Students and the Second 2011 The Author(s) Ghetto: Federal ...urbanoasis.org/files/articles/JPH SecondGhetto Print.pdf · Students and the Second Ghetto: Federal Legislation, Urban

Students and the SecondGhetto: Federal Legislation,Urban Politics, and CampusPlanning at the University ofChicago

LaDale Winling1

AbstractIn the years after World War II, the University of Chicago (U of C) enjoyed a position as a leader inhigher education with the ability to help provide for national economic growth and global securitythrough professional education and scientific research. It also faced a dramatically changing set ofneighborhood conditions that threatened its leadership status. University administrators pursuedan ambitious agenda of redevelopment and neighborhood management in South East Chicago inorder to fight a wave of racial transition. In doing so, the university formed and led a coalition oftop urban universities that shared real estate practices and helped create federal policy thatmade universities integral parts of urban renewal initiatives in the 1960s. This effort to create,manage, and redevelop housing, including student housing, provoked strident opposition from thestudent body and set the emerging New Left against the university in an early salvo of thestudent movement.

KeywordsChicago, urban renewal, universities, urban politics, black power, student movement

Chicago alderman Leon Despres phoned community organizer Nicholas von Hoffman one day in

December, 1960. The South Side politician told von Hoffman that an urban renewal proposal created

by the University of Chicago (U of C) for the neighborhood near the university campus would come

before the city’s planning commission the next day. von Hoffman worked for Saul Alinsky’s Indus-

trial Areas Foundation organizing the largely African American Woodlawn neighborhood in

Despres’ 5th Ward. Given a day’s notice, von Hoffman collected dozens of Woodlawn residents and

led them to a protest at city hall in opposition to the renewal plan, which threatened to seize land,

expand the campus, and effectively build a barricade between the Midway Plaisance and much of the

Woodlawn neighborhood at 61st Street. The strong show of opposition stunned the planning

commission and the protest resulted in a postponement of the renewal plan. While the Temporary

1Assistant Professor, Department of History, Temple University

Corresponding Author:

LaDale Winling, Department of History, 951 Gladfelter Hall, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122

Email: [email protected]

Journal of Planning History10(1) 59-86ª 2011 The Author(s)Reprints and permission:sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/1538513210392002http://jph.sagepub.com

Woodlawn Organization (TWO) battled the city government and university to a stalemate, some of

the university’s own students participated in grassroots efforts to develop the neighborhood and

oppose inequitable U of C expansion. TWO eventually reached accommodation with the city and

the university in the form of an expanded 1963 renewal plan that incorporated community input and

a reprioritization of city resources to the Woodlawn neighborhood (Figure 1).1

After a decade of university intervention in the built environment, this lengthy standoff

over planning between the elite university, the city, and a nascent black community group stands

as a key moment in the history of postwar Chicago. As the university worked to assert and

develop its role as an institution at the very foundation of American postwar prosperity and inter-

national security, it created an identity and ambition as a national, even a global institution.2

However, the U of C was also an institution deeply rooted in a particular local context, having

drawn much of its power and support from regional and metropolitan elites.3 Its ambition for

Figure 1. Planning and redevelopment activity in Hyde Park and Woodlawn. Map by the author.

60 Journal of Planning History 10(1)

a kind of placelessness—an American institution rather than a Chicago university—seemed to be

threatened by its South Side location, where it was surrounded by an expanding African

American community that worried admissions officers, faculty recruiters, and the parents of

prospective students.4

It is this tension between ambition and conditions, between the rhetoric and the reality of

higher education in the context of an emerging urban crisis that prompted the creation of one

of the earliest and most ambitious university-led redevelopment plans in the country. Wielding

political clout at the city, state, and national levels; developing public policy; and intervening

in the real estate market, U of C leadership took on responsibilities typically outside the purview

of and seemingly anathema to institutions of higher education.5 As Arnold Hirsch has shown,

Chicago planners were ‘‘persistent pioneer[s] in developing concepts and devices’’ that shaped

federal renewal legislation.6 However, existing scholarship has framed the university as a

regional planner, one on par with a neighborhood organization or one that ‘‘fail[ed] to achieve

popular consensus’’ in creating a redevelopment plan in Hyde Park.7 I argue that the U of C was

a much more central and powerful actor in postwar urban development and helped create a

movement within higher education wherein universities took on the roles of leading urban

developers—initiating a role that many institutions maintain to this day. Examining a longer time

frame, we can see that U of C leaders pursued the most ambitious agenda of urban redevelopment

created at any university to that time and explicitly established a template for other urban uni-

versities to follow in pursuing expansion at their own campuses around the country. In the pro-

cess, the U of C leadership exacerbated tensions with their surrounding neighborhoods and, in

attempting to maintain a system of racial segregation in their local community, turned U of C

students and local residents from supporters to opponents. These actions prompted students to

protest and work against the university’s expansionary and segregationist practices, constituting

a key front of attack for the emerging New Left alliance. In this way, the global postwar ambi-

tions of the U of C and higher education more broadly came into conflict with the local identity

of the university and the historical relationship between the U of C and Chicago’s South Side.

This work counters much of the established scholarship on universities by placing institutions of

higher education like the U of C at the center of the history of postwar urban growth, development,

and conflict, rather than at the periphery.8 I work to complicate our notion of postwar urban rede-

velopment and segregation, which has often emphasized the agency and opposition of two types

of individuals—economic and policy elites on one hand and grassroots activists on the other.9 By

mid-century, universities had achieved a new status in society and had become a new type of insti-

tution that both comprised and mediated between a mix of constituencies including the metropolitan

elites of the governing board and administrative leadership on one hand and the staff, faculty, and

students on the other, who both participated in and influenced the creation and implementation of

urban policy and development.10 In fact, the coexistence of these many, well-educated, creative con-

stituencies working within one institution toward human, economic, regional, and cultural develop-

ment, often in creative tension with one another, is part of what enabled universities to assume such a

prominent role in postwar urban development.

Campus Vision

At the U of C, two key university leaders, chancellor Lawrence Kimpton and long-time Hyde Park

resident and lawyer Julian Levi, established a vision in the early 1950s, which would guide the uni-

versity’s development activity for the succeeding two decades and involved phases of campus plan-

ning, slum clearance, urban renewal, and building educational coalitions, all the while establishing

precedents for other universities to follow. These two figures represented the academy’s leading

edge of the ‘‘broad front’’ of urban liberalism at mid-century.11 In 1949, residents of the Hyde Park

Winling 61

Figure 2. Race and student residences, University of Chicago area 1940. In 1940, the city’s black populationwas segregated within the Black Belt, insulating nearby neighborhoods such as Kenwood, Hyde Park, andWoodlawn from demographic change. Hyde Park had experienced some deterioration from its suburban ori-gins in the nineteenth century but was still largely white and middle class. Students lived throughout HydePark, Woodlawn, and South Shore to the south, though there were concentrations of student residenceson campus. Data from U.S. Census and a 5 percent sample of the University of Chicago student directory.Map by the author.


community including faculty members and urban professionals formed the Hyde Park-Kenwood

Community Conference (HPKCC) and the university followed by founding the South East

Chicago Commission (SECC) in 1952 to deal with the threat of real estate exploitation and racial

transition in the surrounding communities.12 Like dozens of grassroots organizations around the

country, the HPKCC organized around a strategy of block clubs and neighborhood watches in

hopes of partnering with the university and helping create ‘‘an interracial community of high stan-

dards.’’13 Kimpton and Levi, however, devised a far more ambitious strategy intended to build a

set of buffers around the campus rather than smooth the process of neighborhood transition.

Led by the SECC, ostensibly a grassroots organization independent from the university, this strat-

egy represented a shift in university policy and practice from the university’s prewar agenda,

which, while motivated by racial fear, was largely interested in preserving demographic stasis,

rather than remaking the landscape of South East Chicago (Figure 2).14

The university first sought state redevelopment legislation that would empower private parties to

lead their own local redevelopment projects. Kimpton and Levi had approached the Martin Kennelly

administration to arrange for increased police protection in Hyde Park but found the mayor unre-

sponsive. Lacking clout at city hall, the university turned to Springfield. Drawing on an existing state

redevelopment law, in 1953 Julian Levi devised and successfully lobbied for amendments to the

Neighborhood Redevelopment Corporation Act that would allow a private corporation, formed

by officers of the university, to gain powers of eminent domain. Going forward, the university

‘‘could attack their own problems without regard for what happened elsewhere’’ in the city.15 In per-

haps the most explicit statement of their collaborative vision and its early steps, Levi wrote in a

memo to Kimpton:

‘‘The general planning objectives to be sought in the preparation of plans of the University Community

under the Neighborhood Redevelopment Corporation Law are the following:

1. The development of the concept of a unified U of C campus, involving the development of an inte-

grated community characterized by limited traffic access, broad community landscaping, etc.

2. A drastic reduction in density, to be obtained by the demolition and destruction of over-aged apart-

ment buildings throughout the area and their replacement by single residence, town house, and duplex

structures.

