Rev. Henry Kristian (Kris) Frederick Ronnow, 87, a force for racial justice and diversity management efforts in Oak Park, died on Oct. 25, 2024 from complications of Parkinson’s disease. Born on July 4, 1937, in St. Paul, Minnesota, he dedicated his life to the fight for social and economic justice. As a community organizer on Chicago’s West Side in the 1960s, one of the architects of Oak Park’s blueprint for racial justice and diversity in the 1970s, and a leader in corporate reinvestment and philanthropic efforts in Chicago’s neighborhoods, he sought community-led solutions to complex problems.
He was “that rare combination of ordained clergy who lived his ministry within secular institutions,” his friend and colleague Rev. David Bebb Jones said, and he did so with a “prophetic sense of care and concern for all persons.”
He attended St. Paul public schools, graduating from Central High School in 1955. The first in his family to earn a college degree, he graduated from Macalester College in 1959 with a major in economics. That fall, he began graduate studies at both McCormick Theological Seminary and the University of Illinois Chicago.
Inspired by Saul Alinsky, his professor and friend, who penned Rules for Radicals, he did his graduate-level field work in some of Chicago’s most neglected West Side neighborhoods. In 1963, he completed his master’s degrees in divinity and social work.
He was a community organizer for the Church Federation of Greater Chicago (1963-1966) and executive director of the Interreligious Council of Urban Affairs (1966-1969), before joining the Presbyterian Church USA’s Board of National Missions in New York (1969-1972).
Upon returning to the Midwest, he became director of Oak Park’s then-new Community Relations Department during the village’s efforts to manage racial integration (1972-1977). He was vice president of public affairs at Harris Trust and Savings Bank of Chicago (1977-1988), and then circled back to McCormick Seminary as vice president for finance and operations (1988-1996). He retired in 1996.
At his high school reunion in 1965, the principal pulled him aside and told him the Chicago Police Department’s notorious Red Squad had contacted him. They were building a file. But Ronnow’s goal was only that all people be treated with dignity and given equal opportunity to thrive. Radical for the time? Perhaps, but nonviolent to the core.
Amid racial tension in Oak Park, he worked with grassroots groups to overturn racist, inequitable, and eventually illegal real estate, bank-lending and employment practices. Bigotry and prejudice periodically followed him home, prompting a need for police protection. Oak Park’s leaders had his back.
“Singularly important to the implementation of fair housing in Oak Park, and the creation of the largest volunteer legal aid organization in the United States, my association with Kris was far and away the most important factor in my entire legal career,” said attorney Bob Downs. “If the village of Oak Park, and associated religious and community organizations could propose a saint, it would be Kris Ronnow.”
Community Relations “acquired the reputation as one of the most capable and progressive departments in the country,” one local newspaper reported, and Oak Park remains a model for communities undergoing racial change. His work in Oak Park was, Jones said, “a most creative and long-lasting ministry.”
According to Dan Lauber, Oak Park senior planner, 1977-1979, “As director of the village’s Community Relations Department, he played a pivotal role in crafting and implementing Oak Park’s 1973 genuinely comprehensive and pioneering “Fourteen Points,” which formed the basis for the village’s efforts to prevent resegregation and achieve nascent integration. I doubt if Oak Park could have achieved all it has without Kris Ronnow’s leadership and innovations. Current village leadership would do well to heed his guidance.”
At Harris, he designed and managed the bank’s new foundation; counseled senior management on community engagement and reinvestment; and demonstrated the importance of engaging and rewarding employees, becoming a sort of corporate conscience at the bank. In the late 1980s, as battles to end apartheid in South Africa escalated, he walked into then-bank president Stanley Harris’ office and declared that the bank must stop buying and selling Krugerrand. Harris agreed.
Ronnow served on numerous nonprofit organization boards, including the National Conference for Community and Justice, the Center for Neighborhood Technology, and the Center for Ethics and Corporate Responsibility. He was a teaching elder in the Chicago Presbytery and helped small, struggling urban congregations rebuild. As an active Macalester alumni, he and his wife, Connie, endowed a scholarship program for first-generation college students from the Twin Cities.
A voracious reader and a lifelong learner, he and his wife traveled the world, seeking new perspectives and a deeper grasp of complex issues. After an eye-opening trip to the Middle East in the 1990s, they joined Chicago-area efforts to help Palestinians re-secure a piece of their homeland. They were “a unique couple, always on the cutting edge of issues,” Jones said.
In the 1970s, they bought a cabin in Green Lake, Wisconsin. An amateur sailor, he bought a boat and christened it “Attitude Adjustment.”
“Sailing gave me time to reflect, reject worn-out negative thoughts, recalibrate, reposition and be renewed,” he said. He also loved folk songs and hymns, organ music, brass bands and symphonies, and the sound of many diverse voices singing in unison — loudly.
Ronnow was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2007. Five years later, he and Connie moved to Westminster Place in Evanston, a Presbyterian Home with the continuum of care they knew they’d eventually need. Soon he was organizing there, too, advocating for residents seeking transparency from the administration as chairman of the Residents Council.