Oak Park: The Fight for Integration
“A racially-balanced school system is therefore a necessary if not sufficient prerequisite if residential segregation is to be avoided”
— Oak Park Board of Education, 1974
Chicago’s neighborhoods changed dramatically from the 1950s to 1970s. With white residents fearful of Black families moving into the community, many simply packed up and left. The assumption was that Blacks would lead to falling housing prices, increasing crime, and a collapse in the neighborhood’s general welfare. While blatantly racist, very few white communities not just in the Chicago region but across the United States challenged it. One outlier was Oak Park, a suburb bordering Chicago’s west side. Famous for being the birthplace of novelist Ernest Hemingway and the hometown of Frank Lloyd Wright for 20 years, Oak Park was known for its strong community activism and forward thinking views. As Chicago’s neighborhoods racially changed, the town’s leaders chose not to exclude African Americans, but to welcome them. As a result they had the difficult task of integrating the community’s two main pillars: housing and education.
Despite its progressive reputation, Oak Park during the middle of the 20th century was like most suburbs at the time: overwhelmingly white, middle class, and relatively conservative. In fact 61% of Oak Parkers voted for Richard Nixon while 6% voted for segregationist George Wallace in 1968. Nonetheless, the village’s inclusive religious organizations attracted people from both Oak Park and surrounding communities. One of those people was Percy Julian, a Harvard educated chemist from neighboring Maywood. Charmed by the community’s history and beauty, Percy moved his family to Oak Park in 1950, making them the village’s first African American residents. Their presence, however, sparked a backlash. On Thanksgiving Day 1950, just before they moved in, Percy’s house was firebombed. A year later his house was firebombed a second time. His son would later recount how he and his father would protect the house at night with a shotgun. The incidents led to swift condemnation from village officials, residents, and the local newspaper. It also made residents afraid of what was to come if more Black families moved to Oak Park. Though the dramatic transformations to Chicago’s west side hadn’t happened yet, community leaders understood that Oak Park’s survival would depend on persuading white residents to welcome Black residents while also enforcing integration policies.
Tensions with African Americans simmered for the next decade until 1963 when Black violinist Carol Anderson was hired by the Oak Park Symphony, but was fired after her first rehearsal. Marie Palmer, the symphony’s chairwoman at the time, didn’t know she was Black. In an interview with a local newspaper, Anderson recounted an exchange she had with her: “‘If I stayed it would mean that the community would withdraw its support of the orchestra. She said that I would understand that, as a Negro, I would not be acceptable as a member of the orchestra in this community.’” Palmer was later quoted saying, “‘Nothing is integrated in Oak Park as yet.’” As a result of the incident, 25 of the orchestra’s 83 musicians resigned, community leaders condemned Palmer’s actions, and the village passed a “statement of concern.” Eventually Marie Palmer apologized to Anderson and invited her back, but she declined.
Both the violent response to Percy Julian’s arrival to the community and Carol Anderson’s firing from the Oak Park Symphony galvanized residents into action and furthered the cause of housing integration. It started off informally when white residents encouraged African Americans from the surrounding area to move to the village. After identifying prospective buyers, they would then search for houses or apartments that the families could buy or rent. By the mid ’60s community leaders formed the Oak Park River Forest Citizens Committee for Human Rights, a coalition of religious progressives, leftists, and apolitical citizens who viewed housing segregation to be immoral. The group had 2 objectives: lobbying village officials to establish a fair housing ordinance and pressuring real estate agents to show properties regardless of a person’s race. They used pressure tactics including marches, protests in front of realtors’ offices, and something called integration testing, where two “couples” with similar backgrounds, except for their race, would try to buy a housing unit. Most of the time it showed African Americans being excluded from certain properties. What’s striking is that at the time, only 25 Black families were living in Oak Park and none in neighboring River Forest. In other words, resegregation wasn’t a major issue yet. It shows that Oak Park was ahead of the curve when it came to racial integration. Eventually their efforts culminated in the passage of a fair housing ordinance in 1968, just before President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Fair Housing Act.
By 1970 Chicago’s west side was rapidly becoming majority Black. In 1960, the Chicago’s Austin community was 99% white but by 1970 it was roughly 32% Black. According to sociologist Carole Goodwin, an average of 37 neighborhood blocks in Austin flipped from white to Black between 1966 and 1973. Many white Oak Parkers harbored similar racist beliefs that led their neighbors in Garfield Park and Austin to leave and started to follow suit. Determined to prevent another episode of white flight from happening, village leaders took a series of steps to enforce racial integration.
