To My Civil Rights Activist Mom

In the house I grew up, Mom had a framed letter from Coretta Scott King dated Nov. 10, 1966. It was a letter of thanks. “I would like to thank you very much for your interest in and support of my recent Freedom Concert in Chicago,” Mrs. King wrote. “Much of the success of these concerts depends upon persons such as yourself who devote time and energy in their promotion and support.”

Justice in Winnetka

50 Years Later

On Sunday, July 26, the 2015 Justice Project: The March Continues rally was held in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, Illinois. The event was a 50th anniversary commemoration of the North Shore Summer Project’s (NSSP) 1965 rally that brought 10,000 people together to listen to the stirring words of Martin Luther King Jr.

1965 Fair Housing Rally

That 1965 rally was the largest gathering ever before on the Winnetka Village Green, and the first time Dr. King ever spoke in an all-white suburb. One of the NSSP fair housing activists and rally organizers was my mom, Sally Wendkos Olds.

My Mom was not a political figure. She is a Jewish woman who excelled at writing and raising three kids with my doting Dad. Both parents wanted us to grow up in a just society of equal rights for everyone. Those rights should always include housing rights. In 1965, she worked as the publicity director and contact person for the Winnetka Village Green event. She also wrote a follow-up article for a Chicago church-published magazine called Community.

Racial Discrimination

The N-Word

My parents raised me to never discriminate against anyone based on the color of their skin – nor their religion. Hence, I took little notice of anyone’s skin-color. Sadly, in 1975, when I was in Weber Middle School in Port Washington, Long Island, there were creepy classmates who frequently called me “nigger lover.”  I was shocked. I couldn’t believe that anybody actually still thought that way; that was my introduction to racism.

#BlackLivesMatter should not have to be a hashtag — it should be a given.

It’s a terrible stain on this great nation that racism still runs rampant here. I’d never bash America because I feel lucky to have been born in such a privileged country, but it is painful to hear what goes on outside of my insulated world of diversity and liberals in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood, where almost anything goes and people of all colors, religions, and sexual preferences are celebrated.

On June 1, The Guardian wrote:

“An analysis of public records, local news reports and Guardian reporting found that 32% of black people killed by police in 2015 were unarmed, as were 25% of Hispanic and Latino people, compared with 15% of white people killed.”

Don’t get me started on the disgraceful Confederate flag issue. It took the murder of nine black churchgoers in Charleston to order South Carolina to take down its offensive Confederate flag — the utmost symbol of racism and slavery.

FAIR HOUSING FIGHTS STILL IN THE NEWS

One month ago, the Supreme Court endorsed a broad interpretation of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. They agreed with a Texas-based nonprofit corporation that the Department of Housing and Community Affairs and its officers had “caused continued segregated housing patterns by allocating too many tax credits to housing in predominantly black inner-city areas and too few in predominantly white suburban neighborhoods.”

The New York Times Wrote

After the Supreme Court’s decision June 25, The New York Times wrote:

“Much progress remains to be made in our nation’s continuing struggle against racial isolation,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority in the 5-to-4 ruling. “The court acknowledges the Fair Housing Act’s continuing role in moving the nation toward a more integrated society.”

SEE ALSO: A White Civil Rights Activist Looks Back on Martin Luther King March on Winnetka Village Green

I asked Mom about the past 2015 event in Chicago because I wanted to know how she felt about the tragedy that not enough has changed since the 1960s. She said, “The North Shore Summer Project opened a lot of people’s eyes to the unfairness of restricting communities on the basis of color or religion.”

Hate Mail

Mom said, “Although I received hate mail from some of my neighbors, the NSSP found that most residents in these northern suburbs were very willing to have nonwhite neighbors, and that it was the realtors who made, and acted on, other assumptions.” Concerned, I asked Mom if the hate mail had scared her. “Instead of frightening me, it inspired me to do more, since it let me know that my efforts and those of my fellow activists were being noticed,” she replied.

That’s rather impressive, don’t you think? Way to go, Mom!

When I asked if anything stands out in her mind about this 2015 event she said, “In one way it was dismaying that 50 years later, at this anniversary, we still needed to be reminded about the importance of fair housing, as in the stirring words of Hilary Shelton, the NAACP’s Washington [D.C.] director. He reminded the audience how crucial housing is in determining the schools children go to, the services residents can receive, and the building of personal assets throughout a lifetime. But,” she added, “the speakers acknowledged good news, too, like the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that building affordable housing in areas that perpetuate segregation is illegal, even if intent to do so cannot be shown. Our nation is making progress.”

