Transcription
By the late 1980s, the integration of Lombard placed Parkont on the radar for many striving black families in nearby segregated communities, leading them to seek residence there.
A reminder that Lumbar was the school the white Jewish people pushed the city to build after blacks began integrating in Win High School, which was the original school the kids in Parkmmont attended. So Lumbard was built to get away from blacks, but then in the 70s and the 80s, blacks began sending their kids to Lumbard as well.
Most of these early arrivals sought to escape the worsening crime and school conditions in a black community called Westside.
And at this time, they were able to do so. They weren't forced to live in black communities like they were up until the civil rights victories of the 1960s. So for the most part in the 70s and the 80s, blacks could move freely wherever they qualified to buy a home. So crime and school conditions in Westside were getting worse and therefore certain blacks took off.
At first, Park's black residents were few in number with fewer than 200 blacks residing in Parkmont in 1989, making up only 2% of the total population. In this very early stage of neighborhood integration, the new black residents coexisted with Parkont's white residents, who had by then become accustomed to seeing blacks in the community due to Lombard's largely black student body.
So, still on the radar of whites, but not the biggest deal yet, being only 2% of Park's population.
Interestingly, it was younger white families who seem to have spearheaded Park's white flight.
Why the younger and not the older leading white flight? Unlike older and middle-aged whites, those with school-aged children were forced to confront the decision about whether to send their children to Lumbard.
The younger group had kids to think about. Now, this is the stage where humans are extremely impressionable, and it's the time where foundational pieces of personality and beliefs are built. And a great deal of that is influenced by other kids at school. So, I'm pretty sure this played a major role in their decision to keep their kids at Lumbard or the Fleet.
The nearby First Ring suburbs, which have long been known for their concentration of old money and their streets lined with large, expensive homes and estates, were beyond the reach of Parkont families. However, white levers were unwilling to move too far away from Parkont as they valued the central location of their longtime neighborhood.
It was a sticky spot in the city. Typically, the levers move to suburbs that are located less than 10 miles away. And that met two criteria, availability of affordable homes and largely white populations.
So, these white Jews, who she calls the levers, had two basic requirements. They needed a place that was affordable and located away from blacks, and others identified as people of color. For them, that made it worth staying not too far from Park. Although the Jewish levers had similar incomes to their Catholic neighbors, they tended to select a different set of affordable suburban neighborhoods, those known for having a significant Jewish presence due to the earlier Jewish exodus from city neighborhoods into the suburbs.
So they narrowed their preference down further than just living amongst whites. They wanted to live amongst white Jews specifically. Now, why was that? because that creates the environment for their culture and ideas to reproduce with minimal outside influence. If they could avoid it, they would rather not share space with Catholic whites whose kids might try to convince theirs to worship some Jesus. Right? So that's one of the reasons they tended to select suburbs with a predominantly Jewish presence.
With younger white families on the move, the Parkont housing market opened up to black home buyers. And soon they could be found on every block.
Well, come on with it.
The more tolerant or less prejudiced older white residents stayed put, but many other whites moved to Florida or relocated to condos in the nearby suburbs. As one white resident who left said, "It changed. People moved. Some people seem like racial issues were always the thing. One person of color would move in and they were out."
Oh snaps, it's getting wild.
Like weeds, for sale signs multiplied on the lawns of row houses. As levers erected signs, residents could hear conversations among neighbors who frowned as they wisfully reminisced about the old days when Park was solidly white. To them, the very existence of for sale signs that were blatantly displayed on lawns announced an irreversible loss of community.
It's over with. Remember in the last commentary we discussed how for sale signs were never allowed there. They didn't want blacks having an piece of eye contact on homes that were for sale in that neighborhood. But those days were long gone. Now for sale signs were everywhere popping up like weeds.
With few exceptions, black families were the ones who replaced white movers as younger white families avoided the integrating neighborhood that contained a largely black school. As the scare spread, the inmigration of new black residents surged from a trickle to a steady stream.
Uhoh, here we go.
One black pioneer who moved in when Park was still mostly white described the speed and cause of the racial change this way.
Let me tell you something black people say to me. They'll say, "You know, your neighborhood changed." And I'll say, "Yeah, it's changed as far as being a white neighborhood to being a black neighborhood. It changed." And this is something that I've said. It was just like the plague was coming. Like once the blacks started buying, it's like the plague. When we came up here, it was nothing to have 10 or 12 for sale signs for a block.
Why?
Whites didn't want to live around us. So they left. They were out of here. It was like, "We got to go. We got to go."
That's plain and simple with no way around it.
As houses were going for sale all over the place. I told my husband one time, I'm like, "Damn." You know, we went to sleep and we woke up and the whole neighborhood is black. We didn't used to see that many blacks. It's like we went to sleep in the winter and it changed just that quick.
It threw her off. She wasn't expecting to move to a white neighborhood and within a blink of an eye, it turned all black. It almost seemed like the world was coming to an end when she peeped out her window and saw the whole neighborhood was black. Right. This stuff is wild.
In a short period of time, white panic took over and a large number of homes in Parkmont became available. This period of white flight coincided with the pent-up demand for housing in safe, reputable urban neighborhoods among the city's upwardly mobile workingclass black families from nearby communities.
This was a period where whites were running away from blacks to be around other whites and when upwardly mobile blacks were running away from inner city black neighborhoods. She's saying whites were fleeing at the same time that blacks desired to flee black neighborhoods. That's what this means underneath all the academic language.
Because this period of time overlapped with a national trend in the rise of specialized mortgages and government programs to support firsttime homeowners, even black buyers with only one income could make the leap to Parkont.
