In 1964, the Presbytery of Chicago, a regional body supporting United Presbyterian Church congregations in and around the city, produced a document on racial integration and housing. Working with the national Church’s Commission on Religion and Race (CORAR), the Presbytery offered a report on demographic change in suburban neighborhoods. It rebutted claims that African American residents moving into formerly all-white areas would destroy home values and break up communities.
The report bears the dry title “The Housing Market in an All-White Suburb Subsequent to Purchases by Negro Families—experience of a Chicago suburb, 1963-1964.” With its table of vacancy statistics organized by fiscal quarter and schematic maps of housing lots in suburban neighborhoods, the simple flyer looks more likely to have been produced by a political aide or a graduate student in sociology than by a voluntary organization bound by religious commitments.
Still, the authors insist that religious institutions, public policy, and racial justice are fundamentally interrelated. Arguing that racial integration would only strengthen previously white neighborhoods, they write that “the stability of this now integrated Chicago suburb is attributed to responsible policies of public officials, supportive action by church and voluntary groups, cooperation of realtors, a responsive citizenry.” Where those factors exist, the authors claim, “no valid argument against residential integration can be made on the basis of property values and price behavior.” By weaving church groups into the litany of actors responsible for supporting just housing practices, the Presbytery’s report makes clear that its creators believe their affiliations with religious institutions require them to pursue racial and economic justice.
CORAR had been established in 1963 at the 175th General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church. The Commission’s first chair, Marshal L. Scott, who taught at Chicago’s McCormick Theological Seminary, had a history of bridging religious institutions and economic issues. In 1944, he founded the Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations (PIIR), which sought to prepare Presbyterian ministers to address labor issues by placing them in industrial jobs while they were seminarians.
Gayraud Wilmore, another nationally notable figure, served as CORAR’s initial executive director. To his role on the Commission, Wilmore brought years of experience as an activist for school desegregation. After his time with CORAR, he became a leading scholar of African American church history, teaching social ethics and theology and coediting a sourcebook, Black Theology: A Documentary History, with prominent liberation theologian James Cone.
Regional groups supported the work of the national. Robert I. Christ of Wilmette led the Presbytery of Chicago’s Commission (“we bet Bob is up to here in ‘supreme nepotism’ jokes” quipped the Chicago Defender). His Commission’s “Housing Market” report demonstrates how attention to local patterns, like integration in Chicago suburbs, could speak to national issues—how religious organizations, especially mainline Protestant churches, might intervene in their surrounding communities.
This piece of ephemera points to decades of labor and civil rights organizing in Chicago motivated by religious commitments and carried out by clergy.
Further Reading
The First Presbyterian Church records, in Newberry Modern Manuscripts, include materials concerning the Presbytery of Chicago’s support of social justice activities held at First Church in the 1960s, including those of The Woodlawn Organization and the Blackstone Rangers. The Presbytery conducted an formal investigation of these activities after US Senate subcommittee allegations that First Church's pastor John Fry was protecting criminal actions onsite; the investigation exonerated the church.
Elsewhere in the Newberry’s collection, other religion-affiliated groups also produced materials around race and housing in the 1960s. For instance, around 1965 the American Friends Service Committee, an NGO with Quaker roots, published a pamphlet asking Black and white college students at schools in the North Shore suburbs to apply for a summer program intended to pressure businesses engaging in discriminatory real estate practices.
The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) digital collections contain many internal and published documents from CORAR. Biographical information about Gayraud Wilmore is available on the African American history site The HistoryMakers, which also produced an oral history interview with the minister and scholar.
Grace Holleman is a a doctoral student in American Religions at Northwestern University and a Chabraja Center Summer Intern for the Beyond Belief initiative.