• About Marylou Shira Hadditt
  • About This Blog
  • Gallery

I'm Hadditt

~ 87 year old Marylou Shira Hadditt, born a Southern Belle-Jewish Princess, is a civil rights and political activist, lesbian feminist, mother, grandmother and writer who says, “I want to share my stories before I die."

I'm Hadditt

Tag Archives: integration

31 Organizations, 3000 Meetings

18 Sunday May 2014

Posted by hadditt in Chicago, Civil Rights, Hyde Park Herald, Hyde Park Kenwood

≈ Leave a Comment

Tags

activism, civil rights, Hyde Park Herald, Hyde Park Kenwood, integration

31 orgs img pt 1 31 orgs img pt2These two pages were published in the Herald’s 75th Anniversary Issue, and defined the way I saw Hyde Park. The headline reads : “31 ORGANIZATIONS, 3000 MEETINGS A YEAR and we all BELIEVE IN HYDE PARK.” Some of the outstanding qualities listed were:

  • We have an aware population. Hyde Park has the highest percentage of registered voters of any community in Chicago. Some of our organizations see to it that people register and vote and that people know what they are voting about.
  • We have an integrated population. Hyde Park is a microcosm of all races, religions, and creeds. Some of our organizations have’ seen to it that we don’t preach tolerance but instead live with our neighbors in harmony no matter who they are.
  • We are pioneering redevelopment. We have plans to improve the Hyde Park area in every material respect, to rebuild where necessary, to stop illegal conversions, yes, to close substandard buildings for occupancy. This is done through your organizations.
  • We have amazing facilities for our young people. We have numerous planned recreational and and educational projects. We have more than city-owned playgrounds – we have many community tot-lots and building facilities managed by organized groups. Our organized groups have made Hyde Park the pilot project for youth planning for the city of Chicago.
  • We have  an excellent program for the preschooler. We have non-profit nursery schools for children of working mothers, run by the community; all in the Hyde Park tradition of the very best for our population.
  • We helped pass laws locally and nationally. Hyde Parker put enough pressure on our state legislature to see that the Neighborhood Redevelopment Corporation Act – which would enable re-growth in  Hyde Park – passed. The first test case of this act was in Hyde Park. We’ve passe. national Laws. Just recently Congress enacted a bill to compensate merchants who are victims of urban renewal. This is a national precedent. Organized Hyde Parkers wrote letters and went to Washington.
  • We plan recreation for our adults. We have play reading groups, folk dancing, bridge clubs, painting classes, music groups, Great Books groups, crafts, and many more.
  • We’ve all sorts of special facilities. An Art Fair, organized sitter-swap made  up of people in the Hyde Park area, a credit union, a community operated supermarket, a winning fight on our Lake Front parks, museums, libraries…

These pages inventoried much of what Hyde Park organizations had done and were currently doing. There was a broad range of activity and an energetic belief in human nature and in the community. Years later, a book on urban renewal and Hyde Park, quoted these pages as “quintessential Hyde Park.”

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Tumblr
  • Twitter
  • Reddit

Build a Better America!

19 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by hadditt in Activism, Chicago, Civil Rights, Hyde Park Herald, Hyde Park Kenwood, Memoir, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

activism, Chicago, civil rights, Hyde Park Kenwood, integration, urban renewal

Build a Better America!

I believed that Hyde Park, the people who lived here and the organizations they supported would create the nation’s first interracial community of high standards. Moreover, I believed that only with a courageous newspaper, like the Herald, which serves as a means of communication and a catalyst for action, can Hyde Park succeed.

HPK - Build a Better America

School Friends Photo Courtesy of WoodleyWonderWorks @ Flickr

School Friends Photo Courtesy of WoodleyWonderWorks @ Flickr (this is not the original photo in the Herald piece, but I thought it was appropriate. ~Penny)

 

Just pause a few minutes to look at these children. Who are they? What are they? What are they doing? They are the very life blood of America … a heart which knows no color line, no religious differences, no social barriers. They are living and learning TOGETHER. These children know great things are not built alone. In their play they have discovered that two heads, regardless of faith or color, are better than one. So let the grownups pause long enough to think abut their own personal lives and those around them.

These words were written in 1953. At the time, they were considered by most of Chicago and much of the country as radical: “commie”- “red words”. For Hyde Parkers, they were words of belief in a community, words of promise and commitment. They are applicable today.

I believed that Hyde Park, the people who lived here and the organizations they supported would create the nation’s first interracial community of high standards. Moreover, I believed that only with a courageous newspaper, like the Herald, which serves as a means of communication and a catalyst for action, can Hyde Park succeed.

