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By: Jeff Kelly LowensteinMartin Luther King Jr. often talked about his vision of the “beloved community” in which people from diverse backgrounds lived in loving harmony. He named fear, prejudice, pride and irrationality as obstacles to achieving a truly integrated society. “Those dark and demonic responses will be removed only as men are possessed by the invisible, inner law which etches on their hearts the conviction that all men are brothers, and that love is mankind’s most potent weapon for personal and social transformation,” he said.

Were King alive today and visiting Chicago, 40 years after the Chicago Freedom Movement, the civil rights leader might take an initial look at the North Side’s Uptown neighborhood and conclude that his vision had materialized.

In 2000, among Uptown’s 63,551 residents, 42 percent were white, 21 percent were black, 20 percent were Latino and 13 percent were Asian. These racial groups were not just living in pockets within the neighborhood. An analysis of census data revealed that most of Uptown’s census tracts did not include more than 50 percent of any single racial or ethnic group. In addition, the North Side trio of Uptown, Rogers Park and Edgewater is home to the city’s highest numbers of same-sex households and interracial households.

Signs of Uptown’s mixed character abound.

The Old World Market near the intersection of Broadway Street and Foster Avenue sells food from Nigeria, Mexico and Jamaica, while a nearby dollar store advertises phone cards for Africa, the Middle East and Mexico. And a four-part “racial reconciliation mural” is painted on the side of Unique Thrift Store at the corner of Sheridan Road and Sunnyside Avenue. Organized by Uptown Baptist Church in 1995 and restored in 2001, the mural depicts an idyllic natural world that is populated with people of different skin colors, shattered by a wooden club with metal spikes representing the sins of racism and hatred, and then healed through a multi-colored Christ’s love. The scene is surrounded by the words faith, love, hope and peace.

But a broader view of Chicago reveals a much different picture.

Some people, like longtime activist Kale Williams, who marched alongside King during Chicago’s open housing marches, suggest that King would be far from overjoyed if he saw that most of the city’s neighborhoods display the racial sameness as they did in 1966. “I see that we haven’t advanced very much when it comes to poor black people,” said Williams, senior scholar at Loyola University’s Center for Urban Research and Learning. “There are very few … well-integrated neighborhoods. For poor blacks and other [racial] minorities, conditions are just as bad as they were 40 years ago.”

In a four-part series, The Chicago Reporter is examining King’s work in the Chicago Freedom Movement of 1966, using that struggle as a lens to examine what insight about present day Chicago can be gleaned from it. This story, the second installment, focuses on the entrenched segregation King encountered and how much of it remains today.

Were he to return to Chicago, King would find a city that is far more diverse, but whose movement toward the integration he described has been neither rapid nor comprehensive.

In 1960, less than one in four of the city’s nearly 3.6 million people were racial minorities. Powered by a large influx of Latinos and Asians, by 2000, African Americans, Latinos and Asians accounted for nearly two in every three of Chicago’s nearly 2.9 million residents. And the city features communities like Rogers Park and Uptown where thousands of blacks, whites, Latinos and Asians live in close proximity to each other.

Still, Chicago remains among the nation’s cities with the highest rates of segregation between blacks and whites. In fact, black Chicagoans are more concentrated in heavily populated black areas now than they were in the years leading up to King’s Chicago campaign. The number of communities that were at least 90 percent black tripled between 1960 and 2000. And the percentage of the city’s black residents living in those communities grew from 41 percent to 55 percent.

Latinos, too, are concentrated in majority Latino communities.

Although blacks are not excluded from neighborhoods the way they were during King’s visit, there are still areas of the city where few African Americans live. In 11 of the city’s 77 community areas, blacks were less than 1 percent of the population in 2000. In 33 communities, African Americans were less than 10 percent of the population.

“I see it more like a slow drip than progress,” said John Logan, professor of sociology at Brown University in Providence, R.I. “It’s sort of like a water torture. You might be expecting and hoping for substantial change, but you’re being tortured by how slow it is.”

While discrimination and racism still exist in Chicago, the city has seen a substantial amount of racial progress since the Chicago Freedom Movement, argues Paul Green, the Arthur Rubloff Professor of Policy Studies at Roosevelt University. “There are a lot of people who are now living an integrated lifestyle and not thinking anything of it,” said Green, who maintained that the degree of overt racial hostility has diminished since King’s time. “There are still a lot of hurdles, but I think in my lifetime things have improved 500 percent. As long as the economy can grow, and people can have jobs … the change is going to keep going.”

