‘People don't know this’: Why MLK came to DuPage County in 1967

Almost four years after his “I Have a Dream” speech, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. arrived at a tent-in demonstration in DuPage County.

King sat in front of a gaggle of microphones. Behind the civil rights leader, green tents were pitched on the grounds of a retreat house run by the Cenacle Sisters. Huge “trees shade the area along Batavia Road near Warrenville,” reported the Roselle Register newspaper.

Nearby North Central College still commemorates King’s 1960 visit to the Naperville campus. But that time MLK came to a wooded corner of the county — now part of the Blackwell Forest Preserve — largely had faded from public memory.

That is until Forest Preserve Commissioner Rick Gieser rediscovered it with “shock and excitement.” His sleuthing and a forest preserve blog has brought new attention to the event — 58 years ago this month — and its ties to the origins of Fermilab.

“I've never heard anyone mention it to me, and I’ve been out here 25 years,” said Regina Brent, co-chair of the DuPage County MLK Advisory Committee.

Around the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday and wanting to learn more about the history of the forest preserves, Gieser saw a photo online of King with a caption referring to the Cenacle property. He checked newspaper databases and read various accounts from the time to “definitely verify” the date of King’s visit: June 23, 1967.

“Martin Luther King Jr. is one of the most significant people of the 20th century, and he was right where we live, and we didn’t know this. People don’t know this,” Gieser said. “I think it’s important that we share what’s happened on the land.”

A ‘grave injustice’

The tent-in was protesting the selection of Weston — the town that gave way to what is now the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory — as the site for a “proposed atom smasher,” while the state of Illinois remained without a fair housing law, according to the Roselle Register, a newspaper that was owned by Paddock Publications.

King lent his moral support.

“We are here to dramatize and expose a grave injustice which we feel the federal government should, and certainly has the power, to rectify,” King was quoted as saying.

Chicago civil rights leader Al Raby stood near King at the news conference. The Nobel Peace Prize winner called on then-Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner to get a fair housing bill through the legislature.

“We are disappointed with the callousness and irresponsibility of the state legislature in dealing with this matter,” King said according to the Register story. “Illinois has not and will not pass a meaningful fair housing bill.”

Brent gives context: King had fought housing discrimination in Chicago.

At one point, he lived in an apartment on the city’s West Side “to demonstrate the conditions and how deplorable the situation had become for those residents,” Brent said.

Reflecting on King’s suburban visit, Brent said “God was expanding his territory to do just things, and that’s how he landed here, I do believe.”

According to the Register, an unnamed official with a group called “Save Our Suburbs” promised to release “mites” into the campsite Friday night.

“And yet he went,” Brent said of King. “He was a Christian, he was a minister, and he believed in God, and he obviously had the armor on.”

Honoring history

The Cenacle sisters, a Catholic community of religious women, sold their property to the forest preserve district, and the retreat center was demolished. Blackwell’s Cenacle Trail now connects Batavia Road with the regional West Branch DuPage River Trail system.

“Even though the forest preserve did not own the land at the time, we own it now, we need to share what took place there, and this significant figure was here, and we need to honor that in some way,” Gieser said. “And my hope is that we can put some signage up.”

The forest preserve district shared what took place in a blog post aptly titled “This Land is Your Land.”

“History happens all around us, and we have to be open to it,” Gieser said. “We have to look for it, and we have to celebrate it.”

For Brent, the moment in history is affirming. Brent and Dan Wagner co-chair a committee that has revived an MLK breakfast in DuPage County.

Event proceeds support the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Unity Fund of the DuPage Foundation, a permanently-endowed fund seeded by the Inland Real Estate Group. The fund augments a foundation grant program in the areas of health, human services and education, with a focus on nonprofits that prioritize serving Black, Indigenous, and people of color.

Brent believes the breakfast is bringing exposure to the work King “attempted to do out here in the Western suburbs.”

“People are coming out, and they are disclosing his appearances, his speeches, who he was engaged with,” she said. “And it just seems like this work of his is coming full circle.”