An ‘Unvarnished’ look at housing discrimination
Naper Settlement spearheads online historical exhibit
For more than 80 years, Naperville was a sundown town. After working in a household, farm or factory during the day, people of color had to be gone from Naperville by sundown.
And while Black students attended Naperville’s North Central College, they could not comfortably travel west of Main Street. When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the college in 1960, he was escorted to Aurora to spend the night because no hotel in Naperville would house him.
These and discriminatory housing practices, such as restrictions on property deeds that prevented homes from being sold or leased to any person who was “not a Caucasian,” continued on Naperville property deeds into the 1960s.
A historical look at how diversity in the city and five other U.S. towns grew despite decades historic discriminatory practices and segregation is featured in a free online exhibit spearheaded by the Naper Settlement and the Historical Society of Naperville.
“Unvarnished: Housing Discrimination in the Northern and Western United States,” found at UnvarnishedHistory.org, was developed through a $750,000 Institute of Museum and Library Services Museum Leadership grant. The Naperville historical museum and five other museums and cultural organizations collaborated from 2017 to 2022 to research and present their community’s history of exclusion.
“People are really happy that we are delving into this segment in Naperville’s history. It helps to explain community and demographic change over time,” said Donna Sack, vice president and chief program officer at the Naper Settlement
who directed the “Unvarnished” project.
Sack said Naperville experienced significant change between the 1960s and today. “Through this project we’re able to fill in some of those blanks, connect dots and do all of those things that are important in telling the community story,” she said.
The wonderful part about the project, Sack said, was working with five other communities: Oak Park through the Oak Park River Forest Museum and the Historical Society of Oak Park and River Forest; Appleton, Wisconsin, through the African Heritage Inc.; Brea, California, through Brea Museum and Historical Society; Columbus, Ohio, through the Ohio History Connection; and West Hartford, Connecticut through the Noah Webster House and West Hartford Historical Society.
The communities were selected to provide a good cross section, she said.
“We have very small history organizations to very large history organizations. We have East Coast and West Coast and Midwest,” she said.
While each community is different, what they all have in common is they all practiced exclusion in some form, Sack said.
History is a process of questioning and digging deeper through research, and then questioning again and digging even deeper, she said.
The impetus for the project started around 2006 when Naper Settlement led a community engagement effort to look at where the museum should be moving forward.
“What resoundingly came through that process was that we needed to be telling Naperville’s history to the present day, not just arbitrarily stopping at the beginning of the 20th century,” Sack said.
“Our mission is to tell
Naperville’s history through the present day. Research is a regular ongoing practice for us. That is a best practice for history organizations.” she said.
The result of that inquiry led to a Teaching American History grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Education that allowed the settlement to work with 42 teachers across five school districts, including Naperville District 203, Indian Prairie District 204, East Aurora District 131, West Aurora District 129 and Wheaton-Warrenville District 200, to find primary materials and sources in the three areas of Reconstruction, the Great Migration and the civil rights era.
As part of the deep dive into the subjects, Sack said the museum gathered oral histories.
“What we really found is that there was a fair housing story in Naperville that was really significant and needed to be researched and needed
to be told,” she said.
The housing piece prompted additional questions about what spurred demographic changes in Naperville over the last 50 years and whether other communities across the United States experienced something similar.
To answer those questions, the museum in 2016 applied for a matching $750,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services Museum Leadership.
In the application, Sack said the settlement agreed to work with five groups to research each town’s housing and segregation history and frame it all with the national story.
The project addresses how housing discrimination, often based on race, ethnicity or religion, was a largescale system that resulted in segregation patterns in northern and Western states that intensified over the 20th century.
The online exhibit includes nearly two dozen interactive articles, accompanied by in-depth explainer videos, photos, interviews and other primary sources that showcase how formal systems of segregation were developed through individual practices and expanded through federal policy, sustained over time, which continue to affect today’s communities.
It showcases the discrimination at places like Centennial Beach, where custom kept Black swimmers from entering the water until the 1950s.
“The very heart of this project is showing the similarities in places that might otherwise not seem to have something in common, other than that they have a history that has not been widely discussed,” said Charmaine Jefferson, the project’s cultural adviser in a news release.
“When you peel back the layers and connect the dots, legacies of segregation are widespread, and the six participating communities are representative of so many other places.”
The exhibit also provides resources for teachers in middle and high schools to help students explore compelling questions that will help them discover and share the local dimensions of national segregation patterns and see them through the wide lens of American history. The materials align with the National Council on Social Studies and Common Core Standards for Literacy in History and Social Studies.
Sack said the five-year journey uncovered many primary sources, materials, and documents that tell a complex story of how a nationwide system of exclusion was carried out.
In conjunction with the online exhibit, the Naper Settlement will host an on-site exhibit through Oct. 28 allowing museum visitors to further examine Naperville’s history.
This story is part of a six-part series on the Chicago Tribune’s 175th anniversary. For more, visit chicagotribune.com/175.