Harriette Gillem Robinet’s life story comprises a long list of intriguing distinctions:She was the granddaughter of a slave. She grew up in an all-black neighborhood in Washington D.C. She traveled a long way, to the almost all-white College of New Rochelle near New York City where she finished first in her class. She majored in biology and earned advanced degrees from Catholic University.In spite of her scientific background, or maybe because of it, she became an extremely successful author of historical fiction for children and young adults. As a novelist, she was self-taught but said she learned a great deal by copying passages from famous novelists, longhand. She and her husband Mac raised six kids, four of whom were adopted, one of whom has a significant disability. To find a house big enough, they bought a home in 1965 in Oak Park, which wasn’t sure they were quite ready for that kind of social change, but the Robinets helped form the leading edge of racial integration in a village whose reputation is now based on embracing diversity. Harriette lived in that house until she died in May of 2024. Mac still lives there. She was awarded the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame’s Fuller Award for lifetime achievement in 2023. And tonight she is being inducted into that Hall of Fame. But all of this just scratches the surface of her story.
Harriette Gillem’s father, an educator, required his daughter to pen something every day during her summer vacations while she was growing up. Publication came much later, in February 1968, with a Redbook magazine article titled, “I’m a Mother — Not a Pioneer,” number 89 in Redbook’s Young Mothers series.The latter part of the article’s title turned out to be inaccurate. “I believe that any people’s story is every people’s story and that from stories, we can all learn something to enrich our lives.” If You Please, President Lincoln, Harriette Robinet’s story has deep roots. Her maternal great-grandfather, Thornton Gray, was “owned” by Mary Custis Lee, wife of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, in Arlington, Virginia. Before he went off to fight in the Civil War, Lee freed his slaves and gave them plots of his land. Harriette’s parents built their life in Washington D.C. Her mother, a seamstress, also worked at the Treasury Department. Her father, Richard A. Gillem, Jr., was a geography and history teacher at the middle school Harriette attended. He attended Howard University Law School at night and passed the bar. He had many clients but didn’t charge them. To make a living, he continued teaching. Her father died while she was in high school. After graduating, Harriette wanted to get away from D.C. and, disappointing her mother, who hoped she would attend a local all-Black college, she enrolled in the College of New Rochelle in New York, where she was the only Black student. No one wanted to be her roommate except for the only Chinese-American student, who couldn’t find a roommate either.
Harriette majored in biology and had the highest grade point average in her class but received no honors. Those were reserved for the students whose parents were the top donors to the school. She did, however, receive strong recommendations from her teachers. After earning her master’s degree and doctorate in bacteriology from Catholic University, she was hired to teach biology at Xavier University in New Orleans, where she also served as a house mother for a girls’ dormitory. The chaplain, at the behest of the dormitory students, played matchmaker, inviting Harriette and McLouis (Mac) Robinet, a physics instructor at the school, to an event where they were the only attendees. By the end of the school year, they were engaged. The couple married in 1960 and moved to Chicago, where Mac taught physics in the UIC Medical Center at the College of Pharmacy. They lived in a bedroom-less staff apartment on campus. After Stephen was born in 1964 and Phillip arrived via adoption, it was time to find a larger place. Friends suggested they look for a home in Oak Park, but the local real estate industry had other ideas. “I know what civil rights demonstrations meant for me. For a few years our family joined in vigils, in testing of realtors, and in weekly marches for fair housing. We had the privilege of marching in Chicago with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Taking part in that nonviolent struggle established my self-respect as an African American.”
Walking to the Bus-Rider Blues.
To expose the industry’s racist practices, the Robinets joined the North Shore Project, which documented the unequal treatment accorded Black couples who were looking to buy a house. African Americans in 1965 needed a white “straw buyer” or “nominee buyer” to purchase a home for them — an unavoidable subterfuge to work around unjust restrictions. A Presbyterian minister and his wife, Don and Joyce Beisswenger, bought a house on the 200 block of South Elmwood, then sold it to the Robinets. As Harriette described it in her Redbook article, “On a hazy, uncertain afternoon in October, 1965, our family of four drove up to a spacious old house in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. We had lived in a small Chicago apartment for five years, and the house looked like heaven. An avenue of elms and maples formed an arch of brilliant red and gold leaves. The fenced backyard would be a safe place for our boys to play in; large bay windows promised light and air; there was a real fireplace. And I could still plant some tulips before the first frost. “With its mellow atmosphere, its highly individual, well-kept old houses and its huge trees, Oak Park spelled h-o-m-e to us. But this wasn’t an ordinary moving day,” she wrote. “We are Negroes. When a Negro family moves into an all-white suburb, it’s officially called a ‘move-in.’” In fact, she had never been inside the house till that day. “The Illinois Commission on Human Relations suggests that neighbors not see the Negro family near the house before the actual moving day,” she added. “The moving must be fast and professional, done in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week — no weekend idlers nearby. And the white neighbors must be completely informed before the move-in takes place. ”Redbook published her article in February 1968. It turned out to be one the most popular pieces in the series and generated the most mail. She used some of the $500 she was paid to buy her first electric typewriter.
