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player ready...Tia Brown, a 4th grade Chicago Public Schools teacher and mom of three, was born and raised on the city’s West Side, where she and her husband hoped to buy their first home when they began looking in 2011.
They tried hard, she said.
“We were forced to look elsewhere, further out on the South Side,” Brown said. They bought in Chicago Lawn eventually. “But everything we do is out West. We work out West. We have nonprofit organizations that are out West. Everything we do is out there. It’s very much an inconvenience that we live South and we didn’t know anything about out South. We felt that we were forced to do it if we wanted to purchase a home that was of quality for our family.”
During their search for a home, Brown recalls a homeowner’s apprehension about African American people living there. While viewing a house, when Brown and her husband were given the codes to unlock the door, they didn’t work. When they called the owner, he wouldn’t pick up the phone. Brown said the owner picked up the call from their Hispanic Realtor and told him “this may not work out.”
“I was just in awe,” Brown said. “It was still out South, in a Black neighborhood so I didn’t know who he was expecting. … But it wasn’t us. Maybe he thought we were Hispanic because (our Realtor) was the one that he initially talked to.” They moved on to other properties.
It’s a story told in the new season of “Firsthand: Segregation,” WTTW’s digital documentary series. Brown’s story is one of 15 shared by other Chicago-area residents, all experiences that shed a light on the city’s legacy of segregation and its ongoing effects.
“Segregation is one of those subjects that’s always in the background in Chicago,” said the series’ executive producer, Dan Protess. “I think there’s some misconceptions about segregation in Chicago. One is that segregation is in the past and Chicagoans are free to live where they want. The other misconception is that the problem of segregation is simply that we live apart. The problem with segregation is not just that we’re apart but that separate is unequal in Chicago. It’s not just the segregation of people; it’s the segregation of resources.”
In sharing stories like Brown’s, Protess hopes to illuminate how segregation continues to affect so many. Sitting down with the research, including the Metropolitan Planning Council’s 2017 report on the cost of segregation released a few years ago (which found that segregation cost the region $4.4 billion in lost income, 83,000 fewer bachelor’s degrees, and about 200 lives cut short by homicides every year), Protess said segregation was an inevitable topic for his team.
“It is one of the defining issues of Chicago, unfortunately,” he said. “This seemed like an opportunity to have the uncomfortable conversation that we all should be having.”
“Firsthand” has pointed its lens at some of Chicago’s most pressing social issues in its past three seasons, from coronavirus to gun violence to living in poverty.
The “Segregation” interviewees are part of the yearlong multiplatform WTTW initiative that includes community discussions with experts and talks with those doing work and offering perspectives around segregation’s impact and a discussion guide by Maria Krysan, a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago who focuses on racial attitudes and housing segregation.
Soren Spicknall, a data engineer and hobby photographer, offers an experience with segregation in a nine-minute taped talk called “Unlearning the Bad Advice That Segregates Chicago.” In it, Spicknall says a history of living primarily in largely homogenous white, upper middle-class communities led to stereotypes of those that weren’t similar. When he moved to Chicago to attend the Illinois Institute of Technology, peers and others on campus would say not to go south of 35th Street on campus.
“Despite my best intentions, or my idea that I knew about things like segregation, I still fell prey to those same patterns because I lacked firsthand experience,” Spicknall said in a phone interview. “It took a process of slowly getting to know the neighborhood around my campus at IIT and then slowly getting to know the broader South Side of the city to unlearn a lot of what I had been told and to understand that having an academic understanding of something like segregation is very different from having a detailed real world conception of a place because you’ve actually been there and experienced it.”
“Even if you understand segregation at some level, you can still enact it in your daily life without meaning to, without realizing it,” Spicknall said. “It takes active work and firsthand experience in the communities that you might think about when you think about segregation, in order to have a really detailed, meaningful conception of those communities.”
John Nance, now a Country Club Hills resident, was raised in Evanston. In his video, he shares his family’s decadeslong history there and his reasons for leaving. Evanston received national attention for its reparations plan for years of codified discrimination. But Nance criticizes having to qualify for credit and putting in an application to receive reparations: “What does that have to do with repairing anything you’ve done to me?” he asks in his video.
Looking back, Nance said Evanston integration didn’t mean economic opportunity.
“I don’t know of anything that repairs anything that requires a credit report,” Nance said. “Give me the money. Let me determine what I need to do if you are going to give me anything. It’s scab on top of scab and they keep piling up. The wound never really heals.”
Prices pushed Brown from buying where her family really wanted to put down roots and race impeded her family from getting their dream home. She said her South Side neighborhood is a rocky one. Who lives on the block can change the whole aura of it. During their time there, Brown said her younger two children have seen a man get shot in the back near them at a bus stop. Violence has already effected the kids at the ages of 10 and 6. And the couple still has to drive to the West Side to work, play and interact with their family.
“It’s still happening now where people are being forced into certain neighborhoods that they wouldn’t normally pick if we could really pick and choose where we wanted to live,” Brown said.
The family is looking for another residence out west again, possibly in the suburbs. “This was all planned way before our time and it’s still panning out. You don’t want to come home and know that your neighbors are secretly hoping for your demise just so that you won’t be in their neighborhood. I don’t think other races really have to think about that as much as Black people. We really have to think about that when we’re purchasing a home because anything can happen if you have … neighbors that don’t want you there.”
Protess hopes viewers see that there is a role that everyone can play in disrupting segregation.
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Henry Shelton is a Lawndale native with over 20 years of experience rehabbing homes in Chicagoland. He said he’s done about 50 projects in Brookfield, La Grange and the South and West sides. He just completed the 1,000th property at 3838 W. Adams St. in West Garfield Park with the help of the Cook County Land Bank Authority. Shelton said it’s a great feeling to be from the community and help with the housing situation. He hopes the community appreciates his efforts.
“A lot of people that live on the West Side want to stay on the West Side and they want to buy here,” he said, but segregation is always present. “For instance, if this place was up in Logan Square, this place will probably be almost a million dollars. Where it is, it’s at $400,000. That’s the difference and that’s not even that many miles away. Appraisers, money lenders, the neighborhood getting a bad rap, Black and brown people are getting the back end of it. I’m trying to change that with the help of the Land Bank.”
Visit wttw.com/firsthand to stream the digital series and explore all “Firsthand” content. “Firsthand” executive director Dan Protess will moderate a virtual conversation about segregation in Chicago and the toll on its residents at 6 p.m. Tuesday. The event is free but RSVP is required. “Chicago Tonight” will present a WTTW News special episode dedicated to the topic of segregation in Chicago at 7 p.m.
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