Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2017 Forgetting How to Hate: The Evolution of White Responses to Integration in Chicago, 1946-1987 Chris Ramsey Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Ramsey, Chris, "Forgetting How to Hate: The Evolution of White Responses to Integration in Chicago, 1946-1987" (2017). Dissertations. 2844. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/2844 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Copyright © 2017 Chris Ramsey LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO FORGETTING HOW TO HATE: THE EVOLUTION OF WHITE RESPONSES TO INTEGRATION IN CHICAGO, 1946-1987 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN HISTORY BY CHRISTOPHER M. RAMSEY CHICAGO, IL AUGUST 2017 Copyright by Christopher M. Ramsey, 2017 All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the many people who assisted me in this project. First and foremost, my dissertation director, Timothy Gilfoyle, who has offered me invaluable (and uncannily timely) advice and thoughtful comments about my work every step of the way. I also am grateful for the assistance offered by the archivists at numerous Chicago-area museums, especially those who work at the Chicago History Museum, Harold Washington Library Center, and the Richard J. Daley Library for Special Collections. I will forever appreciate the neighborhood activists who so graciously shared their time and stories with me. I am also thankful for my supportive colleagues and faculty in the history department here at Loyola. I presented embryonic versions of these chapters at our long-running dissertation writer’s group and our graduate student conference. The feedback I received from both the group and the conference have helped transform awkward drafts into a more polished dissertation. Likewise, the lively discussions at the Newberry Urban History Dissertation Group encouraged me to take analytical directions I had not at first considered. I would also like to thank the Illinois State Historical Society for generously providing me with a King V. Hostick scholarship in the 2015-2016 academic year. Above all, I must thank my parents, Kenneth and Katy Ramsey, my sister, Kara, my family, and my closest friends for their unconditional love and support. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: HATRED CANNOT BE PUNISHED 31 CHAPTER TWO: A GOOD PLACE TO WORK AND PLAY; A GOOD PLACE TO LIVE AND STAY 77 CHAPTER THREE: A BUNGALOW DIVIDED CANNOT STAND 127 CHAPTER FOUR: THE STRUGGLE FOR RACIAL LIBERALISM ON THE SOUTHWEST SIDE 177 CHAPTER FIVE: SOUTHWEST WOMEN WORKING TOGETHER 227 CHAPTER SIX: A CONTROVERSIAL MIDDLE GROUND: THE SOUTHWEST PARISH AND NEIGHBORHOOD FEDERATION 255 CHAPTER SEVEN: ETHNIC REVOLT AND RECONCILIATION 298 EPILOGUE 337 BIBLIOGRAPHY 350 VITA 368 iv INTRODUCTION Mary Jane Farrell recognized the ominous signs that appeared two blocks away from her brick bungalow home in Gage Park. In the summer of 1986, the first black families crossed Western Avenue–the de facto dividing line between her working-class, white-ethnic, residential neighborhood on the Southwest Side of Chicago and the adjacent African-American “Black Belt.” Trouble began immediately. Greedy realtors used the prospect of racial change to harass her frightened neighbors into selling their homes at a loss. Unidentified hooligans lobbed firebombs at the new black families who bought them above market value.1 None of this was new to Farrell. Similar dramas had unfolded across numerous neighborhoods on Chicago’s South and West Sides since the end of World War II, a history Farrell understood all too well. Both the panic peddling and the violence stirred up painful memories within Farrell. A forty-four-year-old Irish Catholic mother of thirteen children and the wife of a firefighter, similar patterns of demographic transition forced her family to move out of their former neighborhoods. Yet Farrell lamented the forfeiture of old friendships and communities even more than the equity in her previous homes. Leaving West Englewood stung the most. In West Englewood, she remembered how her kindly Italian neighbors babysat her children and taught her new recipes. These close bonds dissolved once the first black family 1 At the start of World War I, The Black Belt boundaries were 22nd Street to the North, 31st Street to the South, stretching only several blocks east and west of State Street. See Wallace Best, “Black Belt,” in Encyclopedia of Chicago, eds. Janice Reiff et.al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), accessed July 31, 2012, http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/140.html. The Black Belt extended to the lake and as far South as 51st street by the start of World War II. 1 2 moved onto their old block on Honroe Avenue. Virtually overnight, most of her Italian friends left. Farrell tried in vain to organize