Talk:Ginevra King

This article says that the line "Poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls" appears in the novel The Great Gatsby. I believe it never does; a version of this line appears in the Robert Redford version of the film and also in the DiCaprio version, but never in the novel. Does anyone disagree? If not, I will revise this. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rabbiscat (talk • contribs) 03:38, 1 May 2016 (UTC)

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Lake Forest

This article contains this passage, seemingly duly sourced:

"Raised in luxury at her family's sprawling estate in the racially segregated White Anglo-Saxon Protestant township of Lake Forest,"

Yet it clashes pretty seriously with the description offered of Lake Forest in the historical section of the article actually about the neighborhood:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Forest,_Illinois

"Lake Forest had an African-American community from very early on in its history, drawn to employment opportunities on the estates and educational institutions. Unlike other communities in the area, Lake Forest had many residents who were associated with the Abolitionist movement. Lake Forest's first mayor and a founder of Lake Forest College, Sylvester Lind, was a major figure on the Underground Railroad, and was known to help escaped slaves settle in Lake Forest. Roxana Beecher, niece of abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, taught integrated school in Lake Forest. A prominent early Lake Forest businessman was Samuel Dent, an escaped slave and Union veteran who ran a livery stable. A local jazz band was named in Dent's memory. Another black entrepreneur was Julian Matthews, who ran a bakery, restaurant, and ice cream parlor with his wife Octavia. The second police officer hired in 1900 in Lake Forest was a black man from Kentucky, Walker Sales, who was hired in 1900 and stayed on for nearly 20 years. Members of this African-American community established the African Methodist Episcopal Church as of 1866, and it stood at what is now the corner of Maplewood and Washington Road. By 1900, another black church, the First Baptist Church of Lake Forest, had opened and is still active. By the 1980s, increased housing prices had encouraged some older black residents to sell their properties lucratively, but others stayed in the community. Lake Forest also had a small community of Jews, typified by wealthy socialites such as Albert Lasker and David Adler ."

That's remarkably liberal for the times, and in one of the most progressive traditions available in the era, let alone for a suburb of the super, super rich WASP gentry of the time. It does go on to note the rich WASPs of the time were worried about other white people, working class from Eastern and Southern Europe, and held prejudiced attitudes toward them regarding alcohol consumption, which is a stereotype once directed at the Irish and other communities. It doesn't add much to the racially segregated thesis, though. It more suggests intra-white national and class bigotry, common then as before and indeed for decades after. Indeed, the class part was easy to find even among WASPs, who also had an underclass of their own to be snobs at.

All in all, it was a jarring contrast for the article on Ginevra King to make a point about Lake Forest and then link directly to an article radically at variance with that point. Random noter (talk) 03:11, 29 November 2023 (UTC)

@Random noter: Thank you for your comment on the article. It is always refreshing to communicate with someone else who is both interested in the history of the greater Chicago area and in the life of Ginevra King. In this instance, the issue is with the lack of historical nuance in the Lake Forest article and the temporal ambiguity of "early" and "very early." There are several authoritative works which shed light on this subject including the landmark 1945 study Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City by sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Jr. who conducted first-hand interviews with many older African-American residents to record their oral histories.

During the 1800s and before the 1910s, many parts of the greater Chicago area — including Lake Forest — were not racially segregated either officially or unofficially, and many harmonious communities were racially mixed. Black people could live practically anywhere (including Lake Forest), and black doctors were accorded the same rights and privileges as white doctors. In the aftermath of the American Civil War, Union Army veterans in Chicago often championed the rights of African-Americans against Southern interlopers who agitated for segregation. This era was referred to by older African-American inhabitants as a "golden age." However, key events changed this harmonious milieu.

The Great Chicago Fire burned down much of the city and, by design, administrative officials slowly concentrated the previously diffused African-American population into the tiny Bronzeville area. Soon after, due to Jim Crow laws galvanizing African-Americans in the Deep South to head northward, hundreds of thousands of African-American laborers arrived in Chicago during the Great Migration circa 1910. Labor disputes soon precipitated race riots in the greater Chicago area, and racial tensions skyrocketed. At the very time that F. Scott Fitzgerald courted Ginevra King, African-Americans in Chicago were targeted in a terror campaign which involved bombing their residences in order to force them to relocate to black neighborhoods. Between 1917 and 1921, white terrorists carried out fifty-eight bombings targeting black residents in Chicago.

Both legal — and, more pertinently, illegal (i.e., not explicitly stated in laws) — means of segregation were imposed upon African-Americans in Chicago and all of its outlying areas such as Lake Forest. Without any legal justification whatsoever, bureaucrats and policemen began enforcing de facto segregation anywhere and everywhere. Mixed beaches slowly became segregated beaches, and mixed neighborhoods slowly became segregated neighborhoods without any law or regulation being passed. A black man walking down the street in a predominantly rich white area such as Lake Forest would be stopped and, if he could not explain his presence (e.g., "I'm the gardener for Mr. King" or "I'm the chauffeur for Mr. Palmer"), he would be harassed or arrested or both. (See Richard Wright's autobiography Black Boy or his novel Native Son.) By the mid-1910s, the black inhabitants tolerated in Lake Forest were predominantly the servants, helpers or associated persons of the wealthy WASP families.

For this reason, one must have a critical eye when reading the Wikipedia article on Lake Forest and note how it fails to capture these temporal shifts and cultural nuances. The 1890s Greater Chicago Area was not the same as the 1910s Greater Chicago Area. Again, in the 1910s-1920s — as a general rule of thumb — the presence of black residents in Lake Forest would be deemed acceptable if they worked as servants, chauffeurs or other hired laborers of wealthy WASP families. The existing African-American churches built prior to 1900 would likewise have catered to this very specific population. I'm sure there were independent black persons in Lake Forest, but they would have been the exception to this rule.

Hence, it is not accurate to depict Lake Forest or any other outlying Chicago area as a racially integrated harmonious utopia circa the 1910s. The fact that Lake Forest had "a small community of Jews" likewise obfuscates the fact that they were likely pinioned into a tiny area and not socially welcomed by the insular WASP families. For this reason, as an Irish Catholic, Fitzgerald's appearance in the WASP stronghold of Lake Forest would have been as socially alarming as a middle-class African-American doctor showing up to court Ginevra King. Given that Fitzgerald partly based the racism and classism of Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby on Ginevra's father Charles Garfield King, one can imagine how the King family felt about this Irish Catholic parvenu — even though his family was middle-class — pursuing the hand of their beloved daughter. It wasn't just wealth that was the key issue, and the Ginevra King article should reflect these issues. — Flask (talk) 17:53, 30 November 2023 (UTC)