the last book I ever read (Black Deutschland by Darryl Pinckney, excerpt four)

from Black Deutschland: A Novel by Darryl Pinckney:

While he read the Hyde Park Herald, Mom sat defiantly with Voices. She and her white friends at the Unitarian church defended themselves against the charge that Hyde Park wasn’t just an integrated neighborhood, it was where white and black united to keep out the poor. The University of Chicago did what it felt it had to in order to house faculty in the neighborhood, to prevent the whole shebang from going to the dogs. I never particularly wanted to live in a spanking new apartment tower like Dr. Robert Hartley’s, but I wished we owned one of the cubic E Houses the university had bulldozed into place around itself in the early 1960s, especially after I learned who I. M. Pei was.