Chicago Housing Injustice

I worked on housing justice issues in a Chicago neighborhood community organization during the 1966 Open Housing Movement that was spearheaded by Martin Luther King, Jr. along with other civil rights leaders and organizations including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I worked on the same issues in another Chicago community organization in 1968. See the Cleveland Ave. 1968 gallery above. There was a system maintained by entities that included government and realtors that kept blacks from moving into white neighborhoods. This was accomplished with tactics that included redlining and block busting. The racial housing dividing lines were stark with a single street or avenue marking them. This system, which also included the failure to enforce the housing code, limited the housing market available to blacks, which then caused their housing to be both of lower quality and more costly than was housing for whites. Likewise, the price to blacks for houses in white blocks that the realtors were busting was high because of the high demand for and limited supply of housing for blacks. The demonstrations in favor of open housing, one of which is pictured here, revealed the hidden racism of northern whites that was sometimes violent and always hostile and hateful. For further reading, see: https://www.npr.org/2016/08/29/491848087/50-years-ago-martin-luther-king-jr-fought-for-open-housing-in-chicago