Interdisciplinary Approaches to Consumer Culture

Present

Present-day Englewood has two dominant story lines. The first is the story that is told through the media. It measures Englewood by its murder and unemployment rate, which are both quite high. It relishes breaking news and offers very little in substance beyond the headline. This first story also, unfortunately, shapes the way most Chicagoans view the community and limits the ability of those working for change to shape the dialogue. The second story of Englewood comes from the people who live there and commute there every day for work. This story adds layers to the oversimplified media version. It is a neighborhood of families and block clubs who see the violence first hand but who do not see it as an inevitability. It is a group of people fighting for change from within.

Past Part One: Housing Equity and Diversity

Landscape

Unfortunately, the struggle for equitable — quality housing— in Chicago is a story that has been largely forgotten in today's telling of the Second City's narrative. I want my students to examine the consumer symbolism behind home ownership by looking at real estate advertisements from today and comparing them with ads from the 1950s and 1960s, when the push for suburban living was at its peak. Home ownership has been the quintessential mark of middle-class respectability. In this part of the unit, we will look at the price differences between homes sold to whites and homes sold to Blacks in Chicago and at how the badge of home ownership, and the resource of home equity was made more difficult for Blacks to acquire. We will also examine the search by African Americans for quality housing outside of the institutionally-created ghetto of Chicago's Black Belt.

As Blacks were able to afford homes (despite the price increases) further outside their historical? neighborhoods, efforts to exclude them grew increasingly aggressive, beginning with the creation and expansion of restrictive covenants written into house deeds. ⁴ According to Wendy Plotkin, "in 1939, Chicago Housing Authority vice-chairman Robert Taylor estimated that 80 percent of Chicago's land area was covered by racial restrictive covenants," but this number was challenged by people on both side, and others estimated the number to be closer to fifty percent. ⁵ To many scholars, it wasn't that Blacks believed that ending restrictive covenants would solve the all the issues around the fight for quality housing but, as Preston Smith II argues, that "the average black person wanted the choice of whether to stay in an all-black setting or move into an integrated neighborhood." ⁶ Legal covenants were not the only tactics used. More radical segregationists resorted to violence in response to black families moving into all-white neighborhoods. Beryl Satter's Family Properties points out that "between July 1917 and March 1921, there were fifty-eight recorded bombings of properties rented or purchased by Blacks in white Chicago neighborhoods." ⁷

While restrictive covenants were ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in 1948, Chicago's housing segregation continued even through the selected enforcement of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act (G.I. Bill) that offered soldiers returning from World War II guaranteed home loans and reduced mortgages. ⁸ The selective part was due to the process called "redlining" whereby mortgage companies drew lines on maps of neighborhoods identifying them as a risky investment and thereby lowering the home values and contributing to the further decline of the neighborhood. At the same time, middle-class whites were using the G.I. Bill's benefits to move to the quiet, tree lined streets of the newly built suburbs.

The mass construction of the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s and 1960s enabled white consumers to buy into the television advertisements of the suburban American dream of living in the suburbs. The Dan Ryan Expressway further drove a wedge into the blighted areas on the edges of Bronzeville and Englewood, forcing ousted residents to move into one of the two communities. The easy access to the city via automobiles, along with low mortgage rates, motivated many whites to escape the changing dynamic of their city neighborhoods and head to the suburbs.

Real estate agents played on the fears of these changes and used them to persuade remaining whites to sell quickly at a loss in order to get out before the neighborhood lost its value due to the increasing numbers of African American residents. The agent would then turn around and sell the home at an above-market price to African Americans seeking better housing. This process, known as blockbusting, was further aided by the riots that broke out on 63rd street (and in the hallways of my school) in April 1968, upon hearing the news of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. From that point on, Englewood changed quickly and efforts to revive it, most specifically in the late 1960s and early 1970s push for "urban renewal," failed for myriad reasons.

Today Englewood has been hit hard by foreclosures. Englewood, West Englewood, and one other neighborhood make up 20% of Chicago's foreclosures and it has one of "the highest concentration of vacant homes in the city." ⁹ The story my students know is largely that of a failed neighborhood. I wonder if my students, like the young woman who silenced the panel, connect that failure to the coloration of the neighborhood and do not know the larger historical events (the personal and institutional racism) that shaped the story of Englewood and the ability of individuals of all ages to affect change.

In this portion of the unit, I want my students to see what institutional choices and personal actions helped to create the housing problems that they walk past every day on their way to school (vacant lots and boarded up homes) and that other human institutional choices and personal actions can be made to help revive it.

