Chicago is the nation’s most segregated major city. The 10000 block of South Wood Street is among its least segregated blocks.
This corner of the South Side’s Beverly neighborhood isn’t unique in embracing diversity, but it is exceptional in remaining racially mixed for decades, defying the seemingly irresistible forces that have split blacks and whites.
In the early 1970s, as South Side communities were turning from white to black, the Beverly neighborhood made a concerted effort to welcome blacks while remaining a community with some of the city’s top schools and most impressive housing stock, with some homes valued upward of a $1 million.
Rob Breymaier, executive director of the non-profit Oak Park Regional Housing Center, said one reason it’s hard to maintain diversity even in a community that’s trying is that homeowners tend to move every five or six years–for reasons unrelated to race.
“In places like Beverly or even [suburban] Oak Park, there are institutions to promote inclusiveness and integration,” said Breymaier. “Most communities aren’t fighting the structure that encourages us to segregate by race and income. When people find a diverse community that’s thriving and they don’t have to move, they don’t.”
That has been the case for residents along this stretch of Wood Street.
Bill Grady, who has lived there for almost 25 years, said his neighbors don’t visit each others’ houses every night for dinner, but in a crisis, they rally.
“Sometimes I question whether my experience would have even been the same in any other part of Beverly,” said Grady. “Then I think: Maybe I just lucked out by getting several really nice neighbors.”
Here’s a look at five families on a racially diverse Chicago block.
The Gradys
When Kathy and Bill Grady purchased their ranch-style home in 1984, they were about to be married. Kathy Grady, a white woman born in England, was divorced from an African-American soldier. She had biracial children who were teenagers. Bill Grady’s children, who are white, were younger and lived nearby with their mother but visited often. The couple knew that the blended family would need a community where everybody would feel comfortable.
Bill Grady grew up in the Canaryville neighborhood, which in the 1960s was not hospitable to African-Americans. He and his friends used to chase blacks standing on a neighborhood corner waiting for a bus.
During his freshman year at Leo Catholic High School, Grady, who at 4-foot-11 was the smallest freshman in the class, began an unlikely friendship with a 6-foot-4 freshman, one of the few black students in the school. He was from the Englewood neighborhood, and he and his friends used to chase whites passing through that community.
“Our differences initially drew us together,” said Grady, 59, a vice president at a downtown bank. “That year, we also had a theology teacher who spent the whole year lecturing us about becoming men. He said we had to be independent and critical thinkers and challenge our ideas about people, and I was open to that.”
Grady knew that Beverly was one of a handful of racially diverse communities in Chicago. He believed his children and stepchildren would be comfortable there.
For the most part, they were. The exceptions were sobering. One of his stepsons, who’s tall and has light brown skin, used to accompany his sons to basketball games in nearby white suburbs.
“Sometimes my children were taunted or even threatened when peers realized that they had stepsiblings who were biracial,” said Grady. “Fortunately, that wasn’t the bulk of their experience. They could walk down to Hurley Park, a block from our house, and see integrated groups of children playing and living together. That was their norm.”
Kathy Grady said their “norm” also has included relationships that have been nurtured on Wood Street.
“The Wozniaks are retired and they watch everybody’s house,” said Kathy Grady, 67. “Elliot Hayes was my granddaughter’s basketball coach and is like a family member.”
About five years ago a relative of the Gradys was killed in a hit-and-run car accident. The next morning, there was a major snowstorm and neighbor Cecil McDonald was outside shoveling the Gradys’ sidewalk.
“I put on my boots and went outside and he stopped me,” said Bill Grady. “He put his hand up and said, ‘No. What’s going on in your house, I can’t imagine. Go on back inside.’
“That may not seem like a lot, but at the time, it meant the world… . I can’t honestly say that I expected my neighborhood would remain this way 25 years out.”
The McDonalds
A week before Christmas in 1996, the McDonalds moved in. On their first night on Wood Street, the family got a knock on their door.
Cecil McDonald, who is African-American, said the knock was jarring and reminded him of stories he grew up hearing of white Southerners coming to the homes of blacks and terrorizing them.
“Even though I came here for diversity, the feeling that night was quite interesting,” said McDonald, 43. “There were two white people at my door, and for a second it hit me in my stomach. It turns out that Bill and Kathy [Grady] were just welcoming us with cookies and coffee. We’ve been friends ever since.”
McDonald grew up in the Roseland community. He said his family was the first black family on his block. One minute, it seemed, his classroom was racially integrated, the next it was not–as whites moved out.
When Cecil McDonald was young, he would pass through Beverly on his way to the nearby Evergreen Plaza mall.
“Once I got of means, I knew I wanted to live here,” said McDonald, an adjunct professor of photography at Columbia College. “My wife works for [the Chicago Public Schools system]. We knew the schools would be great for our children. We wanted green space. We were hoping for great neighbors and got that too.”
Sandee McDonald, 42, said she wanted their daughters to live in a racially mixed neighborhood similar to the one of her childhood in the city’s South Chicago neighborhood.
“My best friend was a Polish girl, and we went to Catholic elementary school together,” she said. “We learned how to skateboard, and we shared Barbie dolls. It was important for me that my girls didn’t have to wait until they went to college before they had their first encounter with whites.”
Yet McDonald said he sometimes worries that his youngest daughters don’t have many black friends. “I noticed that we don’t have a lot of black children who live in Beverly who go to our high school,” he said. “They live in other neighborhoods.”
He said his daughters understand that not all black children are like them.
