The Assassination of Ted Roe

In the late night of Monday August 4th, 1952, Ted Roe is just leaving his home at 5239 S. Michigan Avenue, alone, dressed casually with a day's growth of beard on his face. Walking down the walkway to his car parked in front, a gray coupe comes to a screeching stop. One man emerges from the passenger door in a graceful smoke-like motion, leveling the business end of a sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun at Ted. Another man emerges from behind the billboard next door to Ted's building, also leveling a shotgun and rushing toward Ted. For a single moment, life seemed to freeze in time.
A shotgun blast rings out, then another, and another... In the distance Carrie screams out, "TEDDY, TEDDY, IS THAT YOU?!!!". A fourth shotgun blast rings out, then another. A gunman tosses a bundle of Policy slips into the air that dance, suspended in space, gently falling, covering the blood soaked, buck-shot-riddled body of the King of Policy Kings.
As the gray coupe disappears, leaving behind the smell of hot burning flesh in the air, Carrie runs frantically out of the building and down the sidewalk to where her dead husband lay. While she cries out into the night, neighbors and neighborhood folk by the hundreds begin to appear as murmurs, whispers and sirens begin to fill the air.

Click here for 1952 TIME Magazine "Lucky Ted"

Click here for 2009 Commemorative Release of The Murder of Ted Roe

POST ROE ERA

As life in Bronzeville changed, Black flight among the more affluent was on the rise. By the 1960s, what once was the Policy Capital of the World, fast became the drug capital of the world. Gone were the days of the strong and powerful Afro-American political machines.
Gone were the days of unity and, as Duke Ellington put it: "us for we-we-for-us." What was once a thriving Mecca of vision, confidence and self-motivating independence, fast became a melting pot of dependency, poverty and slave-mentality. The Promised Land of socioeconomic prosperity that Robert Sengstacke Abbott talked about in the early days of the Great Northern Drive was nothing more than memories to an aging generation and unimaginable legends of what used to be to generations of others. Even the great and time honored tradition of electing a Mayor of Bronzeville faltered. In 1963, CTA bus driver William Davis was elected the youngest ever Bronze Mayor at age 22; he was also the last (for 35 years).
On State Street, the once great street of diverse, prosperous business and world-renowned nightlife, restrictive covenants took on a whole new meaning. Government funded high-rise housing projects, "vertical neighborhoods," were built to keep Blacks in the Black Belt.
Adding insult to injury, the biggest project in the world is named after the very man who fought against housing projects being located exclusively in Black neighborhoods, Robert Taylor Jr.
South Michigan Avenue, the money belt, gave way to high crime born in the projects and Woodlawn became the drug capitol of America. It was all a virtual mirror of many of the nation's black communities that once thrived during the Policy days. Today as we chart the new Millennium, few reminders stand as evidence of Bronzeville's golden past…

From: 'KINGS'
The True Story of Chicago's Policy Kings
and Numbers Racketeers
An Informal History by Nathan Thompson
Published by The Bronzeville Press ISBN: 0972487506

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