This is Episode 3 in our series on the history of Oak Park housing as it relates to racial diversity and equity in the village.
In the first decades of the 20th century, Oak Park’s small Black community, which gathered in the Mt. Carmel Baptist Church congregation, confronted deepening white-supremacist beliefs. Their ability to thrive collided with the birth of racially exclusionary zoning policies, sponsored by the federal government, national realty associations, and community planning experts.(1)
The village joined in these exclusionary housing efforts by adopting its first zoning ordinance in 1921. While (not openly) racially exclusionary, a feature declared unconstitutional in 1917, the ordinance mirrored models being promoted elsewhere, especially in the South, which were clearly racially motivated.(2)
In Oak Park the use of private, racially and religiously discriminatory deed contracts and banking requirements bolstered the exclusionary aspects of the 1921 ordinance, as they would do in later zoning revisions in 1947. Both ordinances provided for most of the village to be zoned single-family housing, restricted multifamily housing to areas like the Austin and Washington boulevard corridors, and limited the height of buildings on main arterial streets to 2.5 stories.(3)
The African American Mt. Carmel Baptist Church was located just south of Lake Street and east of Harlem on Williams Street (now Westgate). The small group of Black congregants saw their church as the cornerstone for growing a larger community. Then pressure for commercial development pushed was brought to bear on Black Oak Parkers. There was a series of unexplained fires at the church. The incidents, which were never investigated by village officials, occurred as commercial investors looked for land to develop south of Lake Street where Marshall Field opened its marquee department store in 1928.
Over the next several years other upscale retailers followed Fields. Among merchants making downtown Oak Park the hottest retail district West of Chicago, the Wieboldt store across Harlem in River Forest opened in 1939, claiming to be the largest department store in the American suburbs. By 1930, under pressure from the dominant racial and economic interests, Mt. Carmel closed and the Oak Park Black population declined, dispersing to more hospitable neighborhoods in Chicago and Maywood.(4)
The devastating impact of the disappearance of Mt. Carmel is passionately told in “Historical Harms to the Black Community of Oak Park and Suggested Repairs,” prepared and presented by the African American Reparations Task Force in 2024.(5)
“The members of Mt. Carmel Baptist Church wanted to access their piece of the American dream through property ownership. Had they been allowed to build and grow at Cuyler and Chicago and also on Williams St./Westgate, it is probable that a few years later they would have built a school nearby to educate Black students. A few years after that they could have purchased a multifamily investment property in another part of Oak Park. A few years later they may have purchased a house for their pastor. As the church grew, Black residents could have purchased homes nearby and opened businesses nearby. The possibilities of what could have been are endless. What we know for certain is properties in Oak Park have increased in value exponentially since the early 1900s, and that wealth could have been in the hands of Black Oak Park residents if the village board had allowed its tax-paying Black residents to build on the lots they owned and for which they had a building permit.”
The disturbing developments around Mt. Carmel Church were sadly but the first instance in a harmful pattern that would recur again and again the rest of the century and into the new millennium. The demise of our first Black church (destroyed by fire on Christmas 1929) was the village’s first episode in a persistently racist set of policy decisions that by design and default contributed to the exclusion and the dispersal of African Americans seeking the amenities of suburban living that still bring people to Oak Park.
The next episode in our series will unpack how federal and local housing policies during the Great Depression of the 1930s aggravated the exclusion of Blacks and Jews from Oak Park.
Citations
1. Richard Rothstein. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated People, 2018.
2. Richard Rothstein & Leah Rothstein. Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted under the Color of Law, 2023.
3. The Unvarnished History Project. https://www.unvarnishedhistory.org/local-spotlights/oak-park-Illinois
4. Stan West, Peggy Tuck Sinko, Frank Lipo, and Yves Hughes Jr., 2009. Suburban Promised Land: The Emerging Black Community in Oak Park Illinois1880-1980, 2009.
5. The African American Reparations Task Force. Historical Harms to the Black Community and Suggested Repairs, 2024.