Lingua Franca ¹⁰

Students will need to know the terms "mortgage," "restrictive covenant," "segregation," "redlining," "blockbusting," and "gentrification" to better understand this section of the unit. Rather than wholly demonizing one side in this historical moment, it might be more useful to help students see that both perspectives represent consumer dreams and fears. While middle-class Blacks were seeking better housing outside the overcrowded and often dangerous Black Belt, white middle-class families (often second or third generation immigrant) saw their homes as representing the equity that would pay for their children to move into a higher class and/or that would pay for their future retirement. Racial assumptions are central to this discussion but understanding the underlying consumer fears at work is an important layer in this complex story.

Past Part Two: Consumer Chicago-Englewood and the Black Belt

Landscape

Englewood began as a sleepy streetcar suburb and home to many of the middle managers of the meatpacking industry to its north. One recent Chicago Tribune article states that, "the commercial spine that began to develop along Halsted Street around Sixty-third in the 1880s had become a complete shopping district within a few decades, serving the many thousands of middle-class and prosperous working-class households that were moving to the South side...." ¹¹ As the city grew and expanded, Englewood became the home to many second-generation immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and Sweden who filled their bungalows with the goods from locally owned shops catering to the needs of the neighborhood. By the 1930s, Englewood's business district was the second largest retail area in Chicago outside the Loop. The peak of consumer Englewood was the construction of a flagship Sears department store at the corner of 63rd Street and Halsted Avenue. As one article describes it, the "site and the configuration of the Englewood building suggested a large downtown store." ¹² The neighborhood continued to thrive through the 1940s, but after World War II conflict over housing spilled over from neighboring communities, particularly the area to the East known as the "Black Belt."

The Black Belt was the area of Chicago that housed the massive "Great Migration" of African-Americans between 1900 and 1950. Its other name, Bronzeville, is known today as the hearth of Chicago's Black culture. The most famous street in the Black Belt was known as "The Stroll" and included very prominent black-owned business from law offices and banks to the quasi-legal and illegal cabarets. It was here that some of Chicago's Blacks made their fortunes. As the Black Belt tightened with the pressure of continuous in-migration, many middle- and upper-class African-Americans began to seek homes outside the overcrowded South Side. Like the immigrants who moved to Englewood before them, they were looking for a safer place to live and for better schools for their children. However, they found the only options available to them were often at the edges just beyond the Belt's border and at prices far higher than their market value.

As Blacks moved in to the neighborhood, they often met fierce resistance and the white residents' assumptions that housing values were at risk due to their presence in the community. As white residents fled to communities like Beverly or to the suburbs, businesses began to close their doors as well. The blight that resulted from the transition led to a dramatic attempt in the late 1960s to convert the former consumer haven into a pedestrian mall. While temporarily boosting the area's lagging sales, the lure of the nearby suburban malls proved too much competition and Englewood began its steep decline by the mid 1970s and early 1980s.

Today, according to census records, there are roughly 300 businesses in Englewood compared to between 1,800 and 2,000 in more prosperous neighborhoods. Around 20% of the residents are unemployed and well over 40% live below the poverty line. ¹³ With such weak purchasing power, many residents cannot even find grocery stores within a reasonable distance of their homes.. Yet Englewood was recently used for a Derrick Rose Adidas commercial in order to highlight connections between his roots in the ghetto neighborhood and his rise to the NBA's most valuable player in 2011.

In this first part of the unit, I want students to see both the commercial viability of an all-black neighborhood like Bronzeville as well as the former status of the Englewood business community. By helping them challenge their notions that successful communities must have white residents and their notions that Englewood has always been an impoverished neighborhood, I hope to help them see that changing the narrative has the power to help them believe that change can happen.

Lingua Franca

It took me an embarrassingly long time to learn from the elementary and middle school teachers I know the value of preparing students for the vocabulary prior to the density of the lesson. This category is in each of the next two sections and is meant to guide the teacher in thinking about and preparing students for the vocabulary they will need to apply correctly to practice their geographic knowledge. Students will need some exposure to the following words to better understand the information presented in texts about Englewood: "streetcar suburb," "middle manager," "business district," "anchor store," "range," "threshold," "gravity model," "immigrant/migrant," "hearth," "blight," "purchasing power," and "development."

