Twenty years after Martin Luther King`s open housing marches, urbanologists say Chicago remains one of the most segregated cities in the country.
But fair housing advocates, building on King`s accomplishments at a summit meeting in the summer of 1966, are planning new strategies in the effort to integrate the city`s neighborhoods and the surrounding suburbs.
”We cannot afford to add one more neighborhood, in the city or the suburbs, to the long list of neighborhoods to which black families moved in search of a better life only to find that hope denied them in the aftermath of a resegregated community,” said Kale Williams, executive director of the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities.
The Leadership Council, a Chicago-based fair housing and civil rights activist group, was one of the outgrowths of King`s summit with city political, religious and community leaders. The council recently convened a second summit of those leaders to reassess the progress made in opening Chicago area communities to minorities.
”Martin`s legacy is the Leadership Council, but the legacy is more than that, too,” said Edwin Berry, a founding director of the council that participated in both summits. ”His dream–and our assignment–is to make it a reality for all Americans to be able to live in dignity under full democracy and with human decency.”
To achieve its fair housing goals, the Leadership Council and its allies will have to overcome strong emotional obstacles in an area where whites and blacks have seen racial change march block by block through many neighborhoods and several suburbs.
But the council is seeing signs of progress. Two recent developments in the southwest suburbs are being pointed to as examples.
Williams said the Leadership Council has reached a ”landmark” agreement with the Southwest Suburban Board of Realtors to conduct a joint equal opportunity program. The council and board will create an oversight committee to train its members in fair housing practices, to monitor compliance with fair housing laws and to review claims of violations of those laws.
The agreement is the first between the Leadership Council and a regional real estate board in the Chicago area, according to the council`s John Lukehart, who is in charge of a regional housing center that recently opened in southwest suburban Oak Lawn.
”The combination of this agreement with our new Oak Lawn housing center makes for an unprecedented opportunity to achieve peaceful integration in a critical part of the metropolitan area,” Williams said.
Located at 4700 W. 95th St. in Oak Lawn, the Southwest Suburban Housing Center opened in April to serve 14 southwest suburbs and Southwest Side city neighborhoods. The center, operated by the Leadership Council, will provide home-seeker and renter referrals as well as information about schools, transportation and community services in the area.
The southwest suburbs, most of which have few minorities, are considered important by fair housing advocates because many of the residents are whites who fled earlier racial turnover on the city`s South Side. And many neighboring south suburbs fear they will be unable to maintain stable integrated communities if forced to meet a disproportionate share of minority housing demand.
”We want to get away from the old destructive model of blockbusting where the people feared (racial change) and the Realtors took advantage of it. It was devastating for the city,” said Jack Cory, an Oak Lawn resident who heads a citizens` advisory committee to the housing center.
”Some residents of the area are concerned that what happened to them before not happen again–that they sold their homes in a panic and lost money or stayed and were eventually forced to move,” Cory said. ”Some residents of the southwest suburbs have experienced that kind of blockbusting more than once.”
”We`re hopefully saying this housing center is a creative way to halt that, not zeroing in on any one village but providing a variety of choices for people. It will still be a slow process, but it`s an attempt to deal with it as creatively as Beverly or Oak Park and yet not upset the stability of any one community.”
The opening of the southwest suburban center follows the creation by the Leadership Council of a similar fair housing center two years ago to serve the western suburbs. Based in Westchester, that center has helped 120 families find housing in the western suburbs, Williams said.
Those centers join other not-for-profit centers at work for a dozen years or more in the southern suburbs, on the North Shore and in Du Page County. Part of a $200,000 federal grant awarded Evanston and Park Forest last year is being used to study the feasability of uniting all local fair housing efforts into one super-regional housing center.
”Integrated housing has been overrated as a problem and underestimated for the good it can do. We have spent too much time coping with our fears instead of realizing the glory in each other,” said Rabbi Robert Marx, a participant in both summits. ”It would be better if we didn`t have the fears of Cicero within us, if fair housing centers were not just in five or six centers but all over the community.”
Cicero, a nearly all-white western suburb where minorities have been greeted with much-publicized violence, recently agreed to a federal court consent decree ending several practices that civil rights activists called discriminatory. The Leadership Council was a party to the lawsuit settled by the consent decree.
”Within five years, particularly with the impetus of the Cicero settlement, there should be no exclusively white community anyplace in our metropolitan area,” said Williams.
Calling the real estate industry ”the most segregated of all businesses,” Williams also suggested that within five years all real estate sales and rental offices in the Chicago area be integrated and ”ensure integrated assignments and equal service in every office.”
”We have also agreed on the goal of ensuring that real estate advertising is not racially targeted and that housing available on the multiple listing services is available throughout the market area,” he said. In that vein, the Chicago Board of Realtors has appointed 16 members to a committee to oversee equal opportunity in housing and to work with government agencies and ”others concerned with fair housing laws to insure equal opportunity to all people,” said board president Gerald Purlow.
”Chicago has a long way to go,” Mayor Harold Washington told summit participants. ”I`m satisfied we can do it. But we cannot kid ourselves. We must be blunt about where we are going.”
Washington said he is seeking a $200,000 federal grant to bolster fair housing litigation. He said the money would be used to represent minorities who feel they have been discriminated against in the housing market.
”There is indeed strong evidence that racial discrimination in housing is alive and well in Chicago at this time,” said James Compton, president of the Chicago Urban League. ”On too many occasions, blacks continue to be met with violent acts of hatred when they do venture into new areas of the city and suburbs.”
Compton said of the 77 communities in Chicago, about a third have a black population of less than 1 percent. Half of Chicago`s neighborhoods are less than 10 percent black, and there are only seven racially mixed areas, he said. In the suburbs, according to 1980 census data, 231 of 258 communities have a black population of 10 percent or less. The total black population in the metropolitan area in 1980 was 20 percent.
