‘She returned kindness’

Harriette Gillem Robinet’s father, an educator, required that his daughter pen something every day during her summer vacations while she was growing up. Publication came much later, in February 1968, with a Redbook magazine article titled, “I’m a Mother — Not a Pioneer,” number 89 in Redbook’s Young Mothers series.

The latter part of the title is debatable, but we’ll return to that later. 

Robinet, an award-winning writer and civil rights activist, died May 17. She was 92.

“Harriette Gillem Robinet’s life and work interacted as a divine gift to the many, many people who read and knew her,” Don Evans, an Oak Parker who founded the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame said after she died.

I believe that any people’s story is every people’s story and that from stories, we can all learn something to enrich our lives. 

‘If You Please, President Lincoln’

Robinet’s story has deep roots. Her maternal great-grandfather, Thornton Gray, was an enslaved person, owned by Mary Custis Lee, wife of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, in Arlington, Virginia. Before he went off to fight in the Civil War, Lee freed his slaves and gave them plots of his land. 

Over time, her parents built a life in Washington D.C., where she grew up in an all-Black neighborhood. Her mother, a seamstress, also worked at the Treasury Department. Her father, Richard A. Gillem Jr., was a geography and history teacher at the middle school Robinet attended. He attended Howard University Law School at night and passed the bar. Although he had many clients, he didn’t charge them and continued teaching.

After high school, Robinet wanted to get away from D.C., and, disappointing her mother who wanted her to attend a local all-Black school, she enrolled in the College of New Rochelle in New York, where she was the only Black student. No one wanted to be her roommate except for the one Chinese-American student, who couldn’t find one either.

Robinet majored in biology and had the highest grade point average in her class but received no honors. Those were reserved for the students whose parents were donors to the school. She did, however, receive strong recommendations from her teachers. After earning a master’s degree in bacteriology at Catholic University, and later, a doctorate, she was hired as a biology teacher at Xavier University in New Orleans, where she also served as a house mother for a girls dormitory. The chaplain, Father Sullivan, at the behest of the dormitory students, played matchmaker, inviting Harriette and McLouis (Mac) Robinet, a physics teacher at the school, to an event at which they were the only attendees. By the end of the school year, they became engaged.

The couple married in 1960 and moved to Chicago, where Mac landed a physics teaching assistant job in the UIC Medical Center at the College of Pharmacy. They lived in a zero-bedroom staff apartment on campus. After Stephen was born in 1964 and Phillip arrived via adoption, it was time to find a bigger place. 

Friends suggested they look for a home in Oak Park, but Oak Park didn’t want them. Or, at least, the local real estate industry didn’t want them at the time.

I know what civil rights demonstrations meant for me. For a few years our family joined in vigils, in testing of realtors, and in weekly marches for fair housing. We had the privilege of marching in Chicago with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Taking part in that nonviolent struggle established my self-respect as an African American.

‘Walking to the Bus-Rider Blues’

To expose the industry’s racist practices, the Robinets joined the North Shore Project, which documented the unequal treatment accorded Black couples and white couples. African Americans in 1965 needed a white “straw buyer” or “nominee buyer” to purchase a home for them — someone white — an unavoidable subterfuge to work around unjust restrictions.

After two years, a Presbyterian minister and his wife, Don and Joyce Beisswenger, bought a house on the 200 block of South Elmwood and sold it to the Robinets. 

 As Robinet described it in her Redbook article, “On a hazy, uncertain afternoon in October, 1965, our family of four drove up to a spacious old house in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. We had lived in a small Chicago apartment for five years, and the house looked like heaven. An avenue of elms and maples formed an arch of brilliant red and gold leaves. The fenced backyard would be a safe place for our boys to play in; large bay windows promised light and air; there was a real fireplace. And I could still plant some tulips before the first frost.”

The house, she wrote, was seven miles from the University of Illinois campus where her husband taught physics. Many of his students and colleagues lived in the village. 

“With its mellow atmosphere, its highly individual, well-kept old houses and its huge trees, Oak Park spelled h-o-m-e to us.

