The New Neighbor

Oak Park, Ill. (pop. 63,175) is one of Chicago's bigger & better suburban bedroom towns, a community which proudly labels itself "the middle-class capital of the world." Its houses are mostly a solid, two-and three-story type built 20 years ago, and its residents are likewise solid and respectable.

"Did you know a nigger is moving into the neighborhood?" an Oak Park druggist whispered to his customers several months ago. The newcomer to the neighborhood around Chicago and East Avenues was indeed a Negro. He was also one of the nation's ablest chemists. Percy Levon Julian A.M., Ph.D. (Harvard and the University of Vienna), the only Negro in his class at DePauw University, where he was valedictorian (and a classmate of David Lilienthal), is the highly paid chief of soyabean research for Chicago's Glidden Co. In that job and earlier, Percy Julian, the grandson of an Alabama slave, had made world-famous chemical discoveries. They ranged from processes for the synthetic manufacture of important body-regulating hormones (e.g., testosterone, progesterone) to a foam fire extinguisher which saved many U.S. naval vessels in World War II.

But in Oak Park, there were people who attached more importance to the color of a man's skin than to his achievements. The town's only two Negro families lived in the northern section. Julian paid $34,000 for an ornate 15-room house in Chicago Avenue neighborhood, and began spending $8,000 more for landscaping and improvements, intending to move his wife and two children in by Christmas. When the news got out, the water commissioner refused to turn on the water until the Julians threatened to go to court. Anonymous telephone callers made threats.

One afternoon last week, after the landscapers and renovators had gone for the day, a dark sedan pulled up at the Julians' house. Two men got out, broke into the house and poured gasoline through all its rooms. They laid a clumsy fuse of surgical gauze to the outside and lit it; it went out. Then they tossed a flaming kerosene torch through a window and drove away. Before the gasoline was ignited, neighbors called firemen and the house was saved.

Percy Julian, a proud, energetic man of 51, stood his ground and served notice that his family would move into the house by New Year's Day. He hired (for $36 a day) a private, round-the-clock guard to patrol the property with bulldog and shotgun. "We've lived through these things all our lives," said Percy Julian. "As far as the hurt to the spirit goes, we've become accustomed to that."

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