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George Schmidt : Long-time Chicago Activist, Editor By Charles Salvatore If you are looking for a speaker
with great knowledge and unique insight and interest in activist issues
facing Chicagoans, look no further than George Schmidt. Schmidt has seen
and done a lot in his life so far, from helping and organize, Vietnam
anti-war newspapers to being sued by the Chicago Public Schools for $1
million because he printed accusations about Daley and the City making
fake tests for students to take. Now Schmidt is the editor of Substance
News, a newspaper that focuses on the issues of public education
in the city of Chicago, which has been around for 30 years. Schmidt is
a father of three children and although not a teacher anymore, he is still
active in the schools his children attend. He taught at 17 high schools
in the inner city of Chicago, during his time as an educator. In August
of 1975 along with other substitute teachers formed a newspaper called
Substance News, which became a monthly periodical in 1979. He was a teacher
until 1999 when he was sued for $1 million dollars by the Chicago Public
School system and Mayor Richard Daley. How could this happen a mild-mannered teacher like Schmidt? In 1999, Schmidt published information about the high stakes testing that was taking place in all Chicago public schools.
“The test was to prove if a school was good or bad, but it was a biased test to attack the poor schools,” said Schmidt. “Then the teachers would be fired because they weren’t doing their jobs, when they knew ahead of time which schools would do bad, and it shows Daley is succeeding and doing a great job.” The schools that Schmidt refers to are mostly in lower income neighborhoods and mostly contain African American students. Schmidt is against placing all of the African American students in the same schools, and he believes the schools should be diversified. A 2002 student Racial/Ethnic Survey of
two school districts on Chicago’s South side provides data to back
Schmidt’s view. The first area has a total of 29 schools and 27,
353 students all together. This area has 15 percent white students, 24
percent black and 59 percent Hispanic. Each school has a different mix
of students, some having more of one ethnic background than others. But
in a second area, comprised of 32 schools and 14,287 students, 12,997
or 91 percent are African American. Out of the 32 schools in the district
25 of them are either 99 or 100 percent African American students. These
are the schools Daley’s test attacked and made look bad, Schmidt
said. Before becoming a school teacher, Schmidt
was involved in publishing anti-war magazines during the Vietnam War.
He was heavily involved in the Solders Movement, which reached its height
in 1971 with 80 underground papers published by U.S. soldiers against
the war. “The way we use to send the newspapers to the soldiers in Vietnam was to put them in a pink or blue envelope with hearts on it, and spray it with women’s perfume so everyone thought it was letters from their girl friends back home,” said Schmidt. One of his newspapers had a picture of
five Vietnam vets sitting over three Vietcong’s decapitated heads,
and all of the soldiers were smiling, he recalled. In addition to demonstrating
the horrors of the war in print, Schmidt was also on the streets of Chicago
every day for the protests. “The protests were very anti-stereotype, the people with the long hair were not always hippies, some of them you knew weren’t sure if they were hippies or cops,” said Schmidt. Schmidt belives that wars are wrong not
only for what they do to civilians and soldiers during wartime but the
effects it has on soldiers after the war. He has seen what has happened
to many soldiers who came back from Vietnam and what happened to their
families. For example, he recounted the story of a veteran he knew who
had a nightmare about his time in a prisoner of war camp, and while sleeping
killed his wife because he though she was a Vietcong. “The problem with war, is that you train people to be killers and some of them begin to love it, some men crave it more than they crave other things in life,” said Schmidt.
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