filed in. Some came in groups with friends and others singly. Eventually the auditorium was mostly filled. I estimated 200 in attendance that evening. Frank brought the meeting to order and introduced the guest speaker of the evening. I along with others looked around since we didn’t notice anyone new on the podium. Suddenly a young man stood up in the middle of the crowded auditorium and introduced himself. His name was Thomas Geoghegan, and he was the lead lawyer for the Leon Despres Legal team adjudicating the lawsuit against Envirodyne/Harvester. Geoghegan cut a diminutive figure among the workers who had come in their everyday attire. Many wore caps and bulky jackets over their work shirts as it was a cold evening. Geoghegan was comparatively slight of build and well-dressed in his sweater and slacks and he stood out in stark contrast to those gathered. He had positioned himself a third of the way from the front, directly under one of the yellow ceiling bulbs and his strawberry blond hair sent rays of light in all directions, like the Star of Bethlehem to the shepherds and the wise men. It didn’t matter that it was a week after Christmas, Three Kings Day was still ahead and Geoghegan was bringing gifts to all. All I could think of was, “Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”

Although the settlement checks weren’t distributed at the meeting, the invited guest gave assurance that the “checks were in the mail.” There was a mixed feeling of excitement in the small gathering at Frank’s office I attended just into the New Year and the new decade. I learned at that gathering that the settlement was proportioned by a formula that took in years worked at the mill before the closing and the age of the worker. The maximum payout was nowhere near the $17,000 the suit had promised early on. Instead, those with the most seniority and maximum age received a total of less than $5000, with some only entitled to $150. While it seemed like a slap in the face given the sacrifices the workers had made and the expectations they had been prepared for, it was better than nothing. The meager payouts left a bittersweet taste at the end of a long and costly battle. Those who had spent and spent up their lives at the mill could take only the comfort of a final moral victory against the company which continued to deny them any true justice. For some however the victory celebration was short lived. And that is where the story of the other Cervantes begins.

Jose Cervantes, a regular at the weekly gatherings in Frank’s office was there to celebrate the victory that day. His regular routine was to bring in the daily racing forms and with a couple others plot out the wagers they would make at the track that day. He was more reserved than some in part because English was a second language and in part because he wasn’t the storyteller that Thompson and others were. I hadn’t gotten to know Jose as well as the others but had interviewed him about his experience for the hoped-for book my friends and I were contemplating writing. He was excited along with the others and I recall he joked about the prospect of having more money to spend at the track. According to the formula reached in the settlement he was eligible for around $2500. On days he wasn’t at Frank’s office he was meeting with other Mexican immigrants at the local McDonalds where his comfort level and his participation in the banter among the former workers greatly increased.

It was several weeks later that I decided to go back and seek out the group at Frank’s office. The hall was being sold and it wasn’t clear that Frank and the others would have a place to continue meeting. I never knew for sure if anyone would show up and since the settlement the meetings became more sporadic and less predictable. Attendance shrank form the seven or eight regulars to just two or three plus Frank. As I entered the office, I noticed that Jose was in attendance along with Frank, Thompson and one or two others. Jose was dressed up in shirt and slacks like he might be on his way to an appointment. The meetings had taken on a kind of social support network during the awaited-for pay-out but had been extended even though there was really no planned agenda or reason other than social to meet. Jose was more animated and involved than I had observed before, and he had a handwritten piece of paper in his hand that he was showing to Frank and the others. I was curious and asked him what the paper was about, so he showed it to me.

Jose informed me that he was on his way to civil court downtown at the Daley Center and the paper was a handwritten plea that he intended to enter into small claims court. It was crudely written but it simply stated that he was petitioning the court to pay him his rightful amount of the settlement which he claimed he had never received. I’m still not totally sure what motivated me to ask Jose if I could accompany him to court that day. I only recall that his diminutive stature, his immigrant status and his lack of language skills in English made me wonder how he would be received in the Daley Center Courthouse in the Chicago Loop. The handwritten plea, while legible was hardly a document designed to impress the court. Jose welcomed my gesture to accompany him that day in late January and since I had my car, I offered him a ride which he accepted. All we did that day was file the claim. We were told that a court date would be forthcoming. And so began a long and drawn-out series of court dates and continuances stretching over many months and which seemed to present insurmountable walls. I was present for all of them.

