The Choice We Face Read online

  Some Whites cashed in on the housing crises that they had carefully engineered. When Black families began to move into White neighborhoods, Whites opted to sell their homes under unfavorable circumstances rather than live next to Black homeowners. White speculators swooped in to capitalize, purchasing the homes of Whites, who often panicked and sold for far less than their houses were worth. Speculators could offer cash up front, which Whites needed for down payments on their new homes. Speculators then sold to African Americans, who were eager to move and willing to pay more for the same home. They charged, on average, 73 percent more than they purchased a home for. They relinquished the title only once the mortgage was paid in full—a prospect that remained a distant dream.39

  To further enhance their profit, White speculators scaled back on maintenance and general upkeep. Their negligence led to increased deterioration of homes and neighborhoods, urban decay and blight. And White Chicagoans were terrified. It appeared that the entire city was crumbling before them.

  Violence and flight were the most visible forms of White resistance to desegregation, but Whites also mobilized an elaborate defense of what they marked as their space, drawing on myriad local economic and political decisions. In a coordinated effort under the rubric of “urban renewal” to stave off “blight” and the Black “invasion,” affluent Whites, civic leaders, and business owners formed partnerships with corporations that had financial stakes in the city. They tapped public funds available from local, state, and federal agencies after powerful coalitions pushed through legislation such as the Illinois Blighted Areas Redevelopment Act of 1947. Later supported by federal policies such as the American Housing Act of 1949, legislation around urban development authorized “slum clearance” and the construction of new public housing. “Slums” and “ghettos,” in the common parlance used to denote all-Black or all-Brown segregated areas, were to be cleared, literally. Led by the Chicago Land Clearance Commission, White Chicagoans called on officials in bodies such as the Chicago Land Clearance Commission to “check the blight” and physically remove Black neighborhoods in disrepair while “renewing” the cleared areas. For the victims of this policy, the process was tantamount to “Negro Clearance.”40

  There was nothing equal about urban renewal. The Urban League in the 1950s launched an investigation into Chicago’s renewal problems and preservation efforts. Its conclusion in 1958 was unsurprising: “Urban renewal, as conducted up to now, in Chicago, is working great and undue hardships on the Negro population, and, on balance, is working more and more harm on the city as a whole.” The Urban League also observed a pattern of racial segregation in the city that surpassed that of any other urban area in the nation and claimed that Chicago was the most segregated major city in the United States. Between 1948 and 1956, approximately eighty-six thousand Chicagoans were displaced by urban renewal projects, 67 percent of whom were African American. Roughly 11 percent of Chicago’s Black population was forced to relocate.41

  Chicago developed a solution to urban “decay” attributed to Black families moving outside Black neighborhoods. City leaders initiated public-private ventures between city, state, federal, and corporate interests. It established a national protocol that influenced urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s throughout the nation. As Chicago renegotiated racial boundaries under the guise of de facto or “natural” segregation, a pattern was emerging in the North that not only maintained residential segregation but also kept school integration at bay.

  Milton Friedman took up residence in the South Side’s Hyde Park neighborhood to teach at the University of Chicago at a time when Whites thought that urban blight was a threat to the school’s very existence. University officials and neighborhood residents anxiously anticipated a Black invasion. More and more Black families were moving into the area. Thousands would soon follow. Whites wanted to avoid what they saw as a point of no return—a line that, once crossed, would make their “interracial” neighborhood an all-Black ghetto. Chancellor Lawrence A. Kimpton claimed in 1959 that the university’s effort in urban renewal was “no less than for the university’s survival.”42 Enrollment was already dropping due to a perceived urban crisis, propagated by racialized fears of the “blackboard jungles” of urban education.43

  The University of Chicago, and the Hyde Park and Kenwood neighborhoods that surrounded it, were desirable areas for Black families who felt the stress of overcrowding. In Black neighborhoods, housing was deteriorating and families were increasingly packed into jammed tenements and overfull apartment buildings. Essentially forced into legally and politically constructed ghettos, African Americans were isolated and primed to move to other parts of the city. The Hyde Park and Kenwood neighborhoods were a logical destination and were increasingly more valuable as the Black population continued to boom. In 1950, only 6 percent of the Hyde Park–Kenwood neighborhood was African American. By 1956, one year after Friedman published his essay on school choice, about 37 percent of neighborhood residents were Black and other people of color.44 Whites were panicking, to be sure. They were attuned to what the Chicago Urban League cited in 1958: that once 25 percent of a neighborhood was occupied by families of color, the community quickly became virtually all-Black.45

  In the 1950s, Whites saw what they angrily interpreted as an approaching storm. The transition their neighborhoods were experiencing was unstable, the growth unsustainable. Over 60 percent of families in Hyde Park–Kenwood had been in their current homes for less than three years. Over 33 percent had been in their present home for less than a year. Streets were congested. Parking spaces were limited. Some buildings were unsightly and unkempt. Crime increased. “On its northwest border was a segregated Negro area,” the Chicago Tribune noted of the university neighborhood, “bursting at its seams.”46 As one neighborhood organizer noted, “The tremendous population densities in the ghetto that almost surrounds Hyde Park–Kenwood will continue to build up and roll right over us. The very existence of the ghetto makes for unrest, tension, and flight throughout the whole South Side.”47

