Fair Housing Month 2025
Honoring Dr. Gwendoline Young Fortune
April is Fair Housing Month. Fifty-seven years ago today – April 11, 1968 – the U.S. Congress passed the federal Fair Housing Act (Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968) which prohibited discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, religion, and national origin. (The law has since been expanded.)
In honor of this anniversary, we venture to Skokie, Illinois, and honor Dr. Gwendoline Young Fortune (1926-2014), musician, singer, educator, and author of a memoir recounting her family’s move to Skokie, Illinois, before either local or federal Fair Housing laws were passed.
In 1961, David and Lois Jones became the first Black family to purchase a home in Skokie. Months after moving in, their home was vandalized – it was the first act of hostility directed at them and it was followed by others.
The housing market was anything but fair in Skokie at the time. For many years, white residents used racial covenants and discriminatory real estate practices to bar Black people from purchasing or financing homes there. In 1940, the East Side Property Owners’ Association was formed in order to work “against encroachment of property owners’ rights.” The association members’ intent was to block any Black home ownership in the area. Membership was open only to white males 21 years or older.
In 1964, Fortune, her husband Freddie C. Fortune (1929-2015), and their three sons moved into a house they purchased in Skokie. They were the fifth Black family to live in the village. They decided to move to Skokie from their home in Hyde Park in order to be closer to Freddie Fortune’s work. He was the first Black engineer hired by AT&T Teletype in Chicago.
It was not easy. “Moving into and living in the white, suburban community of Skokie, Illinois, was a multi-decades long experience that I needed to review forty years after that life-changing decision,” Fortune later wrote.
In her 2015 memoir (she called it her “memory”), Outsider in the Promised Land: Black Family in Jewish Community, Fortune provided an honest and moving account of the “horror stories” and “trauma” that the Fortune family and other Black Skokie residents went through. She also reflected on the many layers of meanings she found in the range of their experiences – both negative and positive. From the friendships she formed in Skokie and the positive connections she forged with members of the Jewish community there, Fortune provides an unflinching, honest account of the family’s time in Skokie.
In 1962, in reaction to the hostility faced by the first Black residents in Skokie, Village government officials attempted to address the issue and published a “short range program for dealing with imminent movement of a non-white family to a white neighborhood.”
“Call a meeting to enlist the cooperation and help of the following community groups: the press, the real estate brokers, the clergy, the financial institutions, and citizen groups,” the program suggested. “This should be done beforehand, if possible. It may be too late after the move-in process has started.”
The Village of Skokie also established a Human Relations Commission which eventually led to the passage of Skokie’s Fair Housing Ordinance in late 1967. (The law went into effect on January 1, 1968.)
Fortune’s story includes an account of the many people who banded together to integrate Skokie’s housing market, work toward the passage of fair housing laws, and support Skokie’s Black residents.
Of note in the fight for fair housing: Dr. Warren Spencer ( 1921-1987), an Evanston physician and president of the Evanston branch of the NAACP. He was one of several people who helped the Jones purchase their house in Skokie. Spencer’s wife, Mayme Spencer (1921-2011), a lawyer and Evanston’s first Black female city council member, played a central role in Evanston’s passage of a Fair Housing ordinance in April 1968.
This memory emerged from thoughts and feelings that slither above my bed when I cannot fall asleep, and when I awake in the after-midnight dark. What are my conclusions of this remembrance? Was the journey worthy of the investment?
“Our family’s Skokie adventure was an experiment, as well as an experience,” Fortune later wrote of her family’s experience in Skokie in the 1960s. “I have been on a Serengeti safari that was less hazardous.”
Photo of Gwendoline Y. Fortune used by permission from Roger Fortune. Many thanks for Mr. Fortune’s permission to reprint his mother’s image.
About Dr. Gwendoline Young Fortune: Born in Houston, Texas, Gwendoline Y. Fortune graduated from Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina. She studied voice and music at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. She later earned an education degree, an MA from Roosevelt University, and an Ed. D. in Higher Education from Nova University. She was a professor of Social Science at Oakton Community College in Skokie and Des Plaines, Illinois, and Ethnic Studies Consultant for the Chicago Consortium of Colleges and Universities at Loyola University. She was an award-winning author of several books and poetry collections and wrote regular columns for several newspapers. Dr. Fortune’s papers are housed at Cushing Memorial Library & Archives at Texas A & M University: https://findingaids.library.tamu.edu/index.php/dr-gwendoline-y-fortune-papers
You can read more and access a range of fair housing history resources at the Skokie Public Library:
https://skokiehistory.omeka.net/exhibits/show/skokie-fair-housing-1961-1971/skokie-fair-housing
Read: Gwendoline Y. Fortune, Ed. D., Outsider In The Promised Land: Black Family in Jewish Community, 2015, here: https://skokiehistory.omeka.net/exhibits/show/skokie-fair-housing-1961-1971/skokie-fair-housing-10/fair-housing-in-skokie-865
Other sources:
Amber Hayes, The Beginnings of Fair Housing in Skokie, January 31, 2025: https://skokielibrary.info/blog/452/the-beginnings-of-fair-housing-in-skokie/
Skokie Heritage Museum, “History of Fair Housing in Skokie,” June 2024.
Written by Jenny Thompson, PhD
