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WORK TITLE: Redlined
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://lindagartz.com/
CITY: Chicago
STATE: IL
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | no2018049976 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/no2018049976 |
| HEADING: | Gartz, Linda |
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| 040 | __ |a NN |b eng |e rda |c NN |
| 100 | 1_ |a Gartz, Linda |
| 370 | __ |a Chicago (Ill.) |2 naf |
| 372 | __ |a Documentary films–Production and direction |a Documentary television programs |2 lcsh |
| 374 | __ |a Television producers and directors |a Authors |2 lcsh |
| 375 | __ |a female |
| 377 | __ |a eng |
| 670 | __ |a Gartz, Linda. Redlined, 2018: |b title page (Linda Gartz) page 317 (author, television documentary producer, and curator of the Gartz Family Papers; born and raised on Chicago’s West Side; studied at the University of Munich and earned her BA and MAT degrees from Northwestern University) |
PERSONAL
Born in Chicago, IL.
EDUCATION:Studied at the University of Munich; Northwestern University, B.A., M.A. Holds a pilot’s license.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Television documentary producer and director, blogger, essayist. Teacher in Chicago and Winnetka, IL; Gartz Family Papers, curator.
AWARDS:Six Emmy Awards.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles and essays to literary journals, local and national magazines, and online, including the Chicago Tribune. Produced educational videos, including Begin with Love, hosted by Oprah Winfrey and Grandparenting, hosted by Maya Angelou.
SIDELIGHTS
Born and raised in Chicago, Linda Gartz is a six-time Emmy Award-winning television documentary producer and director in Chicago, as well as a blogger and essayist. She studied German and spent a semester at the University of Munich. She holds a B.A. and a master’s degree in teaching from Northwestern University. Gartz has published articles and essays in literary journals, online, and in local and national magazines and newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune.
In 2018, Gartz published Redlined: A Memoir of Race, Change, and Fractured Community in 1960s Chicago, based on family diaries, letters, photographs, and letters she and her two brothers found hidden in her parents’ attic after their deaths. Her knowledge of German helped her translate the documents she found. She is now curator of the Gartz Family Papers. In the memoir, she chronicles the migration of African Americans into Chicago’s West Side during the 1960s and the subsequent fleeing of whites out of the neighborhood. However, Gartz’s parents, Fred and Lillian, stay and make friends with the black community. Over the years, the community experiences increased poverty, crime, and two race riots that destroy the business district. Still resilient, the Gartzs maintain their three apartment buildings and tenants for twenty years, until the situation eventually fractures their marriage.
Including her family legacy in her memoir, Gartz writes about her grandparents’ immigration to America, their abusive child-rearing methods, her grandmother’s psychotic episodes, and financial ruin during the Great Depression. Of her own parents, she talks about their responsibilities as landlords and building maintenance. As to racial tension in the 1960s, she comments on blacks heading north to escape the cruelties of the Jim Crow South and the Civil Rights movement. Writing in Kirkus Reviews, a critic called the memoir stunning and “Gartz writes with a warm tone, and the various people and settings are as well-developed and intriguing as those in a riveting novel.” In a book that lives up to its title as a commentary on social ills, “Redlined is absolutely riveting from cover to cover,” according to a Small Press Bookwatch contributor.
In the book, Gartz especially talks about the discriminatory banking practice of redlining, which is the racist system of refusing a home or business loan to someone in a neighborhood deemed to be a poor financial risk or at risk of black encroachment. This practice has contributed to the decline of entire black neighborhoods. Gartz hopes that her family’s story will help readers understand how redlining is still prevalent in America and how similar injustices against poor black communities are still being perpetrated. “Redlined is a personal story, into which is interwoven the history of redlining and its impact on one family in one Chicago neighborhood,” Gartz said in an article by Tanner Howard online at Chicago Reader. Howard added that “She believes a memoir might be less intimidating to casual readers than an academic book on the subject.” Gartz continued: “[I hope] it may provide a path for the nation to move forward and remedy these unconstitutional injustices of the past that are still having an impact on race relations today.”
Calling Gartz’s book an exceptionally rich and readable memoir of family and change, Susan Waggoner commented in Clarion Reviews: “A nice coda to the memoir returns to the book’s starting point: the discovery of diaries and letters, and a grown child’s experience of viewing—and understanding—her parents’ lives from an adult perspective. Well written and amplified with pictures, notes, and maps, Redlined goes beyond the title to offer a nuanced look at ordinary Americans during an event-laden era.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Clarion Reviews, May 9, 2018, Susan Waggoner, review of Redlined: A Memoir of Race, Change, and Fractured Community in 1960s Chicago.
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2018, review of Redlined.
Small Press Bookwatch, May 2018, review of Redlined.
ONLINE
Chicago Reader, https://www.chicagoreader.com/ (April 10, 2018), Tanner Howard, “Redlined Tells Story of One of the Last White Families in West Garfield Park.”
Linda was born and raised in Chicago’s West Garfield Park neighborhood, where she attended Tilton Elementary School and then Luther High School North (LHN), where she met lifelong friends she still hangs out with today.
Her random choice to major in German at Northwestern University opened the door to a year of study abroad at the University of Munich. (Decades later, she’d use her German to translate scores of letters she found in the archives.) A year after graduation, she returned to Northwestern to earn her M.A.T. (Masters of Arts in Teaching).
Linda taught in Chicago and Winnetka, the latter known for its child-centered curricula. It was all a blast, but after nine years of teaching, she was eager for a new challenge. After lots of searching, a video class hooked her on pursuing a career in television production. She started networking to get a foot in the door.
