If any one neighborhood in America epitomized the experience of “white flight” in its most traumatic form, Roseland was it. The name went back to the earliest white settlers, Dutch immigrants who first arrived in 1849 to build homes and farms in the area around what would become 103rd to 111th Streets at South Michigan Avenue—the same street that fifteen miles northward becomes Chicago’s “Magnificent Mile” shopping district. In 1852 the Illinois Central and Michigan Central Railroads interconnected just a little to the southeast, and the settlement that grew up there would be called Kensington. Over the next quarter century Chicago’s role as major rail hub grew dramatically, and in 1880 the already-famous sleeping car magnate George Pullman chose an area just to the northeast—between what later would be 103rd and 115th Streets—to build a new manufacturing plant as well as a company town he would name after himself. By the turn of the century, Pullman’s burgeoning plant employed many workers who lived in Roseland and Kensington, and in the coming decades and the World War II era, thousands of men—white men—who found well-paying jobs in the steel plants east of there, across the large geographic divide of Lake Calumet and its attendant marshes, made their homes in Roseland or the adjoining neighborhoods of West Pullman and Washington Heights, both of which, like Kensington, were often lumped into Greater Roseland.
Black people were almost nonexistent in those neighborhoods. To the north, between 91st and 97th Streets astride State Street, a small black community called Lilydale grew up in the years after 1912, and by 1937, its residents successfully protested for the construction of a neighborhood public school. At the time of the 1930 census, Kensington had 170 black residents. In 1933, when an African American woman purchased a duplex some fifteen blocks southwestward, near 120th Street and Stewart Avenue, white neighbors bombed the property. A decade later, when white real estate developer Donald O’Toole announced the construction of Princeton Park, a new neighborhood of primarily single-family homes for African Americans just west of Lilydale, eleven thousand whites petitioned unsuccessfully to block the development. The end of World War II created a serious housing shortage, and when the CHA moved the families of several black war veterans into a reconstructed barracks project on the east side of Halsted Street at 105th Street, it took more than a thousand law enforcement officers to finally end three nights of violent white protest riots.
Following World War II, Greater Roseland’s racial composition changed gradually, and then incredibly abruptly. Blacks were 18 percent of the population in 1950, but the proportion increased to 23 percent in 1960, to 55 percent in 1970, and then to 97 percent by 1980. But those statistics, while dramatic, nonetheless fail to convey how stark the transformation was. In 1960, West Pullman was 100 percent white; by 1980, it was 90 percent black. Washington Heights, 12 percent black in 1960, was 75 percent so by 1970, and 98 percent by 1980. In central Roseland, the dominant church presence, reaching all the way back to the original settlers, was the four congregations of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) and four more of the Reformed Church of America (RCA). One of the CRC churches considered reaching out to new African American residents in early 1964, but then dropped the idea in July 1968, concluding that the neighborhood was in “rapid decline” by the spring of 1969. As in other neighborhoods all across Chicago’s vast South Side, the onset of the real cataclysm could be dated quite precisely: April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. “From that day on, everything changed,” one resident told Louis Rosen, who wrote a powerful memoir of the transformation before becoming a successful musician. “It was rapid. It was awful,” one white person recalled. “It was an exodus.”
That is what happened in Roseland. In hardly twelve months in 1971–72, all four self-governing CRC churches abandoned the neighborhood and moved to the white suburbs. Of the RCA churches, one decamped in 1971, a second in 1974, and a third in 1977; the last survivor held out well into the 1980s. Of all the statistics measuring white flight, one may capture the price that the neighborhoods—and the new residents—paid more powerfully than any other: in 1960, fifty-eight M.D.s practiced in Roseland. Twenty years later, in 1980, after a population increase of five thousand residents, there were only eleven.
While virtually all whites fled, one Christian Reformed couple in their late thirties walked against the tide. Rev. Tony Van Zanten had finished seminary in the early 1960s, spent some time in Harlem and then over a decade in Paterson, New Jersey, another city experiencing serious decline. In August 1976 Tony and his wife Donna relocated to Chicago and opened Roseland Christian Ministries Center in the heart of South Michigan Avenue’s once-vibrant business district. They fully realized how “the racial change in Roseland was a very radical and very swift one,” maybe more stark than in any other place. “There were no social services at all,” Donna remembered. “There was nothing there for the new people.”26
Standing against the tide were the Roman Catholic parishes that for decades had stood within fifteen blocks or so of each other all across Greater Roseland. Several closings and mergers had taken place in the previous decade as the area’s Catholic population shrank due to the racial turnover, but new African American members energized some parishes. Father Paul Burak was newly ordained when he arrived at St. Catherine of Genoa in West Pullman in 1972, when white flight was near its peak and the population, for the moment, was roughly 50 percent black and 50 percent white. St. Catherine’s retired pastor, Father Frank Murphy, had been a forceful proponent of racial equality, but that hadn’t stemmed the flight. “I experienced a lot of struggle and confusion about the parish” through the early and mid-1970s, Burak recounted. “Every weekend I would meet someone saying ‘Father, this is our last weekend here.’ ” Burak left St. Catherine in 1978, only to return in 1981, and by then few white parishioners remained. Tom Kaminski arrived at St. Helena in 1977, and only a few elderly white people were still in the congregation.
At first glance, the massive white depopulation of these neighborhoods promised a wonderful opportunity—thousands of newly available, often well-constructed brick bungalow-style homes—for African American Chicagoans whose families had for decades been trapped within the clear racial boundaries of Chicago’s South and West Side neighborhoods. But the reality of Roseland’s racial transformation again made black families highly vulnerable to exploitative white real estate “professionals,” this time due almost entirely to federal government policy choices. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), by 1968 part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), was indisputably the villain, but until the mid-1970s, almost no one fully fathomed—or sought to expose—the consequences of government policy-making gone awry.
At first only one little-known housing policy expert, Calvin Bradford, was determined to unmask a widely ignored evil. The term “redlining” was well known, if not well understood, but in newly African American neighborhoods like Roseland, it was not lenders’ refusal to make conventional home mortgage loans available to black home buyers that wreaked widespread damage, but how the FHA, starting in August 1968, made government-insured loans available to such purchasers—often through exploitative mortgage bankers, and even for properties of dubious quality—that ended up decimating newly black neighborhoods in which such insured loans were concentrated.
Bradford and a coauthor figured out that while seeking to “encourage inner-city lending,” the FHA caused local mortgage bankers to simply maximize the number of black purchasers they could entice to buy homes. As a result, thousands of black families were issued mortgages that they were not qualified to successfully carry—especially in an urban economy where blue-collar jobs like those at the Southeast Side’s steel mills were vanishing by the thousands year after year. The result was “massive numbers of foreclosed and abandoned