Ivanhoe

The night before they would leave for Lake Ivanhoe, young Janet Louise Cole would watch her mother begin to pack – clothes freshly washed and starched,

… There was a woman who was the great-granddaughter of one of the three men that bought the area and tried to make it into a resort area and community,” she said. I understand there are people in the world, in the United States, now that don’t want that history to be told, or only to be told in a sanitized way. Reflecting on the day of celebration, the past vacations, Lake Ivanhoe and the country, Davis said, “Just wouldn’t it be nice for people to know that there is a Black history? “And what bothers me so much about our country is those that would rather that we not have the right to vote or have any kind of representation. The family bought a home in Lake Ivanhoe, but Baker did not consider the history of the community for several years, until he decided to look into it. It just covered the whole front leg of this house,” she said. Davis and her husband, James, visited Baker at his home a few days before the ceremony unveiling the markers. She had to drive out to Chicago Heights [a distance of about 32 miles] to teach; she couldn’t work in Chicago any more. “She had been fired from the Chicago Board of Education by Mayor Daley for leading one of the largest protests of the double-shifting of African Americans at the school I was going to at that time. Residents filed articles of incorporation for what in 1946 became the Lake Ivanhoe Property Owners Association. In 1927, legendary band leader and jazz singer Cab Calloway performed at the opening of the art pavilion. Like Idlewild in Michigan, but less upscale and distant, Lake Ivanhoe was a place where Black people could spend a few days away from the city and Jim Crow.