She earned her private pilot’s license at age 26 (when she’d try just about anything), and later, with her best college buddy and their husbands, raced J-24 sailboats on Lake Michigan. She and Bill (pictured with Linda above) still sail with these same friends.
Linda’s yearly camping trips with the family to Devil’s Lake State Park in Wisconsin and the exciting road trips her Dad planned for the family made her a lifelong fan of travel and the outdoors. She’s backpacked in the Sonoran Desert, Colorado, and the Pacific Northwest.
Gardening has been a part of Linda’s life since she collected seeds as a little girl from her parents’ “four-o’clock” plants or helped dig up dahlia bulbs in fall and replant them in the spring. She now has lots of room to garden and likes planning the spaces and moving plants around to find their “happy” spot.
Like all writers, she reads as much as she can, both fiction and nonfiction (especially loves memoir).
Linda Gartz is a six-time Emmy-award-honored television producer, blogger, essay writer, and author of the memoir, Redlined.
Redlined was inspired by the trove of long-hidden family diaries, letters, photos, documents, (and so much more), which she discovered in her parents’ attic after their deaths. Once she began reading, she was instantly gripped by the power of her family’s words to take her into the minds and hearts of each family member. Every new detail she learned fueled her quest to discover what forces had undermined her parents’ marriage and fractured her community. The result is Redlined.
Since then, Linda has worked for all the major TV networks in Chicago, mostly on documentaries but also producing magazine pieces and consumer segments for the local ABC 4 p.m. newscast. Her productions have aired on PBS, ABC, CBS and Investigation Discovery Channel, syndicated nation-wide.
Her educational videos include Begin with Love, hosted by Oprah Winfrey and Grandparenting, hosted by Maya Angelou.
Linda has published articles and essays in literary journals, online, and in local and national magazines and newspapers, including The Chicago Tribune.
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Congrats to Rochelle for this beautifully rendered love story that breathes life into love and takes readers on a jaunt to a historic past that seems as real as if we could walk there today. Sunday Breakfast with Rochelle Distelheim https://t.co/qEvHRaDoLX
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Gartz, Linda: REDLINED
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 15, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Gartz, Linda REDLINED She Writes Press (Indie Nonfiction) $16.95 4, 3 ISBN: 978-1-63152-320-5
A stunning debut memoir that documents the societal and racial changes of the mid-20th century, told from the perspective of a Chicago family caught in the middle of them.
After the deaths of their parents, Fred and Lillian Gartz, the author and her two brothers found a genealogical treasure: decades' worth of "letters, diaries, documents, and photos" written and taken by her parents and grandparents. Using these detailed sources, she pieced together this family memoir, which begins with her grandparents' immigration to Chicago, their strict and sometimes-abusive child-rearing methods, and their financial devastation during the Great Depression. The spotlight then shifts to her parents' romantic courtship and the early days of their marriage. The joy and innocence of their young love would soon face the demands of everyday life, including caring for Lil's psychotic mother, "their time-sucking devotion to building maintenance" as landlords, and Fred's travel-heavy job that severely strained their marriage. Later, she says, the 1950s brought "a mass migration of African Americans, escaping from the...cruelties of the Jim Crow South." Gartz describes the racial tensions that existed in her white family's neighborhood, manifesting especially in discriminatory property laws that kept black people in poverty. Gartz concludes the book with her own recollections of the civil rights movement and the era's changing sexual mores before returning the spotlight to her parents in their old age. Although the subtitle suggests that this book is primarily about race in 1960s Chicago, it actually covers a much broader array of material, both chronologically (from the early 1900s to the '80s) and topically, as she addresses mental illness, marital distress, and her own quest for independence, among other issues. Her primary sources, which include the aforementioned photographs and quoted letters and journals, provide an invaluable, up-close- and-personal view of historical events and family drama. Gartz writes with a warm tone, and the various people and settings are as well-developed and intriguing as those in a riveting novel.
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A rich remembrance of a captivating, transformative era in American history.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Gartz, Linda: REDLINED." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375040/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=1d5815c1. Accessed 8 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534375040
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Redlined Linda Gartz
Small Press Bookwatch.
(May 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Midwest Book Review http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
Redlined
Linda Gartz
She Writes Press
www.shewritespress.com
9781631523205 $16.95 pbk / $9.95 Kindle amazon.com
Synopsis: Set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, Redlined exposes the racist lending rules that refuse mortgages to anyone in areas with even one black resident. As blacks move deeper into Chicago's West Side during the 1960s, whites flee by the thousands. But Linda Gartz's parents, Fred and Lil, choose to stay in their integrating neighborhood, overcoming previous prejudices as they meet and form friendships with their African American neighbors. The community sinks into increasing poverty and crime after two race riots destroy its once vibrant business district, but Fred and Lil continue to nurture their three apartment buildings and tenants for the next twenty years in a devastated landscape, even as their own relationship cracks and withers.
After her parents' deaths, Gartz discovers long-hidden letters, diaries, documents, and photos stashed in the attic of her former home. Determined to learn what forces shattered her parents' marriage and undermined her community, she searches through the family archives and immerses herself in books on racial change in American neighborhoods. Told through the lens of Gartz's discoveries of the personal and political, Redlined delivers a riveting story of a community fractured by racial turmoil, an unraveling and conflicted marriage, a daughter's fight for sexual independence, and an up-close, intimate view of the racial and social upheavals of the 1960s.
Critique: Redlined: A Memoir of Race, Change, and Fractured Community in 1960s Chicago lives up to its title as a window to social ills, told from the up-close and personal perspective of a family that stayed in a redlined district even as white residents fled, crime increased, and two race riots devastated local businesses. "Redlining" (the racist practice of denying mortgages to anyone in integrating areas of the city) played a crucial role in shaping the decline of entire neighborhoods. Redlined is absolutely riveting from cover to cover, all but impossible to put down, and highly recommended for both personal and public library collections. It should be noted for personal reading lists that Redlined is also available in a Kindle edition ($9.95).
