The idea of living with racial diversity has shimmered fuzzily in the American mind for many years, particularly since Martin Luther King Jr. articulated the vision of a truly multiracial society with his “I Have A Dream” speech at the 1963 civil rights march on Washington.
Diversity is hailed on brotherhood-type public murals and in political speeches, preached in churches and synagogues and even endorsed, if somewhat tepidly, in national polls.
The reality, of course, is very different. While nobody has made a precise count of the stable, racially diverse communities in this country, those who have studied the issue agree they are extremely rare.
The Chicago area, with only a handful of relatively stable, racially diverse communities, in fact has a reputation for being ahead of the rest of the U.S. on this score. Across the nation, the shimmer is barely a glimmer.
“This is not a society that gives support to diverse communities,” said Philip Nyden, chairman of the Loyola University Department of Sociology and Anthropology, who has been studying aspects of the diversity issue for several years.
“Often politicians and elected officials and policymakers might talk about the value of diversity, but when it comes down to progressively seeing that it happens, they get attacked from every direction,” he said.
In fact, the idea of people of different races actually living together in the same community is so politically touchy that often people disagree about the very terms used to describe it.
Twenty-five years ago, when Congress-stunned by the assassination of King and the succeeding inner-city riots-passed the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the word used to describe blacks and whites in the same neighborhood was “integration.”
For some, the word is still serviceable, but for others it is a red flag-not politically correct.
“The nature of the term integration is changing,” said Nyden. “It’s sort of less and less the word used. It was a matter of African-Americans going into white communities, adapting to their culture and norms, and wasn’t based on basic strengths of the African-American community.
“Now you have `diversity,’ ” he said. “Diversity is seen as more objective, not loaded yet with ideology and values.”
Whatever people call it, there isn’t much of it around. Nyden and some colleagues at Loyola have been mapping diverse communities in Chicago during the 1980 to 1990 period, singling out census tracts that come closest to matching the city’s overall population figures by major groups-38.6 percent black, 37.9 percent white, 19.6 percent Hispanic and 3.5 percent Asian.
They mapped out the top 10 percent or so in diversity, intentionally avoiding imposing bottom-line quotients-at least 25 percent black or 10 percent Hispanic, for instance. If they had imposed base limits, Nyden said, the list would have been shorter. They followed up the mapping with interviews to make sure the figures represented relatively stable diversity.
The stable diverse communities they identified were Hyde Park, Beverly-Morgan Park, Edgewater-Uptown, Rogers Park, Albany Park, the Near West Side around the University of Illinois at Chicago, Wicker Park-Bucktown, parts of the Southeast Side around the defunct steel mills and Chicago Lawn (Marquette Park).
There is some spotty diversity elsewhere, but in areas that may be more transitional than stable in their integration. And even within the diverse communities, integration is often illusory, with blacks often being concentrated in one section and whites in another.
By the most widely used measurement, Chicago is still the most segregated big city in the country. The seemingly high number of diverse communities may be due mostly to the fact that Chicago, its 1.1 million black population second-highest (after New York) among U.S. cities, would tend to have more blacks living in settings of diversity even given high segregation levels. And Chicago is known for its housing groups that promote integration.
Stable integration is also rare in the suburbs, particularly if you exclude the older outlying metropolitan area cities of Waukegan, Elgin, Aurora and Joliet.
Beyond those, Evanston, Oak Park, Park Forest and Chicago Heights are the major communities that have sizable populations of both blacks and whites, and that did not have overwhelming shifts between 1980 and 1990. Several smaller Cook County suburbs show similar patterns.
Skokie may be the next major diverse suburb. There, the numbers of Asian-Americans, blacks and Hispanics all doubled during the decade, and in total represent about a quarter of the population.
Nyden, extrapolating from interviews with Edgewater and Uptown residents done during his research on diversity, argues that many more people would live in diverse communities if there weren’t so few to choose from.
“The demand for diverse communities far outstrips the ability to live in them,” he maintained.