Once they settled in, the Robinets took action, leading weekly marches down Lake Street to call attention to unethical housing practices. Those demonstrations paid off in May 1968 with passage of one of the nation’s earliest Fair Housing ordinances. “Maybe freedom’s different things for different people. I think it be something small that grows like a seed planted. Every day, I feel a little more free.
”Forty Acres and Maybe a Mule"
By then, the family had grown to five kids, four of them adopted, joined later by Linda, who was born in the early ’70s. Raising six children is not exactly conducive to the demands of being a novelist, but Harriette was determined and disciplined. “My mother often wrote as we were doing homework,” Linda recalled. “She’d be writing at her desk in the dining room while a few of us would be working at the dining room table. She’d have her notebooks that she used for research in neat piles.” Harriette kept a strict routine of cleaning, cooking and shopping, delegating chores to the kids as they grew old enough to take tasks on. The regimen bought her time to write.One day in the ’70s, a librarian at the Oak Park Public Library told Robinet there was a great need for children’s books that featured characters with disabilities. I can do that, she thought.
Her first two books, Jay and the Marigold and Ride the Red Cycle, about children with disabilities, were inspired by her son, Jonathan, who has cerebral palsy. After that, she wrote nine more books for older kids, which her daughter Linda describes as “multicultural historical fiction.” Each contained a character with some kind of disability, and all explored race relations in the context of societal inequality. Linda, a teacher in the Oak Park school district, read her mother’s books to her students. “My mother’s characters were never perfect, just like them. Her characters were brave and scared. Her characters were angry and loving. Her characters were disabled and differently abled. Her books are so powerful for children because they get to experience historical events through the eyes of the characters. My mother’s books gave them hope,” she said.In her own life, Robinet practiced nonviolence. “If they came at her with contempt,” Linda said, “she returned kindness. ... If I were to speculate about how she wove her own biography into her stories, it was to come from a place of understanding. ”Harriette authored 11 books between 1976 to 2003, winning multiple honors, including the Friends of American Writers Award, the Carl Sandburg Award, the Scott O’Dell Award for historical fiction for children and the Jane Addams Book Award Honor.In 2023, the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame presented her the Fuller Award for lifetime achievement. “Her generosity and grace, not to mention her fierce compassion and intelligence, emanated from every stitch of her writing and her life,” said CLHOF founder Donald G. Evans. “You always hear that the author is not the work and the work is not the author, but in Harriette’s case it’s hard to make that distinction. She knew only kindness, sought only prosperity and peace, especially for those whose circumstances made that difficult.”
Harriette Robinet was a mother, yes, first and foremost, but she was also a scientist, a social justice activist, an organizer, a teacher, a good neighbor, a fine and courageous writer.
And, yes, a pioneer. That became evident a couple of months after the Redbook article was published in 1968 when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Home alone with three kids, the only Black family on the block, one of the first and few in the village, her husband working seven miles away at UIC, Harriette Robinet couldn’t help feeling vulnerable as the world around her was about to burst into flames. One can only imagine what it was like for newly arrived Black families in a mostly white suburb. Here’s what it was like: Harriette wanted to do something instead of just feeling helpless, so she brought out their American flag and put it up outside. A few hours later when she glanced out the window, almost every house on the block was flying the Stars and Stripes. “That’s when I knew we were home,” Harriette said when she first related the story.
From many flags, one people.
A longtime, active St. Edmund parishioner, Harriette was often seen walking hand-in-hand to daily Mass with her husband. Harriette Robinet’s writing career was cut short by dementia, but her defining characteristics of grace and kindness, and her smile, never faded. Harriette is survived by Mac, her husband of 64 years, and her children, Stephen, Philip, Rita, Jonathan and Linda. She was preceded in death by her daughter, Marsha.
Harriette’s body was donated to medical science through the Anatomical Gift Association of Illinois. Of her books, she said on her website, “Unless we know our history, we have no perspective on life today. How can we know where we’re going, or appreciate where we are today, if we don’t know where we’re coming from?”
With Harriette Robinet leading the way, in the world and in her books, we always knew where we were going.
— Ken Trainer
