West of western Part 2

We left Chicago in September of 1963, you for the army, me for college. I was still back for Christmas and Thanksgiving and summer vacations for the first couple years and so I was in touch with what was going on, but as the years went by less so. But I was always reading the Sun-Times.

I’m not sure if I was still living in Chicago when block busting reared its ugly head. This was where the real estate guys would find a black family willing to move into a white neighborhood and make sure all the neighbors knew that a black family was moving in, and they would all panic and move out so the realtors would buy the property cheap and sell it high to the black families moving in, and because the feds wouldn’t give mortgages to people living in mixed race areas, they’d have to sign contracts where if they were late on a single payment the realtor could take back the home and they would have nothing.

Some of the white neighbors were out and out racists who would never live next to black people, but most were not that extreme, but they just worried that their property values would go down, and the longer you waited, while the neighborhood was turning, the less you would get for it, so you better sell quick, and I guess those neighborhoods turned pretty fast. I think it happened mostly to the east and the south of my neighborhood, but I don’t think it ever happened around 55th and Kedzie, and probably there is not a black person living in the neighborhood to this day.

But it was a scare, people would look nervously at any black person passing through the neighborhood because why would they be passing through our neighborhood, unless they were thinking of buying a property. And then they would look nervously at their neighbors, were they selling to a black person, or did they know something about a black person moving in and weren’t saying anything because they wanted to sell before the panic began? People who were selling their houses had to go out of their way to tell their neighbors that they would only sell it to a white person. It wasn’t pretty.

There was some kind of plan where you would buy insurance and all this money would go into a pot, and if somebody was panicking after a black person moved in and selling their house cheaply, they would buy up the house to keep it out of the hands of block busting realtors, so that even if some (relatively rich) black people moved in the neighborhood would remain stable. I think some people saw this as a liberal way to integrate neighborhoods, and others saw it as a way to keep black people out of the neighborhood. I wish I had a better grip on the details. I try to look this stuff up, but a lot of it was just what people thought rather than what was really going on.

By 1966 I was a full fledged hippie and Martin Luther King was marching on Marquette and Gage Park. It was a pretty tense time. I remember walking by the American Nazi Party’s storefront on 63rd Street. I figured my parents were surely embarrassed about me being a hippie, but at least I wasn’t a fucking nazi. I still knew some of the guys I grew up with in the neighborhood and I remember them telling me that they had been throwing rocks at the marchers. They told me that in a way to make me think that they didn’t care that much about the issues, it was just a kind of party, but maybe they were soft-pedaling things, seeing that I was a full-fledged hippie.

After awhile I only came back for like Christmas or Thanksgiving and only stayed one or two days. I would catch the train or the Greyhound in Champaign and ride the Archer bus back to the old neighborhood and I never paid much attention to what was going on around there.

When I was still a pretty young, there was a kid up the block named Michael Mendoza, who was a Mexican, but we never thought much about that at the time, it was like being Irish or Italian or Greek. When I moved back from Texas in 1987, maybe ninety percent of the neighborhood was Mexican. Even though they didn’t all speak English there was never that animus against them that there has always been for blacks. And by this time the whites were getting old and dying and their kids were moving out of the neighborhood, and as far as I know there was never a fight about the Mexicans moving in.

There were just a few white people left, my mother, an Irish woman her age a few houses down, maybe a handful, all of them, all old. My mother got along with them well enough, she was old and they helped her out sometimes. But she didn’t like that they didn’t spoke Spanish to each other when my mother wanted to do all the talking. And she didn’t like their food, and their ways, and the way they looked, because they were different from her.