This is the third and final installment of our series leading up to May 6, the 40th anniversary of the Oak Park Board of Trustees passing a landmark Fair Housing Ordinance, beating federal legislation by several months. It is a story of political courage and doing the right thing in the face of vehement, even violent, opposition. We decided to retell the story because some have never heard it, some need to be reminded, and because it’s just too good a story not to tell.
On Aug. 2, 1963, Oak Park Village Manager Harris Stevens sent a memo to the newly established Community Relations Commission titled, “Subject: TENSION POINTS.”
“On July 30,” Stevens wrote, “Mrs. Davison received a call, ‘If niggers use your house, we’ll burn it down.'”
Such memos kept Stevens plenty busy for the next five years as Oak Park waded into the turbulent waters of open housing, the period that retired librarian and local historian Lee Brooke calls “our uncivil war.”
But you could also call it Oak Park’s finest hour-or more accurately, Oak Park’s finest decade.
Sounding the first note
In the early 1960s, civil rights was an even hotter topic in this country than Vietnam. And one of the main focuses of the Civil Rights Movement was open housing-otherwise known as “fair housing” or “equal housing.”
Opponents called it “forced housing.”
Before 1963, ecumenical groups like the National Conference of Christians and Jews, as well as social action committees from a number of Catholic and Protestant churches, worked on fair housing. Oddly enough, it took the Oak Park-River Forest Symphony to bring those groups together.
In February of 1963, longtime symphony conductor Milton Preves agreed to have African-American violinist Carol Anderson sit in on a rehearsal. That didn’t sit well with some, including principal cellist–and Symphony Association chair–Marie Dock Palmer, who was quoted in the press saying that the Oak Park Symphony just wasn’t ready for integration.
Longtime symphony supporter Don Rehkopf kept a diary during that period, and it contains a few pertinent references. On Feb. 10 he wrote, “Preves quitting?” On Feb. 11 he added, “Bravo for the ministers of Oak Park!” And for Feb. 17, the entry reads, “Concert was played, nobly integrated” (For more on this story, see Part I of the Oak Park integration story, The Symphony finds its place, LifeLines, April 16).
According to Brooke’s records, a letter to the editor appeared, presumably in the Chicago papers (it did not appear in the local press, nor was there any mention of the controversy) on Feb. 10, signed by 32 Oak Park residents, stating:
“The Oak Park-River Forest Symphony Orchestra is a community project which depends on community support. Reports that the Orchestra is engaged in the practice of racial discrimination are therefore a community concern. As Oak Park-River Forest residents who are members and friends of the Catholic Interracial Council, we wish to go on record in support of the action taken by Mr. Milton Preves in his refusal to practice racial discrimination in the selection of musicians for the Orchestra. We encourage other villagers to support this action.”
A public response
In the wake of the symphony incident, the Village of Oak Park established a Citizens Committee for Human Rights to address integration issues, something that a number of community activists had already been pushing for. In January of 1964, local residents attended a series of three public forums on race issues at First Congregational Church (now First United Church of Oak Park, 848 Lake St.).
At the end of the third session, recalls Al Belanger, people were asking, “What do we do now?” A core group met and decided to put an ad in the local press. June Heinrich was drafted to write the text, which appeared in the Oak Leaves and the Village Economist on April 16, 1964 under the heading, “The Right of All People to Live Where They Choose.”
The text read:
We, the undersigned residents of Oak Park and River Forest, believing in the essential oneness of humankind, and seeking to foster such unity in our communities, do hereby declare:
That we want residence in our Villages to be open to anyone interested in sharing our benefits and responsibilities, regardless of race, color, creed, or national origin;
That we believe in equal opportunity for all in the fields of education, business, and the professions, in harmony with constitutional guarantees of equal rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness;
That mutual understanding between people of diverse ethnic, racial and religious backgrounds can best be attained by an attitude of reciprocal good will and increased association;
That all citizens, in a spirit of justice, dignity and kindness, should give serious consideration to the challenge that now faces all Americans in the achievement of brotherhood under God.
The wording was penned by the late June Heinrich, and today it serves as the basis of the village’s longstanding “Diversity Statement” (see opposite page).
