Program Helps Chicago Black Families Break Out of Inner-City Despair : Housing: A lawsuit has opened the suburbs to public housing residents. There many of them are carving out new lives.

Arletta Bronaugh moved to this quiet suburb for a safer life, but she remembers her fear the night she walked into her apartment hallway and spotted the ugly message: “Niggers live here.”

She was upset, she was scared, but she wasn’t about to leave. No matter that she was black in a white world, a poor woman in a community of comforts, Bronaugh was determined to make a home here.

And she has. Her promised land is 55 miles north of the violence and despair she faced at Altgeld Gardens, a Chicago public housing project that had been home. She is secure and content here, no longer feels isolated, and takes in stride the racial indignities that surface now and then.

“I’ve got a job, two cars, my son goes to good schools,” said Bronaugh, an ex-welfare recipient turned phone company worker. “Whatever obstacles have been put in the way, it’s worth it. I did what was best for my family and what was best for me.

“I just go about my business,” said the 42-year-old mother of two. “If a person wants to accept me, they can. If they don’t want to, that’s their privilege.”

Like so many big-city blacks, Bronaugh has experienced America’s version of urban apartheid. Chicago is one of the nation’s most segregated cities--almost three of every four blacks live in neighborhoods that are at least 90% black. Family public housing is more than 90% black.

“It’s the system of racial segregation that has replaced the laws of Jim Crow in the South,” said Gary Orfield, a Harvard University professor and expert on Chicago housing patterns.

“It changes everything--land values, investment possibilities, job location, schooling,” Orfield said. “The costs are incredibly high.”

It was racial polarization in Chicago’s public housing--and a lawsuit fought up to the U.S. Supreme Court--that opened the suburbs to Arletta Bronaugh and thousands more poor black families.

The suit, filed in 1966 by a group of public housing residents led by a woman named Dorothy Gautreaux, resulted in the Chicago Housing Authority and HUD being found guilty of discrimination for building high-rise family projects only in all-black neighborhoods.

Today, there is the sad legacy: gang-infested, deteriorating ghettos housing tens of thousands of blacks.

The Gautreaux settlement offers one remedy: a plan that allows up to 7,100 black families--current or former public housing residents--to voluntarily relocate to federally subsidized apartments in predominantly white Chicago neighborhoods or suburbs.

In 16 years, about 4,500 families, mostly single welfare mothers and children, have resettled. About 60% relocated to some 120 suburbs; a concerted effort is made to disperse people to avoid resegregation, according to the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities, the housing group that runs the program.

The Gautreaux plan has been deemed a success in three Northwestern University studies: Welfare mothers find work, and children do well in school after initial setbacks and are more than twice as likely to attend college than those who remain in the city.

These results are even more impressive considering the families’ limited resources and experiences, said James Rosenbaum, a Northwestern sociology and education professor who led the research.

“These are low-income, poorly educated blacks,” he said. “We might have expected this to be a total failure. . . . (But) they handle it extraordinarily well. They figure out ways of doing things.

“The fact this could work in Chicago suggests it could probably work anywhere in the country,” he said, citing the area’s history of segregation.

Five metropolitan areas--not yet named--are expected to enact similar programs under congressional legislation passed last year.

But this integration plan also is no panacea. Critics complain that it offers blacks little but an address.

“They have nothing to do with the operations of the communities in which they live,” said William Simpson, editor of an NAACP newsletter in suburban Park Forest. “Do they belong to the Rotarians, the Chamber of Commerce? Who do black people see running anything?’

Some blacks also talk of isolation from families and friends. Church services are unfamiliar. There are few black men to date.

And then there’s racism.

One study by Rosenbaum said more than half the mothers reported racist incidents in their first year in the suburbs, including name-calling, stone-throwing, taunts by neighbors and police harassment--officers stopping them to ask what they are doing in the community.

Rosenbaum emphasizes that these are the acts of a very few, that most whites are friendly and accepting and that the harassment declines to negligible levels.

Dawn Macklin had little trouble adjusting when she moved six years ago to Westmont, a western Chicago suburb.

“Considering the gangs and the drugs I grew up around . . . I thought it would be a much better environment for my kids,” the former public housing resident said.

Her world improved, too--she found work at United Parcel Service.

“The job market was wide open,” she said. “When you’re in the city, you find yourself in a trap. You can’t get a job as easily. The opportunities are not there. You find you can’t get yourself off public aid.”

Antoinette Rollins was looking for good schools for her two daughters and an escape from inner-city violence when they moved in 1986 to Schaumburg, northwest of Chicago.

“You hate to think . . . to live in a white neighborhood, you know your kids are going to have a better education . . . they’ll have a better life. It’s really true,” she said. “In a black neighborhood . . . they don’t work on computers, they don’t have Girl Scouts. . . . It’s really sad.”

For Deborah Thrower, it was a much tougher transition moving to suburban Oak Forest in 1980.

She was passed over in job interviews, and a hostile neighbor asked her and her daughter not to swim in the apartment complex pool because “dirt would come off our skin.”

When schoolmates taunted her daughter, she gave her a rope and “told her that everyone at recess who calls her nigger, she should hit them.”

But Thrower pushed herself to become involved. She joined a bowling league and participated with her daughter in the Girl Scouts, though she says, “I was scared to death.”

“I never thought I wanted to go back (to Chicago),” said Thrower, now a homeowner in suburban Hazel Crest. “This is America, and I’ve got the right to be here.”

Thrower said the harassment subsided after two years, probably “because no more of us came. They were afraid we were going to take over the community. After they saw it didn’t happen, it was fine.”

But two years later, when the family began house hunting, she said the real estate agent told her, “I hope you’re not intending to live here.” Her response: “I wouldn’t want to buy a house where I’m not wanted.”

Not everyone who relocates to the suburbs manages to stay. The Leadership Council says perhaps 15% of the families return to Chicago.

Arletta Bronaugh has encountered no trouble with neighbors since finding the graffiti outside her door a few years ago--apparently scrawled during a party held by a neighbor’s teen-age son.

Still, even after seven years here, she said, police occasionally trail her, but “as long as I know what I’m doing is honest and respectable, I really don’t worry.”

Bronaugh, who no longer is eligible for a Gautreaux rent subsidy because of her income, ticks off the positives in her life: She and her husband work, their 10-year-old son is on the honor roll, and they have a nice apartment.

She never regrets leaving Chicago.

“What can I do about a community that doesn’t want to do anything for itself? Have the same problems and troubles?” she asked. “If I want a better life, why shouldn’t I be able to get one?”