Library looks at past support of restrictive covenants
Race and real estate are inextricably linked in Chicago.
So when the august Newberry Library opened a 2016 exhibition entitled “CivilWar to Civil Rights: African American Chicago in theNewberry Collection,” the artifacts on display included a sample of a racially restrictive covenant. What theNewberry Library did not emphasize, though, during that 2016 exhibition, was that it had been a party to some of those racially restrictive covenants itself.
In recent days, with a blog post fromtheNewberry president, Daniel A. Greene, theNewberry has decided to come clean on its own past.
Whatwas a racially restrictive covenant? Typically, an agreed-upon private contact wherein a group of homeowners, white homeowners in particular, restricted the purchase, lease or rental of one of their properties by persons of another race, specifically African American or other “non-Caucasians.” These covenants were common in Chicago in the years following the Great Migration of Black Americans fromthe South.
On the grounds of maintaining a neighborhood’s “desirability,” these covenantswere encouraged by the Chicago Real Estate
Board (which provided a template) andwere common both inHyde Park and, especially, onChicago’sNearNorth Side, in the blocks reserved for residential use south of North Avenue. That’s the area nowknown as the Gold Coast, still the most affluent neighborhood in the city of Chicago.
Perhaps most notorious are the covenants in the Washington Square Park subdivision, successfully challenged in 1940 by Carl Hansberry, the indefatigable father of the great American playwright LorraineHansberry, whose Chicago-set drama “A Raisin in the Sun” was informed by her personal experience with this very issue. The Supreme Court declared the covenants unenforceable in 1948, but they stillwere slowto disappear in and around the city. And they are central to the current debate unfolding in Evanston this past summer over reparations.
TheNewberry is, of course, a library, Greene is a librarian and hiswork is not merely some boilerplate, platitude-heavy mea culpa suitable for social media. Greene points out that the library owned (and served as the landlord for) many properties on the NearNorth Side, many going back to the holdings of the estate of the library’s main benefactor, industrialist (and sometime Alderman) Walter LoomisNewberry.
Thus the library, located at 60W. Walton St., was
very much in the sights of theNearNorth Property Owner’s Association, whichwas promoting the racially restrictive covenants. As a party to all of this, theNewberry, or at least its financial agent, prevented African Americans fromrenting some of its properties in the 1930s and 1940s.
Greene’s writing also draws theUniversity of Chicago into this sordid part of Chicago’s past, noting that the university urged that theNewberry sign such a covenant on a property the library owned on the South Side. (The University of Chicago’s role in the business of racially restricted covenants in and aroundHyde Park has been acknowledged andwell reported, including by The Chicago Maroon). But most of the Newberry’s properties were near theNewberry itself. And it kept the records.
“These restrictive covenants,” Greene wrote, “which contributed to institutionalizing racism across Chicago, are located in an archival folder at the Newberry with the uncomfortable title “Negro [ sic] Restriction Agreements, 1936–1938.”
Most of the documents found there include dry legalisms, casually stated and undoubtedly perceived as ordinary bymost elite whites at the time.”
And what did Greene not find? Any evidence whatsoever that anybody with authority at theNewberry had a problem with signing the agreements or even with the agreements in general. Therewas not even record of even a smidgen of debate or discord on these matters (you’d hope for better from so erudite a library, surely).
What happened at the Newberry after the Supreme Court decision in 1948?
“Silence,” Greene reports.
Greene argues that this was not untypical at the time among Chicago’s elite white population, especially since those involved with a library thatwanted to attract visitors had a vested interest in the socalled “desirability” of its tony neighborhood, as understood at the time to mean the own race of those whowere tending to theNewberry’s institutional legacy. Perhaps that is a fair analysis.
Or maybe it is not unreasonable to expect this library, free and open to the public, to have led the way to a less discriminatoryworld, right in its own backyard. Or, at the
very least, to have had some qualms about what was transpiring.
Instead, it appears that it was possible for an African American researcher to havewalked through its doors far earlier than it was possible for a black family looking for an apartment to rent one from the Newberry.
It’s striking to see all of this laid out there in the Newberry’s newsletter.
In an email, Greene said his decision to write about this issue had received a “remarkably positive” response. “Our staff and board are committed to this kind of self-reflection,” he wrote, “and to ensuring that theNewberry becomes more diverse, equitable, and inclusive.”
Of course, you are reading this column in the Chicago Tribune, a paper whose editorial voice supported those racially restrictive covenants too. The archival record is long.
As Ta-Nehisi Coates noted in the Atlantic, this paper editorialized in 1891 that “the account is square with the ex-slaves.” And at least between then and that Supreme Court decision of 1948, therewas a lot more whence that came.