Like most other Chicago suburbs, in the 1950s Dolton was an idyllic little community with cute houses, proud residents, good schools and beautiful little parks and playgrounds, where hard working, mostly white families emerging from Chicago eagerly moved to start a new life. We checked out the latest motor cross bikes at Mr. Ed’s Bike Shop, and always stopped to buy a bag of candy from Panazzo’s corner store, or for lunch at Dog & Suds or Cal’s Roast Beef. On weekends we hung out at Wright’s Arcade Barnyard in South Holland trying to look cool. And the first week of every July meant the Dolton Volunteer Firefighters’ parade, carnival, and fireworks. The amusement rides, the games and prizes, the big red fire engines with blaring sirens rolling in the parade and the fireworks show were the highlight of every kid’s summer. But Dolton also stood for something darker- the racism that consumed our lives. When a cross was burned on the lawn and a brick thrown through the front picture window of the first black family that moved into my neighborhood, my eyes were opened to what hate really looks like. Not just hateful feelings and words that I was already accustomed to hearing as a kid, but venomous, painfully hateful actions. When I rode my bike by the house and saw the kids picking up the broken glass, a little black boy still holding the brick that flew into his living room, I was consumed with guilt. I didn’t know who committed the act, but I felt just as responsible. I saw tears in the eyes of the family members, and connected with them in a way that changed me forever. Why were these people not welcome to live here? Why was skin color a determining factor in whether they should be accepted or not? As I rode my bike back home after making eye contact with the mother sweeping glass off her porch, I began to cry. And it occurred to me then that wet tears streaming down a white cheek look the same as those streaming down a black one. By the late 1970s the dream for white families in Dolton ended, interrupted by the same dream for black families leaving Chicago’s troubled neighborhoods and housing projects in search of a better life. Our parents left the city in the 1950s and 1960s for a suburban experience devoid of diversity, and when black families left Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s for a better life, white families fled once again. Thousands of black families poured out of Chicago’s poor neighborhoods seeking suburbs such as Dolton as a move up. The landscape of the south suburbs of Chicago changed overnight.