3. The establishment of a homogeneous, economic, middle class or better level within the

community.’’16

The university’s first redevelopment effort illustrated the low-density urban design strategy that

most subsequent developments would follow. In 1954, the SECC hired modernist architect Harry

Weese to develop a plan to turn a dense mix of apartment buildings and street-level retail west of

campus near Washington Park into a verdant, low-density residential development for married stu-

dents. The South West Hyde Park Redevelopment Area was the first plan to eliminate housing units

and create a buffer between the campus and the expanding Black Belt population.17

U of C followed this effort by replanning and expanding the grounds of its own campus, hiring

architect Eero Saarinen in the fall of 1954 to create a campus and area plan with the cachet to sway

public opinion.18 As a wave of postwar enrollment and research growth necessitated campus

expansion around the country, universities hired leading architecture and planning firms like

Saarinen & Associates to envision the shape of their future.19 Saarinen, one of the most prolific

architects of the 1950s, was reimagining corporate campuses and research centers in projects like

the General Motors Tech Center in Warren, Michigan, and Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New

Jersey.20 Among the key features of the U of C plan was an expressway crossing from Lake Shore

Drive, east of campus, into Washington Park on the west, separating the U of C from most of the

Woodlawn neighborhood.

Winling 63

As a counterpart to this barricade, Saarinen planned for an expansion of the campus, filling out

parcels to the west of the existing boundaries toward Cottage Grove Avenue and south across the

Midway Plaisance between 60th and 61st Streets. Beyond acquisition of real estate, the location

and design of buildings reinforced the university’s ambivalence toward the neighborhood. In this

vein, Saarinen designed a women’s dormitory, later called Woodward Court, located on the

southwest corner of Woodlawn Avenue and 58th Street on the interior of campus. In concert with

the neighborhood redevelopment plan designed by his friend, Harry Weese, Saarinen anticipated

the development of low-density residential buildings surrounded by green space to replace the

block of dense, multiuse structures located along East 55th Street. Weese later designed Pierce

Hall, a men’s dormitory at the edge of campus on E. 55th, which cleared a block of storefronts, taverns,

and low-rise turn-of-the-century buildings, and replaced them with a single-use building supplying

plentiful interior social space for students but lacking an entry onto East 55th Street, dramatically

reconfiguring commercial, social, and pedestrian life on the periphery of campus (Figure 3).21

In the process of securing the university’s future through neighborhood management,

Kimpton turned to the regional masters of capital. The university trustees—men like meat

packing heir Harold Swift, steel executive Edward Ryerson, retailing scion and publisher

Marshall Field III, lawyer and timber director Laird Bell, and container executive Walter

Paepcke—were heirs to and managers of the regional flows of natural resources, commodities,

retail goods, and information that had made Chicago the country’s second largest city.22 These

Figure 3. Proposed scheme for graduate housing. On land acquired by eminent domain pursuant toNeighborhood Community Redevelopment Act, architect Harry Weese envisioned separation between theproposed housing and E. 55th St. using tennis courts and a double arcade of trees. This development was neverbuilt and the site is now used for the UC football field and athletics track. Source: University of Chicago SpecialCollections, University of Chicago Library.


Figure 4. Illustration from the Saarinen & Associates campus master plan. The proposed South CrosstownExpressway runs east–west to the south of campus, potentially involving demolition of numerous buildings notdepicted here. Source: University of Chicago Special Collections, University of Chicago Library.

Winling 65

Protestant business leaders offered a weighty counterpart to the largely Irish and Polish Catholic

strength of the Cook County Democratic Party, which ruled city politics with a machine fueled

by patronage.23 Trustees Marshall Field III, Marshall Field IV, and Howard Wood were especially

important as regional media influences, publishing the Chicago Sun-Times and overseeing the

Tribune Company, respectively, and could influence newspaper editorials and coverage of city

business and politics (Figure 4).24

The trustees’ social and business networks in the top echelon of Chicago society brought

philanthropic capital to bear upon the project of urban redevelopment and helped advance

the university’s transition from a local institution into a national one. Shortly after the trustees

contracted for the campus plan, Lawrence Kimpton launched a $32.7 million capital campaign

for programmatic development, faculty development, and physical development of the univer-

sity grounds. The ‘‘Program for the University of Chicago’’ included $10.8 million dollars—

one-third of the campaign total—for the university’s ‘‘Neighborhood Improvement and Student

Housing’’ program, including $6.6 million for dormitory construction and $4.2 million ‘‘to buy

and remodel buildings in the University area and to provide inexpensive housing for married

graduate students.’’25 By the time the campaign went public in June of 1955, university trustees

had pledged $4,000,000 of their own money.26 In addition, Kimpton had developed plans to

expand enrollment by drawing students from a national recruitment network, rather than a local

set of feeder high schools. This reduced the institution’s responsiveness to a local constituency

of educators, alumni, and families, while compelling students to live in the campus area as

the proportion of commuter students declined and giving the university greater control over

their housing.27

Masters of Capital

Drawing on the influence of its trustees, the university also attracted funds from a network of

national philanthropic and federal interests. First among these was a $100,000 grant from the

Marshall Field Foundation to create a planning office to envision and manage the Hyde Park A

& B projects.28 With the plan in hand, the university turned to the federal government for slum clear-

ance funds under Title I of the Housing Act of 1949. Clarence Randall, an Inland Steel executive and

U of C trustee, served as an economic advisor to President Eisenhower and in July, 1954, requested a

meeting with the President to discuss a university application for slum clearance funds.29 Randall

and fellow Inland Steel executive Edward Ryerson had been strong Eisenhower supporters and were

prominent Illinois Republicans—Ryerson reputedly had been under consideration for a cabinet posi-

tion.30 The President’s staff responded swiftly to Randall’s request and a contingent of university

trustees and administrators was sitting in meetings just eight days later with President Eisenhower

in the Oval Office, then met with housing officials where they received assurance of approval of $15

million for the redevelopment proposal to be transferred to the City of Chicago. ‘‘[T]hey had every-

body who could say ‘no’ there,’’ Levi remembered later. ‘‘We walked out of the meeting about forty-

five minutes later assured of the contract.’’ At this point, even Kimpton and Levi underestimated

their abilities to sway public officials and policy, as Levi lamented, ‘‘‘The fact is, I’m starting to

realize what you could do . . . We should have been here with the whole package.’’’31 It would not

be Levi’s last trip to Washington, District of Columbia.

The flow of federal resources offered the university leverage in negotiating with the city admin-

istration, led by Mayor Richard J. Daley, Kennelly’s successor who took office in 1955.32 Eager to

increase both city revenue and urban development, the mayor agreed to allow the university to con-

duct all the redevelopment preparations through the university’s new planning unit. This office was

headed by Jack Meltzer, a planner whom the university had hired away from Michael Reese


Hospital, a South Side institution that had responded to racial transition with demolition and rede-

velopment plans of its own in the late 1940s.33

Hyde Park A & B represented the ascendance of technocratic social science and modernist

urbanism—the university reform ethic brought to bear on the mid-century urban crisis. Originating

in the Progressive Era reform impetus, units of the university like the Sociology department and

School of Social Service Administration continued to grapple with problems of urban disorder

(Figures 5 and 6). The U of C had helped the U.S. Census Bureau create tract maps as early as

1920 and tabulate data for the city, and their alumni had a facility with urban data that informed

public policy.34 The SECC employed Don Blackiston, a Chicago-trained sociologist, to research and

map crime, poverty, and housing data, in order to identify potential redevelopment areas. The irre-

gular boundaries of the clearance projects were designed to eliminate a specific set of buildings that

had become sites of crime and dilapidation.35 Julian Levi remembered, ‘‘One of the things that char-

acterized our planning in Hyde Park ‘A & B’ ... were these wonderful maps that Blackiston had, so

that you drew the lines knowing what you were doing in so far as crime was concerned.’’36 Informed

by these data, Levi and Kimpton managed the clearance process, holding influence over municipal

decisions by marshalling a coalition of designers such as Saarinen, Harry Weese, I. M. Pei, and

developer William Zeckendorf to influence public opinion and policy. At one point, Levi

recommended that the university veto a design by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for the Hyde Park

Figure 5. View of Hyde Park prior to land clearance. This view depicts E. 55th St. looking west from the IllinoisCentral RR tracks toward the University of Chicago campus. The street was interpreted as chaotic, congested,and aged. Source: University of Chicago Special Collections, University of Chicago Library.

Winling 67

A project—a power putatively held by the city—because the developer, Herbert Greenwald, did not

have a strong enough equity position to guarantee the success of the upscale project. Zeckendorf and

Pei were subsequently awarded the project.

Changes in federal housing legislation enabled the university and the SECC to broaden the scope

of its intervention as racial transition continued in Hyde Park and Woodlawn. The revised legislation

reflected the shifting federal emphasis in the Housing Act of 1954 from area clearance to a combi-

nation of spot redevelopment and a broad rehabilitation program including historic properties. Col-

laborating again with the city administration, the university developed an urban renewal plan for

most of the Hyde Park neighborhood.37 The SECC successfully sought the support of the HPKCC

and alderman Leon Despres during the three years of developing the renewal plan from 1955 to 1958

in an effort to shore up the built environment for a largely white, professional class population.38 The

student population was generally supportive of urban renewal efforts, and the Chicago Maroon

lauded the university’s pioneering role in urban conservation and redevelopment with headlines

including ‘‘[Kimpton] Helped Improve Hyde Park Housing’’ and ‘‘Hyde Park-Kenwood Renewal

Projects Celebrate Tenth Year.’’39 The university designated the East 55th Street corridor for rede-

velopment to help expand the university’s campus and create a buffer between university grounds

and the neighborhood. The city would condemn properties along the street and, after demolition

of buildings, offer the parcels to the university at discounted rates for development. This segment

of the renewal plan was intended to eliminate the chaos of a bohemian district of taverns, apartment

buildings, and performance spaces, but notable casualties included businesses like the Compass

Figure 6. Hyde Park viewed from the same spot during redevelopment. East 55th has been widened and rou-ted around the University Park condominium towers, under construction in the photo, designed by I. M. Pei andAssociates. Buildings on north side of East 55th have been demolished and redeveloped as part of Hyde Park AProject, providing an updated aesthetic, more parking, and greater traffic capacity. Source: University of Chi-cago Special Collections, University of Chicago Library.


