Open Communities has its roots in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. A group of young mothers in Wilmette, led by Jean R. Cleland, were worried that their children were growing up in a community that lacked diversity, and they began to discuss how they could organize for change. There were no fair housing laws at that time, and local housing ads often stipulated, “No Negroes, Orientals or Jews.”
These initial discussions gave birth to the North Shore Summer Project, an effort to persuade real estate agents in Chicago’s northern suburbs to show and sell homes on a non-discriminatory basis. The project culminated with a rally on the Winnetka Village Green in 1965, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to a crowd of nearly 10,000 supporters, saying, “We must now learn to live together as brothers, or we will perish together as fools.”







