The phrase “you can’t tell a book by its cover” may be a cliche, suggesting that what you see at first is not necessarily what you get.
But the title on the cover of a book just released Tuesday lays out the theme without pulling any punches: “Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs” (Penguin Press, 2024)
Evanston is one of those suburbs.
Education journalist Benjamin Herold follows the families, Black, Hispanic, and white, in five different communities, over four years (2018-2022) and the picture is not pretty.
“My search for answers,” Herold writes, “would eventually lead me on a journey across America’s rapidly changing suburbs,” discovering ” a relentless cycle of racialized development and decline that took root after World War II, then sucked huge swaths of the country into a pattern of slash-and-burn development that functioned like a Ponzi scheme.”
“Through massive public subsidies,” Herold continues, “exclusionary local policies, and a nasty habit of pushing the true cost of infrastructure off onto future generations, our government had essentially paid white families to run away from Black America.”
What remained, Herold says, was a downward cycle of economic decline, with schools falling apart, the middle class moving out in search of yet another suburb, and families of color left in a town which either could not afford to fix its fiscal ills, or was unwilling.
Except for Evanston, at least to a degree.
“Evanston was the outlier,” Herold tells Evanston Now.
It was an older, established city, and not a post-World War II collection of tract subdivisions, and with its affluent population and liberal politics, Evanston, he says, “had a lot of natural advantages” compared to the other suburbs he studied — his home town of Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh; Compton, in South Central Los Angeles; Gwinnett County. Georgia, near Atlanta; and the Lovejoy School District near Dallas.
Herold says he chose Evanston because he wanted a community which was physically, financially, and politically different than the other towns in the book.
Of course, Evanston’s history included real estate redlining that restricted Black families to certain parts of town, ultimately leading to a 1960s plan which bused children from the 5th Ward to other schools, which at the time, Herold says, placed Evanston in the forefront of liberal progress “seen as a model for desegregation.”
Through the experiences of an Evanston activist, Lauren Adesina, (a pseudonym used in the book for an ETHS graduate with a District 65 child), Herold follows how, over decades, the positive feelings about integration gave way to frustration that Black families were bearing the entire burden. (Adesina is part Nigerian, part Ecuadorian).
That frustration helped elect a school board wthat then hired Devon Horton as superintendent and voted to build a new school in the 5th Ward.
Herold tells of the pushback, the racist emails received by the superintendent, and his less-than-politically-savvy response to a parent who questioned remote learning during COVID, saying that parent had “‘not had time to reflect on your white supremist [sic] thinking and way of life.'”
Evanston found itself in the center of an unfolding national controversy of progressives versus traditional liberals. And while it may have been hard to find a conservative in town, outlets like Fox News pounced on Horton’s curriculum and the mantra of “equity.”
Which is where the cover title, “Disillusioned,” comes in for Lauren Adesina, who, Herold writes, “found herself wondering if the fight to make Evanston live up to its promise was worth it.”
Herold clearly comes down on the side of Horton, then-school-board-president Anya Tanyavutti, and Adesina, for finally tackling the 5th Ward school issue.
He says Horton even considered leaving due to the race-related pushback he encountered. (The book was finished before Horton left for a higher paying job in Georgia, and before Horton’s financing plan for the 5th Ward school ended up with a $25 million cost overrun).
As for Evanston itself, Herold tells Evanston Now that this is a place “where you had an extraordinary group of parent activists” who came together to move the system.
“It’s important to acknowledge how significant that work was,” he says.
“But it ended in a place which still feels so dissatisfying,” not for a lack of good intentions, Herold says, but still, there’s a “feeling of disillusionment because we are stuck.”
I’m currently reading the book and finding it fascinating. It’s hard not to jump ahead to focus on the story of Adesina, and Evanston’s part in the story. So far, however, Herold’s exploration of Evanston’s integration history seems quite accurate and thorough to me. I moved to Evanston with my family in 1963, and was in Mama Morton’s 8th grade home room class at Nichols Jr. High when Kennedy was assassinated. Both of my children and my husband attended Evanston schools.
I find myself struggling with the complicated racial politics in our community and have opposed the building of the 5th ward school because, even though the intention is to right a decades long wrong, the current demographics of the 5th ward are no longer majority black, and the current condition of the district is such that we can neither afford to nor justify building a brand new school when others will likely need to be closed because of declining enrollment. Additionally, the declining enrollment is not simply due to demographics, but is also due to many families’ disappointments with the district’s approach to equity and how that has been operationalized. Respecting all children and families is critical, and that means not assuming white children and families are wrong in the present because there have been historical wrongdoings at school by white children and families in the past.
It is hard to believe some of the described experiences of minority children attending Dewey school, for example, in the book, where children were evidently called monkeys…both of my children attended Dewey school and from a white perspective, it did not feel so racist…clearly, white privilege affects my experience and my views, I realize that.
At the same time, I have been very frustrated at the District’s often misguided and mostly failed efforts to create equity in the elementary schools.
The book’s story is very compelling, and although I’m guessing I will disagree with the author’s view of Horton as superintendent, which apparently is pretty positive, it’sa very worthwhile exploration of the failure of suburbia in general to provide better lives for people other than whites with significant financial resources.
Thank you. It is good to get the perspective of someone with historical experience both as a student and a parent. I have been in Evanston for 20 years, and the community has seemed bitterly divided over how schools should be run the entire time I have been here. At some point D65 is going to need more money than inflation rate tax incrases will allow, in part because of the cost of the new school building but other costs too. If they do not get leadership which has broad appeal, I do not see how they will get more money in a referendum vote.