Guilty as charged... Breathes there an Oak Parker with soul so dead, who never to himself has said, “I love diversity”?

A short history of Oak Park, continued . . .

Of course not.

Nonetheless, there are racists among us who joined white flight out of Austin, making that neighborhood slide into rack and ruin. Take the white newlyweds who set up connubial housekeeping in 1969 in an apartment at 334 1/2 North Lotus, in an 18-unit building.

The building was all white because the management company was keeping it that way by not advertising vacancies, because the largely Catholic-funded and St. Catherine of Siena rectory-based Saul Alinsky-style Organization for a Better Austin (OBA) had told it to.

A young ex-Jesuit was OBA point man for the building. The building’s manager, also a young fellow, had his instructions: OBA was trying to keep the neighborhood from being overrun, and this building was to be a sort of rampart. This hard-nosed Alinsky approach was being applied on neighborhood issues also on the South Side of Chicago, where Nick von Hoffman, later a newsman and national columnist, was helping to start The Woodlawn Organization, and on Chicago’s Southwest Side, where the Organization for the Southwest Community tried to stem the tide of white flight and black inundation.

The newlyweds established their household in July. In October the woman drove past Austin High on time to be pelted with rocks by black students getting out of class. The windshield of her Chevy Nova was shattered.

She got back to Lotus Avenue in a hurry, ran up to their third-floor apartment, and knocked on neighbors Gretchen and Richard’s door across the hall. Gretchen called the man at work. He rushed home on the “L.” His wife was O.K., though shaken.

In January a first-floor apartment was burglarized and set afire; the racist couple told the property manager they were leaving, lease or no lease. O.K., he said, we’ll advertise the apartment. The heck with the OBA.

The rampart was breached. The building would no longer be all white. Among people who came looking was a man who asked why the couple was leaving. Burglary with arson, the white man said. Oh, we’re used to that, the other said.

In due time, a woman with a child took the apartment. Unfamiliar with Oak Park and being told the rental office was on North Boulevard, she misunderstood and took a bus all the way to North Avenue. She became the first black tenant. The white couple moved to Oak Park.

There they met other whites who had flown. One hosted a meeting at her splendid house where guests were asked to volunteer as bail-money-suppliers at any time of day for arrested members of the Black Panthers, then making a pretty much ongoing ruckus in “justice”-related matters. The couple declined but in conversation learned that the hostess and her husband had left a South Side neighborhood when their black professional neighbors had told them it was time to go.

The hostess said nothing of any urge to tell the neighbors where to put their advice or to say, “Wait, this is my neighborhood, we ain’t leaving.” Actually, it wasn’t their neighborhood anymore. It had become someone else’s, and they weren’t welcome. Good liberals took their cue and evacuated. . . .

Not from Oak Park, where whites stayed to argue...

At one of dozens of meetings -- mostly school-related -- over the ensuing years, a black woman stood up and announced, “We’re all racists now.” This was received without comment. Discussion was in no way slowed down by it. Either everyone agreed and thought “So what?” or each had something of his own to say and did not wish to be diverted, and the scrum continued.

— from A Short History of Oak Park, Vol. 1 2004-2005. To be continued.