Oak Park has accomplished something few U.S. communities have. They developed a plan to accommodate the movement of African-Americans into their world. At the same time they actively sought out Euro-Americans who wanted to live in a diverse place. As they opened up their community to blacks, they convinced some whites that Oak Park was a good place to live where property values would not fall even though blacks were moving in and that the schools would retain their high standards. These are the standard excuses for "white flight." Oak Park became "diverse-by-design." They prevented the block-by-block rapid resegregation so common in other places, including their neighbors in Austin. In the thirty plus years since the desegregation efforts started, Oak Park has slowly acquired a population that is approximately 20% to 30% African-American and maintained sufficient "white demand" to stabilize the place.
But is Oak Park truly integrated? Not really. While African-Americans have equal opportunities to live where they want to, have access to social services, education, employment and the chance to participate in just about any aspect of community life, Oak Park remains, in many ways, segregated. My experience has been that the restaurants I frequent, the lectures and other cultural events I attend, the churches I visit are all overwhelmingly populated by Euro-Americans. The western and northern portions of the village appear to have many fewer African-Americans than the eastern and southern sections do. A look at the high school yearbook photos attests to the fact that some sports like basketball are overwhelmingly populated by African-Americans and others like swimming are dominated by Euro-Americans. Even organizations like the Black-White dialogue seems to have more whites than blacks, at least at the meeting I attended. The only time I see a real mix of people is when the mixture is planned as I witnessed in the construction of the committees for the Diversity Task Force.
For whatever reason some elementary schools have a rapidly growing African-American population - to the point where some schools are becoming "majority minority." As there seems to be a tendency for those schools to have lower test scores, some Oak Park residents are extremely concerned about the perceived "racial imbalance" in the schools and its potential impact on real estate values - families in the market to buy a house sometimes will look at the test scores of schools to determine which neighborhood they want to live in. Rightly or wrongly many people equate good schools with high test scores.
If we are to judge by the subject matter of many of the local newspaper articles, Oak Park is obsessed with maintaining diversity and in a panic that they may have only slowed down the process of resegregation. Given the situation outlined above I believe that my contention that Oak Park should be viewed as being successful in its attempts to be diverse is justified. Relatively speaking, Oak Park is an amazing success if you compare it to most communities in the U.S. Schools all over the country are resegregating at an alarming rate and diversity appears to be virtually unknown in the majority of the suburbs. The sad irony is that because Oak Park has succeeded as much as it has, they now face the really tough questions about whether or not ethnically diverse places can be integrated or is the best we can hope for is some sort of "separate but equal" situation in which all formal instances of discrimination are abolished but the mixing of people from different backgrounds is rare.
There are some Oak Parkers who question the morality of "managed integration."