  Following a pattern established across the city, university officials by 1960 had teamed up with local and state governments to “save” the university area and maintain a “stable, interracial community.”48 White, affluent, well-educated Hyde Park residents joined other Chicagoans who sought to delay what they saw as “inevitable decay” or the “‘natural history’ of all cities for the center to change from a highly desirable living area to a blighted and decayed slum as the city expanded.”49 Behind a banner of integration and progress, the institution participated in clearing slums on the South Side, especially Hyde Park. It was a practice that was part of what sociologist Margaret Weir and historians Thomas Segrue and Matt Delmont call “defensive localism,” Whites defending their right to own property and maintain boundaries around that property by racially segregating their neighborhood. Hyde Park was cited as the third-largest urban renewal project in the country after projects in New York and Philadelphia, cities also threatened “by encroaching slum and crime problems.”50 In 1958, the University of Chicago demolished four blocks in the southwest portion of the city, an area bordering Washington Park, the neighborhood that had transitioned after the Hansberry case.51

  Hyde Park neighborhood associations sought to control the extent of integration. This amounted to limited desegregation that carefully projected images of diversity while preserving the essence of the White neighborhood. They even recruited African American residents to work with them in cultivating a “stable” interracial neighborhood that adhered to a middle-class White aesthetic and sensibility.52 It was in their own best interests to permit token desegregation with people of color who engaged in the politics of respectability. The neighborhoods did not necessarily have to be all-White for university officials and local homeowners. However, it still had to be majority White, and families of color were expected to conform to White norms.

  The university maintained racial covenants in the housing it continued to ope
rate. Though working under a superficial call for interracial communities, building managers catered to Whites, refusing to rent or lease to students of color, even those enrolled at the university.53 As historian Arnold Hirsh noted, “The university was hardly engaging in a noble experiment on the viability of interracial communities.”54

  The University of Chicago was a powerful ally of fearful white residents in the urban renewal project on the South Side. Its law school supported urban renewal efforts by threatening litigation against “slum landlords” in violation of city ordinances.55 The board of trustees contributed over 20 percent of the budget of the local neighborhood commission that directed urban renewal in the area, the South East Chicago Commission. Board members, who included banker David Rockefeller, grandson of the university’s founder, contributed money and helped leverage private and corporate donations toward renewal.56 The university worked with local neighborhood organizations as well. Since the 1940s, White homeowners there had been organizing neighborhood associations to combat impending blight. Stories of violence and fears of Black bodies that drew on racial stereotypes heightened the sense of urgency.

  The University of Chicago and the Hyde Park–Kenwood neighborhood successfully maintained the “interracial” neighborhood they desired. The project was heralded a success. Mayor Richard Daley, reflecting in 1960 on the renewal of the area, stated: “The program of conservation and renewal in Hyde Park–Kenwood is an excellent example of what can be done through the cooperation between government and private enterprise. But the key to democratic progress . . . has always been citizen interest.”57 Daley’s reflection captured the ardent belief that not only was progress made in saving the neighborhood but also that private enterprise and individuals drove that success. These were the cornerstones of the new ideology that would drive privatization and school choice for the remainder of the century.

  Racial covenants and residential segregation policies alone did not create Chicago’s segregated schooling. As historian Elizabeth Todd-Breland writes, the school boards and school district administrators perpetuated segregation by “manipulating school assignment policies, meticulously districting attendance areas along racial lines, creating barriers to student transfers, and building new schools to maintain this segregation.”58 Such policy decisions from various housing, government, and school agencies at the local, state, and federal level helped remake what historian Ansley Erickson called the “unequal metropolis.”59 Students in Chicago were subject to state-sponsored, legal segregation, though it was more subtle and hidden than the de jure school segregation in the South.

  Starkly segregated public schools defined life in the Windy City as much as racialized ghettos, drawing the scorn of civil rights advocates. The Chicago branch of the NAACP filed reports in 1957 with the city’s board of education, sharing its estimates that over 90 percent of elementary schools and over 70 percent of high schools were de facto segregated. Parents and civil rights activists took matters into their own hands. They launched Operation Transfer in 1961 and sought to transfer 160 Black students to all-White schools. The transfers were denied. They filed Webb v. Board of Education in 1963 through civil rights lawyers, and the NAACP urged Superintendent Benjamin C. Willis and the Chicago Board of Education to refrain “from maintaining and requiring attendance at racially segregated public schools.”60 The courts ultimately ruled that “school segregation resulting from residential segregation, alone, is not a violation of any right over which this Court can take cognizance.”61 In a long pattern validated by the federal government, school district administrators and city officials claimed they did not intentionally segregate by law. Segregation, they claimed, was caused not by intent—which was unconstitutional—but by circumstances and conditions beyond the control of the schools. Courts did not find this de facto segregation to be in violation of the law.

