Redlined Page 5

  Of course, he and Mom would have discussed the pros and cons of working for the NBFU, but really, they had no choice. He needed a job—pronto. Surely their great love, optimism, and steady confidence in the future could weather anything.

  Dad didn’t know it, but Mom had formed an opinion about such a job eight years prior, when she dated a peripatetic salesman. She made what looms to me as an ironic and prescient entry into her diary. “I have always vowed never to wed a traveling man,” she had written. “Life would be just too lonesome.” Now she found herself facing just what she had dreaded.

  Mom wrote Dad a letter dated October 5, 1949, when he was on an early NBFU trip to Ashtabula, Ohio. She reminded him of their dire finances: they were down to their last dollar, $159 in debt to his parents as well as to their children’s accounts, and had to meet monthly mortgage payments. She went on:

  I do hope you are taking advantage of your spare time and studying all you can about your job because this is such a wonderful opportunity. Please do all you can to excel at this job. Don’t take it for granted.

  My parents were on the cusp of a new life. The excitement of owning their first home, a bulwark against financial insecurity, was now offset by anxiety of the unknown: their impending long separations.

  But at the same time, another momentous and historic event was occurring on a national scale, one that wasn’t even a flicker in their imaginations. As Dad began his travels in 1949, a mass migration of African Americans, escaping from the oppression and systematic cruelties of the Jim Crow South, was well underway to northern cities.

  CHAPTER 9: Redlined

  The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot by The Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Photo-about 1919.

  1950s

  Like most major cities in twentieth-century America, Chicago was rigidly segregated. African Americans were clustered primarily in Chicago’s Near West Side and in the South Side’s Black Belt, a strip of land that stretched from about Twenty-Eighth to Seventieth Street in 1940 and inexorably expanded as blacks flocked to the city.

  Chicago’s black population had been burgeoning in these two neighborhoods ever since the beginning of the Great Migration, when vast numbers of southern blacks moved to northern states and California, starting near the end of World War I and gaining steam in a second wave after World War II. In the 1940s and ’50s, three million blacks fled north7 from the daily degradations and abuses of the Jim Crow South. Hundreds of thousands headed to Chicago, where the black population nearly tripled from almost 278,000 in 1940 to more than 812,600 in 1960.8

  Like my parents, many whites remained unaware that this massive population shift was underway—or the reasons behind it. They just knew they didn’t want African Americans moving into their white neighborhoods.

  Most whites were certain that blacks brought decay and dilapidation into every community they entered. When I was young, we sometimes drove through African American neighborhoods, on our way elsewhere, and witnessed blight firsthand: sagging porches and dirty windows; no grass, only twisting weeds in dusty front yards; ill-clad little children playing in the street with no evidence of nearby adults.

  A ferocious white backlash erupted when blacks moved into an all-white area.

  In July of 1953, a black couple purchased a home in all-white South Deering, on Chicago’s South Side. For months, white crowds protested and rioted, hurling bricks, shooting off pistols, and attacking and injuring black passers-by. One of the picketers proclaimed to a CBS reporter that she didn’t want blacks in her community because “every place they’ve taken over, they’ve turned into a slum.”9

  Whites were certain blacks would devastate their communities—and alongside that, would destroy whites’ greatest investment: the value of their homes. In her epic book about the Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson writes:

  It was an article of faith among many people in Chicago and other big cities that the arrival of colored people in an all-white neighborhood automatically lowered property values. That economic fear was helping propel the violent defense of white neighborhoods.

  The fears were not unfounded, but often not for the reasons white residents were led to believe.10

  Years later, I learned that the real culprits behind the decrepitude and the lowering value of white homes were the policies of the federal government, in alliance with the real-estate and mortgage sectors. In the 1930s, the newly created Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), along with the Federal Housing Administration and other government agencies, began ranking communities to assess their creditworthiness, from A (green), the highest, through D (red), the lowest.11

  “If a neighborhood had black residents, it was marked as D, or red, no matter what their social class or how small a percentage of the population they made up. These neighborhoods’ properties were appraised as worthless or likely to decline in value. In short, D areas were ‘redlined’ or marked as locations in which no loans should be made for either purchasing or upgrading properties.”12

  The FHA supported these biases. It relied on color-coded maps to determine “the present and likely future location of African Americans and used them to determine which neighborhoods would be denied mortgage insurance.”13 FHA insurance was typically denied to buildings in these redlined areas. Without mortgage availability, whites couldn’t sell their homes, except to blockbusters, unscrupulous real-estate agents who used race-baiting to scare whites into selling fast and cheap for cash. The blockbusters then sold the property to African Americans at sometimes two to three times the value of the building. Homes to blacks in the redlined areas were usually sold “on contract,” meaning the deed to the property remained with the seller, who could repossess the home after even one missed payment.

  White families like ours didn’t consider the rampant employment discrimination that reduced blacks’ incomes, meaning most could afford only older properties, already in disrepair when purchased. Little money remained for upkeep.14 With the husband and wife often both working to pay off their contract, and no loans available, neither the time nor the money existed for repairs.

