Barbara Baker was driving down a street near her Downers Grove home on a recent weekend with her husband, LaRusso, and suddenly a passerby caught sight of them.
“He gave us a dirty look,” she said. “He stopped dead in his tracks, with his mouth hanging open, and stared till he couldn’t see us anymore.”
This past summer, her husband went out to ride his bike. “People would kind of stop and look and make comments under their breath,” she said. “Like, `Who is he and what’s he doing here?’ and `I wish they would go away.’
“It doesn’t make me feel good at all,” she added. “But we don’t spend a lot of time around here, so it doesn’t happen as often as it could.”
The Bakers are African-American and they moved to Downers Grove in June of 1992. She is a senior programmer analyst for a downtown company, and her husband works for a financial exchange in the Loop.
They’re both 32 and grew up in Chicago. They bought a townhouse in the low $100,000s. She’s pregnant.
The Bakers aren’t leaving their home. In fact, they want to stay in the area and buy a bigger house in a few years because they like the school system and the strong housing values.
But their unpleasant experiences in Downers Grove-respectable, middle-class and almost lily-white, with a 1.7 percent black population-help explain why housing segregation is still so pervasive in the Chicago metropolitan area, and across America as well.
Thirty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. gave voice to a vision of blacks and whites in America hand in hand; 25 years ago, shortly after and partly impelled by his assassination, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
That action opened the possibility of significant changes in the extreme racial segregation that prevailed in most of the U.S. But though many African-Americans have experienced a broadening of opportunities and have increased their numbers in suburbia dramatically, segregation has decreased only slightly in the last quarter-century, especially in the North.
African-Americans, whether they are poor or prosperous, still face hostility when they move to mostly white areas. Sometimes the hostility involves illegal acts that can be prosecuted, but more often it is a matter of casual nastiness.
The Bakers’ real estate agent was helpful, and didn’t try to steer them to a predominantly black or integrated area, as happened in a recently settled Evanston case.
No one refused to sell to them or jacked up the price because of their race, so far as they know. No one burned a cross on the seller’s lawn, as happened this summer in Addison, or torched their house, as happened last year to a Jamaican family that moved to Berwyn.
But they were made to feel-even if only by a few jerks-unwelcome. And that can have a powerful deterrent effect.
“I don’t know what will happen when we want to have a bigger house and have a barbecue in the back yard with relatives,” said Baker.
Such anxiety helps explain why most African-Americans moving to the suburbs overwhelmingly choose communities that contain many other African-Americans.
Many, of course, simply move to where friends and family already have gone, a pattern that exists in all racialand ethnic groups.
And among some segments of the black community, the idea of building up and concentrating black political and economic power has become a more important goal than integration-though it’s hard to tell how much this actually affects individual decisions on where to live.
“Being politically correct has discouraged some of the fruitful things from the ’60s and ’70s,” said Aurie Pennick, president of Chicago’s Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities, one of the country’s leading fair-housing groups. “Even blacks have become politically correct about the matter of combating segregation.”
For some African-Americans, the concept of integration carries an offensive suggestion that blacks have to adapt to white ways, according to Philip Nyden, chairman of the sociology department at Loyola University, who has studied integrated or “diverse” communities in this area.
But for many blacks, “self-steering” to already majority-black communities is greatly reinforced by fear.
“There’s a perception by black families, because of the violence of the past,” said James Shannon, director of the Leadership Council’s Housing Center. “It’s a mind-set as to `where I can live.’ “
The housing center, which has branches in Westchester and Oak Lawn, is dedicated to opening opportunities for both blacks and whites to move to areas in which their populations are under-represented.
These efforts, broadly known as affirmative marketing, constitute one of two key strategies fair-housing groups use to create a colorblind housing market.
On the one hand, the group investigates and litigates complaints of fair-housing violations, which have been increasing in recent years. On the other hand, it promotes unrestricted housing choice by counseling buyers and educating real estate industry professionals.
The promotion of affirmative action in housing has attracted little attention compared with affirmative action in jobs or college admissions.
It actually has been government policy in a limited form since 1972, when the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development issued guidelines requiring developers of federally assisted or insured housing to promote balanced racial demand aggressively.
In 1975, HUD negotiated a Voluntary Affirmative Marketing Agreement (VAMA) with the National Association of Realtors, and a more comprehensive VAMA was renegotiated in 1992.
But HUD has been famously lax in promoting open-housing initiatives, and fair-housing specialists say the marketing agreements have been little regarded and largely ineffective, at least until recently.