Theater, a comedy troupe of university alumni later reconstituted on Chicago’s North Side as Second

City.40 Slated to cost more than $38 million (two-thirds from the federal government), the plan

passed the city’s Board of Aldermen with a unanimous vote, forty-four to zero.41

Despite making robust use of state and federal policy, by 1958, U of C administrators felt they had

reached the limits of existing renewal legislation and set out to create a new program to complete the

work of remaking their surroundings. The political culture and community bonds of Hyde Park were

strong, knotted by defenders and activists in groups like the HPKCC, but transformations in the

Woodlawn neighborhood that weakened community organizations south of campus worried Julian

Levi. Enrollment had declined at U of C in the early 1950s, but administrators decided on a strategy

of programmatic proliferation and southward campus expansion across the Midway Plaisance to bolster

their reputation and deal with a liminal zone between 60th and 61st Streets, just north of the expressway

proposed by Saarinen. Anticipating opposition from the neighborhood, Levi assumed the payroll of

struggling Woodlawn community groups in order to maintain their support and prevent an organizing

effort by Hyde Park resident Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation, who might be invited to take

on Woodlawn as a project if existing groups failed.42 The SECC director found no recourse for aiding

campus expansion in existing law and worked with Kimpton to create such a program.

By the late 1950s, the cultural import and political power of universities was at an all-time high

and the institutions had become integral parts of the postwar liberal consensus. Successful collabora-

tion between the federal government and universities in World War II through efforts like the Navy’s

V training programs and the Manhattan Project—in which the U of C was a key participant and

Lawrence Kimpton a leading administrator—had built political capital for institutions of higher edu-

cation. After veterans swelled enrollments Congress authorized and appropriated additional

resources to universities to expand their facilities.43 Federal science policy recruited universities

as research partners in what Senator J. William Fulbright would call the ‘‘military-industrial-

academic complex,’’ and the Soviet launch of Sputnik prompted the creation of the National Defense

Education Act in 1958, which created scholarships and laboratory facilities for graduate research

and education in math, science, and engineering in order to keep pace in the space race.44 Soon Clark

Kerr, president of the University of California, began to speak and write about the importance of

universities to economic development. In a series of lectures published in 1963 as The Uses of the

University, Kerr called universities ‘‘instruments of national purpose’’ and asserted,

What the railroads did for the second half of the last century and the automobile did for the first half of

this century may be done for the second half of this century by the knowledge industry: that is, to serve as

the focal point for national growth. And the university is at the center of the knowledge process.45

Sensing a shared environmental crisis among leading urban universities, Julian Levi and Lawrence

Kimpton set about creating a coalition of institutions to lobby federal lawmakers for tailoring

renewal legislation to urban universities. Kimpton served on the board of the American Council

of Education (ACE) from 1954 to 1960, holding the chair in 1957 and 1958, and as a board member

of the Association of American Universities from 1951 to 1960. These bodies were two of the coun-

try’s most prominent lobbying organizations for higher education, and the ACE, founded in 1918,

had been the nation’s lead education interest group for nearly half a century. Through these two

groups, Kimpton formed a study group of fourteen leading urban universities to develop a case for

federal aid for campus expansion at institutions that faced changing demographics, aging infrastruc-

ture, and economic transformation of their local communities. The study group included Columbia,

Harvard, Yale, New York University, the University of California, the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology, Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, and the University of Pennsylvania, among

others.46 The ACE and AAU became the lead organizations for managing the lobbying effort in

Washington and Julian Levi coordinated university efforts from Chicago. He hired B. T. Fitzpatrick,

Winling 69

the former general counsel of the Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA), to draft an amend-

ment to be offered during the upcoming reauthorization of the federal housing act in 1958.47

Leaders of the university coalition began a campaign of public advocacy for renewal legislation

based on national interest. Levi testified before Congress several times and, in a 1959 address, con-

nected the university’s specific concerns to the national educational project, justifying the necessity

of a massive planning intervention by grounding it in student needs.

If we are really serious about the next generation of teachers and scholars, lawyers and doctors, physicists

and chemists, then we have got to worry about the adequate housing of the graduate student . . .

We cannot have it both ways. We are either going to have graduate students, who produce leadership

for the next generation . . . or we are not going to achieve these results because we are unwilling to dis-

turb existing owners and populations.48

In this vision for American postwar leadership, students were the instruments of global hegemony and

deteriorating neighborhoods were obstacles to cold war victory. Thus, student housing and campus

neighborhoods were local fronts in a broader battle to shape the future of American and global society.

The key achievement of this Chicago-led coalition was creation of Section 418 of the Housing

Act of 1959, which made universities an integral part of urban redevelopment efforts. Levi created

the idea for a national program that was ideally suited—indeed, designed—for his institution’s

needs. University contributions near to and consistent with an approved urban renewal plan would

trigger a two-to-one federal match, even for acquisition or demolition expenses up to five years before

the enactment of the renewal plan. Federal funds in excess of the cost of the project could become cred-

its transferable to urban renewal projects anywhere in the city. In addition, a new provision removed

the requirement that urban renewal projects be ‘‘predominantly residential’’ when universities parti-

cipated.49 Julian Levi, among a team of witnesses in Congressional testimony, asserted,

There ought to be a national policy that when a university needs land for expansion in an otherwise eli-

gible urban renewal situation, that it is just as much in the national interest to let that land go to academic

purposes as to put it to housing purposes.50

In formulating the policy and recommending its enactment, Levi seemed to offer a postwar inversion

of Franklin Roosevelt’s plea on behalf of ‘‘one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.’’

In Levi’s rhetoric, like that of Clark Kerr, it was the technocratic middle class that required federal

aid and would serve the national interests of domestic security and economic growth.51The univer-

sity coalition played politics in addition to a public relations strategy. Members lobbied key Senators

and Congressmen to support the renewal provisions, with Yale, for example, convincing

Connecticut Senator and alumnus Prescott Bush of the necessity of the program; Harvard worked

John Kennedy, an alumnus; Chicago lobbied Paul Douglas, a Hyde Park resident and former faculty

member; and Penn pushed Senator Joseph Clark, a former Philadelphia mayor.52 All of these men

served on the Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, which was responsible for the legislation

and whose staff included a former U of C employee.53 The act passed Congress with strong majo-

rities in the Summer of 1959 and received the President’s signature.54

The new initiative, known as the Section 112 credits program, augmented the political power of

universities to an unprecedented degree.55 In Chicago, Mayor Daley had spent all of the city’s fed-

eral urban renewal funds by mid-1958 and was eager to find additional sources of federal revenue.56

With this new potential revenue stream, municipal urban renewal administrators were under pres-

sure to approve projects that would aid universities and generate credits for the city rather than make

decisions on the perceived design and development merits of project proposals.57 The U of C had

designed this program with its own situation in mind, and particularly promoted the idea of the


five-year backdating for expenditures to trigger credits, because it had begun investing resources

well in advance of most other institutions and did not want to miss out on federal funds.

The university’s two avenues of city renewal politics and campus expansion intersected at the

Midway Plaisance. The Midway, a strip of land between 59th and 60th Streets separating the uni-

versity from the Woodlawn neighborhood, had served as a recreational and carnival-type space dur-

ing the 1893 Columbian Exposition, and had been used since then as a park for recreation.58 The

university had built on several parcels across the Midway in the intervening six decades but was

poised for a dramatic expansion that would require all the land in a mile-long strip between 60th

and 61st Streets running from Washington Park on the west to Jackson Park on the east.

The new housing legislation allowed for a wide array of institutional alliances that would ulti-

mately empower universities. U of C was able to entertain, under the provisions of the law, a pro-

posal from Sears Roebuck and Co. to give $2 million to the university to spend on urban renewal

near their Hyde Park campus, triggering $6 million in federal credits that could be used on an urban

renewal project in Lawndale on the city’s West Side where Sears was headquartered, tripling the

power of what the corporation could achieve with direct investment in redevelopment alone.59 In

the proposal for the university’s South Campus that came before city boards, the city of Chicago

stood to reap $14 million in federal credits, based on nearly $7 million of university investment

in Woodlawn and Hyde Park.60

By the passage of the federal housing act in 1959, urban renewal had already begun prompting

defections from the postwar liberal coalition. When policy makers and the urban proletariat rea-

lized the promise of postwar growth would not be evenly shared, a new coalition of individual

political and cultural critics and grassroots organizations began to realign and mobilize against

urban growth and redevelopment policies. Liberal modern housing advocates like Catherine Bauer

Wurster, who had worked to popularize European ideals of social housing in the United States,

launched critiques of the public housing and renewal program, as in her 1957 article for Architec-

ture Forum, ‘‘The Dreary Deadlock of Public Housing.’’61 Ideological opponents of centralized

planning attacked from the libertarian left, led by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great

American Cities.62 In the case of South East Chicago, the U of C had so successfully insinuated

itself into the metropolitan vision for economic advancement and the national agenda for techno-

logical and capitalist triumph that it became inextricably caught up in the web of political mobi-

lization, public policy, and redevelopment finance.63

Near the U of C South Campus, the redevelopment proposal sparked the organization of a

community coalition focused on black empowerment and neighborhood self-determination. Mem-

bers of several Woodlawn churches invited Saul Alinsky to organize the community, who set

