Mitchell Ware became one of two black students on campus in the fall of 1951, when he eagerly accepted a scholarship to play football and basketball at St. Ambrose. Raised by adoptive working-class parents in Chicago, he still vividly remembers the racial taunts he and teammates from St. Elizabeth High School endured when they visited predominantly white opponents in the Chicago Catholic League. “One school, they started playing the song Old Black Joe when we came out,” Ware said. “Things like that have some kind of affect on you. And then I get to St. Ambrose and here is a school where everybody treats you like they want to be treated.” The retired judge still can recite the names of the St. Ambrose teammates, classmates, coaches and professors who readily welcomed him. He also can list in detail a lifelong résumé so extensive, it reads like the outline to a movie script. After a record-setting career as a St. Ambrose running back and linebacker, Ware was drafted not by the NFL Bears, but instead by the US Army. His twoyear stint in the military ended early, though, when Bears coach George Halas wrote the Army asking that Ware be allowed to attend summer training camp.
Ware did not make the regular-season roster, but did see action in a preseason game, lining up across from fellow St. Ambrose alum Art Michalik ’51. The end of Ware’s football career was the beginning of an accomplished Ambrosian life. He became a narcotics agent to pay his way through law school at the University of DePaul, taking classes at night. After graduating, he joined the DePaul law school faculty and worked simultaneously as a television news reporter. Ware worked only a year in TV news, but that year was 1968. He covered the Chicago Democratic convention, as well as the bloody confrontations between police and antiwar protestors outside the convention hall that came to epitomize the contentious ’60s. “I covered the Black Panthers and the Weathermen, too,” Ware said. “I was not afraid. I didn’t mind going into places and trying to get the truth.” Because Ware had been equally intrepid as a narcotics cop, Illinois Gov. Richard Ogilvie asked him in 1969 to take the helm of a start-up, statewide narcotics bureau, making Ware the first black man to lead a statewide law enforcement agency in the US. While still in that role, he served by appointment of President Richard Nixon on a national commission to study drug abuse. In 1972, he became the deputy superintendent of the Chicago Police Department. Six years later, Ware finally began to practice law full time. He was appointed to the Cook County bench in 1998 and served in that capacity until his retirement five years ago. Given all he has accomplished, you might think it obvious Ware would have gone on to do great things, even had a St. Ambrose football scholarship not been made available. That is not obvious to him, however. “St. Ambrose played a big role in my life,” Ware said. “It gave me a perspective on a lot of things I really had not been able to envision before going there.”
And then I get to St. Ambrose and here is a school where everybody treats you like they want to be treated.” 17