"You never really
knew a man
until you stood in his shoes
and walked around in them."
-- To Kill a Mockingbird
When I try to remember the old
neighborhood, the towering trees are what I miss most.
It is a cherished memory but
a small part of what was left behind when my family abandoned
our Chicago home to begin a flight that led us to a new home and
surroundings in what we came to know for the first time as "the
suburbs." The move in October 1968 was the beginning of
a long journey for us as racial tensions and fears continued
to escalate on Chicago's South Side.
It began as "White Flight."
But it quickly turned into an excuse to redefine the pursuit of
the more perfect "American dream."
Left behind were the tall, beautiful, full trees, rustling in the light breeze
overhead. Providing a real sense of comfort and belonging --
roots - the trees finished the picture of what a great neighborhood
should be like.
My father was modern in some
ways but Old World in many others. He wasn't Fred McMurray and
didn't talk much with us about social issues at the dinner table,
or anyplace else for that matter. But somehow, the perceptions
of problems that haunted our family and the neighborhood just
seemed to be communicated from one person to another.
Dad was always serious. He was
consumed with the struggle to earn enough money to feed, cloth
and house his family. He wasn't a young father, like the fathers
of many of my friends. Dad had remarried late in life. He was
in his 50s when I was born, although I am not sure what year
he was born in. My mother was many years younger, and I was
closer to her. But at my birth, she had only been in this country
less than 9 months and was still struggling with the English
language. That's how I got my name, Raymond. In the hospital after giving
birth, mom could only understand one phrase that she heard over and over
again on the loudspeakers above her head. "Doctor Raymond. Doctor Raymond.
Doctor Raymond."
It's every Arab mother's dream, to have their son
grow up to be a doctor or a grocery store owner. Fortunately, my father
managed to get her to drop the word "Doctor" from the birth certificate.
I don't ever recall dad waxing poetic about the need
to leave our Chicago neighborhood in South Shore Valley to find a better
place to live in the tree-less suburbs. I had never even heard of the word
"suburbs" before, and it was anew term in the American lexicon. That all just added to the eventual shock
we experienced when we did move.
His most important concerns
involved economics -- his small savings account, building a small
college fund for his three children, and strengthening the equity
in his home.
The goal of living in the suburbs
was not everyone's idea of the American Dream and it was far
from being my father's own dream. It didn't make sense, either.
Why would anyone move so far away from the center of the city
where you earned your living? My father worked in downtown Chicago, "the
Loop." There was no transportation in the suburbs. The
relatives didn't live there. It was time consuming to travel from there. And, it
was strange.
We already found what had amounted
for us to be the American Dream. It was in our cozy, two-bedroom,
two-story light brown speckled brick Georgian on a street lined
with tall and sturdy Maple trees, small but lush green lawns, and white
painted picket fences low enough so that you could reach across
the pickets and shake the hands of your neighbors.
What was more American than
that?
Our bright red 1963 Rambler
parked in front of our home wasn't a luxury car by any means,
but it was comfortable. Dad had traded in a 1959 gray and black
Plymouth with a push-button gear shift. The new Rambler was
something we were proud to own. The Cadillacs and Mark II's were
parked in driveways of homes on the west side of Jeffery Boulevard
in Pill Hill. Sure those cars looked beautiful and luxurious.
But our Rambler was parked among other middle class cars. Plymouths.
Chevrolets. Chryslers.
Buying a new car was a big deal. When dad drove the
Rambler home from
the dealership, everyone on the block came out to take a look
and run their hands along the high polished red finish. The fact that it was
an inexpensive car didn't matter. It glowed
with everything that we and the rest of the neighbors wanted
in life.
We didn't sit there envious
of Pill Hill and its wealth, but we did respect the fact that
the nearby community only added value to our own homes and our
community. We seemed content with what we had. And I am sure
my father was content knowing that the value added in his home
was a financial investment he could count on in the future.
Each morning, mom would make
breakfast and put the gray fedora on dad's head as he headed
out the door to board the rush hour bus on Jeffery Boulevard
a few blocks away. Jeffery Boulevard was our transportation
lifeline to the Chicago Loop. Communities were built around such
transportation points. In the late afternoon, I and my sister
would sit on the front stoop at a stranger's home on 89th Street and watch and wait for
my father to step off of the South Bound bus returning him and
other fathers home from the Loop jobs. The fact that we didn't know the
owners of the home didn't matter at all. No one would bother us. That's the
security sense of the neighborhood we all shared back then.
