This is episode 13 in our series on the history of Oak Park housing as it relates to diversity and equity.
From the early ’80s through the start of the new millennium the major pillars of the Oak Park Strategy (1) and its espoused racial integration goals came under increasing stress. Tensions peaked around opposition to how dominant interests in the village, institutionalized in the Oak Park Development Corporation (OPDC), the Oak Park Residence Corporation (ResCorp), the Oak Park Housing Center (OPHC) and school District 97 operated. Each in complementary ways worked to manage integration and ensure a unitary housing market where all villagers had the opportunity to live in the community in affordable and accessible housing regardless of race, income or age (2).
Over-reach and under-reach
In 1983 a new conservative party Citizens Association for a Responsible Electorate (CARE) organized to challenge managed integration and unseat the Village Managers Association which had elected the majority of trustees since 1952. CARE, mirroring key national Republican beliefs, took an ideological hard line in support of unrestricted, free-market housing, getting village government out of “social engineering,” stopping wasteful spending and making village decision-making transparent. They insisted that ResCorp, the Housing Center, and the OPDC be dismantled. CARE elected two trustees, a few school board members and won control of the parks board before largely collapsing in the early ’90s.
On Oak Park’s political left, multiple progressive groups like African Americans for Purposeful Leadership in Education (APPLE), the Concerned Parents Association, the Oak Park Community Action Organization, and the Oak Park NAACP shaped a critical and widely supported protest around how managed integration was failing Black students and families. They elected multiple racial-equity-orientated board members like Mary Daly Lewis, Sheldon Liebman and Henry Fulkerson in the ’80s and ’90s. They helped shift policy discourse from integration to racial equity (3). By 1989, with a new board consensus around racial equity, D97 began dismantling internal school segregation caused by ability grouping (4).
Next, racial-equity activists like Wyanetta Johnson, John Lukehart, Henry Fulkerson and Jaslin Salmon turned to D200 to replicate policy achievements won in D97. In 1994, activists formed the unprecedented intersectional coalition Building and Renewing Institutions Dedicated to Good Education (BRIDGE) and ran a slate in 1995 that included former D97 board members Henry Fulkderson, Charles Brauner and school equity activist Connie Van Brundt (5). All three lost in an election where racist dog whistles and fear of change prevailed as stalwarts of the status quo defended the long-established tracking system that segregated most Black students in low-status, low-challenge curriculum (6).
Tipping points, real or imagined
In 1986 the D97 Walsh Committee on Re-districting insisted school boundaries had to be shifted because expanding Black home ownership and renting contributing to a larger Black student presence in east side schools like Whittier, Hatch, Longfellow and Irving.
Under siege from hundreds of community advocates demanding structural changes to promote intra-school integration and equitable classrooms, D97 decided to not follow the Walsh recommendations aimed at heading off the feared “tipping point” that might panic whites living here or looking to move here. Still with backroom and open pressure from local media, Bobbie Raymond, Housing Center director, and VMA stalwarts like Anne Armstrong, D97 a few months later voted again — this time redrawing school boundaries one last time (7).
By the end of the century Hatch, Whittier, Longfellow and Irving had Black student populations topping out at 40-50% and the D97 total Black student population reached 35.1% (8). National and regional community integration experts like Gary Orfield and Evan MacKenzie from the Great Cities Institute at UIC urged immediate action before there was no turning back — an alarm that bristled many villagers of all backgrounds (9).
Growing pressure led the village to convene its first diversity summit since 1984. Only D97 and village government participated. Despite pressure to make adjustments to school boundaries, the D97 board balked as it did in 1986. Instead of moving school boundaries in 2001, they pledged to equitably provide the needed resources for schools to reach district achievement goals (10).
Cancelling a second Black church
On Dec. 29, 1987 in one of the most alarming and morally abhorrent actions in village’s post-civil rights era, the village board with the solitary dissent of trustee Thomas Edwalds, gave the green light to the OPDC to outbid by $5,000 the offer by Unity Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church to purchase the First Church of Christ, Scientist located at 200 N. Oak Park Ave. Unity Fellowship was a Black congregation located in Austin with 1,500 members, including 100 Oak Parkers (11).
After Edwalds revealed the decision to block Unity Fellowship, stunned and outraged Black and white villagers condemned the racial hypocrisy by village government and business elites. In private, trustees had discussed fear that a large Black presence near Lake and Oak Park Avenue could frighten away white shoppers and negatively impact the just completed, nearby, upscale Prairie Court housing complex. In response, NAACP president Webster Daniels threatened court intervention to upend what justice-minded Oak Parkers and outside observers saw as the epitome of racial betrayal by leaders who, for a generation, had religiously advocated for and celebrated racial integration.
New York Times journalist Isabel Wilkerson, one-time village resident and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, trumpeted the moral failure of Oak Park elites to a national readership. Defenders of the OPDC framed their action as practical decision-making — preventing Unity Fellowship with its 1,500 congregants from overwhelming the limited parking available and undermining previously planned, but undisclosed development of the First Church property.
The sale to Unity never took place and another buyer eventually purchased the property after defensive trustees yanked their support for the OPDC purchase on Jan. 18. Again, as with the Black Mt. Carmel Baptist Church in the 1920s, racial exclusion, driven by white property interests, marked another disturbing chapter in the long road to inclusionary housing.
Sources for this piece can be found in the online version at oakpark.com/Opinion.
1. John Duffy, The Oak Park strategy, https://www.oakpark.com/2026/06/30/oak-park-housing-history-the-oak-park-strategy
2. Village of Oak Park Diversity Statement, 1973.
3. John Duffy, The volatile ’80s in District 97, https://www.oakpark.com/2020/12/16/the-volatile-80s-in-district-97/?shem=aimgspe
4. School District 97 Strategic Plan, 1990
5. John Duffy, The divisive OPRF election of 1995, https://www.oakpark.com/2021/03/10/the-divisive-oprf-election-of-1995/?shem=aimgspe
6. Oak Park and River Forest High School District 200, Blueprint Assessment, 2011
7. John Duffy, In Search of the Promises of Brown: The Struggle for Racial Justice in Two Communities: Ed. Dissertation, National Louis University, 2011
8. Chicago Tribune, District 97 may reconsider racial balance of schools, July 1, 1999
9. Evan McKenzie, The Politics of School Desegregation in Oak Park, Illinois, 2000
10. Oak Park Commitment to Diversity Task Force Report, 2001
11. Oak Park Reparations Task Force Report, Historical Harms to the Black Community of Oak Park, Il. and Suggested Repairs, 2024. https://oak-park.legistar.com/View