  Then there was the insidious role segregation itself played in the decay whites observed. The thirty thousand African Americans arriving in Chicago each year during the 1950s15 were forced into the limited housing stock of strictly delineated black neighborhoods in the Black Belt and Near West Side. Toilets broke. Closets were turned into makeshift kitchens. With so many people crammed into inadequate housing, buildings and community infrastructure crumbled under the strain.

  But most whites never made the connection. White homeowners judged what they observed, placing blame for rundown homes and lowered property values in racially changed neighborhoods squarely on the new residents. Consequently, white homeowners believed they had a strong economic incentive to keep blacks out.

  CHAPTER 10: Civil Rights

  1963

  Before the first black family moved onto our block in June of 1963, the civil rights movement had dominated the news for several years. Just as I was entering my teens, I saw the effects of the racist Jim Crow laws that denied blacks the freedom promised to them a century earlier.

  On TV, I watched black teens, along with some white sympathizers, staging sit-ins at whites-only lunch counters. White boys with ducktail haircuts taunted them. In my neighborhood, boys who swore and smoked and rolled cigarette packs in their short sleeves sported those cuts. They were guys who acted tough and postured, ready for a fight. They were boys I avoided. I saw this same kind of teen on my television, spattering the black kids sitting at the counter with eggs, or grinning while they poured a drink over their heads. My stomach roiled at their cruelty. I’d witnessed local mean kids dumping water on a mentally challenged boy, and I had screamed, “Leave him alone!” They only laughed and told me to mind my own business. I hated them.

  I heard the name Martin Luther King over and over. As a Lutheran, I knew Martin Luther as the man who had confronted the
Catholic Church over its unjust practices back in the 1500s. I was confused when I first heard the name. Martin Luther was a sixteenth-century German monk. Why did a black man have that name?

  At my all-white Lutheran high school, some teachers talked about King in a way that helped me overcome my confusion. Luther had challenged the Catholic Church’s misuse of power in the sixteenth century. One said that today’s Martin Luther challenged whites’ misuse of power over African Americans in segregated southern states. Blacks were forced to acquiesce to whites in every aspect of life. Jim Crow laws denied them entry into swimming pools, amusement parks, and taxpayer-funded public universities. In many southern cities, blacks weren’t even allowed to use the public library. I gained some understanding, but I don’t recall much class time spent talking about the civil rights movement—and it all seemed so far away.

  I was nearing the end of my freshman year of high school on May 2, 1963, when more than one thousand African American students marched into downtown Birmingham, Alabama. I couldn’t reconcile the images of these protesting teens with the fear my family and our neighbors had felt toward blacks. The black kids in Birmingham were about my age; they looked and dressed a lot like me. The girls mostly wore dresses, and their hair was carefully coiffed. The boys sported slacks and button shirts. The teens sang and chanted, “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” Even after being arrested, they kept singing through the bars of the paddy wagon—and from their jail cells, where they were stuffed like upright sardines.

  Watching TV with my parents, I was flummoxed by competing feelings. On the one hand, I’d never seen protests before, people defying the police. Was that even okay? On the other, I was gripped with horror by the way these well-dressed, singing kids were mistreated. “Why are those kids being arrested?” I asked my parents. “They didn’t do anything bad.”

  My conservative dad said, “When the police say to disperse, they’re supposed to disperse. These protests are illegal.” He was against anyone disobeying the police.

  Mom agreed. “We’ll have total anarchy if laws aren’t obeyed.”

  Mom and Dad were wedded to the status quo. Their immigrant parents had raised them—and they in turn had raised their children—to respect authority. But what about those kids who just wanted to sit at a lunch counter? The black people who were made to move to the back of the bus? I imagined myself in their place—the burn of injustice consuming me. But my parents’ reverence for law and order made sense to teenaged me, too. How could we have a society that didn’t obey the police? I didn’t understand what was at stake.

  The next day, I watched a news report showing hundreds of black youths gathered in downtown Birmingham. What happened next made me dizzy: Birmingham firemen turned their fire hoses full force on the young demonstrators! The blast of water drove scores of blacks against fences and rolled them along the ground. I thought of firemen as protectors, but in Birmingham, they were on the attack!

  Snarling German shepherds surrounded the protestors. I threw my hands over my eyes when the dogs lunged. Teens were dragged away, their shredded pants exposing lacerated and bloodied flesh. Demonstrators lay helpless and injured on the ground, but the police still beat them with batons. I imagined the searing pain of those sticks cracking my bones, my skull.

  “Dad, they’re sending dogs after them!” I cried out. “Remember how you told me the Indians were mistreated by the white man? The Trail of Tears? These police are so … so mean!”

  “The colored are expecting too much, too fast. You can’t just change society in such a short time.”

  That opinion was common among whites we knew. Years later, I read King’s response to the familiar refrain of “Wait.”

