Changing neighbourhoods – no simple black and white answers
Review of "Green Street and Black and White" by Dave Larson.
Green Street in Black and White: a Chicago Story
by Dave Larsen
Reformed Journal Books, 2025.
Dave Larsen’s debut novel, Green Street in Black and White, compactly narrates the backstory of the upheaval of Englewood, a middle-class Chicago neighbourhood, as integration began. The book poses as fiction, though it tells painful truths. The names have been changed – I suspect to protect kind, scared, belatedly guilt-beset white Christian sisters and brothers. I count myself among them.
Dave Larsen and I graduated from Chicago Christian High School in 1965. We were among the first class to attend the school in its then brand spanking-new building in the suburb of Palos Heights (the school’s name never changed). We both grew up on Chicago’s South Side.
Larsen lived in Englewood around 72nd Street. I lived in Roseland, four miles south. Larsen’s early life memories fermented for 60 years, as he gradually processed the uncontrollable, often incomprehensible jolts we both lived through. He distilled them into this remarkable first novel about our generation’s spiritual and physical conflicts.
By 1965, Englewood was writhing with white fear. Petty vandalism from groups of Black teens led to crashing house prices. Both white and Black people suffered.
Many Christian Reformed people from Englewood moved to Roseland, Evergreen Park or Oak Lawn, hoping to regain a sense of safety after literally earth-shaking construction; the trench called the Dan Ryan Expressway from The Loop to Roseland and farther south emptied hundreds of thousands of African-Americans’ homes, as well.
Generation in conflict
The “Great Migration” from the South (the northward movement of around five million African Americans) shattered Chicago’s capacity to absorb newcomers into existing Black enclaves. Englewood offered relatively affordable housing. It took remarkable courage, bolstered by desperate need for housing, for Black people to cross the unofficially “covenanted,” and impenetrable “red lines” that for decades kept the South Side thoroughly segregated.
The daily neighbourhood life and the emotional responses of those fleeing Englewood, and the newcomers that Larsen describes, ring painfully familiar to me, the Roseland boy. It took me a fraught week to read the novel’s 194 pages, each chapter unearthing shallowly buried memories and emotions.
By 1969 Roseland was slugging through shifts like Englewood’s. I remember five Christian Reformed (CRC) Englewood families who moved and joined Fourth CRC, my family’s church. Barely six years later they and many others packed again and fled to South Holland and Lansing. Meanwhile, displaced African Americans moved to Roseland.
All four original Roseland CRCs headed south and west between 1967-1969. We moved to Oak Forest in June, 1969. The Back to God Hour/Reframe Media radio ministry moved to Palos Heights; Roseland Christian Ministries now works from the former Back to God Hour building on Michigan Avenue. Integrated Pullman CRC has sturdily remained. Roseland Christian School long provided Christian education for kids whose parents sacrificed to send them, but closed in 2013. My father was a school board member for more years than I can remember, both before the neighbourhood change and as Black children enrolled. Green Street sketches an all too familiar history about more than one CRC enclave in Chicago and beyond during the 1960s.
Young boys coming of age
The four “Green Street” boys, Erik, Pete, Frank and Eddie, carry the bulk of this novel’s plot as they roam the ‘hood. They ride bikes and generally goof around, only once with impropriety. Their crude and predictable pre-adolescent initiation rite (involving what we politely call #1 under grumpy Finnegan’s porch) cements their annual covenant. They largely avoid Finnegan, reputed to have weapons, but he was onto their pranks. Anxiety cultivated by a mugging and the murder of milkman Fred De Vries stir fears deepened by the historic isolation of an ethnic religious enclave from a big world; latent racism shakes charitable resolve to stay and work with the future.
Magnus and Fenna Pederson nervously but hopefully visit the first Black family to move onto Green Street, Rev. Willowby and Sheila Jackson. Carl Bensema, on the other hand, wishes Pastor Willowby dead, while berating Magnus. Such tumults in South Side neighbourhoods broke long-time neighbours’ friendships. Everybody suffered.
Larsen describes many disturbing events as the neighbourhood changes, some factual, others borrowed or invented. Michael Schaap, a missionary to Nigeria, and his Nigerian wife and children live for a time in Englewood while on “furlough” to their supporting churches.
The children do not feel safe attending the Christian school. Rev. Wolthuis’s sermon twists the Exodus story into a call for CRCs to leave Englewood. Schaap offers a stirring rejoinder, reminding the congregation that they sponsored missions in Africa, but were fleeing African Americans next door.
The consistory soon entertains a motion to withdraw support for the Schaaps (often both church and school members and leaders were virtually interchangeable term by term in each institution).
The Christian school board’s decision encapsulates the fear most white families felt in deciding to buy properties a few miles southwest. Steadily, the changes accelerate. Fearful of staying, the Pedersons reluctantly decide to move, realizing they and all the other white families will lose the suddenly fragile community they’d trusted for years.
Green Street rings true to my youth in Roseland. Larsen’s Dutch-descended CRC characters are not bad people. Sadly, the solid Reformed Gospel they’d devoted their lives to hadn’t prepared them for the unknown demands of living with strangers they feared, but hadn’t even met. The Jacksons personify Black people searching for stability, bolstered by their own community’s deliberate strategy of trying to integrate Englewood, yet knowing the risks. They are unrealistic, but not naïve, idealists. The Pedersons are hopefully naïve, though ill-equipped to turn tides of social, ethnic and racial upset. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of “the arc of history bending toward justice” suffered in many places.
A challenging read
Green Street stands as a daring attempt to comprehend malevolent powers, though Larsen can do no more than chronicle a neighbourhood’s deterioration. Nor can I. Still, I highly recommend this book as a challenging read for churches, book clubs and other groups. Calvin University sociology professor Mark Mulder’s book Shades of White Flight and Urban Departure offers another dissection of Roseland’s CRC congregations’ travails only a few years after Englewood’s tragedy.
Some readers will likely feel hurt and misrepresented. Others will achingly nod their heads, very possibly wallowing in guilt. Those who didn’t live through Chicago’s and other cities’ racial change and turmoil where long-time CRC people lived, thrived and suffered, will learn the sad results of intentional social and spiritual isolation. All readers would better reflect on Green Street as a spiritual discipline, to better live as Christians in today’s still more rapidly changing society.