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Redlined Linda Gartz." Small Press Bookwatch, May 2018. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A543464518/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=e21e55d6. Accessed 8 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A543464518
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Redlined; A Memoir of Race, Change,
and Fractured Community in 1960s
Chicago
Susan Waggoner
Clarion Reviews.
(May 9, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 ForeWord https://www.forewordmagazine.net/clarion/reviews.aspx
Full Text:
Linda Gartz; REDLINED; She Writes Press (Nonfiction: Autobiography & Memoir) 16.95 ISBN: 9781631523205
Byline: Susan Waggoner
Redlined offers a nuanced look at ordinary Americans during an event-laden era.
Linda Gartz's Redlined is an exceptionally rich and readable memoir of family, change, and coming of age in the tumultuous 1960s.
While clearing out the family home after her mother's death, Linda Gartz found a voluminous trove of diaries and correspondence left by her parents. From that material and her own experiences growing up, Gartz weaves a vivid portrait of how rapid changes brought by integration and turbulent times affected one neighborhood and many families.
With World War II behind them, Lil and Fred Gartz set about building the American dream. They bought property in a stable, all-white Chicago neighborhood and endured cramped quarters to rent their unused rooms. Fred's job involved long trips away from home; Lil kept busy raising three kids, caring for her mentally troubled mother, and seeing to the management and upkeep of an increasing number of rental units.
The Great Migration brought tens of thousands of black Americans to Chicago after World War II. During the 1950s and 1960s, federal policies continued to quietly color-code communities with black residents living in them, making property loans impossible to acquire. Neighborhoods like the Gartzes' changed, with many white residents moving out as black residents moved in.
The writing throughout the book is clear, detailed, and never overly sentimental. The many sources of pressure in the Gartz home create reader empathy without hinting at victimhood. With the aid of maps and facts, the narrative shows how the pernicious practice of redlining took advantage of both black and white Americans by rezoning to drive down home values in long-
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established white communities, scooping up houses of longtime residents at bargain discounts, then selling them to black families at unreasonably high prices. Through the experiences of the Gartz family, the book shows how both those who stayed and the new arrivals were punished by forces beyond their control.
Redlined sets a steady pace and holds reader interest by embracing several main themes. In addition to portraying a marriage that survived more than its share of stress, and the consequence-laden decline of an urban neighborhood, it also shows, through the narrator's eyes, what it was like to grow up in the 1960s, to be born into a relatively stable picket-fence world and navigate young adulthood in a world marked by war protests, race riots, assassinations, free love, and the counterculture. The book shifts easily from one focus to another, weaving a seamless tapestry that offers a credible panorama of an entire era.
Characters are fully developed throughout, particularly in the case of the narrator's parents and their marriage. The book includes snippets of the diaries kept by each and of their letters, allowing a rare look at two people whose goals and needs often collided and whose resentments sometimes boiled to the surface but who never, on either side, decided to throw in the towel. In deft brushstrokes the book also conveys a sense of minor characters. When the narrator is about to depart to study abroad, her paternal grandmother refuses to attend the bon voyage party, saying, "She hasn't earned the right to go to Europe!"
A nice coda to the memoir returns to the book's starting point: the discovery of diaries and letters, and a grown child's experience of viewing -- and understanding -- her parents' lives from an adult perspective.
Well written and amplified with pictures, notes, and maps, Redlined goes beyond the title to offer a nuanced look at ordinary Americans during an event-laden era.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Waggoner, Susan. "Redlined; A Memoir of Race, Change, and Fractured Community in 1960s
Chicago." Clarion Reviews, 9 May 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com /apps/doc/A538537821/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=f8381ae3. Accessed 8 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538537821
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dlined tells story of one of the last white families in West Garfield Park
Linda Gartz's memoir also offers some insight into the blindness of neighborhood residents to racial discrimination and disinvestment.
By Tanner Howard @tanner_howard
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click to enlarge Linda Gartz, second from left, with her grandmother, parents, and siblings in 1953
Linda Gartz, second from left, with her grandmother, parents, and siblings in 1953
Courtesy of author
Redlined: A Memoir of Race, Change, and Fractured Community in 1960s Chicago by Linda Gartz (She Writes Press). Talk and book signing Wed 4/18, 6 PM, Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton, 312-255-3610, newberry.org. F
Redlining is still alive and well, continuing to haunt communities that decades ago were denied access to home loan financing. A March report from the Neighborhood Community Reinvestment Coalition found that areas denied credit in the postwar period remain heavily disinvested in today.
One community emblematic of the ravages of redlining is West Garfield Park, one of the city's poorest, most neglected neighborhoods. The city of Chicago has transferred millions of TIF dollars and is now planning to build a new police academy in the community for $95 million—money that many argue could be better spent on other services.
Before World War II, the community looked quite different: it was home to recently settled German immigrants. But that wouldn't be the case for long, as documented in Linda Gartz's new memoir Redlined: A Memoir of Race, Change, and Fractured Community in 1960s Chicago. Gartz, a longtime Chicago TV producer, describes a far different West Garfield Park than the one that exists today: "At the time of Dad's birth, in 1914, West Garfield Park was a neighborhood of wooden sidewalks, dirt streets, and butterflies fluttering above open prairies."
In 1940, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, the organization tasked by the federal government with determining the financial viability of neighborhoods, would mark the area in yellow to signal "definitely declining." Just blocks away, it drew a red line, designating the area as "threatened with Negro encroachment" and therefore an undesirable place for banks to offer home-loan financing. Although these government-backed policies encouraged massive economic disinvestment in changing neighborhoods, their eventual impact was hardly clear to the white families already living there; instead the whites directed their anger and violence at the black families trying to settle on their blocks.
