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  Praise for Redlined

  “ In this compelling journey into the depths of racism, Linda Gartz peels back the onion of America’s original sin to a new level in a captivating personal story told through the lives of her Chicago family. Gartz probes the invisible web of oppression that affected both whites and blacks. Redlining destroyed the American dream without its victims even knowing it.”

  —BILL KURTIS, author, Peabody and Emmy Award-winner, news anchor for CBS Television network, and TV host for A&E

  “ Many watched from afar as Chicago and other major cities underwent rapid racial change in mid-twentieth century America. Linda Gartz lived it … with her sharp eye, excellent writing, and unique perspective, she brings this critical and turbulent period to life.”

  —STEVE FIFFER, coauthor of Jimmie Lee & James: Two Lives, Two Deaths, and the Movement that Changed America

  “ Moving and empathetic, Linda Gartz’s memoir illuminates the inner worlds of two generations of white working-class Chicagoans … who remained in a struggling black community long after their white neighbors had fled—a deeply humane perspective on [how] economic need, racism, and ideals of duty shaped the lives of urban white Americans in the twentieth century.”

  —BERYL SATTER, Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University, and author of Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America

  “ Gartz’s unflinching family memoir offers both intimacy and insight into personal and historical injustices. She traces her parents’ marriage … as they confronted rapid racial change in 1960s Chicago. She deftly interweaves a story of family striving, domestic resentments, and individual decency with the seismic cultural shifts of America’s social and sexual revolutions.”

  —AMANDA I. SELIGMAN, Chair, Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and author of Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago’s West Side

  “ Fearless and precise in her rendering of the intimate truths of her family, rigorous in her analysis of the banking and housing industries, Gartz has written a book that is impossible to put down… . An extraordinary achievement.”

  —SHARON SOLWITZ, author of Once, in Lourdes

  “ In this remarkable memoir, Linda Gartz [takes] her readers on a journey that is neither sentimental nor nostalgic. Committed to finding the truth at every turn, she tracks not only her own experiences but also the social and cultural changes that reshaped twentieth-century America.”

  —FRED SHAFER, School of Professional Studies, Northwestern University

  “ In Redlined, Linda Gartz explores … family, self-sacrifice, and opportunity, but also inequality, racism, and revolution. Deftly weaving together a treasure trove of detailed firsthand accounts, she provides an absorbing view into the life of a family unwittingly caught up in both its own domestic struggles and the turbulent social reckonings of the 1960s.”

  —ANJALI SACHDEVA, author of All the Names They Used for God

  “ Linda Gartz mines a wealth of family letters, diaries, memories, and history to tell a vital American story of immigrant dreams … self-reliance, and heartache—ultimately intersecting with what has become the essential national topic, the racism that weaves itself through all our personal and shared histories. Beautifully told and a compelling read.”

  —JIM GRIMSLEY, author of How I Shed My Skin

  “ With tender and open-eyed concern, Linda Gartz adeptly explores how the human need for recognition and equality is waylaid both by doors slammed against legal access and connection and by the tyrannies of power wielded behind closed doors.”

  —ANNE CALCAGNO, Professor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and author of Love Like a Dog

  “ Deeply personal yet wide in scope, Gartz’s writing seamlessly blends her parents’ struggles as landlords on Chicago’s West Side with the injustices imposed on African Americans by racist housing policies. Redlined is a vivid and historic account of rapid racial change in the community Gartz and I have both called home.”

  —MARY NELSON, founding president of Bethel New Life and faculty at Asset Based Community Development Institute at DePaul University (Chicago)

  “ Intimate and honest, Gartz’s memoir exposes the complex motivations that intertwine the lives of a white couple with their black tenants and renders one of the twentieth century’s most troubled eras through the lives of those who lived it.”

  —SHARON DEBARTOLO CARMACK, MFA, CG, author of You Can Write Your Family History and Tell it Short: A Guide to Writing Your Family History in Brief

  Copyright © 2018 by Linda Gartz

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

  Published April 3, 2018

  Printed in the United States of America

  Print ISBN: 978-1-63152-320-5

  E-ISBN: 978-1-63152-321-2

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017959873

  Interior design by Tabitha Lahr

  For information, address:

  She Writes Press

  1563 Solano Ave #546

  Berkeley, CA 94707

  She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

  This book is dedicated to my parents, Lillian and Fred, without whose commitment to detail and writing, my book wouldn’t exist. Their good hearts and striving, optimistic natures kept them going despite life’s hard blows. They were an inspiration to their children.

  I also dedicate this book to my husband, Bill, the love of my life for more than five decades. Without his constant devotion and support, this book couldn’t possibly have been realized. I love you with all my heart.

  And to my sons, Evan and Sam—you have filled my life with love and pride.

  Foreword

  This is a work of nonfiction. Everything in this book is true to the best of my memory or based on diaries, letters, documents, and photos from my family archives. If I write about the inner thoughts of a person, it is because those thoughts are recorded in a diary or a letter. I create scenes based on what I’ve read and my intimate knowledge of my family members’ or friends’ traits and gestures. I have researched any historical events that I cite. Some names have been changed to protect peoples’ privacy.