Nicholas von Hoffman to build grassroots cooperation and develop a set of neighborhood issues,

including community planning, to take to city hall.64 Students were among members of the liberal

coalition who began to question the university’s intervention in Woodlawn, ostensibly on their

behalf. Several university theology students helped von Hoffman organize the neighborhood as

part of their vocational labor, working to repair the damage university administrators had done

to their local communities.65 Alinsky and von Hoffman, along with several Woodlawn ministers

led by Arthur Brazier, established the TWO, which later became a permanent community fixture

as The Woodlawn Organization. Long before the Chicago Freedom Movement, TWO worked to

connect the southern civil rights movement in the South with northern efforts to promote racial

equality, inviting the southern Freedom Riders to rallies and leading protests at the suburban

homes of exploitative landlords, a practice made notorious when Martin Luther King, Jr., was

attacked in Gage Park in 1966.66

The alliance between administrative leadership and Daley’s political machine rent the relation-

ship between the university and the alderman of the local 5th Ward, Leon Despres, opening a polit-

ical door for the Woodlawn group. Residents of the Hyde Park community were politically active

Winling 71

and skewed liberal, so elected officials like Despres and alderman Charles Merriam before him

served a political base that did not rely upon growth and Democratic Party patronage. Despres had

turned against the university’s redevelopment efforts and claimed Julian Levi orchestrated an elec-

toral challenge against him in 1959.67 Taking stock of the grassroots insurgency, the alderman tipped

off von Hoffman when he learned that the redevelopment proposal was scheduled to come before the

city’s planning commission. TWO gathered a few dozen protestors to oppose approval of the plan

and the commission, stunned to see a politically organized black community, postponed the vote,

giving TWO a morale-boosting victory and illustrating the effectiveness of political mobilization.68

Urbanist Jane Jacobs wrote a feature on Woodlawn in Architectural Forum and quoted the city plan-

ning commissioner’s shock at such an organization, who estimated the crowd in the ‘‘hundreds, you

might as well say a thousand.’’69

The organization leveraged this anti-renewal effort to address broader local and metropolitan

initiatives, including school segregation and landlord exploitation. Still, TWO continued to battle

the Daley administration on development until the mayor lost a bond issue election in 1962 to

refill a municipal fund for urban renewal projects.70 When the city lost the leverage of fiscal

resources, Art Brazier, Mayor Daley, and Levi brokered a compromise that expanded the

boundaries of the Woodlawn renewal plan, incorporated community input, and allowed invest-

ment resources to be devoted to an area reaching south to 63rd Street, serving the priorities of

Woodlawn residents as well as the university.71 Eventually, the university was able to complete

its planned buffer south of the Midway, including the design and construction of Eero Saarinen’s

law school building in 1959 and Mies van der Rohe’s School of Social Services Administration

building in 1965 (Figure 7).

Despite the U of C’s difficulties in implementing a program of its own design, the Section 112

credits initiative proved a popular resource for universities across the country. In subsequent years,

the federal legislation was altered to include the participation of hospitals and, in just its first five

years, nearly fifty institutions around the country drew upon its funding mechanism to facilitate the

expansion of urban campuses and it won plaudits from administrators and planners.72 By 1966, more

than 92 million dollars of Section 112 credits had been authorized for projects involving universities,

colleges, and hospitals.73

Private Property

Though the university had the power to bend city, state, and federal law to its purposes, the

in-migration of African Americans to Hyde Park and Woodlawn from the expanding Black Belt was

a more powerful force than public policy could hold at bay. The private real estate market enabled

such movement through the division and conversion of apartment units, the marketing of buildings

to exploitative landlords and of small units to individuals and families displaced or newly freed from

the Black Belt. The university began a campaign of intervention in private real estate in the 1950s to

counter this movement. Chicago’s participation in the real estate market took several forms, illus-

trating both the complexity of the hundreds and thousands of market actors in the Hyde Park and

Woodlawn neighborhoods and the lengths that the university would go to in order to protect its rep-

utation as a leading cold war research university.

The increasing cooperation of educational institutions in national organizations and local alli-

ances enabled the dissemination of shared real estate practices in addition to the creation of urban

policy. Faced with the realization that the university might have to expand its own private holdings

in Hyde Park and Woodlawn to manage these neighborhoods, U of C administrators consulted the

Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). IIT had expanded its campus in nearby Bronzeville throughout

the 1940s under the leadership of Henry Heald, employing the designs of Mies van der Rohe.74 In the

process of acquiring real estate for expansion and serving as a private market landlord, IIT had


Figure 7. Race and student residences, University of Chicago area 1960. By 1960, a dramatic demographic shifttook place around the Chicago campus. University-led redevelopment preserved a white island near campus, inpart by clustering students in university-owned housing, while Kenwood and Woodlawn have become predo-minantly African American. Larger dots indicate on-campus housing, while smaller dots illustrate private markethousing, in many cases owned by the university or influenced by university housing policy. Data from U.S.Census and samples of University of Chicago student directories. Map by the author.

Winling 73

arranged for lax code enforcement by the City of Chicago to accelerate neighborhood decline,

increase rental income, and facilitate redevelopment.75

Adopting the basics of this strategy, the U of C drew upon philanthropic capital to facilitate

uneven development and maintain urban segregation in its own neighborhood.76 Using the $4.2 mil-

lion raised in the 1955 capital campaign, the university began purchasing buildings throughout Hyde

Park and Woodlawn. University apologists described the real estate acquisitions as a last resort for

dealing with ‘‘threat properties,’’ buildings where owners threatened to sell to speculators who

would convert apartments to kitchenette units—more or less single resident occupancy hotels

(SROs) with shared bathrooms, overcrowding, and insufficient space and facilities.77 However, the

university’s role was much more active. The SECC’s Don Blackiston searched real estate advertise-

ments in Chicago’s newspapers each day and located properties that seemed targeted for exploitative

investors. Julian Levi brought the buildings to the attention of Lawrence Kimpton, who instructed

university staff to purchase the properties or in some cases arranged the purchase through a U of

C investment trust. In one case, when a property near the Midway did not sell through listings in

the Chicago Tribune or the Sun-Times, Blackiston found it advertised in the Chicago Defender and

Levi jumped to arrange a university purchase.78 By the early 1960s, the university had purchased

buildings with hundreds of units throughout Hyde Park, amounting to 10 percent of the private rental

market.79 As the university rebounded from its enrollment crisis, administrators steered older stu-

dents among the growing student body into many of these off-campus buildings and hired a private

company to manage the properties.

University officers instructed their real estate management company to segregate buildings on the

basis of race and establish building quotas to provide white neighborhood residents with comfortable

environments and safe-feeling blocks that were not in danger of tipping to a majority of minority

residents. This strategy, the university later argued, was a more effective, gradualist approach to cre-

ating a stable, integrated neighborhood.80 Levi, especially, was concerned with the proportion of

blacks and whites in Hyde Park public schools. The SECC director monitored enrollments at the

local Ray and Kozminski schools, working to keep white students in the majority.81 At one point

in 1955, Levi wrote bluntly,

The problem of the high school is unresolved. Through the sophomore year, Hyde Park High School is

now overwhelmingly Negro. Thoughtful White families with freedom of economic choice remove their

children from this situation. This battle is now lost. It’s only a question of time within one year or two

Hyde Park High School will be completely Negro.82

With this in mind, Levi advocated public and private neighborhood intervention to manage enroll-

ments and prevent an expected white exodus from the neighborhood if schools became predomi-

nantly minority.

Institutional Alliances

Perhaps most illustrative of the lengths the university would go to manage the racial character of

Hyde Park and Woodlawn was the arrangement Levi made with several local landlords, paying rent

on vacant apartments during the summer months until university students arrived in the fall. Black

families could not occupy these units in the interim and the SECC kept the racial character of a

building or block from changing when the university had no other means of controlling it.83 In addi-

tion to coordinating development and serving as a major South Side landlord, the SECC intervened

in financial transactions, calling on U of C supporters such as Harris Trust and Savings and wheed-

ling other institutions to block and terminate loans to borrowers that Julian Levi suspected of being

or becoming slumlords.84


As part of this private market strategy, U of C administrators recruited metro Chicago theological

schools to relocate to sensitive sites in Hyde Park and Woodlawn, offering help in assembling par-

cels and managing construction. Such close proximity, the dean of Chicago’s divinity school argued,

would create an intellectual community of religious scholars like those found in Cambridge, Mas-

sachusetts, and Berkeley, California, where theological schools crowded around Harvard and UC-

Berkeley.85 The plan proved appealing and the Illinois Synod of the Lutheran Church of America

agreed to merge several schools to create the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago (LSTC) in

Hyde Park. The university had accumulated several parcels on a block northwest of the intersection

at E. 55th Street and University Avenue, intending to transfer the land to the LSTC and facilitate the

school’s acquisition of the whole block for redevelopment. However, when the LSTC announced its

construction plans in early 1962, neighborhood residents organized to oppose the redevelopment

effort, arguing that too much Hyde Park housing already had been lost to institutional uses in the

slum clearance and urban renewal efforts. A block resident formed an organization to obstruct the

sales of buildings to the university and school.86 U of C and LSTC were so motivated in pursuit of

the site that they attempted at one point to take over a holdout cooperative that owned a building by

buying a majority of the building’s unit shares and voting rights, subverting the co-op’s process of

democratic governance.87

Figure 8. Proposed site plan for Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, with holdout building. East 55th St.,south of the site, is at the bottom of the image. The Perkins þWill building design depicts a holdout apartmentbuilding surrounded by the education building and its parking lot. After residents agreed to move and the apart-ment building was demolished, the LSTC building was rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise before construc-tion. Image by author from illustration in Chicago Maroon.