The Gartz family lived in the neighborhood in the midst of these chaotic changes, similarly confused about what was happening. But unlike most white families, who sold their homes and fled the neighborhood, Linda's parents remained, rooted by the reluctance of her father, Fred, to leave the place where he grew up and Fred's parents' decision to give the family their house—a six-flat—after they fled, compelling them to become landlords for more than 40 years. The decision to remain would create an incredible strain on their marriage as Fred traveled for work while his wife, Lillian, became a full-time property manager in a community that grew increasingly unstable and violent each year. Redlined offers insight into the ways white families failed to grasp their own role in how government officials reshaped the city, and how those failures further solidified the racial divisions that continue to plague Chicago today.
SHE WRITES PRESS
She Writes Press
Tracing these consequences is in part what drove Gartz to write the book. After their mother's death in 1994, Gartz and her two brothers discovered in the attic of their former home their parents' and grandparents' letters, diaries, and business records in the attic of her childhood home. In 2002, Gartz began working to compile, sort, and analyze the massive trove of documents. (All the papers will be donated to the Newberry Library.) Sensing that her family's experience provided a distinct perspective on one of the city's most fraught eras, Gartz struggled for years to find a story within the thousands of pages of documents. The historical importance of redlining ultimately helped her find a focus.
"I knew that this story about my parents staying in this neighborhood was significant, because no other whites did that," Gartz says. "I wanted to explore what happened to my neighborhood, what happened to my parent's marriage, and the two sort of coincided."
In the book, Gartz documents the ways in which she grew into political consciousness amid the tumultuous changes brought on by the civil rights movement. While she remembers feeling confused and unsettled as a teenager watching southern police officers attack black protesters, those changes would soon be felt much closer to home.
Gartz writes about her eighth-grade graduation at Tilton Elementary School, where only four of 74 students in her 1962 graduating class were black. She was friends with one of those four, she remembers, but even in second grade, she "knew that because of the way things were in the neighborhood, I wasn't allowed to have her over to my house." But with redrawn school maps and the profiteering efforts of blockbusting real estate speculators to drive white families out and resell their houses to black families at a markup, the school would have a graduating class of 58 percent black students just a year later. This was the moment, Gartz sees now, when redlining "turned the flow of whites out of our community into a flood."
Gartz's parents, Lillian and Fred, on their 10th wedding anniversary in 1952 - COURTESY OF AUTHOR
Gartz's parents, Lillian and Fred, on their 10th wedding anniversary in 1952
Courtesy of author
As Gartz and her parents became familiar with their new neighbors, their racist assumptions were quickly challenged. While Lillian initially describes feeling "squeamish" at the arrival of the first black family on her street, she soon declares to the rest of the family, "You know, I'm not the least bit unhappy in this changing neighborhood." Though a sense of neighborhood stability quickly fell apart after the sudden change in demographics, there's still a sense in the book that Lillian and Fred are transformed by their deepened relationships with black families, which quietly reshape the reflexively racist attitudes they'd once held. Gartz shares a moment at their dinner table, when her mother recounts the experiences that their local butcher, Eddie, experienced growing up in the Jim Crow south. Telling her family how he was used as a shooting target by his white boss, she breaks down crying, while Fred comments, "Man's inhumanity to man."
For that reason, Redlined is an important reminder that white people's racist attitudes are harder to maintain after sustained contact with people of color. Since the 1950s, psychologists have developed the contact hypothesis, which argues that, under the right conditions, meaningful interracial contact is one of the best methods of reducing hostile attitudes between people. That's clear in small moments in Redlined, as when Linda's brother Paul and their neighbor Mr. Lewis repair a car together while the 1965 riots rage just blocks away.
Gartz and Bill, early date, summer 1965 - COURTESY OF AUTHOR
Gartz and Bill, early date, summer 1965
Courtesy of author
Living through the aftermath was a formative childhood experience for Gartz, and as she grew older and came to realize that its consequences were even more far-reaching than she'd realized, she was compelled to explore the topic further.
"I would have never done this search if I hadn't lived through this," she says. "I had heard of redlining, but I didn't realize how pervasive and insidious it was to our present situation."
Though she's lived in Evanston for the past several decades, Gartz still considers herself a "dual citizen of sorts," forever changed by her first 26 years as a Chicagoan—although the family did leave West Garfield Park in 1965 for Old Irving Park. With Redlined, she hopes that her family story will help readers understand how consequential redlining remains across our country today and how similar injustices are still being perpetrated against poor black communities today.
"Redlined is a personal story, into which is interwoven the history of redlining and its impact on one family in one Chicago neighborhood," Gartz says, adding that she believes a memoir might be less intimidating to casual readers than an academic book on the subject. "[I hope] it may provide a path for the nation to move forward and remedy these unconstitutional injustices of the past that are still having an impact on race relations today." v
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Book Review: Redlined
DateTuesday, March 13, 2018 at 1:17PM
Redlined. Linda Gartz. She Writes Press, April 3, 2018, Trade Paperback and E-book, 256 pages.
Reviewed by Roger Prosise.
Redlined, by Linda Gartz, is a luminously written memoir of a white family that lived in West Garfield Park, on the west side of Chicago. The Gartz family managed rental properties for more than four decades, starting in 1949. They rented the apartments in their six flat and the bedrooms in the apartment in which they resided. Linda’s grandparents worked sixteen-hour days to make ends meet and to get ahead a little. Selbststandig, the German term for being self-sufficient, and racism, are themes of the book.