  Figure 1: Chicago Community areas

  Produced by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Cartography & GIS Center.

  Figure 2: West Side community areas

  Produced by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Cartography & GIS Center.

  Figure 3: West Side Schools

  Produced by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Cartography & GIS Center.

  Figure 4a: Racial composition of the West Side, 1940

  Produced by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Cartography & GIS Center.

  Figure 4b: Racial composition of the West Side, 1950

  Produced by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Cartography & GIS Center.

  Figure 4c: Racial composition of the West Side, 1960

  Produced by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Cartography & GIS Center.

  Figure 4d: Racial composition of the West Side, 1970

  Produced by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Cartography & GIS Center.

  Contents

  FOREWORD

  PROLOGUE: The Attic

  CHAPTER 1: On the Street Where We Live

  CHAPTER 2: Nothing from Nothing Is Nothing

  CHAP
TER 3: If We Won’t Be Happy, Who Will?

  CHAPTER 4: Madness and Marriage

  CHAPTER 5: Resistance and Devotion

  CHAPTER 6: Death

  CHAPTER 7: Shock

  CHAPTER 8: The Best-Laid Plans

  CHAPTER 9: Redlined

  CHAPTER 10: Civil Rights

  CHAPTER 11: Flipped

  CHAPTER 12: Blockbusters

  CHAPTER 13: A New Start

  CHAPTER 14: The Long Goodbyes

  CHAPTER 15: Travelin’ Man

  CHAPTER 16: Wanna Trade Places?

  CHAPTER 17: Tenth Anniversary

  CHAPTER 18: A Vision of Decline

  CHAPTER 19: Barbara

  CHAPTER 20: Thief, Robber, Crook

  CHAPTER 21: Travels with Dad

  CHAPTER 22: The Asylum

  CHAPTER 23: Black and White

  CHAPTER 24: Brothers and Sisters

  CHAPTER 25: Not Unhappy

  CHAPTER 26: Saturday Night Burger

  CHAPTER 27: The Tether and the Dream

  CHAPTER 28: Up in Flames

  CHAPTER 29: An Island in a Sea of Destruction

  CHAPTER 30: Be Still, I Am Thy God

  CHAPTER 31: A New Life

  CHAPTER 32: Unraveling

  CHAPTER 33: Riots Redux

  CHAPTER 34: Convulsions

  CHAPTER 35: News from the Front

  CHAPTER 36: Sexual Politics

  CHAPTER 37: Moving On

  CHAPTER 38: Disgraced

  CHAPTER 39: A New Roommate

  CHAPTER 40: No End in Sight

  CHAPTER 41: Home Alone

  CHAPTER 42: Mom’s World

  CHAPTER 43: End of an Era

  CHAPTER 44: Dad’s World

  CHAPTER 45: A Convergence of Change

  CHAPTER 46: Not of Our Choosing

  CHAPTER 47: Reconciliation

  NOTES

  PHOTO CREDITS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE: The Attic

  Kaiser Wilhelm II, the ship that brought Lisi Ebner, Dad’s mother, to America, September 26, 1911.

  On the night of August 14, 1965, my nineteen-year-old brother, Paul, walked toward flames on Chicago’s deserted Madison Street. He couldn’t reconcile the West Side he’d known since birth with the mayhem unfolding just ahead, where crashing glass and the sucking whoosh of Molotov cocktails played against a smoky red sky. As Paul headed east toward Pulaski Road, a scrum of black men turned a corner and came into view. In moments, they surrounded Paul. One said to him, “What you doin’ here, white boy? Don’t you know they killin’ your kind?”

  Nearly thirty years after race riots had wracked our lifelong West Garfield Park neighborhood, Mom had died in 1994, just five years after Dad had passed away. Readying our former home for sale, my two brothers and I scoured the house, separating trash from treasure. In the attic, we found our gold.

  Standing under naked beams in the dim light, we discovered a large box labeled in my mother’s neat printing: “Lil and Fred’s Letters and Diaries.” I ripped off the packing tape and folded back four cardboard flaps. A misty spray of dust and the odor of old paper wafted up. Peering in, I dug out several small books, the oldest dating to 1927—a diary Mom had started at age ten. Flipping through the pages, I recognized in her youthful handwriting the fledgling swoops and curves of the adult script I knew so well.

  Intermixed with Mom’s diaries were ten years’ worth of Dad’s journals. We pulled out bundles of letters, neatly secured with string, each with a label: “Fred’s and Lil’s Letters, 1949,” then “Fred’s and Lil’s Letters, 1950,” and so on throughout Dad’s thirteen years of travel. Digging deeper, we found a parchment-wrapped package, bound with pink ribbon tied into a bow, like a present across the decades. On the wrapping, Mom had written: “Greeting Cards Between Fred and Lil, 1942–1949,” then another, “1950–1953,” and several more multiyear packets. Farther down were Dad’s annotated daily calendars from the sixties through the eighties, and Mom’s seventeen spiral notebooks, with detailed entries of increasing chaos on the West Side and her rising fury at my father.