I recall quite clearly that first court appearance and the presiding judge asking Jose if he had counsel as he stood before the bench. I had approached the bench with him and, standing beside him I volunteered that I was his counsel. The judge asked to see my legal credentials and when I stated I was not a lawyer the judge became irate and informed me that I could be arrested for falsely representing myself. I learned quickly that the court procedures were anything but informal or personal and from then I was careful not to get in the way. I continued to attend the continuances however and to work with Jose to produce any documents that supported his claim. After each hearing and continuance, we had a short debriefing with each other. At the time my employer rented an office in the basement of the Unitarian Church, and I used the fax machine regularly to transmit requested documents.

It’s not clear that early in the proceedings either Jose or I understood the reason for the oversight in the settlement. The group of plaintiffs in the original settlement numbered in the thousands and it seemed very possible that it was simply a clerical error that would be easily and quickly addressed. Only after several continuances which were normally a month, or more apart did we begin to realize that we were not simply trying to collect monies due from the Harvester/Environdyne settlement. We began to notice after the third or fourth continuance that a lawyer representing the Despres/Geoghegan Law Group that had won the settlement began to appear and that they were attempting to get Jose’s claim dismissed. They claimed that Jose had not met the application requirements in a timely manner and therefore was not entitled to this late claim. Only after faxing the copy of Jose’s original application, along with documentation of his tenure at Wisconsin Steel did we learn that another worker named Jose Cervantes had been awarded a settlement. Two workers with the same name but only one had received their award. It was never made clear whether the law firm had ignored Jose’s claim as a duplicate or how the mistake was made. It became clear that the law firm had failed to process Jose’s claim and that they were being held responsible for the error.

Late one evening, after coming back from yet another hearing and after having been personally approached by the Geoghegan team I received a shocking phone call. It was from the principal partner, Leon Despres himself. I had never met Despres personally although we lived in the same Hyde Park neighborhood. I knew Despres’ reputation from his time as Hyde Park’s 5th Ward Alderman. The Chicago Tribune once called him “the conscience of the City Council.” Hyde Park was known to be independent from the “Daley Machine” and Despres along with one or two other Aldermen had gained notoriety for their outspoken opposition to Daley and the patronage system over which he presided. I had attended City Council meetings with my students where Leon Despres’ name was still revered for his speaking in opposition to the political machine juggernaut as a kind of lone voice in the wilderness. I had been given only reasons to respect Despres and he had only burnished his progressive reputation by successfully taking on the cause of the steel workers. He was then and was until his death held in the highest esteem by the activist social justice community and his work on behalf of Save Our Jobs only added to his legendary status.

I was totally unprepared for the call I received that evening. Despres had brought Thomas Geoghegan in as a partner in his law firm. Although it was Geoghegan who had taken the case of the Save Our Jobs suit against Harvester, the phone call came from Despres. He wasted no time getting to the point. His team had identified me as a major obstacle in their attempt to dismiss Jose’s claim. Suddenly my reasons for taking up Jose’s case became clear to me as I listened to Despres castigate me and impugn my motives. Ironically Despres seemed more interested in protecting the reputation his firm had gained from the verdict than in seeing justice for a lowly worker like Jose Cervantes. He had somehow become convinced that I had attached myself to Jose’s claim for my own personal gain. He gave me no quarter to explain my reasons for taking on Jose’s situation. He warned me in essence to cease and desist. It reminded me of the kind of phone call someone receives in a phone booth warning of dire consequences if certain instructions are not followed. Needless to say, I was somewhat shaken by the entire occurrence. I knew I was in the right however and determined to continue the fight for Jose’s claim.

Jose and I continued to attend the hearings even as Geoghegan’s team became more assertive in their attempt to have the case dismissed. At one of the hearings, a member of the team’s lawyers approached me personally to discourage me from pursuing the suit any further. Since I had nothing to hide and was not in any way benefitting personally from the suit, I had no reason to stop supporting Jose in his pursuit of justice. Finally, after months of attending hearings, continuances and postponements, a breakthrough came. The Judge who had presided over the original bankruptcy proceedings for Envirodyne, the equity company that had purchased the mill from Harvester agreed to hear Jose’s case. It seemed too good to be true that a power bigger than Despres and Geoghegan’s Law Firm would intervene for a lowly Mexican immigrant who had been denied his just share of the settlement through no fault of his own.