Gartz’s memoir focuses on her family’s experience of the transformation of their neighborhood from white to black, and the racism and riots that came along with this change. An abundance of the Gartz Family letters and diaries are used to tell her family’s tale. The author also employs her own research on segregation, which describes how blacks were being systematically kept out of white neighborhoods. She is enlightening about how this segregation had detrimental consequences for black renters and white property owners.
Redlined allows the reader to experience the impact of racism, as well as the struggles of living with someone with a mental illness—her grandmother was psychotic and lived with the family for fifteen years. It is also a beautiful coming of age story of a girl who grew up in racially charged and economically challenging times. Gartz provides authentic and honest details of herself and her family, and even includes her own friendships and games such as the dunk tank at the Riverview Amusement Park, which came to be called racially offensive names. Her memoir includes a love story, the obvious being the author’s relationship with her boyfriend/husband, but a more compelling love story is the author’s relationship with her mother and father.
Redlined is a family’s journey through turbulent times, and it brings a personal perspective of life during the '50s and '60s, times of tremendous racial unrest. It is a wonderful read and would appeal to people interested in Chicago history, racial integration, coming of age stories, love stories, and stories that give a realistic look at life with a mentally-ill family member. I enjoyed this memoir, particularly the combination of authentic story-telling and research that provided some of the backstory. The author’s honesty and vulnerability make it a compelling read and draws the reader into the story.
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Redlining Remembered
A new memoir wrestles with a familial history of racism and redlining
by Tammy Xu | June 5, 2018
Linda Gartz’s family lived three generations in West Garfield Park, from the time her father was born in 1914, when it “was a neighborhood of wooden sidewalks, dirt streets, and butterflies fluttering above open prairies” to her senior year of high school in 1966. By the time the family moved away, racial riots had destabilized the neighborhood, and white residents were fleeing for the suburbs. Gartz’s new memoir, Redlined, combines recent scholarship on redlining with the intimacy of a treasure trove of diaries her parents kept throughout the years. The result is a compelling chronicle of both a neighborhood’s journey and a personal one, as Gartz pieces together her past and works to place the events of her childhood in historical context.
The memoir’s title refers to the discriminatory practice of denying access to housing based on race, which was prevalent among banks and government agencies that dealt with housing issues in response to the Great Depression. Agencies like the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) and Federal Housing Administration (FHA) created color-coded maps to determine the perceived risk of insuring mortgage loans in different neighborhoods, with racially homogeneous white neighborhoods deemed low-risk and colored in green, and neighborhoods with Black residents considered high-risk and colored in red.
The memoir gives readers a front row seat to what it was like when, during the Second Great Migration, the practice of redlining combined with ordinary racism led to remarkable changes in neighborhoods like West Garfield Park. Gartz weaves narratives from her parents’ diary entries and her own recollections together with historical research data to tell the story of the changing city demographic in an engaging, multi-faceted way.
An early indication of coming neighborhood change is documented in a 1953 letter between her parents, Fred and Lilian (Lil). They discussed an observation from a neighbor that within the span of three years, the block on 14th and Pulaski in North Lawndale, two miles south of the family’s home, had changed from majority white to majority Black. Gartz uses census data to show that the demographic of North Lawndale in 1950 had been eighty-seven percent white, a drastic difference from the demographic perceived by their neighbor just three years later.
This news added urgency to her parents’ anxiety over the investment in their home, in which they had placed a great financial stake. To supplement the income Fred made as a traveling fire inspector, the family kept on the previous renters in the first home they purchased in 1948, a two flat located in West Garfield Park that they bought with four years of Lil’s secretarial salary savings. In 1951 they took out a large loan, worth almost half the cost of the home itself, to subdivide the second floor and basement levels in order to take in additional renters. This additional investment meant that the wealth of the family—and their debts—were further tied up in the fate of the neighborhood.
“My parents were undoubtedly clueless about the racist policy of redlining an area when Blacks arrived, but they knew the outcome,” Gartz writes. “If even one African American moved into West Garfield Park, property values would plummet for whites who wanted to sell, threatening the money, sweat, and marital harmony my parents had sacrificed in creating and maintaining our rooming house.”
Unlike her parents, Gartz does not come across as clueless about the racist consequences of redlining in her memoir, pulling from a variety of research, including Richard Rothstein’s acclaimed 2017 book on government-sanctioned residential discrimination, The Color of Law. The book describes how although by the 1930s there already existed integrated neighborhoods across the United States, the practice of redlining reversed this trend and instead spurred the growth of aggressively segregated communities.
Though the FHA was created to help families afford homeownership by insuring mortgage loans and new housing construction, the agency considered insuring homes for Black Americans too financially risky. In the Underwriting Manual, a guide for FHA appraisers, the FHA instructed appraisers to assign less value to property in areas that were not all-white, saying that “important among adverse influences…are infiltration of inharmonious racial or nationality groups.” The manual also encouraged segregation, saying that “all mortgages on properties protected against unfavorable influences, to the extent such protection is possible, will obtain a high rating.” Because bank financing for mortgages and new construction depended on whether the FHA appraised an area as low-risk enough to insure, this led to Black residents not being able to afford housing in new white suburbs, and the rapid depreciation in the value of homes in Black neighborhoods.
As a result, Black workers and families moving to places like Chicago had limited housing options. This segregation allowed Black residents to be easy prey for exploitation, such as substandard municipal services and exorbitant rents. Rothstein references a 1946 magazine article that described a minutely subdivided converted storefront in Chicago where the landlord made as much in rent as a luxury apartment in Gold Coast along Lake Michigan.
