Sue Duncan was the founder and guiding force behind a South Side children’s center that for more than six decades provided tutoring to inner-city youngsters.
The Sue Duncan Children’s Center opened in 1961, based in a church in the South Side Kenwood neighborhood. It became a haven of sorts, offering after-school tutoring but also sometimes just a safe place for inner-city children from the neighborhood to go, becoming a local institution that brought people together and spanned generations.
“The real gift that Sue had was that she understood that each person came into the space with some kind of pain that they brought, and she was good at being present to their pain and their story and their experiences,” said Ted Richards, who worked at the center in the 1990s and early 2000s. “Initially people went there for a place that was safe for tutoring, but ultimately what they found was a sense of community and a sense of family.”
Duncan, 89, died on July 9 at the Montgomery Place retirement community in Hyde Park, said her daughter, Sarah. A longtime Hyde Park resident, she had dementia.
Born Susan Goodrich Morton, Duncan grew up outside of Boston and attended public schools. She was a good athlete, comfortable playing hockey and football with the boys in the neighborhood.
Duncan received a bachelor’s degree in English from Smith College in Massachusetts and then a master’s degree in English from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She taught for two years at a private girls’ school in Cleveland before moving to Chicago in 1959 to get married.
Even before academic research was published demonstrating the critical importance of early childhood education, Duncan felt intuitively that stepping in with that education early on made all the difference, her daughter said.
The center had its origins in offering Bible study to youngsters at Kenwood-Ellis United Church of Christ.
“She was supposed to teach Bible study, but there was no curriculum, and she discovered that some of the children could not read,” Sarah Duncan said. “So she felt that this was a problem she could figure out, and the center grew out of that.”
Before long, the center expanded far beyond a Bible study and began drawing 60 to 80 children each day. A 2010 Tribune article described Sue Duncan as “a tough-but-kind teacher” in the middle of it all, telling the kids that they could succeed while drilling the children each afternoon in reading and math.
“We spent a lot of time learning about subjects from the Bible, history, math, Greek mythology, Norse myths and English,” said Michelle Gordon, who attended the center as a child and later tutored there during high school and college. “I learned more at Sue’s than in the Chicago Public Schools. We learned a little bit of everything — and she worked with us on reading, so everybody had a notebook, and by the time you went to high school, you already knew how to take notes. She helped a lot of people in the neighborhood, including some of the toughest ones.”
It wasn’t only academic work, however. In the evenings, Duncan would release the children to the basketball court, holding the view that children benefited from exercise as well.
“What stuck with me the most about Sue was, just love each other, you know?” said Chicago resident Rolando Wilson, 51, a former pupil at the center. “I connected more with Sue Duncan than I have with any teacher. She was really big on zero violence, and she taught people to love and respect each other on levels that one could only dream of. We had so much love coming out of that center that we looked forward to getting out of school to go back to school.”
Wilson recalled that Duncan required pupils to learn 15 or 20 vocabulary words before allowing them into the church’s gym to play basketball.
“That was your ticket to get into the gym,” he said.
All three of Duncan’s children, including Owen Duncan, who later ran the center, and former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, were involved at the center from a young age.
“The Duncans were the only white family in our neighborhood that would be there, and they were there with us,” Wilson said. “They were welcome in our neighborhood. And she would open up her home to us.”
Duncan later moved the center to Woodlawn Mennonite Church, which in 1970 was firebombed by gang members retaliating against an outspoken pastor who was critical of the gang. Undeterred, Duncan packed up whatever books she could salvage and moved the center to another church.
“They thought they’d run her out, and she said, ‘I’m not going anywhere, and she came back the next day,’” Gordon said. “Sue was extremely tough but at the same time, very loving.”
Duncan practiced a holistic view of trying to help youngsters in the neighborhood, Gordon said. That meant providing them with literal nourishment, in the form of snacks, fruits, cheese and raisin bread.
“She knew they would be hungry by the time they left the center,” Gordon said.
With the onset of dementia, Duncan pulled back from the center in 2011, on its 50th anniversary, Sarah Duncan said. The center continued to operate — most recently in Jackie Robinson Elementary School in the South Side Oakland neighborhood — until closing its doors earlier this year.
A marriage to former University of Chicago psychology professor Starkey Duncan ended in divorce. In addition to her three children, Duncan is survived by a sister, Prudence Horne; a brother, William Morton; and nine grandchildren.
A service is scheduled for 10 a.m. Sunday, July 28, at the South Shore Cultural Center, 7059 S. South Shore Drive.
Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.