This week we mourn the death of Kris Ronnow, who died at 87 after a long and well lived life. A minister, a community organizer, a social justice warrior, he was an essential player in Oak Park’s bold, creative, flawed efforts to create a racially integrated village back in the late 1960s and into the ’70s.
One prong of that effort was the decision by village government to create a community relations department with the charge of mediating tensions that were sadly inevitable on a block-by-block basis as the first Black families made their homes here. The department had wider missions of simply building a sense of community as a significant number of white people fled Oak Park out of fear and ignorance to be replaced by people of color and some lucky white progressives who bought lovely homes cheap.
His family recalls in his obituary that police provided them with security when tensions became overt and personal.
We recall this life because Mr. Ronnow deserves the recognition, but also to remind villagers multiple generations removed from the drama of how fragile and fearless Oak Park’s progressive roots were then. We are living our lives literally on the shoulders of great women and men, largely now dead or dying, who saw a possibility few could have imagined.