Dave Cummings remembers his family’s first night, about 15 years ago, in their south suburban Flossmoor home. He said a carload of white teenagers kept driving around the house, shouting a racial slur and “Go home.”
“I didn’t want to call the police unless it was necessary,” Cummings said. “So I just stood at my window and waited.”
In the late 1980s, Bert and Scott Umbreit, an interracial couple, said they had heard rumors that their move to Park Forest prompted at least one neighbor to leave the community. And, after 26 years of marriage, Bert, who is black, said, “People are still fainting when they look at us.” Her husband is white.
Cummings and the Umbreits, along with about 500 other south suburban residents, met recently over dinner in area homes to discuss ways to preserve racial diversity in the region and stem the tide of white flight. Though diversity dinners have been held in Chicago and DuPage County, what made last week’s undertaking unique was the number of people who signed up to take part: Dinners were held in 56 homes with an average of nine people at each site. Hosts and guests came from Ford Heights, Homewood, Flossmoor, Olympia Fields, Crete, Matteson, Park Forest, Glenwood, Richton Park, Hazel Crest and University Park.
Their goal was to make it clear that though some white homeowners are leaving the area for southwest suburban towns such as Orland Park, Frankfort and New Lenox, others feel strongly about staying and fostering communities that are racially integrated as well as economically viable.
Fair housing and civil rights laws have changed, but residents said changing people’s perceptions is much more difficult.
“You cannot legislate morality,” said Jimi Emmons of Park Forest. “It’s an issue of the heart.”
Robin Kelly, director of community relations for the village of Matteson, one of the sponsors of the dinners, said the sponsors agreed on the format of “breaking bread together” because it places under one roof people who might not otherwise have the opportunity, or take the time, to do so.
“Food is one of the universal things that unites people,” Kelly said. “(The sponsors) had been looking for ways to get people more involved and (talking more) about race and diversity.”
Sponsors included Governors State University; the South Metropolitan Regional Leadership Center; the Homewood-Flossmoor League of Women Voters; Healing Racism/Chicago Southland; the Village of Park Forest; and the Northeastern chapter of the National Coalition Building Institute.
At the top of the menu was white flight. Historically, in urban areas such as Chicago, when whites leave a community, so too do economic investment, political clout and the demand for housing.
The panic, many argue, is fueled by ignorance and fear. But when the stakes include property values, quality education and safety, some residents would rather flee than wait to see what happens.
In 1995, this phenomenon prompted the village of Matteson to launch an advertising and marketing campaign to attract affluent white home buyers to slow the pace of racial change. The move offended many African-American residents.
Last June, a “Dateline NBC” special called “Why Can’t We Live Together,” hosted by network news anchor Tom Brokaw, focused on Matteson. The report said whites were leaving in droves because of the village’s burgeoning black community. By 2002, minorities are expected to make up more than 60 percent of the village’s population. The show angered some residents inside and outside Matteson.
Larry McClellan, director of the South Metropolitan Regional Leadership Center and former mayor of University Park, said that 20 years ago, whites would begin fleeing diverse areas at a “tipping point.” Demographic studies have shown that mark to be when a community reaches 20 percent minority.
Fourteen communities in far south Cook County and eastern Will County have shown steady minority population growth. According to 1980 U.S. census figures, the region’s minority population was 18 percent. By 1990, that figure had risen to 25 percent. Today, McClellan projects the area is nearly 35 percent minority.
However, he said he does not believe whites still measure the value of their communities on racial percentages.
Of greater concern is class in areas where the median home values range from $59,000 in Park Forest to $185,000 in Olympia Fields, McClellan said. Residents are more concerned about the effect poorer families could have on their property values than about race, he said.
Mary Pels of Flossmoor hosted a dinner for teens, at the suggestion of her 17-year-old daughter Julia. Earlier this year, the Homewood-Flossmoor High School junior, who is white, completed two 12-week-long workshops on race relations.
Julia Pels said she took the class because she was beginning to feel prejudiced against minority students at school. “And I didn’t know where (those feelings) were coming from,” she said.
At the dinner, she and eight other teens–three whites, three blacks and two Koreans–learned they had a lot in common.
But “the biggest problem,” said Cheryl Mayfield, who is African-American and lives in University Park, “is all of us here tonight are preaching to the choir. We need the people who are basically creating the problems to come in and sit down and try to be understanding.”
