HighBeam Research

Title: Middle-class community reflects black

attainment of the American dream Series:
MAKING IT: The story of Chatham
Date: April 28, 1986 Publication: Chicago Sun-Times Author: William
Braden

((PHOTO CAPTION CONTINUED)) Before Arthur Turnbull, 80, moved into his
house in Chatham in 1955, he asked the owner how the white people in the
area felt about black people. "There's hardly a day we're not out picking up
paper" to keep the streets nearly spotless, says Clem-entine Skinner, 70,
retired assistant principal of South Shore High School. LEFT: Writers and
researchers too often concentrate on poor blacks, says William Sampson,
Northwestern University sociologist. RIGHT: The average household income
in Chatham is $30,000 - quite middle class - estimates William Garth,
publisher of the Chatham-Southeast Citizen. Chatham has its share of well-
known residents, including state Comptroller Roland W. Burris and his wife,
Burlean. The distinguished, tree-lined 8100 block of South Eberhart reflects
the middle-class values of its residents. U.S. District Judge George N.
Leighton dons his robe before entering the courtroom. ((CAPTION ENDS))

Three decades ago, upwardly mobile blacks broke out of the ghetto to settle
in the South Side community of Chatham.

Chatham became a focal point for the emergence of a black middle class
that now represents perhaps half of Chicago's black population.

Chathamites believe in hard work, discipline and family life. They have high
hopes for their children's future, and their emphasis on education has been
described as "almost ruthless."

They have created a vibrant community of excellence that is also now a

community in transition.

How did Chatham succeed, and how is it changing?

This is the first of four articles on the people, the values and the future of
Chatham. The old man, a senior federal judge, sat in the night in his
chambers in the Dirksen Federal Building, high above the roar of downtown
Chicago.
He looked out at the twinkling lights of the South Side, where he lives in a
remarkable community called Chatham.

He looked down at the traffic below and recalled a time when members of his
race were not allowed to drive a taxi in the Loop.

"Things are better now," said U.S. District Judge George N. Leighton. And for
many blacks in Chicago, nowhere is it better than in Chatham.

Chatham is a bastion of Chicago's black middle class. It represents perhaps

the largest concentration of middle-class blacks in America outside of Harlem
and Atlanta, and it calls itself "a community of excellence." Its residents put
a premium on hard work, discipline, education, family life and keeping up
their property. But the winds of change are blowing, and Chatham is also
now a community in transition.

There are comparable black communities in Chicago, including Pill Hill, West
Chesterfield and Jackson Park Highlands. But they are relatively small in
comparison.

Chatham is populated by some 23,000 people who live in an area most locals
agree is bounded by 75th and 87th Streets, the Dan Ryan Expy. and Cottage
Grove Avenue. And its residents epitomize the culture and values of the
middle class that constitutes probably half of Chicago's black population.

You never hear about these people, said Northwestern University sociologist
William A. Sampson.

"Everybody writes about the elite and the underclass," he said. "Nobody
writes about the 50 percent in the middle."

Sampson estimates that about a third of blacks in Chicago and the nation are
poor, and about a third of those poor are underclass. About 20 percent are
upper class. And the rest are middle class. But the press and academicians
have focused their attention on the bottom third.

"Therefore," Sampson said, "much of what we think we know about blacks in

America is erroneous, because it's based upon the studies, essentially, of
poor blacks."

According to Governors State University political scientist Paul Michael

Green, "The Bill Cosby syndrome is alive and well in Chatham. The American
dream is being lived out there."

Sampson, an authority on the black middle class, has been studying

Chatham for years. "Chatham is an anchor," he said. "The people in Chatham
serve as role models for everybody else on the South Side. They are going
about their lives in a decent, respectable way, every day. Mothers and
fathers who are trying to get their kids to live the same kinds of lives in the
surrounding neighborhoods can point to these people and say, `You can do
it. Look at that guy walking down the street. He's doing it. It can be done.'

"There's a breakdown in social control in the underclass because there are

not Chathams all over Chicago. There aren't older folks who are saying to
young kids, `Boy, if you do that, I'm going to break your head.' `Girl, if you
let that happen to you, don't you ever come back here.' These people are
absolutely crucial."

