By JORDAN DRESSER
The UNITY News

When you’re 89, you forget a few things.

But Timuel D. Black Jr. will never forget seeing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. get hit by a brick thrown at him during a summer march through a Catholic neighborhood in Chicago.

The year was 1966; the place was Marquette Park. King was pushing for equal access to housing in Chicago, one of the most segregated cities in the country at that time.

Black remembers the crying nuns in the march who thought their presence would ease the tension.

“They were just embarrassed,” Black said. “It was a terrible day.”

Despite the tension, Black, a lifelong Chicago resident, said he was still hopeful that a change would come and that segregation would be history.

But watching more blacks and Latinos concentrate in fewer neighborhoods and whites migrate farther into the suburbs has dimmed that hope greatly.

Nearly 40 years after Black and King marched together and as Barack Obama, D-Ill., makes a historic bid for the White House, segregation has grown worse in Chicago.

According to a report published by the Chicago Area Fair Housing Alliance in May, the Chicago region was the fifth most segregated in the country.

Almost half of Chicago’s African-American residents live in 22 of 77 areas clustered on the city’s South Side and west side, according to the report.

“This is not an issue of the past,” said Rob Breymaier, executive director of the Oak Park Regional Housing Center, who co-wrote the report.

Housing concerns remain an issue.

In the Chicago region last year, the Illinois Department of Human Rights received 259 housing complaints. Of the 304 complaints received by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, 110 were related to race.

According to the report, the increasing segregation is a result of discrimination, hostility, white flight and a lack of fair-housing enforcement.

“Governments in charge have done almost nothing for 40 years,” Breymaier said.

Personal choices also played a role in the increase of segregation.

The report found that 45 percent of white residents in Illinois searched for housing in communities where they were the majority; 81 percent of blacks searched in areas where they were the minority.

Phil Nyden, professor of sociology and director of the Center for Urban Research and Learning at Loyola University of Chicago, said that diverse communities do exist in Chicago and that he believes more diversity is possible.

“We’re creeping forward,” Nyden said.

Part of this change is David Van-Zytveld, who moved to Rogers Park in 1995 because of its diversity.

Van-Zytveld, assistant director at the Center for Urban Research and Learning, said Rogers Park is a reflection of the United States as a melting pot.

“I love it,” he said. “It has everything we need.”

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