Many white brokers feel they simply are responding to white preferences for an all-white community, and “see preserving homogeneity as an important part of their function and necessary to maintain ties to the neighborhood,” according to Daniel Lauber, a former president of the American Planning Association and. He also is an attorney specializing in fair housing.
But Fred Underwood, vice president for equal opportunity for the Realtor association, said the 1992 agreement stresses broker cooperation with local fair-housing groups, which heretofore have led affirmative marketing efforts.
For the Leadership Council and other fair-housing groups operating in most sections of the metropolitan area, affirmative marketing has proved to be an uphill struggle against entrenched housing patterns.
Only about one in five of the households that get counseling from the Leadership Council’s Housing Center end up moving to a “non-traditional” area. For blacks, that means an area that’s at least 90 percent white.
The overwhelming result of the various forces acting to preserve the status quo has been resegregation of areas of the city and suburbs that were white, went through a transition and then became largely black.
Those who know Chicago history are all too familiar with that pattern in the city. Perhaps less widely known is that the suburbs, to which African-Americans are moving in increasing numbers, are replicating the pattern.
Of the 331,972 African-Americans in Chicago’s suburbs, 68 percent live in Cook County and 42 percent live in just 14 suburbs.
A study of the 1990 Census by political scientist Gary Orfield showed that Cook County suburbs have a black-white segregation index of 88.9, just barely lower than the 90.6 index for Chicago, long the most segregated big city in the country. (An index of 100 means absolute segregation, where no blacks live on the same block as whites.)
Another index showed the typical African-American in the Cook County suburbs lives on a block that is 9.4 percent white, just a few percentage points more than the 5.5 percent index for Chicago.
Shannon points out that African-Americans are penetrating the racial barriers in the outer-ring suburbs, especially in Du Page and Northwest Cook Counties, in increasing numbers.
The progress, however, is snail-like. The black population of Du Page County almost doubled from 1980 to the 1990 figure of 15,119, but that still represented only 1.9 percent of the county’s total population, up from 1.1 percent in 1980.
If the African-American population of Du Page County increased each decade by the same 0.8 percent as it did from 1980 to 1990, it would be almost 240 years before Du Page had an African-American population of 19 percent. That’s the percentage of blacks living today in the six-county metropolitan area taken as a whole.
Incidents such as the Addison cross-burning, with its nightmarish reminder of the worst racist crimes of the past, make affirmative marketing that much harder, Shannon admits.
“There’s no doubt it does have a specific effect on some people,” he said. “There are probably some who would not get in the (desegregation) process because of this kind of situation.
“Before people came out with all kinds of sophisticated ways, violence was the way to keep (black) families from moving in, and we see every now and then people resort to the same old tactics.
Paradoxically, however, Shannon believes some good may come out of the Addison cross-burning precisely because it was so ugly and unambiguously racist.
“When we have a situation like this, we have an opportunity to educate a lot of people,” he said. “Village officials should get involved and make sure families looking to move to the town know that this is not the type of welcome wagon families usually get when they move to Addison. The leadership usually says, `We don’t have a problem.’ They can’t say that anymore.”
And he notes that many people, especially those who come to his offices for help in finding housing, aren’t going to be deterred. “African-Americans are always aware of this difference of treatment and continue to struggle to overcome. This is just another situation that we must overcome.”
Of course, some blacks don’t have problems and don’t foresee any in their housing choices. A 1993 survey by the Oak Park Regional Housing Center of more than 80 African-Americans who recently moved to western suburbs with less than 10 percent minority population showed only 13 percent felt they had been the target of some kind of discrimination.
Stephanie Gilio, an African-American married to an Italian-American who moved in September to Woodridge in Du Page County, said she has not been made to feel unwelcome.
“I’ve been driving my daughter to kindergarten the last few weeks,” she said. “People have not looked at us as strange. They’ve pretty much looked at us as normal.”
Gilio, a nurse whose husband, Jack, is a postal worker, was like many who move farther and farther away from the city. She was escaping social problems: The wrong kind of people, mostly black, were moving into her neighborhood in Broadview, she said.
“We decided it was time to move,” she said. “The schools are not that great, they’re turning quickly predominantly black. Not that that’s bad-I don’t know how to say it-but they weren’t the right type, middle-income and concerned about property and schools.”
Still, though she moved to Woodridge after carefully researching the community and the schools, she is still not quite satisfied.
“Now that I’m here, I’m finding that homeownership for blacks is almost nil,” she said. “Why can’t we find a place where integration is for everybody? It seems like it’s an issue only for my husband and me.”
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Next Sunday: Stable, racially integrated communities are rare in this country, and it takes a combination of propitious circumstances and committed residents to establish and preserve them.