  The Webb case was ultimately settled out of court and prompted a formal investigation into the nature and status of segregation in city schools. The 1964 Report to the Board of Education of the City of Chicago by the Advisory Panel on Integration of the Public Schools found that 90 percent of Black students attended racially segregated schools. The report also found a pervasive lack of qualified teachers, poor test scores, higher dropout rates than White schools, and generally far fewer resources in Black schools.62

  To evade court action and to stave off criticisms and further demands for integration, district officials drew up and used a voluntary transfer plan that allowed families of color to apply to transfer to or otherwise enroll in White schools. Much like the “freedom of choice” plans in the South, this placed the onus of desegregation on the backs of Black families. Withholding transportation to White schools while harassing Black transfer students, White parents and officials ensured that plans were largely ineffective, leading only to token desegregation.63

  To add insult to injury, Superintendent Willis ordered the arrangement of aluminum mobile classrooms for Black and underfunded schools as a way to assuage concerns about overcrowding. Dubbed “Willis Wagons” by civil rights activists and Black parents, the mobile units symbolized the intentions of the city to avoid integration and dismiss demands for quality public education.64

  The city of Chicago and the White men who dictated its education policy made it painfully clear that both neighborhoods and their schools would remain segregated or marginally desegregated, to their own benefit. Even as the civil rights movement won desegregation victories in the South, northern cities like Chicago stood in Dixie-like defiance.

  Supported by a prevailing notion that segregation was somehow “natural” or not produced by law and policy, Chicago was spared the federal intervention that enabled integration of segregationist strongholds in the South during the 1960s. But civil rights activists continued to petition for such intervention. The Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), the civil rights coalition working to desegregate Chicago schools, applied mounting pressure to address racist policy. It organized boycotts, demonstrations, and protests calling for Willis’s resignation and immediate desegregation. The coalition sought legal redress and took advantage of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—the provision stating that institutions, including schools, that practiced segregation would not receive federal funding. In 1965, the CCCO filed a formal complaint of discrimination to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). The federal government found Chicago to be in violation of the law and planned to withhold $32 million of federal funding to force the city to desegregate.65

  It was the first test case of the segregation clause of the Civil Rights Act in a major northern city. Infuriated by the prospect of federally enforced desegregation—presuming it designed only for the racist South—Mayor Richard Daley flexed his political prowess, personally intervening with President Johnson and threatening to withhold the support of Illinois senators and representatives. Johnson and HEW backed off.66

  The city later implemented “voluntary” desegregation plans, which included limited busing routes to transport Black students to White schools. These plans, coupled with an expressed commitment to desegregation, were enough to meet minimal compliance under the Civil Rights Act. The city was free to move forward without federal oversight.67 It would not be until the Carter administration that a federal court decree was issued to desegregate Chicago schools.

  The potential for federal oversight in the North shocked the sensibilities of northern politicians who had passed the Civil Rights Act, assuming that de jure segregation was a problem confined to the former Confederacy. But it also fomented resistance to desegregation in the North, confining “forced integration” to the southern states.

  As no formal Jim Crow laws existed in Chicago, Superintendent Willis, the Chicago Board of Education, and Mayor Daley maintained that they were not perpetuating racial segregation. Friedman concurred, noting: “Chicago has no law compelling segregation. Its laws require integration.”68 Such claims ignored both the real thr
eats of violence against people of color moving into White neighborhoods and the breadth of systemic policy that undergirded segregation in Chicago. Whites defending the “racial integrity” of their neighborhoods did not use the openly racist language of southern segregationists or Jim Crow laws. But they sustained the same racist practices and unequal results through the use of color-blind rhetoric. They also acted on the premise that residential segregation was beyond their control—and the courts agreed. In a pattern that would define desegregation efforts in the North, courts did not account for past housing codes or private, if not vigilante, efforts to maintain residential segregation. The courts often blurred the lines between de jure and de facto segregation. But barring any explicit legal racism or intentionality, northern segregation remained free from any meaningful federal oversight and went largely unchecked.

  From Milton Friedman’s perspective, Chicago represented a limited victory for free market education. The education market in Chicago was free to operate without court-ordered or federal desegregation mandates. Yet Friedman’s “free market” was not free to all. When the courts in cases such as Webb v. Board of Education (1963) would not recognize the entrenched policies behind the residential segregation that perpetuated school segregation, they proved unwilling to create the level playing field required to participate fairly in Friedman’s educational marketplace. Whites’ intimidation and terrorism went unchecked. Whites firebombed Black homeowners with impunity, using fear to wield influence that outweighed that of civil rights groups opposing segregation. These Whites who acted with violence and vitriol while retaining a position of power further confounded Friedman’s theory, exposing the sanctioned violence of “rational” actors and the influence they yielded.