American Pharaoh (20 page)

With the drive to push Elizabeth Wood out gaining force, Kennelly’s housing coordinator recommended that the CHA board commission
a study of the agency’s operations. On his recommendation, the board retained a consulting firm. Wood was frozen out of the
consultants’ information-gathering process, and when the firm completed its report it recommended abolishing her position
of executive secretary and replacing it with a new position of executive director. Wood’s supporters at the CHA were convinced
that the consultants’ report was designed to provide the board with nominally objective reasons for doing what it had already
decided to do. “All that stuff about Elizabeth not being a good administrator was phony,” says the former CHA director of
research. “It was what the board wanted them to say.”
³¹

At an August 23 meeting, the CHA commissioners gave Wood a copy of the report. They informed her that they had taken the consultants’
advice to create a new position, executive director, and had filled it with retired army lieutenant-general William Kean.
Kean would run the CHA. Board chairman John Fugard said he hoped that Wood would stay on to handle “the social aspect of housing
in which she excels.” Wood requested and was granted a meeting with Mayor Kennelly. In a sharply worded statement days after
that meeting, she attacked the CHA board for the new restructuring “without prior notice to or consultation or discussion
with me.” She was being stripped of her authority, she charged, because of differences between herself and the board over
race:

[T]he most significant and dramatic area of conflict has been on the subject of race relations and segregation. The truth
is that the differences that have arisen between the Commissioners and the Executive Secretary have been related primarily
to the issue of the elimination of segregation in public housing and the opening of all public housing projects in the City
of Chicago to Negro and white persons without discrimination or segregation.

Wood went on to accuse the board of paying “lip-service” to open housing “while privately issuing instructions thwarting those
policies.” The CHA refused to admit blacks to all-white projects, she charged, “despite repeated protests on my part.” With
black families in the white Trumbull Park project living “in a state of fear and isolation, subject to constant harassment,”
Wood said, that housing project had “become the shame of Chicago and the shame of the Nation.” Most dramatically, Wood went
on television and attacked Kennelly for his weak support for open housing. “I don’t think that the city administration has
ever adopted a clear cut policy on the integration of races in housing,” she declared on a local news show, only an hour after
attending a closed meeting with the CHA board.
³²

The day after Wood made her public statements, the CHA board met in special session and voted unanimously to fire her effective
the following day. The board contended that she was being fired for making irresponsible statements to the press, including
charging board members with “illegal and immoral motives” in connection with the integration of public housing. But Wood stuck
by her own interpretation: “My feeling is that the racial question lies under my problems,” she said. The
Chicago Defender
agreed, headlining a story: “Action Labeled Victory for Mob.” Wood was quickly hailed by supporters of open housing as a
martyr to the cause. Four members of a CHA citizens’ advisory committee on racial matters, which included representatives
from the
Chicago Defender,
the NAACP, and the National Conference of Christians and Jews, resigned to protest her removal. The black Baptist Ministers
Conference of Chicago denounced her ouster, and one local pastor gave a sermon entitled “Elizabeth Wood and Her Enemies.”
Wood’s backers formed an Emergency Committee on the Chicago Housing Authority, which asked the State Housing Board to investigate,
and held a testimonial for her on October 28, 1954, at the 8th Street Theatre, at which she was praised for her “fearless
leadership and selfless service” in her seventeen years with the CHA.
³³

After she left office, Wood continued to attack the CHA for supporting racial segregation. “In no field,” she said, “is the
program of nondiscrimination so bloody, so ruthless, as in the field of housing.” Before long, Wood moved to New York, where
she became a housing consultant. In 1961, she wrote a report for the Citizens Housing and Planning Council of New York urging
that public housing be designed with built-in lounges, candy stores, and even pubs. She told the
New York Times,
which put her recommendations on its front page, that these social accommodations were necessary to avoid the “army barracks”
feel of most projects, in which residents are deprived of the physical space to socialize with their neighbors. Wood also
traveled to India for the Ford Foundation, as part of a team advising a Calcutta metropolitan governmental body on planning
issues. Her most eloquent later writings, though, were on the importance of racial and economic integration in housing. In
The Balanced Neighborhood,
she proselytized for what she called “good heterogeneity” in urban planning, her vision of a residential environment that
provides for “meaningful contacts between unlike members of a community as a result of shared community facilities.” Exiled
from Chicago, she continued to issue the same warning she delivered shortly before being forced out at the CHA: “The next
generation will have to cure the slums created by this generation’s official blindness.”
³⁴

Wood always blamed the political forces in the Democratic machine and the City Council for her ouster, says a former staff
member who spoke with her after she left. The CHA board was weak, she explained, and important decisions were essentially
forced on it by the mayor and the City Council, which is to say the Democratic machine. Though Daley was still eight months
away from becoming mayor when Wood was forced out, he may have played a significant role in her dismissal. Daley had as much
motive as anyone to want Wood out. He was strongly opposed, on principle, to using public housing to integrate white neighborhoods,
and Wood’s plans hit especially close to home, since she had announced plans to move blacks into Bridgeport Homes, only blocks
from Daley’s house. Wood’s insistence on running a “clean” agency was particularly problematic for Daley, since he was the
head of a political machine that relied for its survival on its ability to find jobs for patronage workers. Her refusal to
hire Daley’s cousin was the most personal affront, and it is likely that Daley would have been especially unhappy with the
way the incident played out in the press.
³⁵

