Our street: the 4200 block of Washington Boulevard.
Saturday, June 22, 1963
Well, the mystery of who bought the Young-Parker house has been solved. As more or less expected, the colored moved in today. It somehow gives me a squeamish feeling to be confronted with the actual fact of having them on our block. The question is, what course to follow? How long before no whites will be renting here anymore?
—from the diary of Lillian Gartz
For years, the prospect of blacks moving into our West Side Chicago community terrified my parents and our neighbors. They talked about it in the alley, on the sidewalk, after church (in hushed tones), or while stopping for a chat when Mom and I shopped on Madison Street, the West Side’s bustling commercial area. I overheard comments like “If the colored come here, the neighborhood will be destroyed” and “Everything we worked for is tied up in our house. If the colored move in, we could lose it all.” The adults’ conversations made it sound as if they thought an invading force were at the city gates.
We kids picked up on the frightening future should the “colored” come to our area. Each comment we overheard added another boulder to a growing wall of resistance against unknown people. But now that a black family lived just two doors away, the wall had been breached. “What’s going to happen?” I asked Dad, who was seated at a card table strewn with notes, writing up reports for his job.
Dad looked up. As usual, he was calm, but his signature smile was absent, his eyes serious. “We can’t know yet. Let’s just sit tight until we see how they act.”
Mom was indecisive, too. She had written further in her diary:
We have hopes of getting $25,000 if we sell. We should, but will we? The question is, what course to follow? Contemplating renting it out—but what a headache! How long will it be before no whites are renting here anymore?
The new African American family on our block must have been plenty jittery themselves. Although we saw no violence toward them, only four years earlier, thousands of whites, throwing bricks and shouting racial epithets, had converged on the first house sold to blacks in West Garfield Park.
This Saturday night, with our windows open to let in a breeze, we heard the new kids in their backyard, shooting off popguns at ten thirty. “Why are those kids making all that noise so late at night?” Mom griped, pacing the dining room, poking her head out the back door, unable to concentrate on her bills and financial work. Sure enough, the newcomers were “causing problems.”
Mom decided she’d give the neighbors a hint. She let out our two spotted mutts, Buttons and Bows. Bounding into the backyard, the dogs barked at the unusual commotion. Paul yelled across the fences, “Stop annoying the dogs!”
“We ain’t botherin’ your dogs,” a young voice called back.
“Well, it’s too late to be making noise. Why don’t you go inside?”
The laughter and shouts ceased; the popguns went quiet. A door banged shut. “They went right in,” Paul said, holding open the screen door. The dogs leaped into the house in tail-wagging unison.
“They went right in?” Mom asked in disbelief, looking up from the checkbook she was struggling to balance.
“Yeah. I told them that it was too late for noise, and they . . . they just stopped and went inside.”
“Oh,” said Mom, looking around, as if searching for an answer to this puzzling outcome. “That’s a surprise.”
“A good sign, too,” said Dad, “that they care what their neighbors think.”
But local whites stayed on high alert. Our neighbor to the east talked to Mom over the fence about moving. “The colored keep ringing my bell—to see if I’m selling, I suppose,” she said, petting her pop-eyed Chihuahua. “I’d just as soon get out before it’s too late.”
“We’re trying to decide what to do, too,” said Mom, mopping the sweat trickling down her cheek that hot June day.
Except for a black girl in my class at my local grade school, I didn’t know any African Americans—nor did my parents. Prior to the civil rights movement, which had been steadily gaining steam during the spring of 1963, blacks had been virtually invisible in our segregated lives. We saw no blacks on television (except for Amos ’n’ Andy, which was later decried for its stereotypical portrayal of African Americans). I saw no blacks in magazine or newspaper ads, and no blacks on billboards, unless we drove through a black neighborhood—where I felt as if we’d entered a foreign country.
My childish understanding had been that blacks had their neighborhoods and we had ours, as if it were simply the natural order of the world.
But now a black family lived just two doors away. That “order” was shattered.