The first was passing an ordinance which outlawed “for sale” signs outside properties. This was due in part to real estate agents purposefully posting such signs throughout the community. By instilling fear in white residents, many moved out and realtors would then make a profit by selling them to Black families. It was one of many attempts to soothe the fears of white homeowners while also attracting Black families to move to the area. As Roberta Raymond, a resident supportive of the integration efforts told NPR, “‘There was a lot of hand holding…And we had to prove that whites would move into neighborhoods that were integrated neighborhoods if they felt — that on a long term basis — that neighborhood would stay integrated.’”
Yet the more impactful and largely overlooked policy that greatly helped make Oak Park the community it is today was integrating the town’s apartments. Apartment buildings were considered to be more susceptible to becoming majority Black, so local officials decided to implement a series of policies to prevent this. One measure included giving greater authority to code enforcement officers. Landlords in Garfield Park, for example, would let apartment conditions deteriorate once African Americans moved into the community. If there was any evidence suggesting landlords were neglectful, officers would cite them. With property upkeep being expensive, village officials created a fund called the Diversity Assurance Program (DAP). DAP would offer low interest loans to landlords to upgrade their properties. There was only one request: take in clients from the Oak Park Regional Housing Center, a non-profit which referred white residents to predominantly Black areas in Oak Park and Black residents to predominantly white parts. The Regional Housing Center also encouraged section 8 voucher recipients — a government program which allows low income residents to purchase rental units from private landlords — to consider moving into apartments owned by another initiative called the Oak Park Residence Corporation (Rescorp). Rescorp., which still exists today, purchases, refurbishes, and manages apartment units. Even though thousands of white residents left the neighborhood throughout the 1960s and ’70s, these housing policies proved to be successful.
In the fall of 1973, the superintendent of Oak Park’s education system submitted a report that concluded there was a serious disparity in student enrollment among Black students. By the 1975–76 school year one middle school in the district had a 33% Black student population while another middle school in the district only had 6% Black enrollment. To combat this growing racial inequality, the village’s board of education assigned a group of residents to figure out how to solve the problem.
Named the Committee for Tomorrow’s Schools, it was led by Galen Gockel, an active resident and someone I had the pleasure of working with during Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in 2016. Committee members were strategically chosen based on their repertoire with certain groups within the village. Towards the end of 1974 they presented their proposals, one of which later proved to be decisive in integrating the village’s education system. They wanted to merge two middle schools, where one had a 23% Black enrollment while the other had a less than 3% enrollment among Black students. All told, the merger would involve 41% of the district’s student population. Getting the plan passed proved to be contentious. One of the additions to the proposal included a busing option to accommodate roughly 1,500 students. While proponents of the measure claimed it wasn’t political, it was such a polarizing issue nationally that some residents perceived it that way and fiercely opposed it. Even though schools were ordered to desegregate after Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, neighborhood and housing segregation prevented many schools from doing so. School busing was seen as the most effective way to enforce the court ruling. Despite the backlash, many were supportive of it. The local Oak Park newspaper wrote an op-ed in March 1975 saying, in part, “‘We strongly support the elementary school board’s efforts to create racial balance within Oak Park’s schools. The board is doing the right thing, and it is doing it at the right time.’” After much debate, the school board passed the merger later that year. The vote took a personal toll on some board members. Marilyn Lehman, the board president at the time, said she received hate mail from the KKK after the vote. Despite the controversy it created, the steps taken worked. In 1979, white enrollment was at 78% but by 2000 it was at 58%. Meanwhile Black enrollment in 1979 was at 16% but by 2000 it was at 35%.
Oak Park is by no means perfect. Despite widespread community support for integration at the time, something fairly unusual in suburban America, there were those who fought to prevent Blacks from living in the village. Today, even though Oak Park is considered one of the most racially integrated suburbs in Illinois, its population is heavily white: 69% of residents are white, while 18% are Black, and 5% are Asian. Nonetheless, when the stakes were high, Oak Parkers had 2 options: flee like other white communities did in Chicago, or welcome their newly settled Black neighbors. Many chose the latter.
