Title
"We Just Can’t Afford to be Democratic": Liberals, Integrationists, and the Postwar Suburb of Park Forest
Department/School
History
Date
2020
Document Type
Article
DOI
DOI: 10.1093/jsh/shz007
Abstract
Park Forest, Illinois, emerged as a prototype suburb in the post–World War II era. Scholars have devoted considerable attention to Park Forest but have not thoroughly explored the efforts of the American Friends Service Committee to integrate this village outside of Chicago in the 1950s. Philip Klutznick, the lead developer of Park Forest, advertised the suburb as a melting pot for a new America, drawing the interest of open housing advocates wanting to include African Americans in this mix. Klutznick and most villagers resisted racial integration, but activists persisted, and by the mid-1960s, the suburb became an interracial community. The exhausting and intricate efforts to realize and sustain integration, however, demonstrated the struggles of the open housing campaign.
Published in
Journal of Social History
Citation/Other Information
Cooley, Will. "'We Just Can’t Afford to be Democratic': Liberals, Integrationists, and the Postwar Suburb of Park Forest." Journal of Social History 54 no. 1 (2020): 330-57. https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz007.