Apartheid. USA 1988

[p. 164]

January 25, 1988:

Officials in Oak Park, Illinois, a predominantly white Chicago suburb have been wrangling over a black church's efforts to move into town. The Unity Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church of Chicago, with 1 500 members, all of them black, has been negotiating to buy a Greek Revival Church building in Oak Park. Just before Christmas, the black church made a final offer of 500 000 dollars. They backed their bid with a down-payment of 60 000 dollars. Less than a week later, the all-white village board called a special meeting and voted a local development concern to buy the building instead. This company offered 5 000 dollars more than the black church. At the village board meeting some members expressed fear that large numbers of black church-goers would threaten the prosperity of the business district a few blocks away. One Board member told the Chicago Sun-Times that a black church could hurt white demand for services in the village. He continued, ‘The only concern is that if you have a church being an all-black congregation, people will begin to perceive the area as a black area. White people tend to react then, it's a black area, therefore I am not going to move in. Or some people might say they will move out.’ Of the 55 000 residents of Oak Park, only 16 percent are black.^209.

209. The New York Times, from a report by Isabel Wilkerson