Gartz’s parents had also subdivided their two-flat to generate more rent income when the neighborhood was still all-white, but they were conscientious landlords who took pride in providing a well-maintained home for their tenants. Fred’s parents were in the janitorial business all their lives, and they instilled in their children a strong sense of stewardship in taking care of buildings. Gartz relates her parents’ surprise and indignation one time when they learned that a prospective Black tenant kept inquiring about the unit’s heat because her previous apartment lacked it, forcing her to wear coats indoors. “Dad, his parents, and his brothers had awakened in the middle of the night to keep their coal-burning furnaces functioning perfectly,” Gartz writes. “He said, ‘I guess that’s how these other landlords make a killing—just don’t heat the place!’”
Despite her parents’ sense of responsibility as landlords, Gartz is clear-eyed about her parents’ racism during the tense period prior to the first Black family moving to their block. She doesn’t shy away from describing the ways in which, as homeowners and as landlords, they participated in discrimination against potential Black residents.
Worried about giving their neighbors the impression that they would be the first to “break the neighborhood”—that is, sell or rent to a Black family—Fred and Lil went so far as to forbid their daughter from inviting her grade school friend Stephanie, who was Black, to a birthday party in case the neighbors saw and drew the wrong conclusion. Gartz writes movingly about skipping over Stephanie when handing out invitations in class: “[Stephanie] held my eyes with clear and bitter understanding as I passed her desk. She said, ‘You only invite those little curly-haired girls, don’t you?’ […] Nothing I said could undo the insult.”
The family also tried to screen out potential Black tenants by writing classified ads aimed at white renters, which were rejected by the newspaper company for seeming discriminatory. Gartz recalls once early on asking why her mother had turned away a Black renter at the door: “Very matter-of-factly, Mom gazed down at me and explained, ‘Linda, we can’t rent to colored. If we did, then the whole neighborhood would go colored, and we would lose our house. This is how we make a living.’”
Gartz doesn’t excuse her parents’ discriminatory actions, but she tries to put them into context by describing the volatility of the era, when “it took only a rumor of African Americans entering a neighborhood to spawn a white riot.” She says that the effects of redlining “exacerbated whites’ racism and maintained segregation of the races, creating a vicious cycle of stereotyping.” As a result of the FHA refusing to insure mortgages in integrated neighborhoods, the housing stock of those neighborhoods plummeted, which in turn fed into the widely held perception that Black residents were bad for a neighborhood’s housing prices—the rationale that the FHA used to justify their policies in the first place. It was a self-perpetuating cycle.
It didn’t help that speculators took advantage of the situation, scaring white homeowners who lived on the border of white and Black neighborhoods into selling their homes below their worth, then turning around and selling to Black families at an inflated rate. These methods, called blockbusting, involved tactics such as hiring Black women to push baby carriages through the neighborhood or hiring Black men to knock on doors and ask whether homes were for sale. Gartz recalls that on her family’s block, they found flyers urging “GET OUT BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!”, and neighbors received phone calls in the middle of that night that only said, “They’re coming,” before hanging up.
Her parents knew that these were scare tactics, but they were often torn about whether to move out of the neighborhood before it declined in value. Gartz negotiates the fraught balancing act between sympathizing with her parents’ unenviable position and pointing out her family’s privileged situation from which Black families were excluded. Their budget was tight, but the family still owned three properties as landlords, one of which was a $40,000 gift from Fred’s parents. They could afford to enroll their daughter at Luther High School North, away from the distraction of gangs and overcrowding, and they had enough money and the option to move out of West Garfield Park and to a new, welcoming community if they chose.
“African American couples had the same dream,” Gartz points out. “They, too, scrimped and saved to buy homes in good neighborhoods. They, too, wanted to own property, wanted their children to attend uncrowded schools. But while whites could live wherever they chose, Blacks were vilified and terrorized out of white areas. They were denied mortgages and therefore the ability to build wealth from homeownership—as white families could.”
Memoirs are always a sentimental undertaking, and, despite the title, this memoir is more of an account of Gartz’s family’s life during her coming of age than an analysis of redlining. A lot of pages are spent detailing the specifics of her grandmother’s mental illness and the deterioration of her parents’ marriage, which may not be of interest to those seeking an insider account of housing discrimination. But the personal family history, which Gartz shares with unwavering honesty, serves as an important reminder of how easy it is for people to perpetuate a great societal injustice simply by protecting their own self-interest.
The Gartz family moved out of West Garfield Park in 1966, well after the last white neighbors they knew had moved out of the neighborhood, adding one more family to the widening segregation in Chicago. The consequences of redlining are as present today as ever. A recent study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition showed that neighborhoods originally redlined by the HOLC and the FHA are now, eighty years later, much more likely to have low-income, minority populations. Redlined isn’t a book that suggests policy changes or solutions, but it is a step forward, showing that the need to understand and fix the problems of segregation isn’t just something done for others. As Rothstein writes, “we, all of us, owe this to ourselves.”
Linda Gartz, Redlined: A Memoir of Race, Change, and Fractured Community in 1960s Chicago. She Writes Press. $16.95 256 pages
Linda Gartz will give a book talk on Redlined on June 24 at 57th Street Books, 1301 E. 57th St.
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Tammy Xu is a contributor to the Weekly. She grew up in Naperville and works as a software programmer. She last wrote for the Weekly about “A Tender Power: A Black Womanist Visual Manifesto,” an exhibition at Rootwork Gallery, in April.
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Thoughts on “Redlining Remembered”
Dear Tammy,
Thank you for this very detailed and carefully written review of my memoir, “Redlined.” I appreciate your close reading of my book, the helpful comments you added based on your own knowledge of redlining, and the consequences of redlining, which our nation still lives with today.