 “But this wasn’t an ordinary moving day,” she wrote. “We are Negroes. When a Negro family moves into an all-white suburb, it’s officially called a ‘move-in.’” 

That day was the first time she entered her new house. 

“The Illinois Commission on Human Relations suggests that neighbors not see the Negro family near the house before the actual moving day,” she added. “I hadn’t even been inside our new home yet. The moving must be fast and professional, done in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week — no weekend idlers nearby. And the white neighbors must be completely informed before the move-in takes place.”

Redbook published her article in February 1968. It turned out to be one the most-read pieces in the series. She used some of the $500 she was paid to buy her first electric typewriter.

Their Oak Park neighbors were welcoming, but once they settled in, the Robinets took action, leading weekly marches down Lake Street to call attention to unethical housing practices. Those demonstrations paid off in May 1968 with passage of one of the nation’s earliest Fair Housing ordinances.

Maybe freedom’s different things for different people. I think it be something small that grows like a seed planted. Every day, I feel a little more free.

‘Forty Acres and Maybe a Mule’

By then, the family had grown to five kids, four of them adopted, joined later by Linda, who was born in the early ’70s. Raising six children is not exactly conducive to the demands of being a novelist, but Robinet was determined and disciplined.

“My mother often wrote as we were doing homework,” Linda recalled. “She’d be writing at her desk in the dining room while a few of us would be working at the dining room table. She’d have her notebooks that she used for research in neat piles.” 

She kept a strict routine of cleaning, cooking and shopping, delegating chores to the kids as they grew old enough to take tasks on. The regimen bought her time to write.

One day in the early ’70s, a librarian at the Oak Park Public Library, told Robinet there was a great need for children’s books that featured characters with disabilities. 

I can do that, she thought.

 Her first two books, Jay and the Marigold and Ride the Red Cycle, about children with disabilities, were inspired by her son, Jonathan, who has cerebral palsy. 

After that, she wrote nine more books for older kids, which her daughter Linda described as “multicultural historical fiction.” Each contained a character with some kind of disability.

Linda a teacher, read her mother’s books to her students.

“My mother’s characters were never perfect, just like them. Her characters were brave and scared. Her characters were angry and loving. Her characters were disabled and differently abled. Her books are so powerful for children because they get to experience historical events through the eyes of the characters. My mother’s books gave them hope,” she said.

In her own life, Robinet practiced nonviolent resistance. 

“If they came at her with contempt,” Linda said, “she returned kindness. … If I were to speculate about how she wove her own biography into her stories, it was to come from a place of understanding.”

Robinet authored 11 books between 1976 to 2003, winning multiple honors, including the Friends of American Writers Award, the Carl Sandburg Award, Scott O’Dell Award for historical fiction for children and the Jane Addams Book Award Honor.

In 2023, the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame presented her the Fuller Award for Lifetime Achievement.

“Her generosity and grace, not to mention her fierce compassion and intelligence, emanated from every stitch of her writing and her life,” Evans said. “You always hear that the author is not the work and the work is not the author, but in Harriette’s case it’s hard to make that distinction. She knew only kindness, sought only prosperity and peace, especially for those whose circumstances made that difficult.”

Robinet was a mother, yes, first and foremost, but she was also a scientist, a social justice activist, an organizer, a teacher, a good neighbor, a fine and courageous writer. 

And, yes, a pioneer.

***

A longtime, active St. Edmund parishioner, Robinet was often seen walking hand-in-hand to Mass with her husband. On Saturday, June 8 at 11 a.m., a memorial Mass will be celebrated at St. Edmund, 188 S. Oak Park Ave., Oak Park, preceded by visitation at 10 a.m.

Harriette Robinet is survived by Mac, her husband of 64 years, and her children, Stephen, Philip, Rita, Jonathan and Linda. She was preceded in death by her daughter, Marsha.

Her body was donated to medical science through the Anatomical Gift Association of Illinois.

In lieu of flowers, donations to her favorite organizations: Community of Congregations, Oak Park River Forest Museum, PING! (Provide Musical Instruments for the Next Generation), and Housing Forward.

 

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