In the fall of 1962 Jack Roth, chairman of the history department at Roosevelt University, again offered me a position at Roosevelt University in Chicago, and a good friend, the liberal Catholic historian Edward Gargan, recommended Wilma for a position at the Jesuit Loyola University, also in Chicago, which she enjoyed the most of the positions she has had. This time I accepted the offer.
Now that the legal barriers to the abolition of segregation had been abolished, different strategies were needed in the North as well as in the South. Now it was a matter of addressing social and economic discrimination and the problem of continuing de facto separation, which was much harder to fight.
We arrived in Chicago in early September 1963. For the first time, I taught exclusively modern European history and did not have to teach introductory courses in American history. Wilma taught language and graduate literature courses at Lewis Towers, the downtown campus of Loyola. Living once again in Hyde Park, we found the library of the University of Chicago, as well as Newberry Library, very accessible. For Newberry, Hans Baron, a student of Ernst Troeltsch and Friedrich Meinecke, had just acquired the collection of books and journals which I needed for my work on German historicism.
I established contact with the NAACP and became a member of its advisory council, but the situation in Chicago was different from Little Rock or New Orleans. Chicago was a much larger city and the NAACP had close ties to the Democratic Party. In many ways I was an outsider. Also, the situation with regard to the relationship between blacks and whites was much less transparent than in the South. The goal still was equal rights for all Americans, but its realization on the social, economic and cultural level proved to be complicated. Since I could not actively participate in the NAACP, I joined the Teachers for Integrated Schools, and became coeditor of their information service, “The Chicago School Integration News.”
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 106