While such a thesis is impossible to prove, it raises the question of why racial diversity is so limited. Unquestionably, the tendency of many people to group with others perceived to be like themselves is a great, perhaps even the greatest, part of the reason.
“Even if you eliminated all discrimination, you might have segregation as a matter of personal preference,” said Robert Schwemm, a University of Kentucky law professor and respected expert on fair housing law.
But discrimination has not been eliminated. The forces that have worked historically to block the formation of racially diverse communities have been immensely powerful, and some of these forces are still active.
Private covenants barring homeowners in a neighborhood from selling their homes to blacks (or anyone else deemed unsuitable) were common until struck down as illegal by the U.S. Supreme Court in a landmark Chicago case, Shelly v. Kraemer, in 1948.
But even without such covenants, discriminatory practices continued largely unhindered until the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which barred bias in rentals and sales, in terms and conditions of contracts, and in advertising and presentations by real estate agents.
Blockbusting, the use of scare tactics by real estate agents to influence white homeowners to sell out fast and cheap because blacks are moving into their block or neighborhood, also was banned.
Still, discrimination in various forms occurs despite the law. And rapid neighborhood racial transition, which is encouraged if not caused by outlawed practices such as blockbusting and steering of home buyers to same-race neighborhoods, has been the rule since 1968 in most areas of metropolitan Chicago and the nation.
Whether rapid transition, or “white flight,” would occur without illegal acts by real estate agents is unclear. A 1991 study of population trends in 60 cities by Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, authors of the book “American Apartheid,” concluded that “whites continue to avoid neighborhoods located anywhere near established black areas, and they are highly sensitive to the number of black residents.”
Such white behavior patterns-whether caused by racial prejudice, in-group preference, illegal real estate practices, rational or irrational fears or any number of other things-create an environment in which rapid neighborhood racial transition is more likely than not.
African-Americans are not necessarily sold on the idea of integration either, of course. South suburban NAACP leader Delores Whiters last year blasted a court decision upholding affirmative marketing efforts to encourage whites to buy in changing areas, saying she was “against the whole area of integration maintenance.”
“The word `affirmative’ is misleading,” she said. “There is a connotation there that African-Americans are spoilers in a community and that European-Americans are needed to keep a community stable.”
All in all, the creation of a racially diverse neighborhood is not likely to occur without some special circumstances being present or special efforts being made to see that it happens.
“People have to be committed to wanting diversity,” said Joanne Adams, a researcher in the Loyola sociology department who has worked with Nyden on his diversity studies.
Nyden has identified two elements that often stand out in stable, racially diverse communities: The presence of a large, unifying institution and the existence or development of active, influential community organizations.
As examples of institutions, he pointed to Loyola in Uptown-Edgewater-Rogers Park, the University of Illinois at Chicago on the Near West Side and the University of Chicago in Hyde Park.
“The institutional employees partially populate these communities, and the institutions themselves are more integrated than the society as a whole, so there is a spillover,” he said.
Strong community groups that focus on housing and related issues also are frequently part of stable integrated communities. Some of the best known are the Organization of the NorthEast in Edgewater-Uptown, the Lawrence Avenue Development Corp. and the North River Commission in Albany Park, the Beverly Area Planning Association in Beverly, the Greater Southwest Development Corp. and the Catholic Cluster Project in Chicago Lawn and the Oak Park Housing Center.
(In some areas, governmental or quasi-governmental organizations have taken a lead role, such as the Park Forest Human Relations Commission or, in a quite different way, the Southeast Chicago Commission. The latter agency directed the massive and controversial urban renewal of the late 1950s that helped keep whites from fleeing Hyde Park.)
The groups can be active in a variety of programs, including economic development, housing preservation and aggressive marketing of the neighborhood.
The type of diversity-promoting intervention that has run into the most trouble and captured the most attention has been management or regulation of the real estate market, including anti-solicitation measures, restriction of real estate signs and home equity insurance programs.
Chicago has been the scene of battles over real estate “for sale” signs for more than 20 years. Four different sign laws have been passed by the City Council and subsequently rejected as unconstitutional reins on free speech.