In 1965, the Winnetka Historical Society wrote, “Dr. King’s appearance in Winnetka came at the end of a day of rallies in the Chicago area. Though hoarse and exhausted from five earlier speeches, Dr. King urged the crowd to ‘go all out to end segregation in housing.’

He asserted that ‘[e]very white person does great injury to his child if he allows that child to grow up in a world that is two-thirds colored and yet live in conditions where that child does not come into person-to-person contact with colored people.’ Dr. King criticized not only the ‘vitriolic words and violent actions of the bad people,’ but also ‘the silence of the good people.’ He observed: ‘We must now learn to live together as brothers, or we will perish together as fools.’”

Amen to that, Dr. King.

The post An Activist Who Fought for Civil Rights Reflects on Racism 50 Years Later appeared first on Award-Winning Writer and Graphic Designer.

[NOTE: My mother, Sally Wendkos Olds, has spent her life fighting for what she believes in with a special focus on civil rights and women’s rights. Kvelling over her latest article about heartfelt and dilligent efforts in the 1960s.]

This past July, I flew to Chicago to attend the 50th anniversary of the North Shore Summer Project, a Fair Housing effort I joined in 1965 to challenge the practices that perpetuated housing segregation. This commemoration led me to look back even further in time.

Some of my earliest childhood memories are of being a student at Charles C. Lea Elementary school, in the Philadelphia neighborhood now known as University City. In the mid-1940s, my classmates included a few “colored” children (African-American wouldn’t come into use for some 40 years), but I never thought to wonder why none of them lived on my street. Later, at the Philadelphia High School for Girls, I became friendly with several “Negro” girls, but none of them lived in my neighborhood, either, and aside from a couple of evenings when my mother invited some of them to dinner at our apartment, I didn’t see any of them outside of school. At Penn in the 1950s, I can’t remember any students of color. No wonder: our 1955 yearbook shows only two black women and three black men in our entire graduating class. A snapshot of the times.

I remember the words of Mahatma Gandhi: “Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”

I never considered myself prejudiced, but looking back, it mortifies me to realize how blind I was to the barriers that separated people by skin color. It wasn’t until the rise of the civil rights movement in the 1960s that I became conscious of them. The violence down South horrified me. But as a Manhattan mother of three children under six, I didn’t feel I could go to Mississippi to fight for justice. When I heard about the New York-based National Committee against Discrimination in Housing, I realized that I could work for change in my own backyard.

New York had a fair housing law—but if people didn’t apply for housing, the law meant nothing. I joined the staff of the NCDH and wrote “Neighborhood Profiles” describing areas of the five boroughs where few minorities lived, and which many nonwhite home seekers knew little or nothing about. We distributed these profiles and followed up with home-seeking families. We tested the law by posing as white applicants for the same housing that rejected non-whites. Whenever minority applicants were refused housing, my anger helped me get through the process of lying to make my profile sound like theirs, just as it helped me overcome my nervousness about testifying in court. I became more and more incensed that people should be treated this way.

Late in 1964, my family moved from Manhattan to Glencoe, a northern lakeside suburb of Chicago, where I met Bill Moyer, a Philadelphian working with the American Friends Service Committee. Bill was a mild-mannered social worker (unrelated to the journalist Bill Moyers) who had a genius for organizing. “There’s just as much racism in Chicago as there is in Mississippi,” he told me. “But white people—even liberals—don’t realize it. We want to make them see it.”

His idea was to launch an Open Housing movement in 13 almost-all-white suburbs along the shores of Lake Michigan by emulating the Freedom Marches in the South. He named this 1965 effort the North Shore Summer Project, after the Mississippi Summer Project.

Civil Rights Denied

“Down South,” Bill told me in his soft-spoken way, “the movement is focused on voting rights. But these North Shore suburbs don’t have to deny black people the right to vote—they just deny them the right to live here.

“Only two of these suburbs, Evanston and Glencoe, have real black populations,” he added. “They also have real ghettoes to keep them in.”

The Quakers, Bill explained, wanted to expand white people’s knowledge of racism—which, as my own childhood had shown, was lacking. “Black people don’t have to learn about prejudice; they’re living it.” Bill’s sense of mission was contagious, and I enthusiastically agreed to serve as volunteer public relations director.

