More than 200 current and former Park Forest residents crowded their way into the village’s Freedom Hall auditorium Saturday to view a 90-minute documentary about the community’s integration efforts.

Produced by former resident Phil Rockrohr, “Revisiting Utopia” tracked the village’s efforts from its first Black resident to a sometimes contentious merger of students from Park Forest and Chicago Heights to the success of an “integration maintenance” program.

Rockrohr, who grew up in Park Forest, said he has worked on the project since 2014, when he first asked himself whether he correctly recalled the relationships between races.

“Was racial harmony in Park Forest as real as I remembered it,” he said.

With the screening in Park Forest, Rockrohr now hopes to broaden his audience with presentations at documentary film festivals throughout the country.

The documentary included interviews with some 75 people who either grew up in the village during its early years or were part of a later effort to maintain a peaceful community, and included the once touchy plan by Park Forest-Chicago Heights Elementary District 163 to integrate the predominantly white grade school in Park Forest with a primarily Black school in the Beacon Hills area of Chicago Heights.

Rockrohr used both sides of this visual coin, telling of groundwork done by the late Harry Teshima to bring Black residents into the community and tales of lasting friendships with stories of insults thrown at Black students.

It was the plan of then assistant village manager Don DeMarco to level the village housing pattern by developing his maintenance plan of dispersing new, predominantly Black residents throughout the community that stabilized the community.

The documentary included the story of the first Black family, that of DePaul University professor Charles Z. Wilson, who moved to a house on Wilshire Avenue Dec. 24, 1959, and included a small item from the Time Magazine that Ethel Klutznick, wife of the village founder Phillip Klutnick, baked a cake for the family.

Some 22 years after the Wilsons arrived, Ron Bean was elected the first Black mayor of Park Forest in 1981.

Along with technical and camera crew, Rockrohr relied on information from the Park Forest Historical Society, including stories from the now defunct Park Forest Star to underline events.

At various times throughout the showing, members of the audience could be heard commenting about scenes and faces on the screen. Rockrohr said he was thrilled with the audience comment and its enthusiastic response.

Jerry Shnay is a freelance columnist for the Daily Southtown.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2026/02/03/column-premiere-park-forest-documentary/