At first glance, the photograph that once hung on Mary Barr’s refrigerator door upholds Evanston’s widely praised reputation for integrated education and open housing. The 1974 photo depicts 13 black and white friends posed on the stairs of a home, the youngsters newly minted middle school graduates headed for Evanston Township High School.
There’s Jesse, giving the Black Power fist, Chip stroking his chin in what Barr describes as a “gangster lean,” and Ray and Jennifer — she with her arm tucked around his while he comfortably rests his elbow on her knee.
But the snapshot has captured something else. It’s that moment right before the friends began to disappear, divided by race, educational opportunity and socioeconomic status. In the end, the white friends flourish but all but one of their black counterparts do not. Barr, a sociologist, returns to her hometown, tracking down the stories of those she once knew as well as delving into Evanston’s history. The result, “Friends Disappear: The Battle for Racial Equality in Evanston,” is a fascinating and painful study of one city’s struggle with integration, fair housing and equality.
“A near even mix of black and white, this group would have benefited from the city’s commitment to integrated public education and open housing during the 1960s,” Barr writes.
Instead Barr’s extensive research and personal journey reveals a racially divided Evanston where policies that appear to be progressive are in the end designed to protect racial and class privilege.
One of the greatest strengths of the book is Barr’s ability to navigate school integration and fair housing battles and then weave the very personal consequences through the stories of her classmates.
Take school lunch. In the 1960s when Evanston began to bus black students from their west side neighborhoods to schools across town, a major battle began to brew. Like most schools in the nation then, Evanston’s elementary schools lacked cafeterias. Students were expected to walk home where their mothers greeted them with a hot meal. But bused students couldn’t walk home.
Initially the school system resisted efforts to create or join federal lunch programs, particularly for those who couldn’t afford to eat. Some bristled at the idea of students eating sack lunches in school. Others advocated that there was no better way to integrate than for children to have lunch together. Others saw it as reverse discrimination if their white children couldn’t also eat lunch at school. Lunch became a battleground.
“Feeding children in school, they claimed, would be the first step in the intrusion of government into citizens’ kitchens,” Barr writes about some board members concerns. “Parents, not schools, were responsible for serving meals.”
What becomes clear in the battle and others Barr details is that black children bore not only the burden of integration but also were cast as the problem. Barr writes eloquently of cousins Jesse and Earl, the latter of whom is not in the photo. Jesse, who hailed from a poor, struggling black family on the west side, tells her he often relied on his classmates to share their lunches while Earl often bullied others to give him theirs. Each, she said, were failed by Evanston’s school integration plan because there wasn’t “an equal playing field for all its students.”
Barr offers other ways the children’s opportunities also differ. The 13 children depicted in the photo are comprised of white girls and black boys. Ronny, who most likely was taking the photo, is the only white boy. Gender clearly matters.
Barr explains that the African-American girls were less likely to have the freedom their brothers had. Most likely, they were at home tending to domestic chores. White boys, clearly highly valued, were more likely preparing for college careers or busy with organized sports.
As the academic tracks widen, by the end of the book, it comes as no surprise that Barr and her white classmates succeeded, even when many of them initially stumbled, while her black classmates did not.
At a time when many public schools remain segregated long after the end of federal desegregation orders and the nation continues to grapple with the complexities of race, Barr’s work is a nuanced yet sometimes disturbing look at Evanston’s evolution on this important topic.
Karen M. Thomas teaches journalism at Southern Methodist University.
“Friends Disappear”
By Mary Barr, University of Chicago, 303 pages, $30
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