Daley was in a good position to influence the situation if he desired. He had already been chairman of the Cook County Democratic
Central Committee for eight months when the consultants’ report on the CHA was commissioned, and for more than a year when
Wood was removed. As party boss, he had considerable influence over the mayor, the City Council, and the CHA board. Daley
also had close ties to James Downs, the Kennelly housing coordinator who commissioned the report and played a key role in
ousting Wood. The NAACP Chicago chapter president said Wood’s removal was an “expertly engineered coup . . . masterminded”
by Downs, and one of Wood’s former staffers called Downs “the evil genius behind it all” and suspected Daley may have been
an important force acting on Downs. “Downs was a running dog for the political system, which at that time was Daley,” says
Edward Holmgren, a former assistant to Elizabeth Wood. Daley proved happy enough with Downs that when he was elected mayor
a year later, Downs became his first housing and redevelopment coordinator and one of his most trusted advisers.
³⁶

With former military man William Kean now in charge, the CHA dramatically changed course. Wood’s aggressive attempts to use
the agency to promote racial integration were replaced by obedience to the city’s political establishment. Kean set forth
the CHA’s new direction in his first statements to the press. Asked if he would take a new approach to the Trumbull Park Homes
situation, Kean said he did not know enough to comment, but that in any case he would not be the one to ask, “because the
commissioners issue policy to me.” As it turned out, Kean lost little time in revising Wood’s racial policies and calling
a halt to the CHA’s efforts to integrate all-white projects like Trumbull Park and Bridgeport Homes.
³⁷

As for the integrated projects, Wood’s successor undid her efforts to promote “managed integration.” Wood had grasped that
with racial animosities running as high as they were in 1950s Chicago, housing projects had to be integrated with great care.
She worked hard to introduce blacks into majority white projects without exceeding the “tipping point” at which whites would
move out and abandon the project so that it became entirely black. She also tried to keep the racial mix in projects in white
neighborhoods sufficiently white to make them acceptable to the surrounding community. Leclaire Courts, for example, had been
built in a predominantly white neighborhood, over loud protests from its neighbors. Wood had carefully managed its racial
composition, holding black occupancy to between 10 percent and 15 percent and making a concerted effort to replace departing
whites with new white families. It was an approach that by today’s standards seems troubling, and perhaps illegal, since it
apportioned housing on the basis of race, and often meant that blacks would have to wait longer for housing than similarly
situated whites. But Wood’s tactics were intended to promote integrated housing in a highly segregated city. When her successor
took office, he decreed that integration would no longer be managed. Kean did not hold open the apartments of departing whites
until new white tenants could be found. As a result, projects that had been racially integrated soon became segregated. Leclaire
Courts, for example, had 315 whites and 40 black tenants in 1953. After Wood’s departure, when whites moved out they were
replaced by blacks. Before long, it was virtually all black.
³⁸

By abandoning managed integration, the CHA effectively decided that Chicago’s public housing would become housing for blacks.
Over the next twenty-five years, whites fled projects like Trumbull Park and Cabrini-Green. By 1969, fully 99 percent of the
tenants in the CHA’s family housing would be black. In addition to ending Wood’s dream of integrated public housing, the new
policies ensured that white politicians would fiercely resist allowing any new projects to be built in their districts “Now
the aldermen could say self-righteously, ‘We can’t give you another site in our area; look at what you will do with it,’”
recalls one of Wood’s aides. “And so no further sites were given.”
³⁹

The CHA also abandoned Wood’s careful attention to tenant selection. Some of Wood’s criteria in evaluating tenants seem, by
today’s standards, to be inappropriate. It is hard to imagine bureaucrats today evaluating the housekeeping skills of applicants
for government benefits, and no doubt civil libertarians would file a lawsuit if they did. But the animating principle behind
Wood’s tenant-selection process was that housing projects would only be healthy communities when careful thought was given
to what kind of tenants would be allowed to move in. “It takes only a very few, very antisocial people to make a floor or
a building or a project unsatisfactory to parents who are concerned about their children,” she once said. Wood’s tenant-selection
process was abandoned not out of concern for civil liberties, but because the CHA was no longer concerned about the kind of
communities that were being created. “The biggest problem after 1954, housing project tenants told me, was the breakdown in
tenant selection . . . no real belief that you had to select self-respecting families,” recalls Wood’s aide. The chronically
unemployed, convicted criminals, and gang members were all ushered into the projects, and hardworking tenants who wanted a
healthier environment for their children moved out.
⁴⁰