Trumbull Park Homes Race Riots, 1953-54 |
Trumbull Park was a housing project located in a white neighborhood. The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) was known to only allow white people to live in this project (Hunt). In 1953, a very 'light-skinned' African-American woman named Betty Howard was mistakenly placed in Trumbull Park because the Housing Authority thought she was white. The months of violence from the whites in the neighborhood came to be known as the Trumbull Park Homes Race Riots. The white people living there threw rocks and fireworks at the Howard household. Police didn't arrest very many people, which shows how when white people were being violent towards blacks, nothing much happened. Local progressives pushed for more black families to be moved into the project, and so this is what the CHA did. It ended up only sparking more violence and riots, which caused a heavy police presence in that area who protected the black families living there. It was all around a bad situation with a lot of tension and was probably a nightmare for everyone in the neighborhood. It wasn't until a decade later that Chicago decided the black families could go about their business without being threatened and the police were removed.
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The struggle of these families is portrayed in the novel Trumbull Park by Frank London Brown, published in 1959. As described by UPNE book partners:
"With honesty and humor, the richly textured narrative chronicles how the small group of black tenants at Trumbull Park endure the strain of living with racial violence: the endless danger of bombings and shattered windows, filthy insults, callous attention from police, and forced rides in armed convoys to and from work and the market. Until, that is, the day Buggy and a friend refuse police protection and walk home together through the white mob."
"With honesty and humor, the richly textured narrative chronicles how the small group of black tenants at Trumbull Park endure the strain of living with racial violence: the endless danger of bombings and shattered windows, filthy insults, callous attention from police, and forced rides in armed convoys to and from work and the market. Until, that is, the day Buggy and a friend refuse police protection and walk home together through the white mob."