Back in 1968 Aurie Pennick was a married teenage mom living in her mother’s south-side apartment. Today she’s finishing her tenth year as head of the largest and most influential open-housing organization in the metropolitan area. “My own life experience is testimony to the need to have access to opportunity,” says Pennick, president and CEO of the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities. “It’s all about access. Just give someone a chance.”
“We were the second black family to move to that block,” Pennick says. “Inside a year there were probably less than two white families left. But as hard as it may be to imagine, I wasn’t really paying attention to all of this. Here I was living in the heart of one of the most segregated cities in the country, and I didn’t even think about it. It just wasn’t part of my consciousness. The struggle for civil rights to me seemed like a southern phenomenon. We had relatives in the south, and when we visited them I’d hear stories about lynchings. But it didn’t seem a part of my life. I didn’t take it personally.”
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Pennick remembers reading about the conference in the papers, though she was still a long way from joining the movement. After graduating from Englewood in 1966, she got married. Two years later her first daughter was born, and her husband went off to fight in Vietnam. “My husband was like a lot of other black boys of his time–he was really eager to go off to war,” she says. “That was a day when being John Wayne was all a lot of young black men could think of. He joined the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne. He loved wearing the uniform. He wrote me letters telling me how much he believed in the war effort. All of his army friends were African-American boys just like him–18- or 19-year-olds from Detroit or Cleveland. Inner-city kids. They thought they would fight the war and then come home and the government would take care of them.”
Under Pennick, the council has expanded many of its training and testing programs. Most blacks and whites in the region still live in separate communities; according to a recent study by the council, “eighty percent of African-Americans would have to move in order to create an even distribution of the African-American and white populations.”
On June 3 the council will hold a luncheon to celebrate, among other things, Pennick’s ten years with the organization. The featured speaker will be Congressman John Lewis, a Democrat from Georgia. “John Lewis is the only surviving member of the Big Six,” says Pennick. “You remember the Big Six, don’t you? They were the leaders of the major civil rights groups in the 1960s who met with President Johnson. I make my staff take the test: name all the members of the Big Six and their organizations. Everyone should know this history. It’s more than trivia, you know.” She pauses. “For all of our progress, we aren’t where we ought to be.”
