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• 1 2022-12-06T12:04:49-08:00 Trumbull Park Homes 20 A History of the Trumbull Park Homes race riots of 1953, an example of the hostile exclusion of Black families from the suburbs plain 2022-12-12T06:29:53-08:00 Located on the south side of Chicago , Trumbull Park is arguably one of the most well-known suburban developments in the country. What makes this so? The Trumbull Park Homes development is the site of the infamous Trumbull Park race riots of 1953 . Trumbull Park, since its establishment in 1938, had maintained its efforts to remain a white-only neighborhood until 1953, despite the area having a population of Black workers who commuted to the area to work at the local steel plant . The Howards, a Black family, had been approved to become residents there, after the Chicago Housing Authority, the organization responsible for the development of the suburban neighborhood, mistook Betty Howard as Caucasian due to her light-skinned appearance when she applied for housing . It was only after a few weeks had passed before the CHA put out a phone call to the Chicago Commission on Human Relations, informing them that the recently settled family was actually Black . What followed were an ongoing series of vicious onslaughts directed at the Howard family and their home. These violent events were so extensive that they made national news, even grabbing headlines in Time Magazine the next year.
  
  During the night of August 5, a large group of young white men descended upon the Howards’ home and attacked it, throwing objects at the house and damaging property. Over the next few weeks the crowds gathered in size, up to thousands at once occupying the lawn of the Howards, terrorizing the family members with verbal attacks and destruction of their home. Although police were present in controlling the situation, little was done to bring aggressors to justice .
  
  
  
  Despite this tension and repeated pressure from local heads to remove the Howard family from Trumbull Park, the CHA decided to continue to deliberately integrate the neighborhood, allowing an additional 10 Black families to take up residence, thus prompting a new wave of racial onslaughts towards these individuals by white people that continued well into the next decade . The race riots even captured the attention of members of the Socialist Worker’s Party, who have consistently been vehemently outspoken against racial oppression and inequality, and in 1954 Marxist leader in Illinois Howard Mayhew wrote on the events and published his thoughts condemning the violence in a booklet circulated through the public .
  
  
  
  Mayhew’s booklet regarding the Trumbull Park riots
  
  Frank London Brown was an author and former resident of Trumbull Park, his family having moved to the neighborhood in 1954, very shortly after its accidental integration. In his book Trumbull Park which was published in 1959, Brown drew from personal experience “of abuse from both white residents and the police supposedly there to protect them…[presenting] a powerful story of white supremacist hatred characterized by riots, death threats, brickbats, and nightly window-breakings and bombings .” Through fictional characters written as stand-ins for his real-life family members and neighbors, Brown effectively captures the pain and distress experienced by the Howards and other Black families while enduring the riots:

  The men looked even more stunned and stepped-on than the women; and it made me mad to see such despair. Yes, I guess that’s what I saw—despair, sitting like a big fat man on top of all these people. I pulled myself away from them in my mind. I pulled and pulled until I was far enough away from them to be angry at them for feeling only sadness and not boiling, scalding anger .

  
  While initial reviews of Brown’s book were supercilious (Kirkus Reviews once wrote: ‘Like many novels by Negro writers this is more a sociological study than an exercise of the novel’s art—detailed, overly long, lacking in narrative strength—but effective on its own terms.’ )
  
  
  
  "How Trumbull Park Exposed the Brutal Legacy of Segregation"
  
  Brown’s book highlights an important yet forgotten account of the violent legacy of this suburban development and remains a significant example of suburbia as a vehicle for American housing inequality. The Trumbull Park Homes development’s decade-long racial unrest provides an illustration of the historic persistent discrimination seen in the suburbs in the U.S., while the darker, lesser-known history of segregation and exclusion of the Levittown neighborhoods highlights the inseparable history of racism with the very inception of American suburbs.