‘Palmer Park’ tackles ’60s integration

“This brother goes into a pawn shop ...”

Black pediatrician Fletcher Hazelton jokes to his white friend Martin Townsend in “Palmer Park,” a play by Joanna McClelland Glass, which was performed as a staged reading Monday. 

The play, which dealt with issues of racial integration, was performed at the Ruth N. Halls Theatre as part of IU’s Themester on evolution, diversity and change, which is “a series of events to promote campus and community dialog on challenging issues.”

Trish Hausmann, house manager for the theater, said she enjoyed the presentation.
“I think it’s going fabulously,” she said.

Hausmann, a native of Michigan, said she also recognized many of the places mentioned in the performance.

Palmer Park is a social commentary set in late 1960s Detroit as the white flight was taking hold of the city. The black families began to move into white neighborhoods, scaring the whites into what would become the suburban sprawls that now surround major cities.

After a series of riots rock the city, property values plummet as more than 250,000 affluent citizens abandon their city homes and move out.

The play specifically concerns the Hazelton and Townsend families and how they attempt to improve their neighborhood, Palmer Park.

The Hazleton family is an upper-middle class black family while the Townsends have moved in from Iowa, a state sparse in diversity. After the riots, the city’s school system finds itself more than $7 million in debt and the Hazeltons and Townsends, along with their neighbors, set out to go door to door in order to raise funds for their struggling school.

Conflict arises when working class families whose children attend a crowded school near Palmer Park demand that their children be let into the nearby Palmer Park school.

This, the residents worry, would create a black majority and scare off future white residents, eventually resulting in a totally black neighborhood, destroying the diversity that they had worked hard to foster. Eventually, more riots rock the neighborhood and most of the residents scatter.

“We were all very uncomfortable at times,” said senior Christina Rahn, who played resident Harriet Rifkin.

She recalled a scene in which the Hazeltons told their neighbors that they had to dress well in order to be served at highway restaurants.

“That’s still heartbreaking to me,” she said.

Graduate student Jaysen Wright, who portrayed Fletcher Hazleton, a black pediatrician in the neighborhood, said the play was about when “things fall apart.”

“I found this play and playwright very ambitious,” he said. “At the end of the day, all I had to hold onto was who these people are ... I’m proud of what we did.”