the diminishing number of white residents, arguing that “if we don’t move, we get integration. If we all move, it’s resegregation.”2 The Farrells were among the last white holdouts in West Englewood. They tried to befriend and welcome their new black neighbors. They got along well with the middle-class black families who first arrived, but the situation deteriorated when impoverished African Americans joined them. At that point, even the black families with the money to do so left West Englewood. The poorer ones who replaced them intimidated her family. Black youth attacked and insulted her kids as they walked to the parish school of St. Justin the Martyr. They threw rocks at her children from the alley whenever they tried to play in their own backyard. The Farrells finally gave up on West Englewood when her daughter, then in the first grade, suffered a concussion after a black student smashed her head against a coat rack and mocked her as a “’white honky.’” Similar to other neighborhoods which underwent rapid racial change, West Englewood soon suffered from a lack of resources, a diminished commercial base, abandoned homes, and higher crime.3 Gage Park now faced a similar threat, but Farrell kept the same resoluteness she displayed in West Englewood a decade earlier. She vowed to prevent her current home from meeting a similar fate to her earlier abodes. Unlike in West Englewood, she received help. Gage Park had a strong community organization looking for people with her level of fortitude. She became a member of the Southwest Parish and Neighborhood Federation (SPNF), an alliance of 2 Tom McNamee, “The Struggle Along Gage Park’s Color Line,” Chicago Sun-Times, September 7, 1986. 3 Ibid. 3 seven Southwest Side Catholic parishes and one neighborhood association, to combat abusive real estate practices and economic disinvestment. Farrell and other members of the federation pledged to give families who wanted to stay on the Southwest Side the means to do just that. They loudly broadcasted their struggle to the rest of the city and the nation when they famously opposed Chicago’s first African-American mayor, Harold Washington, with a “white ethnic agenda” meant to keep the city responsive to their demands for stable neighborhoods. Yet to Farrell, this did not mean prohibiting racial minorities from moving to Gage Park. Despite what she experienced in West Englewood and other South Side neighborhoods, she still believed in racial integration; provided her neighborhood remained prosperous and safe. As she explained to the Chicago Sun-Times, “As soon as white people realize they’re gonna have to live in integrated neighborhoods if they want to live in Chicago, the better off they’ll be…[but] we’re not gonna be the last ones. No way will that happen again.”4 Farrell’s personal history reflected a larger question no one in Chicago satisfactorily answered: could predominantly working-class, lower middle-income white ethnic neighborhoods integrate without facing spasms of violence and economic decline? Southwest Side residents knew of few affirmative examples. The neighborhoods which successfully mixed together people of different races in Chicago, such as Hyde Park, possessed wealthier populations, powerful anchor institutions which commanded substantial resources from the government, or both. This poor track record did not deter the SPNF from working to stabilize Southwest Side neighborhoods against white flight. Following the organizing guidelines elucidated by Saul Alinsky, the federation pestered real estate firms, financial institutions, and politicians through 4 Ibid. 4 persistent picketing and protests. These aggressive tactics, however, led some civil rights organizations, the media, and liberal Southwest Side residents to categorize its goal for neighborhood stability as a racist code for segregation.5 This reputation came with the turf the federation and similar organizations on the Southwest Side represented. Since the end of World War II, the Southwest Side served as a frequent arena for those who wished to advance or restrict civil rights in Chicago. The Airport Homes riot of 1946 in the West Lawn neighborhood foreshadowed the difficulty and outright failure of integrated public housing. Numerous other white South Side neighborhoods copied the patriarchal violence Southwest Siders exhibited at the Airport Homes in their own bids to keep African-Americans out of their neighborhoods throughout the remainder of the 1940s and 1950s. Twenty years later, the Chicago Freedom Movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. exposed the racial steering practices of Southwest Side real estate firms and led a march calling for fair housing laws through the area’s most prominent civic space, Marquette Park. King received a brick in the head for his efforts from an angry white mob numbering in the thousands.