Winling 75

When the university and the theology school relented and shifted their target site one block west

in 1964, where the university also owned land, they found more opposition. Jane MacMillan-

Macurdy, a resident in danger of displacement, wrote, ‘‘I know we will not be able to duplicate these

conditions in Hyde Park when so much residential space has been preempted by the University and

institutions such as yours.’’88 However, land acquisition and tenant negotiation went more smoothly

when LSTC administrators hired the wife of a U of C PhD student to deal with residents on the

block, especially students, who were guaranteed comparable accommodations in other university-

owned buildings, and might be less resistant to redevelopment.89 By the end of 1964, the institution

faced just a single holdout building and had engaged Chicago architecture firm Perkins þ Will to

create a design for the building, planning to begin construction at the end of the Summer of

1965.90 Early in 1965, the Lutheran institution released a site plan depicting its education complex

surrounding the holdout building on three sides, isolating the residents from the rest of the neighbor-

hood.91 Realizing the difficulty of living in such conditions, building owners agreed to exchange

their property for another site in Hyde Park and relocated there, removing the last obstacle to con-

struction, completed in 1966 (Figure 8).92

Student Protest

In the summers of 1960 and 1961, several students had worked in southern states on voter

registration drives and, in concert with TWO efforts, began to connect the segregation in Chicago with

civil rights efforts in the South. Allegedly discriminatory activities in university-owned properties

caught the attention of the south side chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, including local res-

idents and students at U of C and Roosevelt University.93 Southside CORE conducted paired rental

applicant testing, where a black potential tenant attempted to rent an apartment, followed by a white

potential tenant who made application—black applicants were rebuffed but white applicants were

approved to rent the apartments. In January 1962, CORE organized a sit-in protest at the university’s

administration building and a picket outside the real estate company’s office, with the support of stu-

dent government leaders. Graduate students, undergraduates, and community members took direct

action against segregated housing policy, claiming ‘‘The spirit of the Freedom Riders and the Southern

Sit-ins have moved North from Mississippi and Alabama to Chicago, Illinois.’’94

The sit-in at the administration building and the real estate offices lasted a tense two weeks that

split the U of C community, even exposing fractures between students within departments.95 Among

the demonstration’s leaders and participants were both undergraduates and graduate students,

including Robert Kern, a graduate of Chicago who studied the history of Spain, and Bernard

Sanders, a transfer student in political science from Brooklyn College. University faculty largely

withheld their support, which seemed to undermine broader support for the protestors, and criticized

the methods of direct action. Around the city, however, black institutions including the Chicago

Defender and labor unions lauded the student effort.96 Defender editorials noted that, ‘‘In the area

of race relations, the U of C has a long and disgraceful history’’ and supported such protests, calling

the demonstration ‘‘the only intelligent, rational way of making the U of C realize its moral respon-

sibility to the surrounding community.’’97 University president George Beadle, who succeeded

Lawrence Kimpton as chancellor in 1961, admitted the university took an incremental strategy in

dealing with segregation but pledged that the university and students were committed to the same

goals, promising a review of policies if the protesters ended their demonstration.98 Students agreed

to withdraw (Figure 9).

In the spring of 1962, the university commissioned a faculty report on housing in Hyde Park that

revealed the university controlled nearly a tenth of the Hyde Park private rental market. About 2500

off-campus units in the area in more than 100 buildings were under university ownership through

title or trust. The report echoed the HPKCC’s rhetoric in promoting ‘‘a stable interracial community


of high standards’’ and suggested faculty play a role in ‘‘an active program of experimentation and

research throughout the area.’’99 Sit-in participants and the Chicago Defender praised the report and

suggested it showed a way forward to an integrated community.100

Soon after the report was issued, a request from a city board provided university administrators an

opportunity to pursue the integrationist goals they claimed to share with the students. The city’s

Commission on Human Relations questioned the university’s commitment to integration in a letter

from commission chairman Ely Aaron to the Dean of Students, asking that landlords who refused an

antidiscrimination pledge be forbidden to list their apartments with the university.101 The Human

Relations commission argued that, if the city was to overcome its problems in housing discrimina-

tion and racial segregation, change would have to begin with leading liberal institutions like the U of

C, as universities such Yale had done. When Dean of Students Warner Wick drafted an assenting

reply, he was contradicted by the university’s business office. After consideration, the administration

concluded that they would not respond to the commission rather than take an antidiscrimination posi-

tion and provoke the ire of local property managers in the name of housing equality. Wrote a university

business officer, ‘‘Certainly, we can ill afford to undertake the responsibility for telling our neighbors

that they should not discriminate.’’102 Aaron’s letter went unanswered and the university, which had

directed the demolition and redevelopment of dozens of city blocks, managed the housing of

thousands of students on campus and in Hyde Park, and lobbied federal legislators and administrators

to create new programs, denied their ability and responsibility to effect change in their community.

Figure 9. CORE students occupy the University of Chicago Administration Building, January, 1962, to protesthousing segregation. Members of the Congress of Racial Equality allied with neighborhood organizations, con-fronted the university leadership, and staged a multi-week sit-in to oppose segregation in off-campus housingowned by the university. Addressing the crowd of students at left is UC undergraduate, CORE officer, and futureU.S. Senator Bernie Sanders. Source: University of Chicago Special Collections, University of Chicago Library.

Winling 77

University development, at the U of C and elsewhere, served as a catalyst and a bridge between

students’ civil rights organizing of the early 1960s and the broader spectrum of protests later in the

decade, from the antiwar movement to a critique of concentrated power within the city and soci-

ety.103 The ambivalence of the emerging New Left toward institutions of higher education was

reflected by the 1962 Port Huron Statement, which began, ‘‘We are people of this generation, bred

in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we

inherit.’’104 Students at the U of C became more strident in their critiques of the university and seg-

regation in the urban north, especially after students became more involved in national efforts,

such as the 1964 Freedom Summer and the creation of a local chapter of Students for a Democratic

Society the following autumn. In the fall of 1964, while students at Berkeley engaged in a semester-

long series of nationally covered protests sparked by campus expansion, comedian and civil rights

activist Dick Gregory sat for an interview with the student newspaper, the Chicago Maroon, to

discuss race and renewal on the South Side. Gregory charged the university—by its very technocratic,

modernizing, and progress-oriented operations—with undermining black advancement and being a

destructive institution as much as a creative one. The university, the comedian flatly asserted, had

‘‘a duty to do something for the dignity of humanity after its work on the bomb.’’ Equating northern

segregation with the Jim Crow legacy of the south, Gregory argued, ‘‘When people become aware that

there is no ‘down south,’ they’ll be facing the problem more honestly.’’105 Increasingly, students at the

U of C and at universities around the country came to agree with him, critiquing university develop-

ment as a kind of ‘‘bulldozer’’ and opposing its leadership, rhetorically and physically.106

This period of planning and redevelopment led by the U of C casts the growth of postwar higher

education in a new light. For more than a decade, students housed at the U of C were part of a broad

administrative strategy to manage community demographics and to physically remake the landscape

of Hyde Park and Woodlawn in order to secure the university’s growth and stature. These redevelop-

ment efforts illustrate the new-found and increasing power of the institution, owing in part to the

cultural, political, and economic ascension of higher education, which provided administrators

political leverage at both the local and the national levels.107 In remaking its surrounding environment,

the U of C used students as tools in a broad and enduring area redevelopment and management

strategy—as rhetorical justification for intervention and as masses of tenants to be moved around the

campus and surrounding neighborhoods with housing policy. In the process, the university brought

their intellectual and political resources to bear on municipal planning while heading a national effort

to expand the use of new planning practices and resources to education institutions around the country.

In many instances, this expanded ambition, scale of intervention, and the racial implications of the

assumption and deployment of new powers exacerbated tensions among Hyde Park’s liberal coalition,

prompting neighborhood opposition and from some segments of the student population. As a national

leader in research and redevelopment, the case of the U of C helps illustrate a new center of power

within American cities. In the postwar years there emerged, as a coordinator and catalyst of an ongoing

series of urban collaborations and conflicts, a new political player–the university.108

Notes

1. John Hall Fish, Black Power/White Control: The Struggle of the Woodlawn Organization in Chicago

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 71-73. A municipal bond proposal that would have

helped fund renewal projects such as the South Campus plan and obviated TWO opposition failed in the

spring of 1962, partly forcing Daley and Levi to broker the compromise with the Woodlawn community.

Julian Levi Oral History, 88-92. University of Chicago Special Collections; Amanda Seligman, Block by

Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago’s West Side (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago

Press, 2005), 86; and Roger Biles, Richard J. Daley: Politics, Race, and the Governing of Chicago (Dekalb,

IL: Northern Illinois University, 1995).


2. University of California president Clark Kerr wrote the most prominent description of the role of the

postwar university in promoting economic and cultural development and its increasingly important role

in the United States and the world. The U of C addressed their particular contributions in a profile for the

Ford Foundation in 1965. Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University, 4th ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1963); Reprint, 1995. ‘‘A Profile of the University of Chicago,’’ folders 1–3, box 273,

Beadle Administration Papers, University of Chicago Special Collections (hereafter BAP UCSC).