Such a statement might easily have been dismissed by that era’s more conservative mainstream except for one thing: The ad, which took up most of a two-page spread, was signed-and paid for-by more than 1,000 local residents.
The ad’s appearance was newsworthy enough to warrant an article in the following day’s edition of the Chicago Sun-Times.
All the signatures had been collected by volunteers-door to door and through the schools and churches. Each individual or couple who signed, paid a dollar to help fund the ad, which cost $620. They raised $629.
The late Doris Hoigard, a social worker, fair housing advocate and Heinrich’s sister, recollected in a 1996 video interview with Lee Brooke that those who signed thought about it good and hard and often had second thoughts. Some called back and asked to be removed from the list. But most were willing to take a stand.
The names were then used to form a membership list for the newly formed Citizens Committee for Human Rights. Hoigard said they deliberately chose “Human Rights” instead of “Civil Rights” in order to be as inclusive as possible and to avoid being so easily pigeon-holed by opponents.
The signatures on the ad included names like John Gibson, the late Joseph Woods (former Cook County sheriff and a Republican) and the late Dr. Gregory White (co-founder of La Leche League), none of whom would ever have been mistaken for liberals. The list also contained well-established names like Dwight Follett and respected clergy like Msgr. John D. Fitzgerald of Ascension Church and Rev. Oliver Powell of First Congregational Church.
Everyone knew what they were signing because the Oak Park Board of Realtors had been conducting a leafletting campaign in opposition to this burgeoning movement. The board also sponsored a competing ad in the same issue of the Village Economist which said, “Let the voice of the people decide the issue of forced housing by referendum.”
Unexpected allies
Coming out in favor of equal housing was not an easy stand to take 35 years ago. The opposition was intense and often ugly. Fortunately, fair housing proponents had two remarkable allies-Village Manager Harris Stevens and Police Chief Fremont Nester.
Fair housing activists set up an informal network, said Brooke, and informed one or both of these authorities whenever a black family was about to move into a neighborhood. Nester would post a squad car in front and in back of the house as a show of force. And wherever trouble was suspected, the two men, sometimes in conjunction with Msgr. Fitzgerald and other teams of volunteers, would visit the homes of upset neighbors and talk them down, even if it took-as it sometimes did-until 3 a.m.
Nester’s knowledge of the town, built over some four decades of service with the police force, proved invaluable. Brooke recalls a meeting during which Nester gave him the phone book and asked him to point to any name. The chief then proceeded to rattle off from memory everyone else who lived on that block along with what they did for a living.
Nester also provided police protection during the fair housing marches and the picketing of Realtors conducted in Oak Park during the next few years as the movement gained momentum in pursuit of its goal-passing a fair housing ordinance that would outlaw the “redlining” practices of banks and Realtors from that era that led to white flight and resegregation of the entire West Side of Chicago.
Brooke noted that Nester and Stevens didn’t lead the fight, “but we couldn’t have done it without them. We needed their moral persuasion and the physical power they represented-someone to say, ‘You can’t burn that house down.'” Other municipalities did not enjoy such cooperation from local authorities.
In the 1996 interview, Hoigard said Oak Park was successful because it started so early.
“We didn’t have a choice,” she recalled. “The line [of resegregation] was moving west.”
She described that era as “the most exciting time of my life. We were all raised in segregated communities. We were all afraid, afraid for our property values, etc. We didn’t know how to integrate, but we all came together and found a way to do it. I was born a social worker because I’ve always wanted to change the world. We didn’t change the world, but we changed our world and who we are. [Integration] was the important issue in this country,” she said, “and it still is. It hasn’t been resolved.”
But she was proud of her fellow Oak Parkers-all of them. “It wasn’t just the Citizens’ Committee on Human Rights. It was also the people who stayed even though they didn’t agree with us.”
Putting Oak Park to the test
As we all will agree, practically without exception, our village is a fine place in which to live. … However, we have recently encountered a serious problem which has split our village into two opposing camps-a fearful majority on one side, and a dedicated, organized, liberal minority on the other side. The people of Oak Park, whom you represent, have heard many predictions from this organized minority-none of which they can guarantee to the majority. Many of us are rightfully suspicious and fearful of these predictions. In fact, we have witnessed just the opposite-time after time-the ultimate fall of community after community.
