Protest in Suburbia! The 1965 North Shore Summer Project for Fair Housing in Chicago’s Suburbs

• In Event: 463 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 02. Community Organizing and Mobilization

Abstract

The 1965 North Shore Summer Project (NSSP) was the first so-called direct action civil rights protest in a suburban area and possibly the only white civil rights movement consciously patterned after southern black models. NSSP was a remarkable marriage of civil rights fervor with suburban sophistication and resources. It took on the powerful Evanston-North Shore Board of Realtors that refused to rent or sell to blacks in Chicago’s exclusive suburbs. The name itself Summer Project was inspired by the previous years’ Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. This paper will examine the Summer Project in all of its complexities. What is its legacy and how do we remember and mark its fiftieth anniversary this summer in Chicago? From a social scientist’s point of view the Summer Project retained a laboratory quality—it was small, it had a beginning and an end. Archival research suggests that the movement was a success. Some participants, however, had deep doubts about the premise on which it was based and believed future historians would pay little attention to it. For eight weeks they had surveyed residents to demonstrate that most would not oppose a black family moving into their neighborhood and had produced enough data to publish a report persuading the real estate industry to change their discriminatory practices. These students, who were sufficiently frustrated by surveying and had the perception that it would make no real difference to realtor practices, rebelled and turned their focus to organizing in the Evanston ghetto.

Author

• Mary Barr, Clemson University