When we'd see him walking
home from the bus stop, we'd run up and jump into his arms.
Fathers were doing that everywhere in South Shore Valley.
We also attended a good elementary
school and looked forward to attending a highly rated high school,
Bowen, when we graduated. It was one of the reasons my parents
felt so comfortable about the area.
My sister, my brother and I would eat our cereal, and then make
sure our sandwiches were wrapped tightly in wax paper, tucked
neatly into our lunch boxes. Mine had a picture of Roy Rogers
on the front.
We were off to school in no time.
It was a neighborhood school.
Joseph Warren Elementary school was located at the top of the
hill on Jeffery Boulevard. We walked there. Five blocks in
the morning and five blocks on the way home. There was no bussing
plan to integrate the neighborhood schools. I walked passed
familiar places, including the homes of my friends on my way
to school. I was very close with my friends, even though there
were many things that kept us apart.
Bethany Lutheran Church is located
across the street from Joseph Warren. It's still there, with
a Black congregation, today. That's where we went on Sunday mornings
for church services. It was a simple but sturdy looking structure with
wide sidewalks, expansive front lawn leading to a large entrance
facing the community. Christian churches love to have their congregations
gather and linger in the front, and enter together. Our pastor
lived in the adjacent home. My Jewish friends went to the larger,
more elegant Rodfei Shalom Synagogue one block north. The entrance
was right up to the sidewalk, but the Synagogue was as large
as our elementary school. It housed a Hebrew School. The outdoor
play area was fenced in.
We respected the boundaries
of our neighborhood, too. Out of fear, and maybe a little bit out of
selfishness. Or maybe, it was just that we didn't really know or care about
what was beyond our neighborhood.
We rarely went beyond the viaduct
on the east. Beyond it was South Chicago Avenue and Commercial
Avenue. We didn't cross 87th Street on the north, even though
across 87th Street was Chicago Vocational High school's vast
baseball and football fields. We rarely crossed the viaduct
on the south, which ran parallel to 95th Street and entered into
a whole new area called Jeffery Manor.
And, we didn't cross Stony Island
Avenue, to the west, unless we had too. There was a certain
irony about how the streets were "designated." For
example, Jeffery Boulevard was really just a two-lane street.
Stony Island Avenue was a beautiful, multi-lane boulevard. Jeffery
Boulevard belonged to "us," and Stony Island Avenue
was shared with "them." Even the selection of the
names seemed to reflect differences. One of the few times I crossed
Stony Island Avenue was to go to the Chicago Public Library branch
that was located on the west side of the avenue. My mother had
to drive me there. I could walk up to the east side of Stony
Island, but not cross it.
Stony Island Avenue was a "dividing line" between the
White, predominantly Jewish community on the east, and the growing
Black community on the west. We knew they were there. We just
didn't see them that often, at least at first. Or, maybe we just
didn't look for them.
The jewel of South Shore Valley
was Pill Hill, nestled tightly between Jeffery Boulevard and
Stony Island Avenue. It was a predominantly Jewish enclave of
fashionably built homes anchored around Rodfei Shalom Synagogue.
Across the street, was the Henry Hart Jewish Community Center.
Next door was Markon's deli.
Some time in the mid-60s, the
JCC added a large outdoor swimming pool for its members. I went
there often as a guest with my friends.
Pill Hill got its name from
two factors. The first being that most of the Jewish fathers
living there were doctors. Pill Hill enjoyed a reputation that
was far greater than the reality. But a few streets, like Bennett
Avenue from 90th to 92nd Street, showcased South Shore Valley's
most spectacular homes. Jewish doctors owned all four of the
homes located at the intersection at 92nd and Bennett. Their
children had been my classmates in school. Although it had many
doctors and lawyers, for the most part, the homes on the other
streets in Pill Hill were very similar to the homes on the east
side of Jeffery Avenue where I lived.
The second reason for its name
was actually geographical. A hill divided South Shore Valley,
a limestone ridge that ran along 91st Street through 92nd Street,
the top of the hill. The best homes were built along this inclining
street slope adding an extra luster to the already beautiful
area.