“My daughters notice that some of the black kids aren’t as polite and some are loud,” he said. “But living here, they also get to notice the white kids who are not polite and who are loud. And they realize people are just people.”
The Wozniaks
Larry and Lynn Wozniak are white and bought their bungalow brand new in 1966, when the block and much of the Beverly neighborhood were overwhelmingly white.
Back then, South Side communities were in the throes of racial change. Blacks were moving in and whites were moving on. But some stayed and attempted to embrace diversity.
“It wasn’t easy because city blocks were turning [from white to black] almost overnight,” said Larry Wozniak, 70, who grew up in South Chicago. He remembers the 1950s race riots in Trumbull Park, not far from his home, that began after a fair-skinned black woman, whom Chicago Housing Authority officials believed to be white, integrated a white housing complex.
“It was an ugly time,” said Wozniak. “But my parents were different in that we knew the stereotypes [about blacks and others], but they were going to let us make up our own mind.”
Lynn Wozniak, 69, said that by the time she was 20, her family had left five Chicago neighborhoods that were experiencing racial change.
“At one point, we were the last white family on the block and we didn’t have any trouble,” she said.
Before she and her husband moved onto Wood Street, she said, some relatives warned that it wasn’t a good idea because there was so much upheaval on the South Side.
“Then when the Hayeses [who are black] moved in next door, 21 whole years later, my family still said, ‘Aren’t you going to leave now?’ I said: ‘Why?’ Larry and I walked right next door to meet them and, talk about the nicest people.”
She said it takes a lot of work to maintain diversity.
“You realize that the sky doesn’t fall in,” she said. “There was a little Asian girl outside who I watched walk down the sidewalk. She went over and jumped in a puddle and her father sighed and I said to myself: ‘See, see, I remember my daughter doing just that.’ “
The Hayeses
Elliot and Brenda Hayes live in the bungalow to the east of the Wozniaks. Before the couple moved onto Wood Street in 1987, they lived in the predominantly black Bronzeville neighborhood, not far from where each had grown up. Elliot Hayes’ father owned an apartment building at 39th Street and Indiana Avenue; Brenda Hayes lived in the Robert Taylor housing development along State Street.
Brenda Hayes, 50, said that when their real estate agent showed them their home, she fell in love with it. Neither knew much about Beverly, and it wasn’t until they drove around the community that they realized it was racially mixed.
“Was that our reason for moving into the community?” said Elliot Hayes. “No, but when I look at it now from the eyes of my [18- year-old] daughter, I’m happy that it gives her the opportunity that we didn’t have: to live next door to a person of a different race and interact from an early age.”
Brenda Hayes said that for all the benefits of living in an integrated community, she believes that black neighbors are scrutinized more heavily than their white counterparts.
“You feel like you have to work twice as hard and be twice as good to be accepted,” she said. “I’ll be frank. Not everybody was as welcoming as the Wozniaks or Bill and Kathy [Grady].”
Elliot Hayes says there are subtle reminders that even though you’re on the inside, you sometimes feel like you’re on the outside looking in.
“There was a particular basketball game that I’ll never forget,” said Hayes, an assistant basketball coach. “We were down one point, and there was six seconds left… . Keep in mind that I had coached these girls since they were 4 and now they were adolescents.”
When one of the players, the Gradys’ granddaughter, made the game-winning layup, she jumped into his arms.
“I’m like, ‘Oh my goodness.’ And I’m looking at the facial expressions of the people in the stands, who weren’t from around here, and I say to myself, ‘This girl just doesn’t realize.’ I was afraid that one of these parents would have said something and if they did, you never get your reputation back.”
Bill Grady said that men in general have to be careful when coaching adolescent girls.
“But I know that Elliot is like a father or uncle to her,” said Grady. “I immediately looked at the people in the stands too. In the back of my mind, I kept looking at their faces, trying to figure out what they might be thinking of this black man and this girl.”
The Davenports
Three weeks after the Davenports, who are black, moved next door to Bill and Kathy Grady in 1988, a pipe carrying water into the Davenport home burst and Bill Grady hooked a hose from his house to the Davenports’ home so the new neighbors wouldn’t be without water.
David Davenport said he’ll never forget the generosity because he and his wife had a newborn in the house, and also because it set a neighborly tone.
“Immediately, they welcomed us and went above and beyond,” said Davenport, a retired autoworker.
Davenport said that when he moved onto Wood Street, his experience with integration had not been positive. He was 10 years old in 1966 when his family moved from a housing project at 39th Street and Lake Park Avenue to the Washington Heights neighborhood near Beverly, becoming the first black family on the block.
“The white folks moved out in a matter of minutes, it seemed,” Davenport said. “We joked that they moved at night because we didn’t even see them moving. They would smile and welcome us and then move on. That hasn’t been the case here.”
He said he believes his current neighbors stayed in part because they are good people who accepted diversity.
“They just decided to stick with it, you know?” he said.
Davenport noted that by 2042 the racial makeup of the country is expected to be majority minority, with whites falling below 50 percent of the population.
“Eventually there won’t be any place else for anybody to run to, just to separate,” he said. “So what we’ve accomplished here, to some, may seem so simple and so yesterday, but it may just offer lessons for tomorrow.”
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dtrice@tribune.com
The series: To read Part 1 of “Separate Chicagos,” go to chicagotribune.com/separate
Coming Monday: Part 3 looks at how the newer communities on the fringes of Chicagoland have the potential to rewrite old racial rules.
Join the discussion: Dawn Turner Trice leads an exploration in diversity at chicagotribune.com/race
