Common Good: The York Center Co-op Story- Documentary Screening

On a small network of curving, treelined streets in Suburban DuPage County, Illinois, rests a collection of homes known today as The York Center Homeowners Association. From 1947 to 2007, these custom, single family homes built on 1 acre plots over ground once occupied by a dairy farm, came to be known as the York Center Co-op. This pioneering, faith-based effort provided fair housing, community and opportunity in an era of white flight, redlining and restrictive covenants that effectively prevented non-white Americans from fully participating in the American dream. It’s a dream that influenced the course of American history during the Civil Rights era when a young attorney for the NAACP who would later go on to become a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, wrote a legal brief to President Harry S. Truman, advocating on behalf of the Co-op, just as Truman and Congress were grappling with the crisis of an epic housing shortage after World War 2. Despite acts of overt racism that included a cross burning, bullet holes through widows, internal conflict and systemic economic racism, the York Center Co-op and the white, black, asian and Jewish families who lived there, demonstrated to themselves, their neighbors and America, what results when determined people put aside racial, religious and class differences, and work together for the common good.