So, white flight opened up housing slots in Parkmont's community and government programs opened up more financial options. Those together created the opportunity. The other half of the equation required people to actually act on the opportunity, which many blacks did if they were tired of crime and the poor conditions in the inner city black neighborhoods. Even blacks with only one income could act on that opportunity to move to Parkmont.
In this modern era of white flight, hostility toward Park's blacks was not as overt as it had been in the 1970s when blacks first entered the community to attend school at Lombard. Instead of the open resentment found in the nearby Italian communities, Parkmont's mostly Jewish residents talked quietly about the change.
How?
They would discuss racial turnover only when it felt safe to do so. And even then, it was often in the context of other non-racial concerns such as schools, crime, and taxes.
That's cover up language people use when they don't want to be blunt and upfront about specific groups. Remember, we talked about this in the book White Flight by Dr. Kevin Cruz and how whites adjusted their political strategy from being super blunt about not wanting to be around blacks to later using more subtle language to address them without revealing racial intentions. That's what we're seeing here with the white Jews. That's why she has nonracial in quotation marks.
It would be dishonest to characterize Park's remaining whites as enthusiastic about integration or eagerly anticipating the chance to interact with blacks in order to advance the cause of racial harmony.
They weren't standing at the neighborhood entrance with signs saying, "We want more blacks to move over here, right? They weren't enthusiastic about integration and kumbayyanging with different colors."
That said, many of the whites who chose to remain in Parkont were the most tolerant of blacks integration.
That's what it was. a a tolerance.
These stayers were also active members of Parkmont's civic association and made concerted efforts to reach out to new black residents and help socialize them into community norms. Like the whites levers who moved away, the stayers were aware of the possibility that crime and disorder might accompany racial integration.
Pay attention. After all, whites in the United States have long associated blacks with crime because of negative past experiences, gossip, local news stories, as well as the more general media representations and stereotyping that pervade US culture and that are especially exaggerated in cities with large black populations.
Now, we know violent crime was extremely high in inner city black neighborhoods, especially in the 70s, 80s, and the '90s. And because of that, whites linked crime to those identified as black people. So when she says general media representations that are especially exaggerated, I assume that she means that they made it out to seem like the vast majority of black identified people were criminals when that wasn't the case. So, it sounds like she's saying that the media overdid it, which contributed more to the white perception of black involvement in crime.
Additionally, Parkmont's remaining whites had to endure the warnings of family members, friends, neighbors, and realtors who spoke of the inevitable ghettoization of Parkont and the associated risks to stayers, property investments, and personal safety.
Those are the legends and mythologies they passed around from lip to ear. Some true, some exaggerated. These were campfire stories of how every time blacks enter a neighborhood, it turns into a ghetto, where violent crime goes up and property values go down.
Thus, crime and disorder soon became the focus of civic association meetings convened at the local synagogue. Keeping longtime residents in the community, preventing and controlling crime, and avoiding social and environmental degradation were the key goals of Parkmont's block watch groups and block captains. It was no coincidence that civic association leaders and members timed the prioritization of these goals to overlap with the onset of black in migration. All of a sudden, it became high on the priority list.
I bet white stayers, many of whom were elderly, knew they needed the energy, skills, and interest of younger people to meet their goals. So, they eagerly urged new black residents to get involved. Stayers correctly assumed that these young black newcomers with families would be interested in maintaining a stable, orderly community with property values that would continue to appreciate over time.
The young black newcomers were the pioneers. They weren't moving over there to bring the ghetto and create all types of problems. They wanted a peaceful neighborhood just like the white stayers did. And because they valued the same thing, they were able to work together for a period.
So for a brief time, Park's whites and blacks actively worked together toward common goals.
But watch this. However, when white residents, some of whom were civic association members, continued to sell their homes and new whites failed to relocate to Parkont, membership in the civic association dwindled.
That civic association began dying. It reached the end of its life cycle.
Many of the remaining members became disillusioned as complete racial change started to seem inevitable and residents feared that economic and social decline might soon follow. morale and organizational effectiveness slowly deteriorated as older white stayers and young black newcomers felt betrayed by their community leaders and neighbors. With reegregation well underway and seemingly unstoppable and the knowledge that Parkont was not a violent community needing immediate intervention, it was easy for elderly white residents facing health deterioration and busy, hardworking pioneer families to cut back on their civic association involvement and refocus their attention on their personal lives.
They moved away from the needs of the community to focus on the needs of themselves as individuals.
As blacks continued to stream into Park, pioneers remained aware and concerned about the racial factors contributing to white out migration. When buying homes from whites, it was common place for black buyers to engage in awkward conversations with white movers.
Here it comes.
They would ask why the white sellers were moving, often with skepticism, and would hear a range of excuses. Since whites did not want to insult current black residents or scare off potential buyers, they mostly explained that Parkmont's housing was no longer meeting their changing lifestyle needs.
But the real reason was that there were too many blacks moving into the neighborhood and they didn't want to take the chance to find out what the outcome of that would be.
Sam Wilson, one of the first pioneers to move to Parkont, explained that even though whites were congenial when he first arrived, he still felt suspicious of the racial intolerance of white sellers. you felt welcome, but at the same time, you just assume that people aren't going to tell you the truth. They put their for sale sign up and say, "Well, my grandkids moved." Or they'll tell you, "We really don't want to leave, but the bills are so high now." Come on, they're just giving us an excuse. You don't have to tell me anything. You want to move. You got to do whatever the hell you want to do. But when you start giving me an excuse like that, that's definitely like you've got some sort of racial issue behind it.
It's getting good, ladies and gentlemen. Good people of the planet is getting good. Now, we're going to get into a little bit more on the black in migration into Parkmont in the next commentary. So, be on the lookout. All right. And so, I thank you right now for your time and attention. My name is Brooklyn St. Michael and I'll see you in the free