Between all of this was the
heart of South Shore Valley, a mix of middle class Jews, a few
Arab immigrant families, and white collar Whites. The fathers
worked downtown at banks like Northern Trust, or the corporate
offices of international oil companies like Sinclair and Standard
Oil. East of Yates were many Eastern European families, whose
fathers worked at the Steel Mills.
Just south of Warren Elementary
school was a poorer, blue collar Christian community, consisting
mostly of frame homes and the area's harvest of "greasers."
Most of the Jewish students aspired to go to Bowen. That's where
I wanted to go. Most of the "greasers" looked forward
to a technical education at Chicago Vocational High school, located
on 87th Street. I only knew one Jewish student who went to CVS
after graduation from Bowen. All our friends said his grades
weren't that good. Students went to CVS because of poor grades.
That was the perception. Despite that, my brother, who had an
excellent academic record, went to CVS where he graduated and
continued on through college to become an engineer. And there were many other schools nearby including Caldwell Elementary and Hoyne Elementary.
These were the kind of social
choices that confronted our community, the kind of choices we
didn't mind facing.
The viaduct on the east divided
the communities racially and economically. It was the last barrier
of several barriers that kept the Mexicans and Puerto Ricans
apart from the Serbians, Croatians and Poles, separating all
of them from the "rest of us."
These neighborhoods were far
from being melting pots. We were clumps of diversity floating
in Chicago's pottage of ethnic "mix."
As we got older, the boundaries
remained, but we would take excursions on Saturday or on holidays
to the Oriental Theater in the Loop to see the James Bond movie,
Goldfinger. For 12 and a half cents, we took the Jeffery Boulevard
bus downtown. We played the pinball games at Treasure Island.
We sat and ate Wimpy hamburgers across the street from the Art
Institute. We were only 12 and 13 at the time.
Then we went home.
If we had to go to the Avalon
Theater, north of 87th Street, our parents would drive us there
and then pick us up when the movie was over. There were all
kinds of silly movies that we watched starring Doris Day, Cary
Grant, Rock Hudson, Fred McMurray and Dick Van Dyke.
Avalon was a different neighborhood.
The concerns weren't dramatic, but they were there.
We walked around them when we couldn't avoid them.
Nobody had told us that "different"
also meant "scary" or "dangerous." But "different"
did raise our guard and there was a sense of fear when we were
someplace else.
We had all heard the ghost stories
at summer camp or in the Cub Scouts. And, we had heard the tales
about the "boogie-man" and the "hatchet man."
We knew that dangers lurked beyond the boundaries of our neighborhood,
across the "dividing lines." No one ever spelled out
what those dangers were, but we knew they were there. And it
had to do with things that were "different."
The fears lurked in the "darkness."
And, if that were not enough
to feed the fear of something being "different," there
was the television set which was filled with an assortment of
programs providing very subtle messages about who was good and
who was bad.
We didn't have to get off the
bus until we got to the Theater, watching instead with curiosity
as we passed through strange neighborhoods filled with strange
looking homes and people. We were glad we didn't live there.
Halloween was a good example
of the high comfort level that existed in South Shore Valley
during the late 50s and 60s. Young children were permitted to
go out on their own late into the evening, after the sun had
set and the street lights had gone on.
Our neighborhood was safe.
And the only fears of a razor blade being plunged into a Halloween
apple were those fears expressed among us kids, mostly trying
to frighten each other.
We could walk from house to
house and knock on doors and the neighbors several blocks away
would know our names. That comes not from structured social
guidelines, but from a high comfort level in a neighborhood where
people went out of their way to get to know each other.
We took it for granted, also,
that the teachers who taught us during the school year also lived
right in our neighborhood too. I recall the fear of knocking
at the door of one teacher who lived at the corner of 90th and
Merrill Avenue. She always made caramel corn balls and hand
wrapped them in colored sheets of cellophane. It was always
the highlight of Halloween. Even through our masks, she would
recognize her social studies students.
South Shore Valley boasted a
wonderful familiarity and friendliness. That encouraged security
and confidence.
But like the huge trees, that,
too, was missing from the aseptic suburbs where we later found
ourselves, refugees from a racial skirmish, a social war that
we had no control to stop.