  For years now, I have heard the word “Wait!” This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” It is easy for those who have never felt the stinging facts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim … there comes a time when your cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice… .16

  By the age of fourteen, I’d heard Dad talk about lynching as our family sat tightly packed at the kitchen table, the steam from our chicken and vegetable soup clouding the air. “In the South,” Dad said, “if a colored man looks wrong at a white woman, a white mob’ll just string him up. No trial. No questions. Just vigilantes doing what they want. They set the Negro on a horse, place a noose around his neck, throw the rope over a tree and tie it tight. Then they smack the horse on the rear. When the horse takes off, the man dangles from his neck till he’s dead. A mob’s a frightening thing.”

  The image terrified me, but I had no real knowledge of the torture, humiliation, and lack of basic freedom blacks had endured at the hands of white people. Except for the lynching explanation, I don’t recall my parents ever talking about the unfairness in the South. I had never even heard the term Jim Crow. To me, it seemed as if the civil rights movement had just exploded out of nowhere. It was happening in the South, where black kids couldn’t sit at a lunch counter or go to school with white kids. That doesn’t happen here, I thought. My understanding was that we didn’t want blacks in our neighborhood to protect our property. So when Dad said, “Wait,” it made sense to me. How could the status quo just change overnight?

  Were most whites as ignorant as our family was? Years later, I came to see how myopic “Wait!” was, as if blacks had been seeking freedom and equality for just a few months rather than the one hundred years since they were supposedly freed from the cutting chains of slavery. They were still bound, this time by Jim Crow manacles.

  But neighborhood whites like my parents weren’t thinking about equality for African Americans. They were focused on their own fear—that they would lose their greatest investment, the value of their homes.

  CHAPTER 11: Flipped

  Linda, 1962 Tilton graduate, with her 8th grade teacher, Miss Kelleher.

  1959–63

  On August 1, 1959, four years before the first black family moved onto our block, a house deeper into West Garfield Park than blacks had lived prior was sold to an African American family—on Jackson Boulevard, a couple blocks south and west of our home.17

  Before the black family moved in, a mob of more than one thousand outraged whites, some throwing stones and bricks, gathered outside the building. The Chicago Police Department dispatched hundreds of officers to the scene, arresting more than two dozen people. For several weeks, police kept a visible presence in the area, an unusually robust response to white intimidation of blacks integrating a Chicago neighborhood.

  I don’t recall any discussion about what would have been big news in our community, probably because we had been traveling on a five-week family car trip to the southern and western United States.

  One year later, the 1960 census showed that the percentage of African Americans in West Garfield Park had jumped from just about .25 percent in 1950 to 16 percent.18 In 1960, most blacks lived south of Madison Street, which evolved into a de facto Mason-Dixon line: blacks to the south, whites to the north.

  Children would breach the border.

  A crisis had been fomenting in black neighborhood schools. The burgeoning population trapped in Chicago’s black segregated neighborhoods had created dilapidated buildings, damaged community infrastructure, and strained local schools to the snapping point. In February of 1961, “Willing Willie,” the pseudonym of a columnist for the Garfieldian, our local West Side newspaper, visited an eighteen-unit apartment building just a few blocks south and east of us. “At the building, Willing Willie observed ‘an amazing number of children hopping around in the mud.’”19 Willing Willie estimated forty to fifty families were living there instead of the expected eighteen. The columnist probably used the technique of counting the multiple name tags on the mailboxes for each apartment, as was highlighted in another Garfieldian article.20

  The abundance of children in black
neighborhoods so jammed local schools that pupils often sat two to a desk, sharing the limited number of outdated textbooks; gymnasiums and closets were transformed into classrooms. Unable to accommodate hundreds of extra children, many black neighborhood schools started split-shifts; pupils went to school either morning or afternoon, leaving many unattended for hours while their parents worked.

  Just before I entered eighth grade at Tilton Elementary in 1961, CPS had built two new schools in our community to alleviate the pressure of an exploding student population in West Garfield Park. In the fall of 1961, I watched the two co-presidents of my eighth-grade class smiling broadly as each held up a shovelful of gray dirt. Cameras snapped, documenting the ground-breaking for Marconi School, six blocks northwest of us. Hefferan, two blocks south of Madison, opened in September of the same year, but by December of 1961, Hefferan already held double the students for which it had been built.21

  Other school boundary changes profoundly influenced my, and my classmates’, high-school choices. At one time, our home had been in Austin High School’s district. Austin, where my father had graduated, was about fourteen blocks west, located in its eponymous community. Two years prior to my graduation from Tilton, Austin was 99.84 percent white.22 Our home had been redistricted to high schools in East Garfield Park, where the population in 1960 was 60 percent black,23 and undoubtedly higher by 1962. My two choices were Lucy Flower, a girls’ vocational school, known to have tough female gangs, or Marshall, already overcrowded and also notorious for gangs. Dad slapped his left hand with his right for emphasis and shouted, “They expect us to send a young white girl into that dangerous, colored neighborhood? She could be raped!”