I was young when I wrote this- twenty-four. I believed in the power of the written word. I believed in the power of self determination. I still do.

ML 1956 1

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Tumblr
  • Twitter
  • Reddit

Dr. Gleason

18 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by hadditt in Chicago, Hyde Park Kenwood, Memoir

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Chicago Architecture, Hyde Park Kenwood, integration, race

Dr. Gleason

I vividly remember Dr. Gleason the year of the big blizzard. The time the Outer Drive was closed, the buses and even the Illinois Central commuter trains weren’t running. Twenty-four inches of snow fell in less than twelve hours. Everything was covered with masses of white, wet snow blown by the winds from Lake Michigan into fifteen and twenty foot snow drifts.

That is, everything was covered with snow except the sidewalk belonging to our across the street neighbor, Maurice Gleason. His sidewalk and driveway were pristine: spotlessly clean and dry. The minute more than a half inch of snow fell, the melting machines installed under Maurice’s sidewalk first melted the snow, then dried the concrete. We gazed out our windows, across the expanse of white which had been our lawn, across the street to see Dr. Gleason pacing the full length of his hundred foot sidewalk. He was a handsome fiftyish African-American man with light adobe colored skin and elegantly gray tinged side burns. He wore a maroon silk smoking jacket over dark trousers, shaking his head in disbelief as he strolled on his dry sidewalk from one fifteen foot snow drift to the other. He gazed at his garage door, at his clear driveway ready for him to back out the car, only to stop at street’s edge. There was no place to go.

We laughed and wondered if Maurice was also laughing – though we had our doubts. Ours was a laughter of both amusement and a good deal of self satisfaction – that Maurice had maybe finally gotten his comeuppance. He was such a perfectionist, which would have been all right if it were just about his house and land, but in the spring time, he would stroll over to our house, and point out the dandelions pocking our lawn. And winter time, as soon as those two inches of snow fell which activated his snow melting machines, he would come pester my husband, Tom, or me to tell Tom or my son, Steve that the snow needed shoveling.

As I look back, I recall that Tom and I were often derisive, poking fun at Maurice’s perfectionism. In retrospect, our attitude was racist. It was as though a rich African-American had no business telling white people how to mow their grass or shovel their snow. Back then, in the ’60’s, there was little or no understanding, much less an admission, of white awareness. Most white Hyde Parkers we knew were subtly sanctimonious about being neighbors to African Americans.

***
It was a pleasure to look across the street at the Gleason home.( See Hyde Park Federal page) It is now an official Chicago architectural landmark. Its melting machines were only part of its joy. The house was brick, half a hexagon which encircled three enormous weeping willow trees and was closed off from the street. All the rooms looked out on the willow trees. The interior had polished slate floors, heating pipes underneath. I recall being in the house once or twice in the twelve years we lived on 50th Street, and it was not for a meal. The neighborly exchange with our African-American neighbors was confined to the sidewalk. We lived next door to each other, but not really with one another. The three white neighbors borrowed a cup of sugar here, a muffin tin there. I have no idea what the African American neighbors did.

Dr. Gleason's Trees-edited

The Gleason family was the first African-American family to move into Kenwood.They purchased an older house, half a block away on Ellis Avenue before they built their present home with its the melting machines and willow trees. Tom, a great story teller, often related this version of the Gleason’s move into Kenwood:
The year was 1949. Maurice Gleason knew that he and his family were setting a precedent as the first African-Americans to move into the all white Kenwood neighborhood. The move was not without some apprehension, given the tenor of Chicago’s racial attitudes. The Gleasons experienced no problems on moving day- didn’t even see any neighbors, and with a sigh of relief, they went about unpacking their furniture and house-hold treasures. A couple of days after they moved in, Maurice, his wife Liz, and their daughter, Joy, were about to sit down to dinner when they heard the sound of many footsteps on their front porch. Fearing a white citizens council, Dr. Gleason sent his family upstairs for safe-keeping while he answered the door. Standing at the door were a half-dozen people- white men and white women. A woman stepped to the front of the group, holding an apple pie in her hands. She introduced herself, saying, “We’re neighbors. Welcome to Kenwood.”

