Part II of our series on the history of Oak Park housing as it relates to racial diversity and equity in the village.
The 1920s were a decade marked by the village’s greatest period of commercial and housing development. Oak Park’s population soared from 10,000 in 1900 to 40,000 in 1920, then to 64,000 in 1930 and its peak of 66,000 in 1940 (1). During these years Oak Park’s Black population almost disappeared — falling from 169 to 57 by 1950. It was a period when the village’s exclusionary housing trends continued to be aggravated by dominant racial beliefs, religious prejudice, socio-economic interests and local policy decisions.
This happened in a context much like today’s, of oppressive racial and cultural beliefs. White replacement theory was widespread and articulated in best-selling books like Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, which was deeply racist and antisemitic. With the massive nationwide immigration of Eastern and Southern Europeans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Oak Park’s white Protestants believed their political and social dominance was in jeopardy.
The open presence of the 300-member Women of the Ku Klux Klan illustrated the anxiety and resistance to social change of many Oak Parkers — especially toward village newcomers of Irish, Italian and Jewish identity. Like most who came to the village for the rest of the century, these groups sought the comfort, prestige and middle-class amenities suburban Oak Park continues to offer. Opposition that spurred exclusionary attitudes and policies emanated from popular beliefs about culture, education and housing a century ago that still linger more silently in today’s policy debates in our schools, in zoning decisions, and in housing reform.
In what historians refer to as the Progressive Reform Era in the early 20th century, upper-class business interests, through the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, advanced a class- and race-based curriculum tracking of students. They helped institutionalize racially-segregated, occupationally-focused school experiences. Despite strong opposition from the early Chicago Teachers Union and its charismatic leader, Margaret Haley, Chicago’s corporate elite secured two distinct school curriculums — one for the managerial class and another for the working class. That model soon became common across the nation (2).
Paralleling this development by the end of World War I was a full-blown American eugenics movement led by Lewis Terman at Stanford University, who reinforced and made even more acceptable existing racist beliefs with a new pseudo-science-based research claiming a natural racial hierarchy. “Scientific” racism then became imbedded in federal and local school and housing policies that assumed the infallibility of white racial supremacy (3). The American eugenics movement along with the legal and social racism of Jim Crow practices were admired and adopted by Nazi Germany. Both shaped the deeply discriminatory Nuremberg Laws and led to the genocide of millions of European Jews and other people deemed racially and socially inferior by the fascist regime of Germany (4).
About the same time, President Wilson removed thousands of African Americans from government jobs, segregated the federal work force and reinforced racist beliefs in a manner similar to the current U.S. president.
The Great Migration of millions of African Americans to cities of the North in pursuit of freedom and economic opportunity aggravated the ethnocentrism of Oak Park elites. In nearby Chicago, white violence against African Americans became epidemic at the end of World War I. In the week-long race riot in 1919, 28 African Americans and 15 whites died and 2,000 Black residents were left homeless. The Illinois state militia eventually restored order to Chicago as Oak Parkers cautiously and nervously watched, as they would do years later in 1968 following Dr. King’s assassination (5).
It was in this context that Oak Park’s long-established Black residents sought to thrive as a community of less than 200 residents. A few Black families owned their own homes. Like today, most Blacks rented living space. Some owned small businesses. Others worked as skilled and unskilled laborers and as traditional domestic servants. They joined in social discourse and civic action in the West End Men’s and Women’s Club of Oak Park and regularly interacted with the larger Black community in nearby Maywood. Unlike Oak Park, Maywood reserved a section of their village for Black home ownership. The small Black community in Oak Park lived mostly concentrated along Williams Street, now called Westgate, where Target and the Emerson high rise now sit in our thriving downtown business district (6).
In 1909, Black residents looked to organize a lasting community institution, the Black Church, to establish the essential foundation for the centuries-old, African American culture. The house of worship, regardless of denomination, has been and continues as the cornerstone of Black life. It was the incubator of moral fervor, artistic vision, and political action. It served as a sanctuary in their arduous journey to finding freedom in a racially hostile world. And prevailing white power in Oak Park opposed a permanent place for the community’s first Black church — Mt. Carmel Baptist (7).
Part three of this series turns to that story which would be painfully re-lived in the late 1980s with another denial to Black people hoping to establish a church in Oak Park.
Sources:
(1) oprfmuseum.org/brief-history-oak-park
(2) Defending Public Education from Corporate Takeover. Todd Price, John Duffy, Tanya Giordani, 2013.
(3) The Mismeasure of Man. Stephen Jay Gould, 1980.
(4) The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism. Stephan Kuhn, 2002.
(5) Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. St. Clair Drake & Horace R. Clayton, 1980.
(6) Suburban Promised Land: The Emerging Black Community in Oak Park, 1880-1980. San West, Peggy Tuck Sinko, Frank Lipo, and Yves Hughes Jr., 2009.
(7) Historical Harm to the Black Community of Oak Park and Suggested Repairs. The Oak Park Reparations Task Force, 2024.
Images:
Both the KKK advertisement in the Oak Leaves and the photo of the 60th Anniversary Dinner of the Oak Park Maywood Improvement Association are taken from Promised Land Suburbs.