3. On founding support for the university, see Robin Bachin, Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic

Culture in Chicago, 1890-1919 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 34-35, 42.

4. Levi noted that the fear of racial transition was as much a factor as actual demographic change, asserting

that parents would ‘‘applaud the ‘noble experiment’ [of an interracial community] while at the same time

they caution their daughters not to go to the U of C lest they be raped on the streets.’’ Quoted in Arnold R.

Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL:

University of Chicago Press, 1998), 168.

5. John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (New York, NY: Longmans, Green & Co., 1923).

6. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, xiv.

7. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto. Peter Rossi and Robert Dentler, The Politics of Urban Renewal: The

Chicago Findings (New York, NY: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961), 156-90. Writing from a political

science perspective emphasizing liberal pluralism initiated by Robert Dahl and taken up by Nelson

Polsby, the authors minimize the use of power by elite actors in metropolitan redevelopment. Levi tried

to prevent the publication of Rossi and Dentler’s work because it cast the university and the SECC in a

bad light.

8. In this, I offer an alternative to the existing emphasis on suburbanizing, antiurban, or utopian characteriza-

tions of universities. Paul V. Turner, Campus: An American Planning Tradition (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 1984); Stefan Muthesius, The Postwar University: Utopianist Campus and College (London, UK:

Yale University Press, 2000); and Margaret Pugh O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the

Search for the Next Silicon Valley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

9. Historians such as Arnold Hirsch and Thomas Sugrue first gave scrutiny to grassroots whites’ roles in lim-

iting policy choices shaping metropolitan segregation in the north, while Kenneth Jackson led a wave of

suburban historians in illustrating the role of the state in promoting urban disinvestment and suburban

expansion. More recently, Robert Self has illustrated the interaction between policy elites and local grass-

roots groups, both black and white. Margaret O’Mara’s work remains the key historical work exploring

universities’ pursuit of economic and metropolitan development. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto. Thomas

Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 2003); Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United

States (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1985); and O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge.

10. These groups and alliances are not exclusive—students might ally with administrators, and faculty might

help develop urban policy. However, the mid-century university was a place where a wide range of these

groups participated in and reacted to these processes.

11. I borrow this term from Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold

War New York (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010).

12. Lawrence Kimpton served as the president of the SECC and Julian Levi as the Executive Director. Arnold

Hirsch and Robin Bachin have also illustrated some of the university’s efforts to create a segregated cam-

pus area before the war through homeowner associations and restrictive covenants. Julia Abrahamson, A

Neighborhood Finds Itself (New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1959), quoted in Hirsch, Making the Sec-

ond Ghetto, 144-45; Bachin, Building the South Side, 60; and Bonnie Marantz, ‘‘The Political Effectiveness

of the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference’’ (MA thesis, University of Chicago, 1967).

13. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 142. For an example of another such citizen group in St. Louis, see

Joseph Heathcott, ‘‘The City Quietly Remade: National Programs and Local Agendas in the Movement

to Clear the Slums, 1942–1952,’’ Journal of Urban History 34, no. 2 (2008): 233.

Winling 79

14. Robin Bachin, Building the South Side: Urban Culture and Civic Space in Chicago, 1890-1919 (Chicago, IL:

University of Chicago Press, 2004), 58-61. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 144-46. Levi regularly invoked

public support and a grassroots constituency even though the SECC was a thoroughly top-down organization.

See, for example, letter from Levi to Mendel Flanders August 19, 1953, folder 5, box 230, Kimpton Admin-

istration Papers (hereafter KAP) UCSC. In one instance, staff reported that an SECC board member com-

plained that ‘‘she feels she is being ‘used’ and doesn’t know what really happens in the Commission. She

feels that at the decision-making level you and Mr. Kimpton do this without consultation or direction from

the Executive Committee.’’ Sarah Wexler to Julian Levi. March 31, 1955, folder 6, box 230, KAP UCSC. Levi

expressed disdain and ridicule for the staff and efforts of the HPKCC, while also criticizing university faculty

whose planning work in the Hyde Park neighborhood he considered overly idealistic and esoteric.

15. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 152.

16. ‘‘Memorandum—Planning Objective’’ (n.d.), folder 6, box 234, KAP UCSC.

17. The depicted construction part of this plan was never carried out, though the redevelopment corporation did

acquire the land and demolish the buildings.

18. Particularly on the proposed treatment of the Midway, the university promoted an ideal of historical con-

tinuity between their plans and those of renowned designers from Olmsted to Burnham to Saarinen. Trustee

Walter Paepcke of the Container Corporation of America specifically advocated for Saarinen’s hire—in

part, the two men shared a vision of a modern industrial future in which automotive transportation shaped

and improved urban life and culture.

19. See, for example Turner, Campus, 249-306; Muthesius, The Postwar University; and Walter McQuade,

‘‘College Architecture: The Economics and Aesthetics,’’ Fortune (May 1963): 148-50.

20. Rather than research parks deriving their form from college campuses, postwar universities were often

designed with the innovative form of new corporate and research campuses in mind. ‘‘The Maturing Mod-

ern,’’ TIME (July 2, 1956). Scott Knowles and Stuart Leslie, ‘‘‘‘Industrial Versailles:’’ Eero Saarinen’s

Corporate Campuses for GM, IBM, and AT&T,’’ Isis 92, no. 1 (2001); Louise Mozingo, ‘‘The Corporate

Estate in the USA, 1954-64: ‘Thoroughly Modern in Concept, But...Down to Earth and Rugged’,’’ Studies

in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes 11 (January-March 2000): 25-56; and Alan Plattus,

‘‘Campus Plans,’’ in Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future, ed. Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen and Donald Albrecht

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).

21. In the end, much of Saarinen’s plan was carried out, including two of his own buildings, but full implemen-

tation (including the expressway) was precluded forestalled? by his death in 1961. See also Eero Saarinen,

‘‘Campus Planning: The Unique World of the University,’’ Architectural Record (November 1960): 123-30.

22. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1991).

23. Edward Banfield and James Wilson, City Politics (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1963); Milton Rakove,

Don’t Make No Waves, Don’t Back No Losers: An Insider’s Analysis of the Daley Machine (Bloomington,

IN: University of Indiana Press, 1975); and Milton Rakove, We Don’t Want Nobody Nobody Sent: An Oral

History of the Daley Years (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1979).

24. Levi interview, 27.

25. ‘‘A Program for the University of Chicago,’’ folder 1, box 98, KAP UCSC. $10.8 million is roughly equiv-

alent to $87.2 million in inflation-adjusted, 2009 dollars. CPI Inflation Calculator http://data.bls.gov/

cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl (accessed January 7, 2010).

26. Ibid.

27. Historian and Dean of the College John Boyer attributes postwar enrollment declines to Robert Maynard

Hutchins’ creation of a junior college, which admitted students normally in their last two years of second-

ary school. This innovation alienated educators, including alumni, who had been part of the university’s

metro Chicago recruiting network. Boyer, ‘‘The Kind of University That We Desire to Become,’’ 53-54.

28. ‘‘$100,000 Given to Renovate 3 Neighborhoods,’’ Chicago Daily Tribune (October 22, 1953): C2. Total

inflates to approximately $803,000 in 2009 dollars. CPI Inflation Calculator http://data.bls.gov (accessed

November 7, 2009).


29. Ryerson to Thomas Stephens, July 13, 1954, folder 1, box 231, KAP UCSC.

30. ‘‘Redeclaration of Independence.’’ LIFE (November 17, 1952).

31. Clarence Randall, chairman of Inland Steel and university trustee, served as a special economic advisor to

President Eisenhower with an office in the Old Executive Office Building. Julian Levi interview, 45.

University Archives, UCSC. Memo from Clarence Randall to Edward Ryerson, July 19, 1954, box 231,

folder 1, KAP. Edward Ryerson to Clarence Randall, July 19, 1954, folder 1, box 231, KAP. ‘‘Agreement

between the University of Chicago . . . ,’’ folder 2, box 67, KAP. UCSC. $120.4 million in 2009 dollars. CPI

Inflation Calculator (accessed November 7, 2009).

32. The university had had a cool relationship with Daley’s predecessor, Martin Kennelly. Levi interview, 24.

33. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 152.

34. Ernest Burgess and Charles Newcomb, eds. Census Data of the City of Chicago 1920 (Chicago, IL:

University of Chicago Press, 1931), v.

35. On the history of Title I, see Hilary Ballon and Kenneth Jackson, Robert Moses and the Modern City: The

Transformation of New York (New York, Ny: W. W. Norton, 2007).


37. The city received a $198,680 planning grant from the Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA) through

the university’s connections. The city subcontracted urban renewal plan development to the university

planning office for that sum. Contract Document No. 70-56-56, Contract No. 17732. ‘‘Agreement Between

the University of Chicago through the Chicago Community Conservation Board.’’ January 12, 1956, folder

2, box 67, KAP UCSC.

38. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 161-70. The U of C helped mitigate criticism from the nascent preserva-

tion movement by intervening with Zeckendorf to save Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House from demolition.

Zeckendorf’s firm, Webb & Knapp, used the residence as its local office during Hyde Park A & B redevelop-

ment. While the number of rental units, total population, and African American population declined after the

commencement of renewal activities in the late 1950s, throughout the postwar period the number of owner-

occupied units in Hyde Park never decreased. Data from United States Census, 1940-1980.

