Helen Shiller - Early Career

Early Career

Shiller moved to Chicago's Uptown neighborhood in 1972 with her husband Marc Zalkin and her infant son, Brendan, and lived on N Malden Street in Uptown. Shiller drove a cab, worked as a waitress and free lance photographer, and jumped into radical politics. With one of Chicago's most controversial political organizers, Walter "Slim" Coleman, Shiller helped organize the Intercommunal Survival Committee, a sort of white support arm of the Black Panther Party. The committee evolved into the Heart of Uptown Coalition, a political and social service organization then steeped in the rhetoric of Marxism. In the coalition, "comrades" were expected to organize "cadres." "We must have the frame of mind that as revolutionaries we have (to) be able to solve any problem that comes our way..." Shiller said. The Uptown Coalition provided an array of programs geared toward providing essential services for the poor, including medical clinics for pregnant women, mothers and young children; a legal aid clinic, food pantries and distributing clothes and meals to the poor. Shiller and her allies labored for decades to preserve Uptown as the last North Side lakefront neighborhood south of Rogers Park that is home to significant numbers of low income households.

Shiller supported Michael Bakalis in his 1978 primary challenge to Illinois Governor James R. Thompson, attacking Thompson for "making deals with the Chicago machine" and for being unsympathetic to the urban poor. Shiller helped open an extension of Shimer College at 4833 N Broadway in the Fall of 1978. Shiller took on Illinois' dentists when in 1978 the Uptown Peoples Community Services Center joined consumers groups in a federal lawsuit which attempted to break up the dentists' monopoly on fitting dentures. From 1981 to 1987, Shiller was President and CEO of Justice Graphics, Inc. a print shop, a small business of which Shiller and Coleman were two of five owners.

Shiller recalled in 2003:

I was as student in the sixties, engaged in the civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam War protests. I'd come from New York to attend the University of Wisconsin. It was an exciting time. A lot of active students wound up in different cities and communities as organizers. I chose Racine, Wisconsin. I spent three years there. We had developed a legal clinic and we had a whole health program, but the city was too small. I had, of course, heard about Uptown in Chicago, and the challenges. So I wound up here in 1976. I waited tables. I did photography, took pictures for attorneys. Ultimately we started our own print shop in order to print our own newspapers and magazines.