When David Jones attempted to buy his first house in 1961 on Kildare Avenue in Skokie, he said he realized that the real estate agent had given him the wrong key to visit the home he was interested in. At first, Jones thought it was an innocent mistake. “It never occurred to me that he might have done it on purpose,” said Jones, who is Black, of his white real estate agent. “I mean, he had a bunch of keys.”
Little did Jones know that it would only be the first hurdle for him and his family to overcome a color barrier in Skokie about seven years before the village’s Fair Housing Act was introduced. That ordinance made it illegal to pursue redlining, restrictive covenants, and other housing practices that furthered racial segregation.
Jones and his daughter, along with a historian, a real estate agent and fair housing advocates spoke at a fair housing event June 11 at the Skokie Public Library, hosted by the village’s Human Relations Commission and the Skokie Heritage Museum.
Back in 1961, Jones was able to enter the house after climbing through an open window, which he thought was okay because he was presented with the key in the first place.
“The house was like a palace,” he paused before laughing to say it was a regular house. When he returned to the real estate agent to say he wanted to buy the home, he said the real estate agent told him he couldn’t sell it to him.
“He didn’t use the word Black, but you know, I was non-white,” he said.
“People would be proud of you,” Jones recalled telling the real estate agent if he sold the house to him.
“No, I’d be out of business in two days,” Jones remembers the real estate agent replying to him.
Jones said the real estate agent consulted the Village Board to ask permission to sell the home to him. Jones said he felt that the agent was hoping for someone to tell him that he couldn’t sell the home to a Black man because after the Village Board didn’t have a problem with the sale, the agent still wouldn’t sell him the home.
Undeterred, Jones obtained the assistance of a white couple who bought the home from the real estate agent and then sold it to Jones. The real estate agent, however, attempted to distance himself from the sale, buying a front page ad in the Skokie Review clarifying that he sold the property to the couple, and not to Jones.
Jones described his experience after moving to Skokie as “a few difficulties when we first moved in and then after for about four or five months.”
He later said that the windows to his home were shattered, and at times they were set on fire. The Skokie police and fire departments had to be vigilant to protect the home.
“People would put liquid metal in the locks,” he recalled, which he was able to pick out. “Sometimes the moving truck would park out there and they would come say, ‘We’re here to move you,'” he said, taking a second to chuckle and then add, “I’d say, oh, we’re not moving.”
Although Jones said he doesn’t remember the name of the real estate agent, the ad names him as Joseph J. Hansen, the same name as the developer of the Concord Lane subdivision, which included 20 lots between Kenton and Kostner Avenues to the east and west and James Drive and Cleveland Street to the north and south. The houses in that subdivision had a restrictive covenant that said “premises shall not be conveyed or leased to be occupied by any person who is not a Caucasian, except servants.”
According to the Chicago Covenants project, a collaboration of researchers from Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, Virginia Tech and other universities that a Skokie Heritage Museum speaker mentioned at the presentation, at least four other properties in Skokie carried restrictive covenants that barred people who were not white from living in those properties until those covenants were outlawed in 1968.
The same year that Jones bought his home, the village launched its Human Relations Commission “to encourage understanding and respect between residents of Skokie of various racial, religious and nationality backgrounds and to safeguard the rights of all citizens as defined by our Ordinances, Statutes and Constitution.”
The village passed a Fair Housing Ordinance on Jan. 1,1968, months before President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the federal Fair Housing Act into law on April 11, 1968.
At the event last week, Realtor and Skokie Human Relations Commissioner Alexander Chaparro said, “Realtors, during the time that (Jones) had discussed would engage in all kinds of different types of fair housing violations from blockbusting, redlining and steering, all of these things that are so damaging, and in ultimately, what costs the minority homebuyer more money, and loss of opportunity and their future.”
“Realtors need to stand up for their clients. And they need to educate the client, and make sure that these things don’t happen,” Chaparro said. “I find after 31 years in the industry, people who engage in these activities have refined their skills. So sometimes it’s difficult to say, ‘Did it actually happen?’ And what I always say to people is, ‘If you felt it, it happened. You would not have felt it (if it didn’t happen).'”
The discussion was part of a series celebrating Juneteenth in collaboration with Crossing Borders Music, the Chicago History Museum, The National Underground Railroad Underground Freedom Center, and the Skokie Library.
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