It was a heady time. I set to work alongside representatives from the worlds of religion, civic involvement, and social activism. Because these suburbs were almost totally white, we had black committee members from only two towns: the Reverend Emory Davis, from Evanston; and Gerry Washington, a Glencoe mother whose daughters went to school with and played with mine. We met with realtors, conducted vigils outside their offices, and distributed literature about their discriminatory practices. We marched and we sang. We recruited college students to interview North Shore residents, who declared overwhelmingly that they would welcome nonwhite neighbors, despite realtors’ contentions that they were merely following homeowners’ wishes by refusing to show houses to nonwhite home-seekers. Our major coup was bringing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to Winnetka, the whitest of these suburbs, to speak to a crowd of 10,000 on the Village Green.

SEE ALSO: An Activist Who Fought for Civil Rights Reflects on Racism 50 Years Later

I issued weekly news releases, was quoted in the local press—and received hate mail. Instead of intimidating me, it assured me that our efforts were being noticed and inspired me to become even more committed. (Of course, hate mail in Glencoe was not as scary as hate mail in Biloxi.) Our final event was a six-mile march from our NSSP Freedom Center in Winnetka to the Evanston-North Shore Board of Realtors, where on August 29 we presented a summary of the project’s findings at a rally, followed by an all-night vigil. Then the NSSP, which from its conception had been a time-limited effort, disbanded. Our students went back to school, our AFSC sponsorship ended, and most of the volunteers moved on to other forms of activism.

Soon afterwards my family moved away from Glencoe, and I lost touch with my fellow volunteers. Last spring I reconnected with Carol Kleiman, another white activist who hailed from Philadelphia. Carol reminisced about telling Dr. King that she wanted to move from Glenview to an integrated area. “No,” he told her. “Stay where you are. Lance the boil.”

The “boil” was segregation, and a few results of its “lancing” can be seen in activities we helped set in motion—even if our efforts were only the beginning of an arduous process.

Although the NSSP failed Harriette and McLouis Robinet (a physicist then teaching at the University of Illinois), who were not able to buy a house on the North Shore and suffered humiliation while looking, they were energized to continue their search and very soon succeeded in buying in the previously all-white western suburb of Oak Park, where they still live. Harriette wrote about her family’s experience for Redbook in 1968, launching a career as a writer of award-winning multicultural historical fiction for children.

David and Mary James’s North Shore story was a more immediately encouraging success. The first African American to buy in Winnetka, David, a lawyer and former Tuskegee airman, founded a program for suburban and inner-city children, which is now a day camp for 7- to 12-year-olds.

Yet it remains infuriating to learn how hard it was for so many good people to do something as simple as shelter their families. Fortified by the 1968 Fair Housing Act, Winnetka’s Open Communities has extended its mission beyond trying to change attitudes among white communities; it now works to influence housing policy and enforce the law. At the anniversary celebration it sponsored, a crowd of about 1,000—many of whom had not been born in 1965—gathered on the same green where Dr. King had addressed the largest crowd ever to assemble there, and pledged to continue the work. The bronze marker memorializing him, installed with money raised by Winnetka schoolchildren, gleamed in the sunlight, heralding a brighter future.

But the wheels of justice still grind exceedingly slow. Even though the Fair Housing Act has been law for almost two generations, many brokers have simply gone underground. The North Shore suburbs are still almost entirely white. It’s disappointing, half a century later, that there’s still a need to follow up our 1965 push to open closed borders. In moments of pessimism, I sometimes wonder whether our efforts had any impact at all. But then I remind myself that change did occur—and that even when an ideal is not fully realized, efforts to advance it are not in vain. Although the numbers of nonwhite residents in these suburbs are still small, they’re larger than they used to be.

The biggest change was in us mostly-white volunteers, because we learned from our educators: the black volunteers and home-seekers whose futures truly hung in the balance. Working in the vastly different society that was the United States in the mid-1960s, we morphed from white liberals to white activists. Many of us went on to work for change in many facets of society, including but not limited to racial equality. Do-gooder has become something of a skeptical sobriquet these days, but it’s a badge I’m proud to wear. We did do some good—for ourselves, no doubt, but also for 13 communities, and several families whose profound fortitude deserved all the support their daunting mission required. I remember the words of Mahatma Gandhi: “Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”

Sally Wendkos Olds CW’55 lives in Manhattan.

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