This village for the last 146 years has had what I will call a laissez faire approach to ideology, and I will use our neighbor Oak Park as a foil. Oak Park has a history of village government supporting Ideology with an upper-case “I”.  

Perhaps the most striking example of how the two villages differ is in their approaches to creating multicultural communities. Bobbie Raymond, who was instrumental in creating the Oak Park Strategy as a way of achieving racial balance, wrote, “It has been demonstrated that stable, integrated communities require careful planning and organization.”

That approach, which included village promotion of DEI, resulted in the transformation of their community from what Ernest Hemingway allegedly characterized as having wide lawns and narrow minds into a model of racial and to some extent, economic diversity beginning in 1972.

In contrast, Forest Park has evolved into a diverse community with village government maintaining pretty much a laissez faire, hands-off approach to the process with the following result:

The Harlem (precursor to Forest Park) village government put up no resistance to the Jewish Waldheim Cemetery being founded in 1870, and the German Waldheim Cemetery, established in 1876, was advertised as the only “German, non-denominational cemetery in the Chicago area.” 

Talk about non-sectarian and multi-cultural! “Residents” of our cemeteries include such unlikely bedfellows as Native Americans, Roma, Haymarket martyrs, Odd Fellows, Druids, evangelist Billy Sunday, anarchist Emma Goldman, Ernest Hemingway’s parents, and James Fletcher Skinner, partner in Sears Roebuck & Co.

Here’s the present racial breakdown of students in D91.

Black/African American: 41.4%

Hispanic/Latino: 26.1%

White: 23%

Two or More Races: 7.4%

Asian: 2%

The 2010 census reports that Forest Park ranks No. 2 in Illinois for same-sex households per capita.

All of this DEI happened organically without pretentious self-promotion as a city on a hill and a model for other communities to emulate. 

“So,” you might respond, “since both the careful planning and organization approach and the laissez faire approach seem to have worked, why are we worried about our village promoting values the vast majority of residents already hold, with banners that advocate what we already believe in?”

The reason I worry is because careful planning and organization ironically inhibited DEI in Oak Park until the 1970s, and that story should be a cautionary tale for us who live in this village with small-town charm.

Exhibit 1: Oak Park’s village government put the Temperance leanings of its WASP residents into law by outlawing the sale of liquor in 1872, while Forest Park tavern owners made a lot of money by serving beer to those who crossed the ideological border of Harlem Avenue to quench their thirst. Putting temperance into law reflected the values of the WASP residents 150 years ago and that legislation had staying power, affecting the community long after it represented what the residents believed in.

Exhibit 2: Perhaps the most striking example of trespassing the boundary between village government and replacement religion is Oak Park’s attempt to exclude Jews from participating in the life of their “model” community.

Last April, Rabbi Adir Glick and Rabbi Max Weiss wrote in Wednesday Journal,

“About 70 years ago, the synagogues in Oak Park and River Forest had to use straw buyers in order to purchase land to build our places of worship. The leaders of the Jewish community at the time did so because it was clear to them that there was latent and active antisemitism endemic to the community, including village ordinances that would make openly purchasing land for synagogues difficult, if not impossible.”

In contrast, Harlem (aka Forest Park) village government put up no resistance to the Jewish Waldheim Cemetery being founded 100 years before Oak Park saw the light.

 So back to my worry about the banners. The line is thinly drawn between the banners being a statement about the village’s identity and the promotion by the “state” of the establishment of “replacement religion.”

A year ago, I approached a Republican voter whom I knew was not a MAGA and asked him for an interview in which he would share what center-right traditional conservatives believe in. He declined, explaining that he did not want a brick thrown through the window of his business or his family harassed. 

“Oh, progressives wouldn’t do that,” we reply. Maybe, maybe not. We progressives are concerned about minority rights. Except when we are not.

What began as privately funded events, the Drag Performance and the Juneteenth Pool Party now receive taxpayer funding from the village. The banners are all designed, produced and installed with our tax dollars. The separation between ideology and village is narrowing.

No red line has been crossed. Maybe a pink one.

I counted eight rainbow flags just on homes on Circle Avenue between Roosevelt Road and Madison Street. That, I believe, is the right place for them.