As you mention, my memoir is not an academic book on the subject. My website’s “book” page (drop-down menu: resources) lists many excellent academic books (as well as articles and videos) if one wishes to learn all the historical and policy details of the history and impact of redlining.
For those readers who prefer a story to an academic book, “Redlined provides the basics of the insidious practice of redlining told from the point of view of a family (as recorded in letters and diaries) who stayed to witness and suffer the consequences. That’s what make “Redlined” unique.
My parents stuck with the community for more than thirty years after the first blacks moved onto our block in June 1963. (Although the family moved north in 1966, my parents continued to travel to West Garfield Park to care for their three buildings until 1983, and for the two flat in which I grew up until my mom’s death in 1994.)
As you point out, I was scrupulously honest about my family and the era. It’s a universal story of the forces that can undo a relationship, the impact of mental illness on families (an issue for many families today), and the coming of age of a young girl in a tumultuous time.
Thank you again for a thorough, finely written review.
Q&A: Linda Gartz on Growing Up in West Garfield Park In the Era of Redlining
The Emmy-winning television producer talks about her new memoir and her parents, landlords who remained in the neighborhood through white flight and racial tension.
By Robert Chiarito
Published March 28, 2018
Linda Gartz and her new book, 'Redlined'
Linda Gartz and her new book, ‘Redlined’
Linda Gartz, an Emmy-winning television producer and native of Chicago’s West Garfield Park, has written her first book, Redlined: A Memoir of Race, Change and Fractured Community in 1960s Chicago, which is focused on her family and the neighborhood where she grew up. After her parents’ deaths, Gartz discovered 25 banker’s boxes filled with journals and letters written by her grandparents and parents, who lived and worked in West Garfield Park for decades before the Great Migration led to white flight in their neighborhood—and where they remained there living and running their three buildings which they rented.
Set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement, Redlined focuses on her parents, Fred and Lil, how they overcame their own prejudices, and the effects of redlining on West Garfield Park, which despite being outlawed 50 years ago, resonate today.
Redlining began in the 1930s as a New Deal policy that color-coded neighborhoods based on the perceived risk of offering home loans there; neighborhoods with large percentages of non-white residents, particularly African Americans, were colored red, deeming the entire area unworthy of loans. Racial prejudice, both individual and as codified by law, led many whites to leave their neighborhoods by the thousands.
African Americans, many new to Chicago, were packed into apartments that were then neglected by its owners, and often forced to live crammed together because of housing shortages, then blamed by outsider whites for the condition of the buildings that their landlords willfully neglected.
I spoke with Gartz in Evanston, where she now lives, about her family and new book.
After your parents passed away and you discovered their journals, how long did it take for you to realize their story would be a great story worth sharing?
Pretty much right away. I started out with the idea that what my parents did on the West Side of Chicago was unusual. There were not many white people who stuck around and actually served the community. They were taking care of buildings day and night. There were thousands of pages of letters and diaries. The more I read them the more I realized that there was a story here.
Then the question became what story was I going to tell. That was my biggest hurdle. I started making charts and spreadsheets to keep track of where the quotes were. I had hundreds of pages of notes. So, finally I wrote the story from start to end, starting with my grandparents. I had 135,000 words and realized that no one is going to read that. All along I kept taking classes because as a documentary producer it’s a totally different writing style than when you are an author, so I really had to learn how to write.
You didn’t sugar-coat anything. Were you ever tempted to make your family members look a little better?
Yeah, of course. I think what kept me honest was reading other people’s memoirs and reading lots of books about memoirs and what makes a good memoir. All of them say the same thing - if you’re not honest, if you’re not vulnerable, if you try to sugar-coat things, the reader will see through it and it’s boring.
It’s more real because life isn’t so black and white, not to use a cliché. People often idolize their parents but as they get older they realize that they have flaws.
Yes. I adored my dad as a little kid. My mom was a good mom. But then as I got older, I saw his flaws. So, yeah. I tried to be very fair. I did not want to paint either of them at fault because I see them both at fault for what eventually really hurt their marriage. I think that’s probably true in most relationships. That’s one of the takeaways, I hope. Look at this marriage, they started out so wonderfully happy and what happened. That was my quest. I had two quests—what happened to my neighborhood and what happened to my parents’ marriage.
It was interesting that you showed that people like your parents weren’t against integration solely because the new neighbors were black, but because everything they worked for—their homes, and in the case of your parents being landlords, it was even more important, was threatened with losing its value because of racist mortgage laws.
It was pretty much on the minds of white people at the time. These are mostly working-class areas because the blacks were not going to be moving to the Gold Coast. They couldn’t afford to. So, the resentment in the neighborhood was sort of like, “Easy for those people to be liberal, because they don’t have any risk of losing their homes.” The blacks couldn’t buy there.
The overall sentiment was that if you drove through a black neighborhood, it looked pretty decrepit. Windows weren’t washed, porches were falling down, paint was peeling off. And of course, we just observed what we saw, we didn’t know the reasons behind it.
I think part of the view among whites at the time was that they were going to lose the value of their homes because it was an understood thing among them that when blacks moved into your neighborhood, the neighborhood went to hell. One woman I quoted said “Any place they’ve moved to turned into a slum.” Well, it wasn’t them who turned it into a slum. The mortgage laws turned it into a slum. Because if there was a place to put a polluting industry, they weren’t going to put it into a white neighborhood, so that made it even worse. They were jammed into these apartment buildings because they couldn’t get out, there was a housing crisis.
And a lot of the landlords were not like your parents who took care of their buildings. A lot of them let their buildings go.
My parents and grandparents were old-school. They took care of their property. But a lot of the landlords were absentee. When my mother showed one of her apartments to the first black family, they kept asking her about the heat, asking if they had good heat. My mother was totally puzzled and said “of course.” The woman told my mother that they used to have to wear their coats inside at their other apartments.
