Today we are beginning a series on the history of Oak Park housing as it relates to racial diversity and equity in the village.
Over the last several years, village trustees, candidates for office and various community advocates have addressed housing development, housing affordability and their connections to equitable socio-economic and racial diversity. To better understand where our community is in this dialogue on housing policy reform, it is essential to know where we have been. To that end, I offer a series of articles delving into the history of how fair and inclusionary housing came to Oak Park in the Civil Rights Era and how we have sought to preserve that ideal since.
This series honors and builds from the extraordinary history of rich personal narratives and compelling events told in Suburban Promised Land: The Emerging Black Community in Oak Park, Illinois, 1880-1980 (West, Sinko, Lipo, and Hughes: 2009), and from the recent work of local Jewish historians like Michael Zimora. The series starts with a reminder that the land we live on was for centuries the home of the Potawatomi Indian tribe. They were the first people in 1833 to be unjustly dispersed and excluded from what would later be Oak Park.
Much of the forthcoming series is tied to the concept many historians and economists call racial capitalism — the body of economic and social history that narrates and interprets American history as being shaped from the beginning by white racism. Whether you accept or reject this perspective, its presence is sadly replete in Oak Park’s history of housing. To assert this is not to ignore the better angels of our nature — the idealistic civic and strongly faith-based individuals and groups who fought for racial inclusion in the ’60s and ’70s. As we regularly remind ourselves, Oak Park does provide a worthy, but still flawed, counter-narrative of courageous actions by Oak Parkers who have persistently struggled to create a racially diverse, culturally and religiously inclusive community.
Recently we have witnessed a resurgence of America’s legacy of racism in so many painful ways in this country. We watch the purging and rewriting of the history of race at all levels of education, the intentional suppressing of the Black vote, the Supreme Court’s greenlighting of racial profiling and ICE agents invading our community and kidnapping our Brown immigrants and residents. As our community resists these developments, we must remain vigilant about how national trends can, as they have done in the past, either undermine or bolster inclusionary housing and our local, rather newborn efforts at racial equity, inclusion and diversity in housing policies and programs.
To that end, successive Viewpoints articles will revisit key events, significant individuals, and volatile times from the past. It includes how local developments, national policies and popular beliefs influenced what happened in Oak Park.
Much of this history will be disturbing. Hopefully it can help us bridge the gap today between our greatest ideals and the economic and social reality that still hinders us from realizing those ideals. A fuller understanding of that history may aid us in finding paths forward with equitable inclusionary housing policy and programs. It may help us transcend the ongoing paradox of what we rationally insist public policy should do, as we wrestle with persisting individual and collective hopes and fears, just as we have done in the past.
Along the way, this series will tell a history familiar to some Oak Parkers, but it is especially intended to freshly inform those living here for decades as well as newcomers to our community. For all of us, this history can be a reminder of the lesson James Baldwin poignantly counseled during the Civil Rights Era — “We don’t begin again as if there is nothing behind us or underneath our feet. We carry that history with us.”
The second part of this series will visit the 1920s when a resurgence of oppressive beliefs about race, culture and housing opportunity played out in Oak Park.
John Duffy is a longtime resident of the Longfellow School neighborhood, a retired teacher historian, and a member of Oak Parkers for Affordable Housing and the Committee for Equity and Excellence in Education.