“We live here, and we must speak up. We stand here today to say we no longer, by silence, condone the evil system of segregation perpetuated by realtors such as Quinlan and Tyson.” This defiant pronouncement was not made in Alabama, Georgia, or Mississippi, the familiar sites of Jim Crow. It was made in a Chicago suburb in 1965 at the height of a movement that confronted such discrimination as just as racist as that perpetrated in the Deep South. Activists in several northern cities, including Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia, took to the streets during the mid-1960s to pressure state legislatures and city councils to pass open housing laws. When, in 1966, Martin Luther King, Jr. brought his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) north to desegregate Chicago's neighborhoods, several organizations had already been fighting vigorously to eliminate housing discrimination. Prominent among these was the Housing Opportunity Program (HOP) established by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker civil rights organization founded in 1917. Through its director William Moyer, a professional organizer, the HOP came to the forefront of the 1965 North Shore Summer Project, an open housing campaign that challenged discriminatory practices in the suburbs lining the lakeshore north of Chicago. The Summer Project stated its goal on student recruitment flyers: “To have the North Shore real estate industry adopt nondiscriminatory policies and practices.” To achieve this goal, it sought “to overcome fear with love, to meet emotionalism with logic, to counteract rumor with fact” (see Mabley, 1965).

Affluent and middle-aged white women spearheaded the Summer Project with help from local college students home for school break and black homebuyers wanting to move to the suburbs. Together they hoped to convince exclusive north shore communities to admit black residents. While King's Chicago housing campaign is well known, the North Shore Summer Project has been largely ignored. Reflecting on the Project a few years after it ended, political scientists Michael Barkun and James Levine wrote: “It seems safe to predict that historians of the future will pass over this group” (1967, 21). They were partly right. William Moyer and his co-authors did not even mention it in Doing Democracy: The MAP Model for Organizing Social Movements (2001).