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The Art Luncheon

20 Tuesday May 2014

Posted by in Chicago, Hyde Park Herald, Hyde Park Kenwood

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The Art Luncheon

The Art Luncheon and Exhibition was one of the few times all of Hyde Park Kenwood joined together, without dissension, without numerous bosses knowing how to do it differently, simply to enjoy the area’s children and the way they perceived their community.

April 1957 we received a standard letter from Mayor Daley’s office inviting the Herald to celebrate “Clean up Week” to be held the week before spring break in the public schools. I invented a variation on cleanup: an educational program within the elementary schools on urban renewal. The Herald would encourage students to paint or draw their perceptions of urban renewal and offer prizes. I was referred to Evelyn Krackover, an imaginative and energetic superintendent of art for the district. (See Co-op photo).

Evelyn was concerned that as many students as possible be involved; that we obtain community experts to lecture students on urban renewal; that parents be involved in taking classes on field trips to observe changes in the neighborhood. Furthermore, it was not to be considered a “contest”, but an:”exhibition”.

The idea blossomed. Local organizations offered prizes – YMCA memberships, scholarships to classes at the Hyde Park Art Center, memberships to the Neighborhood Club, art supplies, gift certificates. No money was to change hands. A presentation luncheon was planned at the lake front Del Prado Hotel.. Mayor Daley himself made a brief appearance. The business and organizational community happily representative. Top awards of a $50 bond were presented to a child from each of the participating six schools. These children and their parents were guests at the luncheon.

Many of the illustration were remarkable, showing a sensitivity to demolition and construction processes and an astonishing sense of design. Others touched me deeply which depicted a child or children (usually African American) sadly sitting among debris or watching demolition of a home or apartment building.

All illustrations submitted were displayed in local merchants windows’ . An alphabetical directory of each child showing the displaying store was published in the Herald. The most complicated part of the entire festival was returning each illustration to the correct child in the correct school. Every child who submitted an illustration received a blue ribbon.

Note: The following Herald front page is typical: In addition to the Art Luncheon article, note articles on urban renewal demolition, “rebel” on Co-op board, a fire, robbery and trees.

Dr. Gleason

18 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by in Chicago, Hyde Park Kenwood, Memoir

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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.”

 

Gensie

16 Thursday Jan 2014

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

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This was written in 1950, in the early days of Hyde Park’s experiment in creating a viable interracial urban community. The Hyde Park Kenwood Conference was a strong grass roots organization which joined together diverse ethnic and racial groups by means of block group meetings and social activities. This was a beginning of a time for the white population to listen to the peoples of color.

Gensie

We sat around Herb and Lenore T.‘s living room, ten or twelve of us, at a meeting of the Maryland Drexel block group of the Conference. Everyone was busy counting white faces. black faces and Asian faces. Nobody admitted, especially to themselves, that they were counting. People talked about rats in the alleys and street lighting; how Hyde Park must not become a slum and that we need to press for city services. All valid complaints, but an easy way to avoid talking about the real issues: race. Everyone was afraid to ask what if felt like to be black (a term not yet invented in 1950) or white. No one dared ask the University professor if he liked living next door to a Pullman porter. Or how the Pullman porter liked living next to the professor. The issues were there, but never placed on the table.

Until Gensie F. appeared at a meeting.

She was a small woman, stylishly dressed is a tailored suit with a shy feathered hat perched on her head. Her soft voice was commanding, so filled with quiet rage that the room stopped breathing.

“You folks think because I moved here and because my house was torn down by Slum Clearance ? That I lived in a slum? Do you honestly believe that Negroes bring slums with them? “Well, let me tell you something. I had a home that looked out on the Lake. Every morning I woke up early to watch the sun rise over that lake and into my house. In all the years I lived there, the Lake was never the same color twice; sometimes it was purple, sometimes it was green, and sometimes, in a fog, it was silver. “That’s the house they told me was a slum, I had three fireplaces with tile scenes on them: one had cupids, another knights and ladies, and another pyracantha leaves. My oak floors were beautifully refinished and every Saturday I polished my brass door knobs.

“One day this man I never saw before knocks and my door and tells me the Slum Clearance is going to tear down my beautiful home. He offered to buy my house for a third of what it was worth. I refused. He told me I had no choice. Slum Clearance would take my house with eminent domain.

So what could I do? I took the little money they gave me and went partners with my sister. We purchased a small house in Hyde Park. I come to meetings now and hear everyone talking about rats in the alley and not wanting to make a slum. Let me tell you: I never made a slum, I didn’t take a slum with me when I moved. And like a lot of Negroes, all we want is a decent place to live, to raise our families. Sometime, I drive past my where my old home was. Everything is gone. Instead, there are white only apartment buildings for the rich folks to watch the sun rise over the Lake. Evidently, that’s not for colored school teachers like me.

Hyde Park, 1950

10 Friday Jan 2014

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

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(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.