Past Part Three: Education Equity and Diversity

Landscape

Education was one of the principal motivations driving African Americans to move to Englewood and was largely responsible for the resistance that white residents gave to changes in their community. The desire to give our children the best education to help them succeed is a significant part of the oft-referenced American Dream. It drives those advocating for an expansion of school choice as well as the Dream Act activists seeking the opportunity of a quality education. Chicago, during the bitter Civil Rights battles raging in the South, prided itself on a system of neighborhood schools that did not discriminate on the basis of color. Yet, as students will learn in Part One of the unit, neighborhoods were fiercely segregated and that, in turn, led to a segregated school system.

My high school, Lindblom, was at the heart of the school battles of the 1960s. It served as a neighborhood high school for much of its history and then in 1965 changed to a "technical" high school that selected students based on test scores. This transition to technical occurred because the original South side technical high school, Tilden, had become surrounded by an all-Black neighborhood. In order to restore the technical high school to a white neighborhood, the board of education selected the neighborhood of West Englewood which in 1965 was over 80% white. ¹⁴ Savvy middle-class black parents understood that "technical" meant better quality and completed the necessary steps to get their children into Lindblom. As with the earlier history of housing resistance, efforts were made to limit the acceptances of black students into Lindblom. One Chicago Tribune headline from the era announced: "10 Blacks Denied Entrance to Lindblom." ¹⁵ Yet, pressures by black organizations and the growing awareness of civil rights issues in the North increased black population at Lindblom and eventuated in a majority black freshman class by 1968. Again, efforts were made to redline education by returning Lindblom to a neighborhood school.Englewood remained majority white, barely) but, when those efforts failed at nearly the same time as the riots that broke out as a result of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the neighborhood of West Englewood followed the path of the adjacent Englewood neighborhood and quickly turned from nearly all-white to all-black by the mid-1970s.

Neighborhood high schools had been in rapid decline, but Lindblom remained a school of choice for many Blacks on the South side. Yet, the early mayoral reform efforts of the Daley-Duncan team (Mayor Richard J. Daley and, current Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan) threatened to close Lindblom in 1995. However, community, parent, and alumni resistance thwarted that initial attack. Decreased enrollment and test scores helped the school administration eventually close the school in 2000 as part of the Renaissance 2010 initiative. Lindblom reopened in 2005 as a selective enrollment high school serving students from all over the city. Meanwhile, other neighborhood schools, namely Harper and Englewood High Schools, continued a steep decline, eventually facing the same fate as Lindblom. Harper High School is a "turn-around" school that fired its entire staff in order to start over, and Englewood High School became home to two charter schools: the nationally known all-boys Urban Prep Charter School and TEAM Englewood Charter School. Both are housed in the same building.

As students in a selective enrollment school, most of my students have parents who advocate for them and communities of support to help them succeed. I hope this part of the unit will help them see education as a consumer civil right for all students in Chicago and see Englewood as ground zero for these battles over quality education.

Lingua Franca

I am positioning education in the consumer world of shopping and home ownership. There are some problems with this approach as the people who lived the experience did not see the desire for quality education as a consumer product. I suggest making sure that students understand that the conceptual shift to pre-collegiate education as a consumer product to be shopped for and selected is a relatively new phenomenon. That said, I still think it is useful to place education and schooling within the conversation over access to retail and home ownership since they are so intertwined in the story of Englewood's past and present. To better understand the content in this unit, it would be useful if students knew the basics of the court cases Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education.

Future: It Takes a Garden to Build a Community

Built Environment

Part Four of this unit is the creation of the product (website) that brings their learning to life for a real-world audience. Each of the three previous sections build up to the final part of the unit. This portion asks students to find ways to rebuild consumer Englewood in the three ways discussed: shopping, housing, and education. Students will work on the areas that they find most interesting in order to reach out to community organizations and research programs implemented elsewhere to help revive struggling communities.

This section will be guided by the metaphor of the community garden. For a garden to grow, certain resources are required. First, a successful community needs good soil. Good soil is rich in nutrients and helps support the growth from seed to flower. The good soil represents what we focused on in parts one through three. Quality mixed-income housing, anchor stores that can weather economic storms, and quality schools. Part four will talk about other aspects necessary to create a flowering community. Water, a vital part of growth requires a balance between too much water and too little. I am reminded here of the importance of smart, purposeful, community-driven development. Students will research what development has already happened in Englewood along with what examples from other neighborhoods and cities might be useful to replicate. Plants cannot grow without sunlight. For Englewood, sunlight means a source of positive media to help change its reputation across the city. Such exposure would help to promote economic growth and encourage in-migration that would strengthen the community. Finally, no garden can long survive competition from pernicious weeds. It would be easy here to make the "bad seed" argument, but true community sees its members as part of the solution. Weeding here can mean the effort of the people to be responsible for maintaining the community.