As the sixties gave way to the seventies on the south side of Chicago, 11-year-old Christine Shunko was receiving mixed messages about racial relationships.
At school, her sixth grade teacher chose to give her students an object lesson on the dangers of judgment based on skin color by asking all the children in Chris’s class to come together and stretch their arms into a circle. “If you pay close attention, not one of our arms are the same color,” the teacher said. For Chris, the lesson was a revelation and completely dichotomous to what she was learning from family and friends.
At home, her newly widowed mother of seven girls, four of whom lived at home, was growing agitated by the new complexion of their surroundings. What had once been a white, working class neighborhood, had become an African-American majority as the affects of the “White Flight,” became apparent in the area known as Roseland.
Ann Shunko based her final decision to sell on the predatory and now illegal practice of blockbusting. The operation was a scare tactic used by unscrupulous Real Estate Brokers to panic white residents into selling at a greatly reduced price to escape their changing neighborhoods. Aside from depriving homeowners of a fair price for their homes, blockbusting pushed white flight into high gear.
“Real Estate Agents would read the obits and make random phone calls saying, ‘Mrs. Shunko, we see that your husband just passed away and you’re left at home with four young girls. You need to move out of that house,” Chris recalls. Insinuating and flat out expressing ominous predictions of impending danger created a situation that pushed the family to move to the south suburbs before Chris completed the last few weeks of seventh grade, leaving her to grieve the loss of her father, close friendships and the only home she’d ever known.
Years later after Chris married and had a family of her own, her childhood lessons reasserted themselves in a cogent way. Through sacrifice and determination, she bought a shingled Dutch Colonial in Calumet City, IL, a mostly white, blue collar, neatly kept neighborhood, where house values had fallen due to the quickly abandoned plan to demolish the area for an airport.
Chris and her family became completely entrenched in the area; neighbors became friends, and most kids, including her elementary-aged children, James and Amy, attended the parochial school just up the block. They played little league in a large park just past the forest preserve where the street dead-ended, and the children explored the cul-de-sac outside until dark.
Sometime later, whispers of gang activity in nearby neighborhoods began to filter into over the fence chats. After the police said they could do little to stop the influx of the mostly African-American crime syndicates, the community organized neighborhood watches. Real estate signs began to pop up and neighbors began announcing their intentions to flee, and like dominoes, one white family after another tipped over the Indiana border.
In Chris’s opinion, the tipping point toward White Flight came as the young children in the neighborhood were nearing enrollment age at Thornton Fractional North, a High School with a vast majority of black students.
Meanwhile, Chris’s marriage ended and her dog grooming business, which she ran in her home, was keeping a roof over her family’s heads and food on the table with absolutely no extras. To follow her former neighbors into Northwest Indiana would mean the loss of her customer base and income, but that isn’t the reason she’s resisted moving.
“My new neighbors are much nicer than my old ones,” she says with a laugh. “They’re lovely people. All they want is to live in a nice neighborhood. I like it here. I’m established. It’s quiet here, for the most part, and the people who have become friends keep an eye on one another.”
Once, after an incident where a man spit on her dog, a neighbor came over to ask, regretfully, “was that a brown boy who did that?” Chris answered, “yes, but I didn’t see how that was part of the story.”
In a couple instances, Chris has been the target of racial discrimination by young adults in retail areas, and in both situations, a strange twist on discrimination occurred when the police arrived, and advised her against pressing charges for fear of retaliation by gangs, despite there not being any evidence of gang connections in either case.
However, for the most part, Chris’s life remains largely unchanged. Amy and James attended the High School that an entire neighborhood moved to avoid without incident.
“I’ve learned to ride the wave. Incidents that happened at my house such as stolen pumpkins, and my car antenna broken off, but I don’t know if that was a white or black kid. My former neighbors would have used those things as reason to move,” Chris says. “However, I know that prejudice is a luxury that I cannot afford, so I take a step back, and say, it was just a bunch of bratty kids.”
Family and friends continue to be outraged over Chris’s minority status in her neighborhood, but she still remembers the lesson she learned in the sixth grade about stretching out the arms, and still feels right at home.