When Park Forest won its first All America City award in 1953 only white Americans were welcome there. When it won its second award, in 1977, it was one of the few racial-integration success stories in the country.
Racial integration wasn’t part of the original plan. William Whyte’s classic study of the new suburban lifestyle represented by Park Forest, The Organization Man, published in 1956, mentions “Negroes” only once–and then only to say they weren’t welcome in the village. Asians and other nonwhites weren’t much more welcome.
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According to OH! Park Forest, a 1981 compilation of articles and oral-history interviews, when Teshima and Kay (who’s also Japanese-American) showed up in 1954 Sweet and his partners refused to sell them a house, for reasons that aren’t clear. The developers’ business depended on being able to get loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration, and Don DeMarco, who worked in community relations in Park Forest from 1971 to ’82 and is now acting executive director of the Fund for an Open Society, remembers that the FHA agreements contained language that in effect barred loans if they would be used to integrate a community. Bill Caruso, who runs the fair-housing legal clinic at John Marshall Law School, thinks that’s likely. “It’s hard to be sure now,” he says, “because many of the documents showing federal complicity in housing discrimination have become very scarce.”
But the developers could offer to sell Teshima land, and they did. He bought it, then built his own house, where he would live for the rest of his life.
Teshima began meeting once a week with James Saul, Shirlee Wheeler, her husband Ted, and a few other people, trying to figure out the best way to integrate blacks into Park Forest. “We thought we could change things by marching and demonstrating,” remembers Saul, who still lives in the Park Forest home he bought in 1953. “Harry thought you had to use the law. Harry was right.” Saul called their meetings a “floating crap game,” because they’d meet in different members’ homes to keep from calling too much attention to themselves. “We tried to be cautious,” he says. “We knew the Klan and its many little brothers were watching.” As he told the oral-history interviewer, “There could be economic retributions. There were constant threats of that and of physical violence. . . . We do know of someone who had a cross burned on their lawn.”
Wheeler says that when she called to invite the Growalds she spoke to Bert’s wife, who seemed shocked to hear that her husband wanted to sell to a black family. He’d evidently forgotten to tell her. According to OH! Park Forest, he didn’t tell his neighbors either. Wheeler told his wife that the Wilsons thought they were coming simply to meet nice, progressive whites. If the Growalds liked the Wilsons, then they could decide what they wanted to do.
The Wilsons moved in on Christmas Eve 1959. One of James Saul’s coworkers tried to enlist him in a plot to splash paint on their house, and he says gleefully that he ratted the guy out to village authorities. A few years later Dr. Wilson got a new job, and the family moved on.