The 50s and the 60s were rough
decades. They represented continued change. Decades of upheaval.
Decades when racial issues began to seep beyond the headlines
and slowly make their way into our lives.
I didn't know of any "Colored" kids my age. They weren't
called "Black," back then, they were called "Colored."
Today, though, that would be considered derogatory. I guess
the fact that we referred to any other people by their skin color
was probably derogatory by nature. But it was done.
I had seen a few Black people
riding on the bus, and saw a few working in our neighborhood.
There was an elderly Black maintenance man at the Rodfei Shalom Synagogue.
The commercial strip along 87th Street between Luella and Stony
Island Avenue was a magnet for shoppers from our area. It was
rare to even see Black people crossing over, although there were
a few celebrities who were exceptions.
As a child, I had heard about
"Colored people" on the TV news. They didn't seem
to exist on TV sitcoms like My Three Sons, which was a cookie-cutter
for White society. Black people worked as janitors and as maintenance
workers at some of the local businesses. Not at our school, though.
Not at the church we attended every Sunday. Not at the restaurants
we ate at.
My image or perception of them
was not very high, a feeling shared by many. I guess the essence
of racism or racially inspired fear is that it is easy to hate
someone whom you do not hold in high esteem.
The apparent absence of Black
people and families seemed to connect to our comfort level as
a community. Race differences didn't seem that important when
we were dealing with other ethnic groups. Greeks, Poles, Serbians,
Arabs, Asians and Jews all had differences but those differences
were accepted, or at least not challenged. Maybe, the differences
were even ignored.
My parents never spoke unkindly
of Blacks, Hispanics. (There was no such term as "Hispanics,"
either. They were Mexican or Puerto Rican. Or, just Spanish.)
My parents never spoke disrespectfully of other ethnic groups,
either. After all, we were Palestinian Arab and our skin color
was slightly darker than the rest, too. It was olive colored.
Yet, we were not called "colored" as were Black people.
Obviously, the racial feelings had more to do with other social
issues than they did simply with skin color.
We lived in a predominantly
Jewish community, too, yet everyone seemed to live together without
the ugliness of racism. Being Palestinian Arab, that could have
caused a problem, too. But it did not. Most of my friends were
Jewish. But our differences never became an issue, and my parents
never spoke unkindly about Jews, either.
When the Arab-Jewish issue was
right in your face, however, sure it surfaced. After the 1967
Arab-Israeli War, for example, some of my friends convinced me
to dress up in real Arab Bedouin clothing, a Keffiyeh on my head
and long robe with a scimitar at my side. Larry Kogan and I
knocked on doors in Pill Hill that Halloween. There were only
a few homes where people who answered the door simply threw the
candy at us before we actually got to their front doors to knock
or ring the door-bell. I'm not sure they were trying to hit me in an Arab outfit or Larry, my friend, who was also well known to other kids from some of the families there.
At least they threw chunky Baby
Ruth bars, though, and not tiny candy corns.
It seemed that the richer an
area, the better the candy. Pill Hill was a treasure of expensive
candy bars. Toward the east side of South Shore Valley, the
home owners would open small bags of orange and white stripe
"candy corn" and count out five pieces that they dropped
in your bag. Those homes got egged very quickly.
For a long time, race just didn't seem to be an issue, although
it really was.
The bubble seemed intact. Until
one day, a "Colored" student, Lee Bogan, registered
at Joseph Warren Elementary school. Three more Black students,
Jane Seaberry, Yolanda Davis and Michele Demby, followed. I'm
sure they owned homes in or near our neighborhood, but at first,
it didn't seem to set off sirens. The barrier was broken at
the school level, and it forced parents to start thinking about
the bigger picture. Attending our schools pushed the threshold.
Moving into our neighborhoods, on our blocks, crossed the threshold.
In 1968, the year after graduation
from elementary school, that second threshold or barrier was
broken. Several Black families moved into homes on our side
of Jeffery Boulevard. One of those families moved into a home
on our block on Luella Avenue, several houses from my own. And,
as suddenly as the Black family moved in, the entire neighborhood
seemed to panic and White families began to leave. "Began"
is too soft of a description. They ran. They packed up their
belongings in a disorganized panic and they fled.
