In this case study in white resistance to housing desegregation in Peoria, the Peoria Journal Star‘s Bill Conver traced how a once-promising plan to create better homes for blacks outside downtown Peoria foundered.
The tenants, Tony S. Rudd and James Bryant, spearheaded the project in 1952 with initial approval from the Peoria city council only to find themselves stonewalled by city and state authorities two years later.
A campaign against the plan in the white community exaggerated the size of the proposed housing and compared the renovation project, misleadingly, to the the Taft Homes, a large public housing project occupied by blacks in central Peoria.