Do you think redlining was a symptom of the racial fears that drove segregation or did the laws themselves drive segregation?
I’m going to refer to an academic book. Last year a book called The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein and his premise is that the government segregated America. These policies segregated America. There were places outside of St. Louis that were integrated communities because all the people had to walk to work at a car plant. Then they decided to make public housing black and white and the FHA—and if someone was trying to create a housing project, the FHA would not underwrite their loans if there was one black family in it.
So, his premise is that redlining segregated America and that the segregation that we live with today everywhere in the country is because of what he calls de jure segregation—by law, versus de facto segregation, which is what everybody claims—that people what to live by their own people. My sense is that these policies did create segregation.
Most people only think the racist mortgage laws that were intended to give preference to whites only hurt blacks, but your story shows that it hurt people like your parents as well.
Whites were hurt in the sense that they lost their property values, but they could move out and find other housing. That’s why they fled to the suburbs. The FHA gave almost all of its loans to the suburbs. There was like 300 loans in Chicago and thousands in the suburbs, so they underwrote white flight.
The first black family to move to your block moved there in 1963, and your families became friends. How different do you think your book be if it was written from their point of view?
I think they would have a much deeper story about experiencing racism. My parents didn’t really understand true racism and how it was built into our society.
Redlining began as a policy that emerged from the New Deal in the 1930s and was around until The Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlawed housing discrimination. Yet, would you agree that the effects of it remain still today?
Yes. A recent PBS NewsHour working with the Center for Investigative Reporting looked at who gets mortgages today. They looked at around a million mortgage records and found that even today with all these laws, whites get three times the mortgages as blacks with the same financial profile. It’s still going on in more subtle ways.
The day after a race riot at Madison and Pulaski in 1965, just blocks from your home— in which 79 were hurt, including 18 police officers—your brother and Mr. Lewis [a black neighbor of the Gartz family] were working on your family’s station wagon together at your home. What was the factor that kept your family and the Lewis family together?
None of my parent’s tenants rioted. 1965 was the year my parents started renting to blacks. First of all, my parents were completely unaware of what was going because they were driving home from Lake Geneva that day. They were also unaware of the way blacks felt about the white fire department. [The riot was sparked by an accident when the crane from fire truck hit and killed a black woman.]
I’ve talked to blacks who lived in the area, and one woman said to me, ‘The people that you as white people expect to be for you, as a black person they were against you.’ For example, she said you might have a small kitchen fire and the fire department would come and spray water all over your house just to be mean. So, there was a lot of resentment towards that white fire department. There were some social advocacy groups that were actively interested in getting the fire department integrated but they couldn’t get anywhere. Why we didn’t get involved? We didn’t even know there was an issue.
At one point you do write that “later you better understood how racist housing policies and the bigotry blacks endured from white controlled society in which my family had been complicit, allowed you to gain perspective and put the riots into context.” How was your family complicit?
The way all whites were and the way many whites still are today. They didn’t want blacks in their neighborhood. Is that complicit, if you don’t want blacks in your neighborhood? When the neighborhood was still all white, my mother would say to a woman right to her face, “We don’t rent to colored people.” I was a little girl and asked her, “Wouldn’t that hurt your feelings?” She said, “It’s our property.”
It wasn’t that they were Klu Klux Klan members. They would never go out and do anything vicious, but their attitude was that they didn’t want blacks in their neighborhood. Then of course once we did have blacks in our neighborhood they came to really enjoy them and liked them better than our white neighbors.
You wrote that the only thing that changed is that we had black neighbors.
Yes, right. Of course, over time you see what happens because of the riots and the city never cared about West Garfield Park. They’ve always marginalized my neighborhood.
I noticed you said, ‘My neighborhood.’ Do you still consider it your neighborhood?
Yeah, sorta.
The riots that happened in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. really destroyed what was left of the commercial areas of the West Side and it still hasn’t fully recovered. The neighborhood remains rough–in 2016, the 4400 block of Monroe was identified as the most dangerous in Chicago.
Right. That’s like two blocks from where I grew up. Two blocks south and two blocks west.
Do you think West Garfield Park will ever come back to what it was once?
If it does, it will happen because of gentrification and that’s become a huge hot potato. I don’t know what to say about gentrification because there are so many points of view on it. It’s good for the landlords, but it hurts the renters.
I’m shocked that it hasn’t come back. It is so close to downtown. You can hop on the El and be downtown in ten minutes. It has beautiful buildings. When you say “come back” I can hear African Americans saying “What do you mean? We’re here.”
I didn’t mean come back to being white, I meant come back to be a safe, decent neighborhood.
Yes, right, but that is what it will mean because when these prices get jacked up to the certain point there is stratification in terms of income. Who knows, but I think it needs more city attention which they haven’t given it in 50 years.
Reading the book it seemed that without being aware of it, your mother was an early believer in the broken windows theory—that if you keep the building nice the tenants will keep it nice. It sounded like, despite the beliefs of some whites at the time, no one destroyed your parents’ buildings.
No, they didn’t. We had some incidents were people did some careless things, but the worst thing they had to deal with was a deadbeat tenant. But they always had some deadbeat tenants.
I think if someone reads the book they will figure it out, but can you summarize why they stayed and held on to their buildings for so long?
I think they were sorta in a rut. They were not do-gooders per se but I think my mother did have a social mission that she didn’t know she had. She wanted to prove to all these naysayers that if we took good care of these buildings our tenants would be good tenants and for the most part they were.
I think my dad always looked at it as his neighborhood and felt that he’d be looked at as running away. It was really no longer his neighborhood; all his friends were gone. Even his parents deserted us.
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