The family that moved near us
had two children, a young boy, and an older girl who was handicapped
and who seemed to maneuver her wheel-chair up and down the block
all day, her head leaning to one side. Her speech was slurred,
but understandable.
They didn't stay long. A friend
of mine who lived on my block and I went up to meet her. She
seemed to be a nice person, although her handicapped speech was
pronounced.
The racial rumors were rampant.
But as hard as I tried, and in talking with other friends who
lived nearby, no one could place a finger on the exact moment
when the racial bubble burst. But it happened. Just that quickly.
There were secret meetings up
and down the block in the basements of several of the homes.
People were called to attend deliberately, quietly and somberly.
"We have a meeting tonight
to talk about the problem," the caller would whisper. "It's
at Stuart's home. 7 p.m."
It was just called "The
problem."
Everyone was mad at the family
that had "sold" their home to "those Colored people."
As it later turned out, the Black family was only renting the
home. No one knew how long they would stay. That didn't seem
to matter. The fact was they were there. And, their leaving
was not going to change anything one bit.
Realtors started knocking on
doors, like vultures feeding on the remains of the neighborhood's
fears. They could smell the "neighborhood death" that
was all around us.
"If you don't sell now,
you're never going to be able to sell and you will lose all the
equity that you have built up in it." Real estate agents
brought it down to a level neighborhood fear could understand:
"You don't want to lose your home, do you?"
Race was about economics as
much as it was about societal differences. Of course, if no
one moved, there wouldn't be an issue of plummeting home values.
In 1968, things changed in South
Shore Valley. Our block at 89th and Luella Avenue was part of
the fuse for an explosion in race relations that transformed
the community and sparked a White Flight surge out of South Shore
Valley. The world was exploding around us and it was hard to
tell which explosion was which any more. Assassinations. Riots.
Racial turmoil. All of it served as a backdrop for our own
growing tensions.
There could have been a natural
integration. One based on slow change. People who moved in
could have replaced people who were moving out for other reasons
than race. That small group, unfortunately, will forever bear
the scars of White Flight only because of coincidence.
The fear that many White homeowners
experienced may not be justifiable, but nonetheless, it existed
and was real. And the stampede that it caused can be compared
to the stampeding of cattle. White Flight stems from a communal-based
fear or a herd mentality, something similar to what cattle experience
as the frenzy toward stampede takeovers.
Like a stampede, White Flight
relies on a bizarre kind of trust.
One cow or several cows on the
fringe of the herd are frightened into running. Their fright
is absorbed one cow to another on the basis of trust. The other
cows, not having seen the cause of the original fear, accept
the fear as fact. They react as if they had seen the cause of
the fear without confirming it. This spreads like a shock-wave
through the herd, or, in this case, it spread through the White
community.
In less than a year, more than
half of the homeowners had put their homes up for sale and were
making plans to move to suburban locations "that would remain
White for decades to come." Most of them probably didn't
understand the reasons why they were moving, and just wanted
not to be the last ones left behind, living in homes that had
no value and in communities destined to deteriorate and rot.
If no one cared about who they
lived among before, it mattered that year. The Jews moved north
to growing "Jewish" communities like Skokie, Niles,
and south to communities like Flossmor. Most of the Catholics
moved west to strong "Catholic Parishes" while other
non-Catholic Christians moved east into Hegewisch.
That summer in 1968, South Shore
Valley had lost its innocence.
Looking back, I realize now
that the Black families that moved in buying up the de-valued,
under-priced homes in the White Flight Fire Sales were not the
ones who destroyed that community.
The existing community was destroyed
by the people who fled, not by the people who came. Those that
left were too willing to give up so many years of contentment
and satisfaction.
Certainly real estate panic-peddlers
were very much to blame. But the panic was almost irrational,
especially when you look back at it from our time, today.
We didn't run from Black families.
They were looking for the same neighborhood values that we had
and had wanted for ourselves. We ran from our own self-inflicted
nightmares.
More tragically, we didn't leave
looking for something better. We left fleeing from something
we feared and didn't understand. We knew what we thought we
were running from, but we didn't know where we were running to.
South Shore Valley was a community
of people turning the corner into the turbulent decade of the
1970s afraid of the shadows they thought they saw.
All someone had to do was yell
"boo!"