I wrote my senior thesis about Oak Park. Here’s what I learned:
Oak Park’s history of managed integration is more complicated – and more significant – than you might think.
Tucked inside a yellow manila folder inside a grey archive box inside the backroom of the Oak Park-River Forest Historical Society sits a memo dated Jan. 21, 1964. Harris Stevens, then-village manager, wrote to the Community Relations Commission that “a negro family is moving into Oak Park on Thursday of this week.” He anticipated a stir in the village. Just a few months prior, a Black violinist was told by the president of the board that she could not play with the Oak Park-River Forest Symphony Orchestra, a racist act that brought local and national condemnation. The double-bombing of Black scientist Percy Julian’s home in 1950-51 was not yet a distant memory. Stevens and Police Chief Fremont Nestor were prepared to “be on hand at all hours” to deal with any potential disturbances.
Sitting down in a coffee shop in Bridgeport with Lloyd King, son of the couple mentioned in the memo, Leo and Vera King, I learned that those disturbances included a brick thrown through a second floor window shattering glass on third-grader Lloyd, overnight graffiti of racial slurs on the garage, and a potato shoved into the exhaust pipe of the family car. Oak Park certainly did not live out the progressive reputation I grew up with.
In the 1960s, Oak Park was at an inflection point. Residents saw Chicago’s changing urban fabric stretch from Garfield Park to Austin. They recognized the disinvestment and redlining that followed white flight, locking out these communities from vital economic resources. They were put on alert when UIC sociologist Pierre deVise predicted Oak Park was next up for white flight. Would Oak Parkers resist integration or flee to further suburbs?
The answer was more complicated: managed integration.
So how did Oak Park confront this pivotal moment? This was one of the questions I set out to answer in my award-winning Columbia University senior thesis titled, “It Takes a Village: Managed Integration and White Flight in Oak Park, Illinois 1963-1980.” As a born-and-raised Oak Parker, I realized that existing academic narratives about white flight, the phenomenon of white residents fleeing urban neighborhoods as Black residents began moving in, did not fit squarely with a suburb like Oak Park, which found a way to both integrate Black residents into a formerly almost entirely white suburb and maintain increasing housing prices.
As a history student, I wondered if the story I was told about Oak Park growing up, namely that we triumphed over segregation, was more complicated. Combining these two mindsets, I got to work.
What did I find? Grounded in the archives of the Historical Society and the Oak Park Public Library and over a dozen oral history interviews, my research sought to redefine how we look at this period of Oak Park’s history. I argue that Oak Park’s strategy of “managed integration” is best viewed as primarily a strategy of defense against white flight, not primarily a strategy of community integration. Integration focuses on the safe, just, and equal entry of Black residents into the neighborhood. “Managed integration” adds the caveat that this entry cannot perpetuate an exodus of white residents or a decline in property values, a caveat that is fundamentally incompatible with the equality implied by integration. While there were individual actors who sought integration above all else, by-and-large Oak Park’s strategy focused on preventing white flight, landing it squarely in the managed integration camp.
Oak Park’s first assertion of managed integration came in the landmark 1968 Fair Housing Ordinance. Community activists pushed village hall to pass a local ordinance that banned discriminatory real estate practices, defeating a reactionary group that sought to block the proposal by implementing a binding popular referendum which never came to fruition. It was the work of these activists – Black and white – that guaranteed Oak Park would become integrated.
However, the ordinance enshrined “managed” in Oak Park’s conception of integration. If a section of the village was becoming too integrated, residents could file an “exemption location” request, which if approved voided the Ordinance’s anti-discriminatory protections in the name of preventing Oak Park from developing “racially identifiable” areas.
It was not just the village government that was concerned about white flight. The Oak Park Housing Center (OPHC) was, and still is, a key community organization that serves as an intermediary between people looking to move to Oak Park and local landlords and realtors. The OPHC helped move thousands of people into the village in the 1970s. Core to its philosophy was “dispersal,” or the encouragement of Black clients to spread out across the village, because too many Black residents in one area was seen as risky for neighborhood stability. While never preventing Black residents from renting in an area, this philosophy embodies the spirit of “managed” integration in its acceptance of a racist framework – that too many Black residents in one area was risky for the neighborhood – and sought to find a “workable” solution within that framework. Additionally, I found that Black clients throughout the 1970s had a significantly lower chance than white clients of successfully being placed within village limits by the OPHC.
These two examples, alongside several more outlined in my thesis, reveal that while successful in creating a geographically integrated community, the foundational elements of managed integration – monitoring where Black residents lived, dispersing them across the village, and slowing down their entry – imposed a racist double standard on Black residents. These elements are best viewed as part of the umbrella community defense, not an integration that centered on equality and justice. Only Black residents, not Croatians, Catholics, Communists, Cubs fans, coffee-drinkers, nor any other socially constructed category of people were subjected to these regulations. Oak Parkers accepted racist frameworks and tried to find a pragmatic solution within them. Perhaps they believed they had no other choice in a city ravaged by white flight and a country gripped by racism. Regardless of the reasons, racist double standards based on ancestry constituted an undeniable element of Oak Park’s managed integration.
As we tackle current problems facing the village, we must look back and learn from our history. The 1960s and 1970s were the inflection point that produced the Oak Park of today. We must recognize both the good – the civil rights marches, the straw buyers who helped move in Black residents, the shared kitchen-table conversations – and the racism implicit in managed integration policies implemented during this time period. We cannot let pride in our progressive reputation blind us to engaging in the necessary and sometimes uncomfortable work of building a village that is equal and just for all.
Ted Schmiedeler grew up in Oak Park and graduated from Columbia University in May of 2026. His senior thesis, “It Takes a Village: Managed Integration and White Flight in Oak Park, Illinois, 1963-1980,” received the Undergraduate Education Committee Prize, an award given to a thesis of excellence written in any field of history.