  We moved on to Grandma Gartz’s cedar chest, which had come to be stored in our attic after she and Grandpa had died. It was filled with letters, diaries, documents, and photos spanning the twentieth century. “Listen to this,” one of us would call out in astonishment. Then all paused as a line from a letter or journal entry was read. Our ancestors’ pack-rat traits, once an object of our head-shaking bemusement, infused our attic labors with amazement and joy. For a solid week we tossed, culled, and pondered what to keep. After filling a Dumpster with the useless and unsentimental, we stored twenty-five bankers’ boxes of our treasures in my garage, where their secrets lay silent, like the contents of an ancient, unopened tomb, as I got on with the business of life and family.

  For decades, I had puzzled over what had caused the demise of my parents’ marriage—Mom’s hurtful recriminations against Dad, followed by his wounded retreat, their rift reducing me to tears. And what of the downfall of our community, where Dad’s parents had lived for half a century, raised three sons, and bought property, the apogee of the American dream?

  At the time of increasing turmoil between my parents, coinciding with the racial upheavals on Chicago’s West Side, I had been a teen and a young adult, with no context for the strife in my home or on the streets. But now, a nagging inner voice echoed in my head, luring me like a siren song: the archives might hold clues, answers.

  I finally gave in, hauled out one box after another, and began reading: my grandfather’s 1910 journal of his daring journey from Transylvania to America; diaries from Dad’s and Mom’s youth, revealing their inner thoughts and passionate courtship; court records and diary entries of my maternal grandmother’s psychosis; letters between Dad and Mom during his thirteen years of grueling travel; Mom’s diaries of their twenty-year-long effort to maintain quality buildings in a riot-riven landscape and her downward spiral into bitter rage; her vicious attacks on Dad, his parents, and me, a participant in the 1960s sexual revolution.

  The archives blazed light onto long-hidden family secrets, but to understand what had happened to our community, I needed more, so I devoured everything I could find about racial change in American cities. I learned that our family’s fate on Chicago’s West Side was entangled with racist mortgage policies and predatory real-estate agents, which together undermined the housing dreams of both blacks and whites.

  Within the story of our family’s presence on Chicago’s West Side throughout most of the twentieth century lies a larger truth that is still playing out today in the segregation that costs Chicagoans billions of dollars each year and grows the homicide rate.1

  This is also my story—of growing up in a sprawling West Side rooming house filled with wacky tenants and my live-in delusional grandmother; of seeing Mom manage alone while Dad traveled for weeks at a time; of my quest for independence just as America exploded in the social revolutions and racial upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. But it was my dismay at the unraveling of my parents’ marriage that prompted my search for answers in the family archives. These treasures, which had lain in the dark for decades, now illuminated the path that led to domestic collapse, from the ravages that mental illness wreaks upon families to the insidious role parents can play in undermining the marriages of their children.

  With the civil rights movement as backdrop and a crumbling marriage in the foreground, this story tries to make sense of the racial transformation of our Chicago West Side community and its impact on our family dynamic, also formed by love, loss, madness, race, rage, and, ultimately, forgiveness.

  CHAPTER 1: On the Street Where We Live

  Our street: the 4200 block of Washington Boulevard.

  Saturday, June 22, 1963

  Well, the mystery of who bought the Young-Parker house has been solved. As more or less expected, the colored moved in today. It somehow gives me a squeamish feeling to
be confronted with the actual fact of having them on our block. The question is, what course to follow? How long before no whites will be renting here anymore?

  —from the diary of Lillian Gartz

  For years, the prospect of blacks moving into our West Side Chicago community terrified my parents and our neighbors. They talked about it in the alley, on the sidewalk, after church (in hushed tones), or while stopping for a chat when Mom and I shopped on Madison Street, the West Side’s bustling commercial area. I overheard comments like “If the colored come here, the neighborhood will be destroyed” and “Everything we worked for is tied up in our house. If the colored move in, we could lose it all.” The adults’ conversations made it sound as if they thought an invading force were at the city gates.

  We kids picked up on the frightening future should the “colored” come to our area. Each comment we overheard added another boulder to a growing wall of resistance against unknown people. But now that a black family lived just two doors away, the wall had been breached. “What’s going to happen?” I asked Dad, who was seated at a card table strewn with notes, writing up reports for his job.

  Dad looked up. As usual, he was calm, but his signature smile was absent, his eyes serious. “We can’t know yet. Let’s just sit tight until we see how they act.”

  Mom was indecisive, too. She had written further in her diary:

  We have hopes of getting $25,000 if we sell. We should, but will we? The question is, what course to follow? Contemplating renting it out—but what a headache! How long will it be before no whites are renting here anymore?