This is the seventh installment of a series on Oak Park housing history as it relates to diversity and equity:
In the 1960s open housing became the central focus of civil rights efforts in Chicago and in Oak Park. As white opposition violently attacked the Chicago freedom movement and Dr. King Chicago freedom movement open housing activists stepped up their work in Oak Park.
Students march for fair housing
Students from Rosary College (now Dominican University) and Concordia College (now Concordia University Chicago) held an open housing march to the Baird Warner office in Oak Park. Courageous students challenged realtors to end their racially discriminatory practices toward Blacks and Jews (1). This all happened when white fear of Black migration to white Oak Park was spiking. In the Austin community in the 1960s, a real-estate practice called “block busting” was common. It happened when panicked, hostile and fearful whites sold their homes to African Americans in a process that benefitted realtors while financially exploiting white sellers and Black buyers (2).
Housing efforts in Chicago spurred action by significant religious and civic allies for inclusionary housing in Oak Park. Despite intense opposition, they came together to pass the village’s Fair Housing Ordinance in 1968 (3).
This extraordinary step was part of a national and regional political transformation that saw integration as the solution to racial injustices reaching back centuries. In our village, a broad consensus of civic, religious, and social groups and individuals backed racial integration for practical and idealistic reasons.
At their best, these villagers sought a social order where residents might relate to each other, not as superiors and inferiors, but as moral and social equals. Key white pro-integration interests, in alliance with a group of like-minded African Americans, were essential to planning and succeeding. While there is no exact number of villagers who supported or opposed open housing, 10,000 residents petitioned village government to sponsor a referendum on the fair housing ordinance which the powerful realty industry strongly opposed. Realtors eventually got on board when the ordinance was amended to also prohibit individuals, not just realtors, from discriminating (4).
The entire undertaking was in the best tradition of American liberal reform of making significant changes within the prevailing political and economic order. Our current shared memory of Oak Park’s transformation emphasizes that ideals of racial democracy drove Oak Park’s inclusionary housing project. As a chapter in American racial capitalism, open housing in the village from its inception was equally shaped by the dominant white culture’s material interests of property, both in housing and schools. Opponents of the village’s open housing plan claimed it was an undemocratic gutting of personal property rights, and a manipulation by village elites who refused to put the whole matter before a referendum proposed by 10,000 voters (5).
Racial justice beliefs go public
Two legendary events energized the village racial integration change process. The first involved the actions of individuals in the Symphony of Oak Park & River Forest. In 1963, when learning of a possible unprecedented appearance of the young accomplished African American violinist Carol Anderson, symphony board president Marie Dock Palmer telephoned Anderson telling her that her services were not needed in Oak Park. When Milton Preves, the symphony’s conductor and artistic director learned of the phone call, he and several other musicians resigned in protest. Palmer then pilloried Preves in the press. Her attack included antisemitic comments about Preves’ Jewish background. Widespread community uproar brought a public apology from Palmer, and Anderson performed in the concert. Preves’ courage in calling out racial injustice lives on to this day (6).
In response to the incident, outraged community members from Oak Park and River Forest formed the Citizens Committee for Human Rights, which became an important ally in the push for the passage of the Fair Housing Ordinance of 1968. Responding directly to what came to be called “the symphony incident,” Oak Park village trustees in a unanimous vote established a Community Relations Commission, which the village used to foster the advancement of racial inclusion and open housing (7). In the following decades, the commission and key individual commissioners would act as the community’s moral conscience as the village wrestled with controversies involving housing, schools and policing (8).
‘The Right of All People to Live Where They Choose’
In April of 1964, as the national Civil Rights Movement approached its apex, a small group of Oak Park and River Forest residents published “The Right of All People to Live Where They Choose” in the Oak Leaves newspaper. It was an extraordinary manifesto calling for full inclusionary housing in Oak Park. Ninety-nine percent of the signers were white and included many signers from River Forest. It read in part:
“We, the undersigned residents of Oak Park and River Forest, believing in the essential oneness of humankind, and seeking to foster such unity in our communities, do hereby declare: That we want residence in our villages to be open to anyone interested in sharing our benefits and responsibilities, regardless of race, color, creed, or national origin ” (9).
The appeal became the basis of the Oak Park Diversity Statement. Their collective voice launched a decades-long visionary chapter in Oak Park history that institutionalized the village’s commitment to open housing and a set of deliberate, enforceable policies in housing and schools that came to be called “managed integration.” It was a resounding rejection of the reprehensible racial, ethnic and religious exclusion in place in Oak Park for most of the 20th century.
John Duffy is a longtime Oak Park resident and retired high school instructor. He is a member of CEEE (Committee for Excellence and Equity in Education).
1. Stan West, Peggy Tuck Sinko, Frank Lipo with Yves Hughes Jr., Suburban Promised Land: The Emerging Black Community in Oak Park, Illinois, 1880-1980 (2009)
2. Beryl Slatter, Family Properties: How the Struggle Over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (2009)
3. Village of Oak Park, Opening the Door https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV3GhPSgnK8
4. Ken Trainor, “Why I am proud to be from Oak Park,” Wednesday Journal, May 15, 2018.
5. Ibid., Trainor
6. Elizabeth Rexford, “A History of the Symphony of Oak Park and River Forest” (2006)
7. Ibid., West et al.
8. John Duffy, https://www.oakpark.com/2020/11/25/promise-and-challenge-of-managed-school-integration and https://www.oakpark.com/2020/12/16/the-volatile-80s-in-district-97
9. Oak Leaves, “The Right of All People to Live Where They Choose,” April 16, 1964