Benjamin C. Willis; Controversial Chicago School Official

Benjamin C. Willis, 86, who stepped down as Chicago’s school superintendent while under fire for allegedly segregationist policies. Willis took the Chicago post in 1953, and in his first eight years he received national praise as the builder of more than 100 schools and as an educational innovator. But in the 1960s he was criticized by civil rights groups, mainly because of the 625 mobile classrooms he set up at overcrowded, mostly black schools. Dubbed “Willis Wagons” by his opponents, the mobile classrooms were seen by many as a means of perpetuating racial segregation in the Chicago school system. Civil rights groups and some school board members urged Willis to reassign black students to white schools with space for them, but he refused. By the end of 1963, Willis was forced to travel with a police bodyguard because of widespread opposition to his policies. He stepped down in 1966. In 1979, the U.S. Office for Civil Rights charged that the Chicago Board of Education had systematically contained black students in overcrowded, segregated schools, primarily through use of the mobile classrooms. On Aug. 27 at his retirement home in Plantation, Fla.