2005 study, Census show NWI is most segregated metro area in the country

A century of racial segregation and discrimination hangs like a pall over Northwest Indiana and Chicago's south suburbs.

U.S. Census figures and a 2005 study by expert demographers confirm what area residents have long known: The Gary metropolitan area is among the most segregated in the country.

"Housing segregation is the absolute bedrock for all the other forms of separations and division among us," said Connie Mack-Ward, executive director of the Northwest Indiana Open Housing Center, a nonprofit fair housing agency serving Lake and Porter counties. "(Northwest Indiana) has consistently from its founding been among the very top -- if not the absolute worst -- segregated area in the country."

And the dividing lines are seen in more than just where we live in the region. We also see the lines in our schools, where mostly white school districts continue to see higher achievement scores than the districts with a larger portion of minorities.

Divisions are further accentuated by seemingly hate-driven crimes peppering the region: six bullet holes in the copper dome of the Michigan City Islamic Center in Pine Township, an obscene racial term scrawled on the home of a Munster family from India and a 15-year-old Hobart High School freshman charged with spray-painting racial epithets and a swastika near the home of a black resident in the city.

During the next week, The Times will chronicle the religious, housing, educational, health, transportation, employment, public safety and cultural consequences of this racial divide across Chicago's south suburban and Northwest Indiana area.

Those dividing lines have never daunted Richard Hardaway, who moved to Gary's Glen Park shortly after housing laws opened it up to black homeowners and again to Merrillville, the one suburb closest to mirroring Lake County's racial diversity.

"I have taken the stand that this is my community, and I will do everything I can to sustain it," said Hardaway, who became Merrillville's first black Town Council president three years ago.

The U.S. Census Bureau measures segregation with a gauge called a dissimilarity index, ranging in value from 0, which means completely integrated, to 100, which means completely segregated.

The Gary metropolitan area has a dissimilarity index of 87.5. That means almost nine out of every 10 whites in Northwest Indiana would have to move to make whites and blacks evenly distributed across all neighborhoods.

A 2005 study by the University of Michigan's Population Studies Center stated Gary's segregation is shared to a lesser degree by Detroit, New York, Milwaukee, Chicago, Newark, N.J., and Flint, Mich., which attracted many black migrants to factory jobs during the middle of the 20th century.

Blacks and Hispanics were drawn to Northwest Indiana by reports of plentiful jobs and steel mill recruitment agents seeking cheap labor, said James B. Lane, a professor of history at Indiana University Northwest and the author of "City of the Century" and other local histories.

"When industry first opened, the only people willing to do the low-paying, undesirable jobs" were Eastern Europeans and southern whites and blacks driven north by unemployment resulting from mechanization of the cotton industry, Lane said.

Hispanics, primarily from Mexico's north-central regions and Texas towns, including Laredo and El Paso, came north on trains for work in the mills, too. U.S. Steel recruited Puerto Ricans during a labor shortage in the late 1940s.

Lane writes, "Gary's first black residents suffered from substandard housing, job discrimination, inferior educational opportunities, inadequate hospitals and recreational facilities and inadequate law-enforcement procedures."

Many critics today believe those problems persist.

Earl R. Jones, an associate professor of African-American Studies and city and regional planning at Indiana University Northwest, said this legacy has a strong influence on current racial and ethnic living.

"You have a period from 1900 all the way up to the 1960s (with) discrimination and segregation in housing," Jones said. "Change came about with passage of open housing laws of the 1960s. You have -- to a certain extent -- dispersal of the African-American population south toward Glen Park and then further south toward Merrillville.

"You see a continuation of that dispersal further south to Crown Point and east and west to Schererville," Jones added. "But while housing opportunities are opening up, you still have the covert kind of discrimination occurring."

Hardaway said he faced it in 1983 when the color line for most blacks ran down the center of 53rd Avenue, the boundary between Gary and Merrillville.

"I did anticipate problems because this is when they wouldn't show you houses in Meadowland Estates (subdivision)," Hardaway said. "I got rid of a couple of Realtors because they wouldn't. I explained to each one of them I knew where I wanted to live, and if this is all they had to show me I'd find another."

The greatest racial dividing line in the region today, though, is fear -- not hate, Mack-Ward said.

"Racism today is based on fear rather than hate -- fear that your property values are going down, fear that crime is going to go up, fear of not knowing people who don't look like you," she said.