Chatham today is virtually 100 percent black. Its residents include civil
servants, schoolteachers, city workers, business people, politicians and a
growing number of young black urban professionals.

Some three decades ago, Chatham was 100 percent white. Groundwork for
the change was laid in 1948, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down
restrictive covenants.

There always had been a black middle class, said William J. Grimshaw, an
Illinois Institute of Technology political scientist. But its members had lived in
the city's Black Belt cheek to jowl with the poor, and they became visible
only when the court ruling allowed them to break out of the ghetto.

With savings accumulated during the war years, they began to move south
into Chatham around 1955. The migration accelerated with demolition for
the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Dan Ryan.

Chatham at that time was an attractive community occupied by middle-class

and working-class ethnics, mainly Irish and Scandinavians. The whites
resisted the incursion. But ultimately they fled, whipped into panic by
blockbusters who warned that property values were sure to plummet.

Some of the whites who decamped come back now to visit, and find
Chatham an upgraded community with greatly increased property values.
It's a standard joke in Chatham that a motorist driving through would think
he was in an upscale white neighbor hood if the residents would hide in their
homes.

"When friends from work come out here, they're just absolutely shocked,"
said Lee Nunery, 30, an assistant vice president at the First National Bank of
Chicago. They say, `Gee, you have grass and trees and squirrels. This is kind
of like Wilmette, isn't it? It's kind of like Evanston, isn't it?' They say, `Jeez,
the house is nice.' I say, `What did you expect, jungle vines?'
"We care about a fig tree. We care about the type of grass we're going to
plant, and the way we're going to cut it. We added a garage, added
carpeting, resodded the lawn, added another layer of insulation in the attic.
In three years we've plowed almost a third of the purchase price back into
the house."

"I bought my house from a Lithuanian in 1955," said Arthur N. Turnbull, 80, a
retired vocational high school teacher who serves as treasurer of the
Chatham-Avalon Park Community Council. "Before I moved in, I asked him
how the white people really felt about black people. He said, `Hell, these
Irishmen don't speak to me.'

"And his son comes back today. He's a grown man. But he almost cried in
front of the house. They went out to Cicero and went to the dogs. They have
problems out there. He looked at the house and said, `Gee, I wish we were
back.' He had so many fine memories."

"There were many schoolteachers among the original settlers," said real
estate broker Jane Melnick. "There were post office workers and a sprinkling
of Pullman porters. But the common denominator was, these were people
who were putting their money in the future. They were buying a house. And
they were people who knew what it was to save that money every single
paycheck, to pinch it off and sock it away."

They also were charged top dollar for their homes. The poor couldn't afford
Chatham. And that's one reason it remained stable during the early years.

Drive through Chatham today and you'll see block after block of large brick
bungalows set far back from the street. Some north-south avenues stop
short of Chatham, so lots run as much as 185 feet deep (compared with
about 125 feet in the average city lot).

You'll see lawns that look as if they were trimmed by obsessed barbers.

There are broad avenues with median parkways planted with flowers.

There are gaslights and wrought-iron fences that real estate broker Dempsey
Travis said became the rage after he put up the first one on his property.
(The fences cost $10,000 to $15,000, Travis said.)

There's the Whitney M. Young Jr. Library that opened in 1973 at 79th Street
and Martin Luther King Drive after the community council picketed to
prevent construction of a filling station on the site. In her office, librarian Mae
Gregory sits under a sign that quotes Young: "If we must march, let us march
to the library." She does a brisk business in books on home repair, gardening
and computers.
Apartments are concentrated to the north and east and are mostly two-flats
and three-flats, many of them owner-occupied. Residents picketed to
prevent construction of high-rises on King Drive. The highest structure in the
community is a new seven-story senior-citizen building, the Chatham Park
South Cooperative, approved by Chathamites at a mass community meeting.

The Chatham Park Village Cooperative looks like the residential quarter of an
Ivy League college campus. Formerly a rental development for whites, it
turned co-op on Jan. 23, 1962, and now has 552 units in 63 buildings on 23
acres, said site manger Jack Seals. It's beautifully maintained and has a 24-
hour private patrol.