 

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Tumblr
  • Twitter
  • Reddit

Hyde Park, 1950

10 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by hadditt in Activism, Chicago, Hyde Park Kenwood, Memoir

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

activism, Hyde Park Kenwood, integration, race, urban renewal

(note from Penny: this is the first of many essays/articles from “Fragment of a Memoir: Hyde Park Herald 1952-1967″.  I’ve always known of Hyde Park Kenwood on the south side of Chicago as “The First Integrated Neighborhood In America” but there is much, much more to the story. It is a story of displacement, urban renewal, and people coming together in new and groundbreaking ways)

 

1950

Hyde Park- 1950- the winter I moved in. Here was a one mile square community inclusive of the prestigious University of Chicago. Bordered on the East by Lake Michigan, parks, and beaches; on the North by an African American ghetto, on the West by a large urban park separating the university’s white community from the black neighborhoods pushing against it. To the South was a broad greensward, the Midway Plaissance, stretching one mile east to west, separating the academic world of the University from the rest of the city. The “Midway”, as it was called, was a remnant of the 1893 Chicago Colombian Exposition. Along the lake front was “Indian Village” so called because each of the high rise apartment buildings had Indian names, Algonquin, Chippewa, etc. including several steel and glass apartment buildings designed by avant garde Bauhuas architect, Meis Van de Rohe. Moving inland from the Lake were stone townhouses and large three and six flat apartment buildings occupied by middle and upper middle class academic and professional families. Heading west from the Lake, the number of single family homes and townhouses decreased, more and more six flat buildings appeared.

Until after World War II, Hyde Park Kenwood had a predominantly white and heavily Jewish population. In 1948, the Supreme Court declared respective covenants unconstitutional. Concurrently, two miles North of Hyde Park in what was considered the “black belt”, the Chicago Land Clearance began mass demolition. Large tracts of homes and apartments, owned by African Americans were acquired by the City of Chicago using powers of imminent domain often paying far below the market price for the properties. These were demolished, sold to white real estate developers for the construction of high price, high rise rentals. African American homeowners and tenants were left with no place to live.

African American families looked South to Hyde Park. Many joined together to purchase six and eight flat buildings on Hyde Park’s western edge. It was then, in late 1949, that a group of Unitarians, Quakers, Jews, and liberal U of C academicians met to explore welcoming the new neighbors. A grass roots group, the Hyde Park Kenwood Community Conference, was formed. Their goal was the creation of the first stable integrated community in the nation.. The Conference formed block groups, invited neighbors to gather together to meet one another and discuss needs of the immediate area. Gensie Fields and Dr. Gleason are specific examples of the kind of interchange which took place within the aegis of the Conference.

The winter of 1950 I moved, with my first husband, Warren and infant son Steve into a six flat building on the western edge of Hyde Park. Our landlord was an Asian Indian (I’d never before seen an Asian Indian) who was quite explicit about not being “colored,” but “Caucasian.” An orthodox Jewish couple, escapees of the Holocaust, lived across the hall. Six months after we moved in, they moved out- too many “schwartzes”. On the second floor were two Chinese couples, one with a little girl Steve’s age, and an African American couple with no children. I looked at my building -5548 Maryland Avenue –observed my neighbors- many of whom were African American. Pleased that I was far from the segregated South I’d grown up in. I was living with Negroes in an integrated world.

Every Wednesday, a stack of Hyde Park Herald newspapers was deposited in our building lobby- In that newspaper, every single week, were photographs of African American people and white people, side by side at meetings and at social functions. An integrated paper in an integrated community. In those pages I saw an actualization of an ideal from my childhood: as a nine year old hearing Paul Robeson sing “”Ballad for Americans”; as a teenager intent on author activist, Lillian Smith’s goal of all the children of the world – of all races, all colors or all religions, playing together, Now this seemed true on the pages of the Hyde Park Herald.

Two years later I joined its staff as advertising sales rep.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Tumblr
  • Twitter
  • Reddit

Recent Posts

  • Still Stirring Shit Up: Sonoma Seniors Protest Managment Change
  • Kaddish Poem
  • More Words on Racism
  • Dear Mr. President:
  • Breslaur’s Department Store

Recent Comments

  • Joanne Whitfield on Gallery
  • Suzanne Erfurth on Dr. Gleason
  • Suzanne Erfurth on Dr. Gleason
  • Les on Breslaur’s Department Store
  • William Schill on Breslaur’s Department Store

Archives

  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • April 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • July 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013

Categories

  • Activism
  • Chicago
  • Civil Rights
  • Family
  • Hyde Park Herald
  • Hyde Park Kenwood
  • Lesbian
  • Memoir
  • Poetry
  • Sonoma County
  • Uncategorized

Subscribe to be notified when new posts go up

Join 324 other subscribers

Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Chateau by Ignacio Ricci.