For his part, Floyd Russaw, an African American who has lived in South Shore for almost 40 years, agreed with Green that the city’s racial separation endures partially because of individuals’ choices. “I could afford to live any place,” said Russaw, who cited the softening of racial boundaries between neighborhoods during the time he has lived in Chicago. “I elect to live here.”

Green believes that class has become a more significant wedge between communities than race in the past 40 years. “You don’t see any hue and cry from the middle-class black community demanding that those poor souls leaving public housing come into their wards in the name of racial solidarity. Just the opposite,” he said.

But others are less convinced of the diminishing role of race in the city’s housing patterns, and that those patterns still exist by choice.

“I’m not quite as optimistic,” said Rob Breymaier, director for community relations at the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities. While Chicago has witnessed some progress during the past 25 years, he said discrimination still exists and contributes to persistent residential segregation for African Americans and Latinos.

“About 20 percent of the time they are given less information, being limited in their options … or being blatantly, or nearly blatantly, discriminated against,” said Breymaier, who worked on the Chicago portion of a fair housing research study conducted by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

And he said the decisions of blacks and Latinos to live in mostly black and Latino communities may be motivated by persistent perceptions that other communities would not welcome them.

Breymaier also cautioned against treating the fall of segregated strongholds as triumphs of racial uplift. Some communities that have opened themselves to blacks and Latinos, particularly those on the South Side and in the south suburbs, are now viewed as depressed areas with lots of poverty, he said. In addition, many of these areas have resegregated with a different racial group, like west suburban Cicero, a former all-white ethnic enclave that is now nearly 80 percent Latino.

He questioned what Cicero might look like 20 years from now. “Will it look like Harvey or look like Barrington?” Breymaier said. “There are very few places that have over 80 percent minority population and are economically well off.”

He said that elected officials, real estate agents and local businesses all have an important role to play in working affirmatively for integrated communities. “[Realtors] have a duty to tell a person what all of their options are,” said Breymaier. “When someone does something to self-segregate, [realtors] need to tell them what they are doing and identify the risks and benefits of each choice.”

In Uptown, the Wilson Yard Development, a mix of affordable housing, retail space, movie theaters and parking, is one effort where people from different backgrounds have recognized common interests, said Alderman Helen Shiller, whose 46th Ward includes most of the Uptown neighborhood. “It’s taken a huge amount of effort and time and political will by many people to maintain any kind of diversity,” she said. “I try to do a lot of stuff that involves planning and conversation.”

But Shiller concedes that there is room for growth. She cited racial and economic differences between subsidized housing residents of all races and some of the neighborhood’s newer, more affluent residents, many of whom are white. “[These youth] are being observed under a microscope by people who have no understanding of their culture, at a time when they are most vulnerable in life,” she said.

Judy Mancref, who has lived in Uptown off and on since 1960, explained that she has been called a “white honky” by other residents. “People don’t like each other,” she said.

Michael Maly, author of “Beyond Segregation: Multiracial and Multiethnic Neighborhoods in the United States,” said that people of different backgrounds living in a community is a starting point, not an ending place, for integration. “I think it’s better than nothing,” said Maly, who heads the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Roosevelt University.

Maly noted that integration in Uptown stemmed from external forces---like the neighborhood’s supply of affordable housing, social service agencies and lakefront access---rather than from intentional community action. He added that Uptown’s comparatively large Latino and Asian populations act as a buffer for some whites, who might otherwise leave Uptown if they thought it had too many African Americans. “Race still matters, particularly when it comes to housing. Even if people don’t say it, that’s the case. We like to think it’s color blind,” Maly said.

“Neighborhoods considered ‘black’ are wrongly stereotyped. If there are other groups there, then it doesn’t carry the same stereotype,” he said. “If [the community] is 20 percent Latino and [13] percent Asian, it doesn’t have the perception that the neighborhood’s going black.”

In the next installment of this series, the Reporter will retrace the steps of King and other key activists who planned “open housing” marches into the city’s white ethnic neighborhoods, like those surrounding Marquette Park on the Southwest Side, as a way to visibly illustrate the injustices occurring in housing markets.

Leading to some of the Chicago Freedom Movement’s most dramatic and bloody encounters, these marches demonstrated in memorable fashion that violent resistance to efforts aimed at ending racial segregation was not confined to the South.