Don Benedict, Chicago activist, dies at 90.

When I first moved to Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood in late seventies it was very different community than it is now. Middle class white families that had lived here in the fifties and sixties had moved farther north or out to the burbs.

On the one hand, Puerto Rican families had crossed the Bloomingdale wall that separated Humboldt Park from Logan Square. On the other hand, the politics of Logan Square were firmly in the grasp of the corrupt Democratic Machine of the first Mayor Daley. Things were run by Richard Mell, the local ward boss. It was a poor and struggling neighborhood.

But a face you would see at every meeting, at every community gathering or just walking along the boulevard was that of Reverant Don Benedict.

Benedict died last Thursday in Pittsford, Vermont at the age of 90.

The Tribune reports:

He helped create such groups as the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization, the Urban Training Center and the West Side Organization. The Chicago Reporter, a newspaper that covers urban issues, started publishing through the Community Renewal Society under his watch.

Benedict was a committed peace activist.

Rev. Donald Benedict spent 366 days in prison for resisting the draft during World War II, the first chapter in a long career as a civic activist who saw injustice on many fronts and took action.

Anticipating the success of independent politics in Logan Square, Benedict ran for alderman and lost to Richard Mell in 1987.

He will be missed.