"We had 35 people on the waiting list when we stopped the list more than six
months ago," said duplex owner Herman O. Hamilton, 74. "When the 35 are
placed, we'll start taking more applications." Travis said homes range in
value from $40,000 to $500,000, and they include some veritable palaces
constructed since the racial change. Melnick said bungalows that sold for
$17,000 in 1955 would sell for about $50,000 today, without improvements,
and improved basements have been added to almost every house. As for
more expensive homes, Melnick said, "the sky's the limit."

"I could sell block after block in Chatham," he said. "I don't even advertise. If
I get a listing in -Chatham, I call people on my list. And it will go. I'd give my
eye teeth for more. I want them so much I can taste them."

Travis said he has a two-year waiting list.

"I line up maybe 20 clients to look at a house," he said. "So I can pick and
choose. It's that kind of market. I can sell anything that comes on the market
in Chatham within 48 hours."

Streets and alleys are whistle clean.

"Paper doesn't stand a chance in this community," said Keith Tate, 37, an
accountant at the University of Illinois Medical Center. "We pick it up. We
don't wait for the city to come by and sweep our curbs."

"There's hardly a day we're not out picking up paper," said Clem-entine
Skinner, 70, retired assistant principal of South Shore High School. "People
come by in cars and toss it out, as if there's some magic person to come pick
it up. We get out there and sweep that stuff ourselves."

William Garth, publisher of the Chatham-Southeast Citizen, esti mates the

average household income at $30,000. Travis said incomes range up to
$500,000, and a substantial number of Chatham residents are in upper-
income brackets.
Well-known residents in addition to Leighton include millionaire Travis;
Illinois Comptroller Roland W. Burris; Daryl F. Gris-ham, president of Parker
House Sausage Co.; Jolyn H. Robichaux, chief executive officer of Baldwin Ice
Cream Co.; William Abernathy, president of Jiffy Cab Co., and Fred Luster Sr.,
president of Luster Products.

Chatham went up instead of down because its settlers inherited a viable

community, had the money to maintain and improve it, came into the area
with middle-class values, and banded together in block clubs and a
community council that enforced rigid standards of construction,
maintenance and social behavior.

Council members slap tow stickers on abandoned cars. Block clubs won't
permit residents to wash or repair their vehicles on the street. Block-club
signs admonish, "No littering. No loitering. No ball playing. Please drive
carefully. Have a nice day."

The community has two major problems. One is the vitality of its shopping
strips. A far more significant problem was summed up by the Rev. Michael J.
Nallen, pastor of St. Dorothy's Church and one of the few remaining whites in
Chatham.

"We just had six funerals in two weeks," he said. "And this is a small parish."

It's the community's greatest challenge: "the graying of Chatham."

Chatham's pioneers are dying off, and it's an open question who'll succeed
them.

America has many dreams. And the 73-year-old Judge Leighton suggests that
one of them, integration, might now be eroding the original purpose of
Chatham. He wondered aloud if blacks still need such a community.

"Something has happened," he said. "The younger people are moving out.
They're moving into places like Lake Point Tower, Outer Drive East, Lincoln
Park. They are quietly disappearing into the integrated community. And I
have no doubt that Chatham will pay a price. But I think it's good.

"When I was active in civil rights, we were talking about an integrated

America. At least, that's what I understood. I thought we were struggling for
the very thing that to some extent is happening now. And I have a great deal
of difficulty mustering any feeling of regret about this."

Sampson and others fear the price could be painfully high - and that
Chatham could go the way of Woodlawn, the blighted South Side community
from which many Chathamites migrated in the 1950s.
Although homes sell quickly, turnover at this point is still very low. And there
is no guarantee that the exodus of Chatham's young people will be balanced
in the future by an influx of middle-class young adults now living in
integrated areas who will find Chatham an attractive place to settle when
they decide to raise families. Low-income young people already are moving
into rental units in Chatham and surrounding areas, and Sampson worries
that the community ultimately could lose its middle-class character.

"If these middle-class folks disappear," he said, "then you leave the black
community at the mercy of the pimps and the hustlers and the nogoodniks. If
Chatham goes, then to a considerable degree, the whole South Side goes.
The people in Beverly had better watch out if Chatham can't survive."

Many observers share Sampson's concern. But others believe a new

generation of young blacks, and whites, will build a new and better Chatham.

Next: Bill Cosby and Chat-ham's middle-class values.

Copyright (null) Chicago Sun-Times

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