taking over really explained

When we grew up on the southwest side of Chicago, black people had long been segregated into a small strip of State Street  roughly around 31st Street.  There were legal means to keep them there and there was also violence against any black person who tried to move out of Bronzeville.  Because they could only live in that small area and more were moving in every day it got awfully crowded, rents soared and they were paying way more for a small apartment than was being charged in the white districts.

We grew up in the aftermath of that in Gage Park.  There was a movement southward, they crossed Ashland, and now Damen, and now they were at the tracks just east of Western.  Not too long ago Beagles and I both read a book about those times written by a guy who used to be a preacher at Elsdon Methodist.  I believe this is where Beagles picked up the term taking over, (which by the way he failed to explain what he meant by it in his post titled Taking Over Explained)

That is the phrase that went around these days, they are taking over.  What happened was a black person would buy a house in a white area, and all the white people would flee,  They fled because their property values would go down, but also a lot of them just plain did not like Black people,  They didn't want to live near them, have to work next to them, or have them sitting next to their kid in school.  There was strong racism everywhere evidenced by the behavior of the locals when Martin Luther King marched through Marquette Park.

I remember as a teenager people saying to me that they would never let them take over Marquette Park, like if even a single black family had a picnic there it would be polluted and white folks would never go there.  Nowadays there are black people picnicking in Marquette Park, there are also white people, they get along as well as people do these days, but I reckon Beagles considers that this means that the black people have taken over. 

Rainbow Beach was another of those white bastions of our youth.  We had to go through maybe a couple miles of black neighborhoods to get there.  It was completely surrounded by black neighborhoods but blacks were not permitted to wet their toes there, because that would be seen as taking over and they would get their heads busted.  It was integrated some time ago and white people stopped going there, but recently the south shore has been gentrifying and whites have been moving into the area

Gentrification is going on all over the neighborhoods that are close to downtown.  Pilsen, Humboldt Park, Cabrini Green.  I guess the white people are taking over in those areas too.  They don't bust any heads they just pay a lot more for properties than the former occupants can afford.

Nowadays Gage Park is almost all Mexican, but the bungalows are as well-kept and the lawns as trim as they were when it was all white.


There was this bogus argument that went around in Gage Park when most people were racist and proud of it, that the blacks had their neighborhoods and the whites had theirs so that everything was even steven.  Blacks were not allowed in white neighborhoods which was only fair because whites were not allowed in black neighborhoods.  The fact was that white people were afraid to go into black neighborhoods because they feared blacks but white people who had business there didn't have a problem, whereas black people who ventured into white neighborhoods were likely to get their heads busted.  Because black people were mostly poor their neighborhoods were crappy and white people did not want to live there.  White neighborhoods were pretty nice but if a black person worked hard and made enough money he was not allowed to move into a white neighborhood.  There was nothing even about it.

What Beagles means by taking over is when people not as white as he want the same privileges that he has: work, school, residence, but he does not to give them that.  But that doesn't sound so good so he says taking over.  And that is what taking over really means.   


A ;lot of stuff on the Beaglestonian this morning.  Glad to see Old Dog contributing something,  but I don't have time to address everything today.