George T. Phelan
Comments to the village board during an open forum on the proposed Fair Housing Ordinance, April 22, 1968
Not everyone who opposed open housing in Oak Park in the mid-to-late 1960s was a bigot. Many residents felt extremely ambivalent and caught in the middle. They urged caution, i.e., slowing down the process.
But a growing group of fair housing proponents felt that Oak Park’s only chance to avoid the fate that befell the entire West Side of Chicago-inexorable resegregation, block by block-was to accelerate the process of integration.
They decided to “test” the practices of local Realtors in order to document and expose injustices.
A white couple would enter a local real estate office under the pretense of buying a house in a certain section of Oak Park, and would receive the expected cooperation and information. Shortly after, a black couple would come in and invariably be told that, alas, nothing was available in that same area or price range.
In order to circumvent the Realtors’ reluctance to sell to black couples, white couples often acted as “fronts,” allowing blacks to purchase their home under someone else’s name.
When Harriette and McLouis Robinet tried to buy a home in Oak Park in 1965, they ran into typical stonewalling. They couldn’t even get into available houses to look at them. Local architect Bob Bell would attend open houses and actually drew the floor plans for the Robinets to pore over later.
“You wanted to be honest,” recalls Bell, “but this was a situation where you had to tell lies to help the Robinets, and it was worth it.”
When their efforts continued to be frustrated, Don and Joyce Beissenger took matters into their own hands, and bought the house on Elmwood Avenue that the Robinets still live in to this day. They did it without even telling them, Harriette recalled
That was the good news.
“The bad news is you have to move in tomorrow,” they were told.
“You had to move in mid-day, mid-week in order to reduce the possibility of violence,” Harriette said in a 1996 video interview, part of the Oak Park Public Library’s “Legends of Our Time” oral history project.
“Those were the rules.”
Police Chief Nester wasn’t happy about the suddenness of the move–the Robinets didn’t yet have insurance on the house, for instance–but he dutifully posted plainclothes officers on the block to head off any trouble.
Harriette Robinet, “a struggling writer” at the time, wrote an article detailing their move-in experiences for Redbook Magazine’s “young mothers” series, which appeared in the February 1968 issue, titled, “I’m a Mother–Not a Pioneer.” (For more on the Robinets’ story, see Part II of the Oak Park integration story, A 1960s ‘move-in’, LifeLines, April 23.)
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Many of the neighbors were supportive; a few definitely were not. And then there were the people in the middle, many of whom actually paid a visit “to find out what we were all about.” They wanted to know why the Robinets chose to live in a place where they weren’t wanted. But she welcomed them because her philosophy, and the philosophy of the Open Communities Movement to which the Robinets belonged, was: “We don’t want to win over them; we want to win them over.”
Two months after the article appeared, on April 4, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated (one month and two days before Oak Park passed its Fair Housing Ordinance), Harriette was distraught and looking for some way to respond. She went out on the porch and put up her American flag. When she looked outside a few hours later, every house on the block had its flag out as well. She knew then they were part of one community.
Marching toward fair housing
But it took three years to get there. The Robinets and plenty of other Oak Parkers-along with black families from Chicago who were recruited to move to the village-began a series of Saturday marches over a nine-month period in 1966, starting at Stevenson Park near Austin and heading west along Lake Street, their final destination being the Baird & Warner Real Estate office on Marion Street near North Boulevard.
Although the local press refused to publicize their efforts, the Chicago newspapers and TV stations gave the marches considerable coverage.
It took awhile, but village government followed their lead and by 1968 the momentum was building toward passage of a local Fair Housing Ordinance. The public hearings were tense and contentious. Virginia Cassin recalls that at the April 22, 1968 hearing at OPRF High School, one woman actually charged the stage where the village board was sitting and started choking Trustee Hazel Hanson.