Among the rationales often given by neighborhood groups for control of “for sale” signs are that a concentration of signs decreases community confidence, lowers property values and promotes a “flight” mentality.
A new proposal restricting size, placement and coloring of signs is being considered in the council. While backers claim it has been crafted to avoid being struck down, it is being hotly opposed by the local real estate industry.
Realtors also have sued to quash a new “for sale” sign restriction ordinance in Cicero, where a quadrupling of the Hispanic population was accompanied by a pronounced drop in the number of whites during the 1980s.
The new sign laws got a boost last year when the U.S. Supreme Court turned back a challenge by real estate groups, letting stand a ruling upholding sign restrictions adopted by a group of nine south suburbs that have been undergoing racial change. The ruling-the same one that upheld the affirmative marketing efforts-said a substantial public purpose has to be served by the restriction.
The Beverly area, in which the Beverly Area Planning Association (BAPA) has acted aggressively to maintain integration, has achieved its own informal control of real estate signs despite the absence of a city ordinance.
The community began its largely successful campaign to discourage “for sale” signs during the 1970s when a number of block meetings were held to air concerns about racial transition, according to Veronica “Sis” Costello, BAPA executive director.
” `For sale’ signs were one of the things that were causing a great deal of concern, so people complained to various (real estate brokers),” she said. “We still get frequent calls, and we do call real estate offices and let them know the neighborhood or the block or the next-door neighbor is not pleased.”
Another highly publicized integrationist-or anti-transition-tool has been home equity insurance, which covers fee-paying participants for any losses occurring because of deteriorating neighborhood conditions.
Such a program was adopted in the 1970s in Oak Park when rapid racial change was widely predicted there, and was embraced in 1988 in local referendums by residents of three areas in Chicago, one on the Northwest Side and two on the Southwest Side.
The creation of the local option programs-which came about through state legislative action-followed a long and rancorous wrangle over citywide home equity insurance, which was attacked by some city black leaders as a subsidy to benefit whites only.
Nyden said sign laws and home equity insurance are useful tools because they help preserve confidence in a neighborhood where residents-whether they are black or white-are getting anxious about change. And he pointed out that home equity insurance can benefit black homeowners in blight-threatened middle-class neighborhoods as well.
One little-noticed virtue of home equity insurance, he added, could be to provide a test of whether economics or race is really involved in white flight. “If white folks are living in an area, and you give them insurance, and then they still go, then it’s patently racist,” he said.
But such tools have to be combined with other initiatives that deal with neighborhood problems such as deteriorating schools, crime, physical decay and business disinvestment, he insisted.
Economics has become more of an issue in diverse areas where the population is not predominantly middle class and well-off.
James Capraro, executive director of the Greater Southwest Development Corp., argues that the racial changes in Southwest Side areas such as West Englewood, which shifted from white to black in just a few years in the late 1960s to the early 1970s, were accelerated by economic changes.
“When it racially changed, it economically changed and became blighted, so the two things got mixed up, race and economics,” he said.
“Because of that, people who fled racially changing neighborhoods would equate problems caused by economic change with race,” he said.
He said many of the first black residents of West Englewood, who tended to be relatively well-off, ended up moving out of the community along with most of the whites, indicating the importance of the economic factor.
As a result, his group’s strategy is to promote the neighborhood to anyone, black or white, who has the means to choose where he or she wants to live, and at the same time concentrate on maintaining businesses in the area and bringing in new ones.
The area has changed greatly in the last 10 years since the first black residents came in 1982 and is tending toward a mix of one-third white, one-third black and one-third Hispanic, said Capraro.
But that is a much slower change than previously occurred in adjacent neighborhoods, he pointed out.
“We’re seeing an inward movement of different kinds of people still. It’s mostly blacks and Hispanics, but there are still some whites, and we’re hoping for more whites with the (new CTA Southwest Rapid Transit Line) to keep it racially integrated.
“If it remains economically competitive, but racially homogenous, that will be another kind of segregation,” he added, “but it will still be a really nice neighborhood.”