39. Numerous Maroon articles gave significant coverage to the university’s efforts, ‘‘LAK helped improve

Hyde Park Housing,’’ Chicago Maroon (March 30, 1960); Mary Finkel, ‘‘Hyde Park-Kenwood Renewal

Projects Celebrate Tenth Year,’’ Chicago Maroon (November 27, 1959). A few members of the community

voiced criticism. See ‘‘Renewal Aids Racial Bias,’’ Chicago Maroon (November 19, 1959). Indeed, even

Martin Luther King, Jr., visited the U of C in 1959, but offered nothing like the criticism he would level in

1966, instead working to promote Northern support for the Southern civil rights effort. ‘‘Dr. King Visits

UC,’’ Chicago Maroon (October 30, 1959).

40. See also Bryan Berry, The Impact of Urban Renewal on Small Business: The Hyde Park-Kenwood Case

(Chicago, IL: Center for Urban Studies, 1968); David Spatz. ‘‘‘Safeguarding Community Values and Stan-

dards on Every Front’: The Crusade Against Taverns in Hyde Park Urban Renewal’’ (Unpublished MSS,

2002), in possession of author; and Janet Coleman, The Compass: The Improvisational Theatre That Revo-

lutionized American Comedy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

41. Mary Finkel. ‘‘HP Redevelopment Plan Approved,’’ Chicago Maroon (October 24, 1958). Equivalent to

$284.5 million in inflation-adjusted, 2009 dollars. CPI Inflation Calculator. http://data.bls.gov (accessed

January 7, 2010).

42. Levi to Kimpton August 11, 1955, box 231, folder 3, KAP UCSC. Levi to Kimpton November 16, 1955,

box 231, folder 3, KAP UCSC. Levi dismissed the effectiveness of citizen-led reform movements, claiming

‘‘I don’t believe . . . that the ‘little people’ working at the ‘grass and weed’ roots are going to grow cab-

bages and other items of civic virtue.’’ Levi to Kimpton, April 7, 1955, folder 2, box 231, KAP UCSC.

43. Examples include Section IV of the Housing Act of 1950 creating the College Housing Program within the

HHFA; Keith Olson, The G. I. Bill, the Veterans and the Colleges (Lexington, KY: University Press of

Kentucky, 1974); O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge; Stuart Leslie, The Cold War and American Science (New

York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994).

Winling 81

44. Roger Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities since World War II

(New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993), 165. See also Zuoyue Wang, In Sputnik’s Shadow: The

President’s Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University

Press, 2008).

45. Kerr, The Uses of the University, 88. For more context on this postwar transformation, see Ethan Schrum,

‘‘Administering American Modernity: The Instrumental University in the Postwar United States’’ (PhD

dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2009).

46. Memo from John I. Kirkpatrick to George Baughman (NYU), John Moore (Penn), Edward Reynolds

(Harvard), Stanley Salmen (Columbia), and Philip Stoddard (MIT), December 8, 1958, folder 5, box 14,

KAP UCSC. Memo from Lawrence Kimpton to Arthur Adams (ACE), December 8, 1959, folder 5, box

14, KAP UCSC.

47. Letter from Kimpton to Carroll Newsom, Clark Kerr, Nathan Pusey, and Ethan Sheply, January 7, 1959,

folder 1, box 233, KAP UCSC. ‘‘Enactment in 1959 of Section 112 of Housing Act.’’ n.d., folder 1, box

233, KAP UCSC. Memo from Levi to J. I. Kirkpatrick, June 4, 1959, folder 1, box 233, KAP UCSC.

48. Julian Levi quoted in Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 154.

49. United States Congress, Committee on Banking and Currency, and Subcommittee on Housing, ‘‘Housing

Act of 1959 Report (to Accompany S. 2539),’’ (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959), 19.

The formula allowed for a three-to-one match under certain circumstances where the federal government

did not contribute planning costs.

50. United States Congress, ‘‘Housing Act of 1959: Hearings Before the Committee on Banking and Currency,

United States Senate, Eighty-Sixth Congress, First Session, on Various Bills to Amend the Federal Housing

Laws’’ (Washington, DC: U.S. GPO, 1959), 500-530. In this instance, Levi testified with representatives from

Seattle University, New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Louisville.

51. Roosevelt’s Second Inaugural Address. The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.

edu (accessed October 2, 2009).

52. Memo from UC Chancellor to Committee on Urban Renewal, Association of American Universities,

January 7, 1959, folder 1, box 233, KAP UCSC. Paul Douglas, In the Fullness of Time: The Life of Paul

Douglas (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1966).


54. Senate Bill 57 passed both houses of Congress in January 1959, but President Eisenhower vetoed it with a

message about fiscal restraint.

55. This was known as the Section 112 credits program because Section 418 of the 1959 act amended Section

112 of the Housing Act of 1949 to create the program.


57. Where previous scholarship has characterized this program as offering incentives and subsidies for universities

to support urban renewal efforts, in fact these provisions were created by university interests to serve their

desires for expansion and to create political leverage for their projects. See O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge, 78.

58. Bachin, Building the South Side, 27-68. The university had identified the area south of the Midway as a point

of concern up to two decades earlier but lacked the resources to act. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 147.

59. Amanda Seligman discusses Sears, Roebuck & Company’s urban renewal activities on the west side at

greater length in her book on Chicago. Seligman, Block by Block, 82. Notes from the UC Trustees Com-

mittee on Budget meeting, October 19, 1959, folder 1, box 233, KAP UCSC.

60. Press release from U of C, July 18, 1960, folder 3, box 32, KAP UCSC. $14 million is equivalent to

$102.3 million in inflation-adjusted, 2009 dollars. CPI Inflation Calculator http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/

cpicalc.pl (accessed January 7, 2010).

61. Bauer had written an influential book on social housing in Europe, directed the U.S. Housing Authority,

and served on the faculty at both MIT and Berkeley, where her husband, William Wurster, was the dean.

Catherine Bauer, Modern Housing (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1934); Catherine Bauer, ‘‘The

Dreary Deadlock of Public Housing,’’ Architectural Forum (May 1957), 140-42, 219-21.


62. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York, NY: Vintage, 1961). Later in the

1960s, such critiques came from the academy and from the libertarian right, including Herbert Gans, The

Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1962);

Martin Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Appraisal of Urban Renewal, 1942-1962 (Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 1964).

63. Particularly notable in the case of Hyde Park was that the process of racial succession put three key con-

stituencies of the liberal coalition at odds—African Americans, who sought housing and economic mobility

in Hyde Park and Chicago; Jews, who had found tolerance and community in Hyde Park, many of whom

were real estate owners, and who were in the process of moving from Hyde Park to Chicago suburbs; and

the university’s white middle class technocrats. This community fragmentation seemed to foreshadow the

breakup of the liberal coalition later in the 1960s and 1970s.

64. The IAF’s effort was partially funded by the Catholic Archdiocese and the Schwartzhaupt Foundation.

65. Horwitt, Let Them Call Me Rebel, 398.

66. Scholarship on Black Power has taken an increasingly sympathetic view of these empowerment efforts,

illustrating continuity in the transformation of the civil rights effort, rather than a violation or corruption

of civil rights organizing. Fish, Black Power/White Control; Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The

Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York, NY: Random House, 2008); Matthew Coun-

tryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA: University of Penn-

sylvania Press, 2006); and Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

67. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 162. Despres’ opponent accused him of stirring up racial trouble.

68. William Dawson had long held power over black South Side politics as Representative to U.S. Congress

and Committeeman for the 2nd Ward but was largely affiliated with Mayor Daley and the Cook County

Democratic Party. James Q. Wilson, Negro Politics: The Search for Leadership (New York, NY: Free

Press, 1965). For a revisionist view of Dawson’s career, see Christopher Manning, William L. Dawson and

the Limits of Black Electoral Leadership (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009). For another

local challenge to a university-led renewal plan in Philadelphia, see O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge.

69. Jane Jacobs, ‘‘Chicago’s Woodlawn—Renewal by Whom?,’’ Architectural Forum, May 1962, 124.

70. Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor, American Pharaoh—Mayor Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago

and the Nation (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 2000), 288-89. Fish, Black Power/White Control, 71-73.

UCSC. Seligman, Block by Block, 86.

71. Levi interview, 88-92. See also John Hall Fish, Black Power/White Control: The Struggle of The Woodlawn

Organization in Chicago (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973); Arthur Brazier, Black Self-

Determination: The Story of the Woodlawn Organization (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1969); and The

Woodlawn Organization, Woodlawn’s Model Cities Plan: A Demonstration of Citizen Responsibility

(Northbrook, IL: Whitehall, 1970).

72. Julian Levi, Municipal and Institutional Relations within Boston: The Benefits of Section 112 in the

Housing Act of 1961 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1964); J. Martin Klotsche, The Urban

University: And the Future of Our Cities (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1966), 75-76, quoted in

O’Mara, 78-79; and Kenneth Ashworth, ‘‘Urban Renewal and the University: A Tool for Campus

Expansion and Neighborhood Improvement,’’ Journal of Higher Education 35, no. 9 (1964).

73. ‘‘Evolution of the Federal Urban Renewal Program,’’ Report 20 to The National Commission on Urban

Problems. September 1968. Table D-4. Section 112 credits comprised approximately 1.75 percent of urban

renewal net project costs through 1966. $92 million inflates to approximately $610 million in 2009 dollars.

CPI Inflation Calculator. http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl (accessed July 24, 2010).