At a five-hour public hearing, held in February of 1968 at the old Lowell School auditorium (now 100 Forest Place), no less than 73 people delivered five-minute statements-53 in favor of an open housing law and 20 against. McLouis Robinet said, “It is unreal to pretend that we as a village can survive unintegrated. We cannot afford to play a wait-and-see game with fair housing … Yesterday was already late.”
Despite the fears of some of the trustees, the village board passed the Fair Housing Ordinance at its May 6, 1968 board meeting.
Opponents tried to mount a referendum on the issue and when that failed, they threatened to get revenge in the following year’s village election. Cassin recalls that the campaign was clearly framed as a referendum on the 16-year-old Village Manager Association. But the VMA slate, led by President John Gearen, handily defeated a slate put up by local Realtors, proving that Oak Parkers were firmly committed to the course of integration.
Many Oak Parkers, black and white, stuck their necks out in the 1960s and ’70s to help make the village the oft-cited model of managed integration that it is today-far more than could be mentioned in this article. And there is much more to the story than we have hinted at here.
But a statement by Mac Robinet, 34 years after he took a risk and moved into Oak Park, may provide the best measure of Oak Park’s success.
“Growing up in Louisiana,” he said in his 1996 video interview, “I never had a sense of community. Oak Park is home for me. I feel a part of it. I have a real sense of what a community is like, and I’m grateful for that.”
n Those who want to hear more about the fair housing battle in Oak Park should consult the Oak Park Public Library’s “Legends of Our Time” project, a series of 23 oral history videocassettes that can be checked out. Several deal with the early days of integration.
Anthropologist Jay Ruby’s multimedia ethnographic study, “Oak Park Stories,” can also be found at the library-the Oak Park Regional Housing Center and Taylor Family Portrait in particular. Rick Kuner’s commentary about Ruby’s study can be found in today’s Viewpoints section.
And there is a wealth of information on the era to be found at the Historical Society of Oak Park-River Forest, located on the second floor of Pleasant Home (corners of Pleasant Street and Home Avenue). Contact Frank Lipo, executive director, at 848-6755. n
After every election, the Village of Oak Park Board of Trustees votes to re-affirm Oak Park’s commitment to diversity. The statement was revised some years back, incorporating language used in the famous 1964 newspaper ad titled, “The Right of All People to Live Where They Choose:”
The people of Oak Park choose this community, not just as a place to live, but as a way of life. Oak Park has committed itself to equality not only because it is legal, but because it is right; not only because equality is ethical, but because it is desirable for us and for our children.
Ours is a dynamic community that encourages the contributions of all citizens, regardless of race, gender, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, religion, economic status, political affiliation, or any other distinguishing characteristics that too often divide people in society.
Oak Park’s proud traditions of citizen involvement and accessible local government challenge us to show others how such a community can embrace change while still respecting and preserving the best of the past. Creating a mutually respectful, multi-cultural environment does not happen on its own; it must be intentional. Our goal is for people of widely differing backgrounds to do more than live next to one another.
Through interaction, we believe we can reconcile the apparent paradox of appreciating and even celebrating our differences while at the same time developing consensus on a shared vision for the future.
Oak Park recognizes that a free, open and inclusive community is achieved through full and broad participation of all its citizens. We believe the best decisions are made when everyone is represented in decision-making and power is shared collectively.
Oak Park is uniquely equipped to accomplish these objectives because we affirm all people as members of the human family. We reject the notion of race as a barrier dividing us, and we reject prejudicial behavior toward any group of people. We believe residency in this Village should be open to anyone interested in sharing our benefits and responsibilities.
To achieve our goals, the Village of Oak Park must continue to support the Board’s fair housing philosophy that has allowed us to live side-by-side and actively seek to foster unity in our community. We believe that mutual understanding among individuals of diverse backgrounds can best be attained with an attitude of reciprocal good will and increased association.
The Village of Oak Park commits itself to a future of ensuring equal access, full participation in the Village’s institutions and programs, and equality of opportunity in all Village operating policies. The success of this endeavor prepares us to live and work in the 21st century.
It is our intention that such principles will be a basis for policy and decision-making in Oak Park. The President and Board of Trustees of the Village of Oak Park reaffirm their dedication and commitment to these precepts.