In a span of 10 years, with bursts of intense political division, the Oak Park community crafted a set of housing strategies that would, over time, test the strength of our humanity to live differently and overcome generations of exclusionary housing and economic discrimination. The strategies were imbedded in ethical, religious commitments and traditional property interests.
The overall plan came to be called the Oak Park Strategy, a label that came from Carol Goodwin’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago, which was published as a book in 1979. National media soon adopted the branding as they covered Oak Park’s volatile change process (1).
Core of the plan
Housing Center (HC) – Renamed the Oak Park Regional Housing Center (OPRHC) in the early 1990s, the HC worked closely with realtors, apartment owners, home buyers and renters to integrate housing across the village. The center prioritized convincing whites that the East side of town was a desirable and safe place to live. To this day the OPRHC still marks its local success with what it calls “affirmative moves.” These moves were personal decisions by newcomers to reject an unwritten but widely spoken guideline that has circulated for generations among whites coming to Oak Park: “Don’t look at homes east of Ridgeland.” In that effort, the center’s annual reports of the 1970s and 1980s show that their clients were overwhelmingly white, professional and highly educated, and its Black clients of all demographics were very small in number (2).
Conversely, the center encouraged Blacks to live in areas of the village where they were under-represented. Village trustees strongly funded the work of the HC until 2023. Then trustees’ concerns about the effectiveness, and perhaps the ethical appropriateness of the HC efforts, combined with shaky accounting practices of the center, led the village to drastically cut the HC budget until remediations were effectively in place (3).
Oak Park Residence Corporation – ResCorp was created in 1966 in collaboration with, and operational funding from, the village. It continues its mission today to provide quality rental housing that supports economically affordable, racially diverse, rental units throughout the village. It did this from the 1970s through today by purchasing and rehabbing deteriorating buildings, then designating 30 percent of the units as affordable for village residents or those who worked in Oak Park. ResCorp today owns 30 buildings and administers close to 500 federal housing choice vouchers through the Oak Park Housing Authority (4).
Media marketing – The HC promoted the village’s racial integration ideal while pitching the community’s unique appealing features in liberal national publications to attract middle-class whites and Blacks to Oak Park. The strategy was highly successful, especially with new white residents.
For sale sign ban – The ordinance was adopted to avoid the appearance of a concentrated sale of houses that might feed white homeowner panic-selling. The Illinois Supreme Court declared the ordinance unconstitutional, but the practice has continued on an individual, voluntary basis to this day.
Equity Assurance Ordinance – This legislation was aimed to stem white flight without adopting the legally and morally dubious Black residential quotas under consideration in 1974, introduced by village trustee Robert Varnes to limit Black home buying in Southeast Oak Park and to direct Blacks elsewhere. After many religious and civic leaders questioned its legality and morality, it was abandoned. In its place in 1978, the village passed the Equity Assurance Ordinance which protected participating home buyers against loss in market value of their home caused by integration or its failure. Not a single claim has been made to this day.
Hundreds Clubs – These arrangements were block-by-block social networks established in 1968 to personalize what the vision of racial inclusion would look and feel like. The clubs launched the village’s block party tradition, encouraged pride in property maintenance, fostered a local ethos of welcoming new residents, especially Black neighbors, and nurtured a culture of inclusion necessary for the success of managed integration. Interracial dinners were a spin-off of the Hundreds Clubs.
Redistricting – The overall goal of school redistricting was to create racially integrated schools and ensure no school became too Black or too white and that students would attend integrated schools across the village. The strategy aimed to prevent the dreaded “tipping point” when whites became uncomfortable with too many Blacks in a school or neighborhood and then moved elsewhere. Redistricting was the inseparable flip side of inclusionary housing (5).
The courageous District 97 board president Marilyn Lehman, who spearheaded the bold plan to integrate Oak Park schools, was repeatedly threatened with violence from racist opponents. Lehman and D97 board member, sociologist, and civil rights activist Galen Gockel co-chaired the Committee for Tomorrow’s Schools, which finalized the district’s integration plan in 1975. It created six K-6 integrated schools by redrawing school boundaries to create more racial balance and formed two junior highs by taking students from geographically distant neighborhoods to learn in more racially integrated settings (6).
The next installment in our series turns to the findings and impact of the 1984 Diversity Task Force Report and its assessment of how early managed integration was working and where it needed changes.
Episode 9 citations
1. Carole Goodwin. The Oak Park strategy: Community control of racial change, 1979.
2. Oak Park Housing Center Annual Reports. Special collection, Oak Park Public Library.
3. Luzane Draughon. OP regional housing center is in financial trouble. What now? Wednesday Journal, June 18, 2024. https://www.oakpark.com/2024/06/14/oak-park-regional-housing-center-finances
4. Wayne Pierce. What the Residence Corporation stands for. https://www.oakpark.com/2021/12/14/what-the-residence-corporation-stands-for
5. John Duffy. The promise and challenge of managed school integration. https://www.oakpark.com/2020/11/25/promise-and-challenge-of-managed-school-integration
6. Ken Trainor. When we sought racial balance in our classrooms. https://www.oakpark.com/2014/03/25/when-we-sought-racial-balance-in-our-classrooms