74. Sarah Whiting, ‘‘The Jungle in the Clearing: Space, Form, and Democracy in America, 1940-1949’’ (PhD

dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001); Sherry Tierney, ‘‘Rezoning Chicago’s Modern-

isms: Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, Remment Koolhaas, the IIT Campus and Its Bronzeville Prehistory

(1914-2003)’’ (MA thesis, Arizona State University, 2008); Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 135; Daniel

Winling 83

Bluestone, ‘‘Chicago’s Mecca Flat Blues,’’ in Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preser-

vation in the United States, ed. Max Page and Randall Mason (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004); and

Michael Carriere, ‘‘Between Being and Becoming: On Architecture, Student Protest, and the Aesthetics

of Liberalism in Postwar America’’ (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2010).

75. Memo from W. B. Harrell to Lawrence Kimpton, August 10, 1955 ‘‘CONFIDENTIAL,’’ box 36, folder 12,

IIT 1955-65, KAP UCSC.

76. David Harvey has recently argued that universities now comprise key members of the neoliberal

coalitions of business and political leaders that have engineered the transformation of American cities

and society. However, business-education alliances date from at least the turn of the century and are a

fundamental feature of institutional growth and urbanization in education communities. David

Harvey, The Limits to Capital, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Verso, 1999). See also Thorstein Veblen,

The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men

(New York, NY: B.W. Huebsch, 1918); Clyde Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State:

Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894-1928 (Madison,

WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); and Christopher Newfield, Ivy and Industry: Business and

the Making of the American University, 1880-1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

77. Muriel Beadle, Where Has All the Ivy Gone? (New York, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1972), 74.

78. Don Blackiston to W. B. Harrell, September 4, 1956, box 231, folder 3, KAP UCSC. Don Blackiston to W.

B. Harrell, August 28, 1956, box 231, folder 3, KAP UCSC.

79. Alison Dunham et al. ‘‘Report of the Faculty Committee on Rental Policies,’’ folder 1, box 272, BAP UCSC.

80. ‘‘UC Admits Housing Segregation,’’ Chicago Maroon (January 17, 1962).

81. Levi to Kimpton, November 3, 1954, folder 1, box 231, KAP UCSC.

82. ‘‘Memorandum,’’ November 1, 1955, folder 3, box 231, KAP UCSC.

83. Julian Levi was particularly sensitive to the impact of racial demographics at local schools, arguing that

significant minority school populations would provoke white disenrollment. Julian Levi to Gardner Stern,

August 15, 1955, box 231, folder 13, KAP UCSC. Levi to Kimpton, Kirkpatrick, Harrell, July 7, 1959,

folder 1, box 233, KAP UCSC.

84. See, for example, Levi to Morton Bodfish, August 19, 1953, folder 5, box 230, KAP UCSC. Bodfish was

the President of the First Federal Savings and Loan Association of Chicago. Levi to Mendel Flanders,

August 19, 1953, folder 5, box 230, KAP UCSC.

85. ‘‘Lutherans Won’t Change Site, UC Will Help Students,’’ Chicago Maroon (January 22, 1965).

86. ‘‘Resolution of the Fifty-Four Hundred University Woodlawn Block Club,’’ n.d. Lutheran School of

Theology Chicago Archives (hereafter LSTCA). ‘‘Open Letter to the People of Hyde Park and Kenwood,’’

July 5, 1963. LSTCA. Press Release from Arthur Para, July 12, 1963. LSTCA.

87. Letter from 5460 Woodlawn Corporation to Joseph Cox, October 4, 1963. LSTCA. Memo from C. H.

Anderson to Robert J. Marshall, February 6, 1964. LSTCA.

88. Letter from Jane MacMillen-Macurdy to LSTC, December 21, 1964. LSTCA.

89. Frank Zimmerman to Helen (Mrs. David) Tanner, December 22, 1964. LSTCA.

90. Frank Zimmerman to John Duba, November 11, 1964. LSTCA.

91. ‘‘Reveal Site Plans for Lutheran Seminary,’’ Chicago Maroon (February 25, 1965).

92. Memo from Winston Kennedy to James Ritterskamp, September 7, 1965, folder 8, box 205, BAP UCSC.

Records indicate SDS member Bernardine Dohrn was one of the students relocated in this redevelopment

process. Memo from C. H. Anderson to Eugene Feit. April 3, 1965. LSTCA. New York University also

employed this architectural strategy of surrounding a building in the Loeb Student Center (now demol-

ished) when faced with a holdout building. Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, Housing Act

of 1959: Hearings before the Committee on Banking and Currency 1959, 517.

93. The Congress of Racial Equality was originally founded by a group of students at the U of C in 1942.

94. Bob Hunter, ‘‘Students Protest U. of C. Housing Bias Policies,’’ Chicago Daily Defender (January 24,

1962). ‘‘Chicago CORE-LATOR,’’ January 1962, in ‘‘Diary of the Sit-Ins,’’ folder 1, box 272, BAP UCSC.


95. ‘‘CORE, UC Hassle; Students ‘Sleep-In,’’’ Chicago Maroon (January 24, 1962). ‘‘Realty Sit-Downers

Arrested,’’ Chicago Maroon (January 25, 1962). ‘‘Chicago U. Stops Student Sit-In Charging Prejudice

in Housing,’’ New York Times (February 6, 1962), 57. In the history department, one graduate student and

his wife were arrested for participating in the protest, while another graduate student wrote President

George Beadle a supportive letter describing the university’s ‘‘limited segregation policy’’ as ‘‘wholly

justified.’’ Exhibit U, a list of students arrested for participating in the occupation of the real estate office.

‘‘Diary of the Sit-Ins,’’ folder 1, box 272, BAP UCSC. Letter from K. Jackson to Beadle January 20, 1962,

‘‘Diary of the Sit-Ins.’’ When ninety-four UC students signed a petition against the CORE demonstration,

the university issued a press release to local media. January 23, 1962 press release, ‘‘Diary of the Sit-Ins.’’

96. Exhibit P, ‘‘Diary of the Sit-Ins.’’

97. Editorial, ‘‘The University of Chicago,’’ Chicago Daily Defender (January 29, 1962).

98. ‘‘4 Comment on Segregation,’’ Chicago Maroon (January 29, 1962).

99. Alison Dunham et al. ‘‘Report of the Faculty Committee on Rental Policies,’’ folder 1, box 272, BAP

UCSC. National Historical Geographic Information System, U.S. Census of Housing data for 1960 from

Minnesota Population Center (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2004).

100. Editorial, Chicago Daily Defender (March 12, 1962).

101. Memo from Ely Aaron to George Beadle, March 26, 1962, box 22, folder 8. Commission on Human Rela-

tions 1956-62. Beadle Administration Papers (hereafter BAP), UCSC.

102. Memo from William Harrell to Ray Brown, May 18, 1962. Memo from Ray Brown to Warner Wick May

29, 1962, box 22, folder 8, BAP UCSC.

103. U of C students occupied the administration building in May, 1966, to protest the military draft and

in February, 1969, to protest the dismissal of a faculty member, while Chicago and the university

became key sites of the Black Power and anti-war movements. ‘‘U. of C. Sit-in Protests Aid to Draft

Lists,’’ Chicago Tribune (May 12, 1966); Michael Smith and John O’Brien, ‘‘225 Seize Offices at

U.C.,’’ Chicago Tribune (January 31, 1969). The national CORE, for example, was one of the key

organizers of the protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Chicago was also

the location for the October 1969 Days of Rage protests organized by Students for a Democratic

Society. For a contemporaneous analysis of this phenomenon, see Theodore Roszak, The Making

of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition (Garden

City, NY: Doubleday, 1969).

104. The robust literature on the New Left has lamentably ignored student activists’ early engagements with

campus development and mass education in shaping their later responses to universities, military

research, and racial segregation. See, for example, Tom Hayden’s description of his experiences in his

freshman dormitory at the University of Michigan, ‘‘Nearly thirteen hundred young men were cramped

into my sterile quad . . . The barracks culture, with its twin lacks of privacy and community and its

sink-or-swim message, extended to the academic sector as well.’’ Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir

(New York, NY: Random House, 1988), 27; Port Huron Statement from James Miller, Democracy is

in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1994), 329.

105. ‘‘Dick Gregory on Urban Renewal: Will UC Ever Learn?’’ Chicago Maroon (November 3, 1964).

106. Students for a Democratic Society. ‘‘U of C as bulldozer: The Ins and Outs of Urban Renewal.’’ 1967.

Northwestern University Special Collections. Other notable instances of student protest prompted or cat-

alyzed by development include the Free Speech Movement at the University of California-Berkeley in the

fall of 1964 and the campus takeover of Columbia University in the Spring of 1968.

107. Major federal legislation with provisions in support of higher education includes 1944 Servicemen’s

Readjustment Act, 1950 Housing Act, 1958 National Defense Education Act, 1959 Housing Act, and

1965 Higher Education Act, among others.

108. See, for example, Columbia University, with which the U of C had a close working relationship through-

out the 1950s and 1960s; the University of Pennsylvania, during its own urban renewal effort; and 1960s

Winling 85

urban renewal efforts in Berkeley, California. O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge, 176; LaDale Winling,

‘‘Building the Ivory Tower: Campus Planning, University Development, and the Politics of Urban Space’’

(PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2010).

Bio

LaDale Winling is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of History at Temple University. He is cur-

rently working on a book project, Building the Ivory Tower, examining the role of American universities in

urban development in the 20th century.


Documents

Students and the Second 2011 The Author(s) Ghetto: Federal ...urbanoasis.org/files/articles/JPH SecondGhetto Print.pdf · Students and the Second Ghetto: Federal Legislation, Urban