Until this point the hearings and continuations had been held at the Daley Center in the civil courtrooms. Jose would typically take the CTA from his East End home to Chicago’s Loop, and we would meet at the time of the hearing at the scheduled courtroom. The bankruptcy settlement had been adjudicated in Federal Court and the next hearing was scheduled in front of the bankruptcy judge whose courtroom was in the Dirksen Federal Building Courthouse a few blocks from the Daley Center. I had been to the Dirksen Building with my seminar students, so I was familiar with the courtrooms. I was concerned that Jose would not be able to navigate the new environment and be comfortable making the appointment. We agreed to meet in the cafeteria on the second floor and then proceed together to the courtroom.

In another unforgettable moment, Jose and I sat in an ornate courtroom alongside Geoghegan’s legal team before the Judge who would decide the fate of Jose’s handwritten complaint against Envirodyne/Harvester and, as we had later learned against the law firm who had taken the case. We listened as the Judge laid out a plan that would in the end satisfy both parties. Despres/Geoghegan’s firm would not be liable for overlooking Jose’s rightful claim and Jose would receive his share of the proceeds according to the formula worked out in the settlement. It seemed that there was a cache of money sitting in the state coffers of nearby Indiana which had accrued from the tax deposits of Wisconsin Steel and its workers, and which had been frozen when the company closed and declared bankruptcy. The Judge ordered that any reserve being held rightfully belonged to the workers who had not received their settlement. A rare win-win situation.

It was a huge victory for Jose and as it turned out another 70 workers who had not received their settlement due to various circumstances. It was a lesson in persistence for me and a vindication for Jose and his pursuit of justice against overwhelming odds. Jose’s courage and fortitude within a system where he was a part of a marginalized group deeply impressed me. I’m not sure what effect my presence had in the outcome, but it was abundantly clear to me that Jose was the hero. The last time I saw Jose he was hanging out with other former Wisconsin Steel Latino workers at the local McDonalds which had replaced the union hall as a gathering place for the displaced workers. The Steelworkers Hall had been sold and was now a sanctuary for a Praise Church.

After the case was closed, I never heard from Despres or Geoghegan’s Law firm again. I wasn’t surprised but maybe a little disappointed. The abuse of power is not the exclusive domain of the unjust. Little people, people whose power is thwarted by the powerful can be victims of the progressive politics of those who hold themselves to be morally superior as well as by those whose intentions are suspect. It wasn’t the first or last time my idealism has been tested and matured. I’ve learned to be skeptical of labels such as progressive and terms such as social justice. As one of my professors in graduate studies in sociology taught me, all social relationships are interested relationships and power is about protecting those interests. I would like to think I’ve become more of a realpolitik than an idealist. That frame makes room to understand not just the interest of Harvester/Environdyne against the displaced steel workers, but the interest as well exhibited by Despres/Geoghegan against Jose’s rightful claim. All interested relationships are power relationships. And I? As a member of a class that includes race identity as well as social and economic advantage, I was well aware of the power differential between myself and Jose as we stood before the “impartial scale” of American justice. I certainly relished the victory.

Afterword:

Frank and Bea Lumpkin and I as well as my colleagues continued our friendship. We were a part of Frank’s 90th celebration and I was there at Forest Park Cemetary for his interment. His urn rests not far from that of Emma Goldman’s grave. They were comrades in the fight for workers’ rights. One day after Frank passed, I was driving through the Hyde Park neighborhood and spotted Frank’s widow, Bea standing on the corner holding a large bag. I rolled down the window to greet her and asked her if she needed a ride? She was looking for a ride home if I wasn’t already obligated. She lived in South Shore at the time which was several miles away. As we drove to her home, she revealed that in the bag she was carrying was the urn containing Frank’s ashes. She was just leaving the crematorium when I came across her on the corner and was about to take the bus home. I was overwhelmed with emotion and as we stopped in front of her house I asked if I could hold the urn before she took it inside. It was a moment that I won’t forget and a connection to a history that made Jose’s and countless others’ stories possible. Bea celebrated her 104th birthday in August 2022.