West Cook News

Susan Buchanan, the Oak Park Trustee who once berated her colleagues for offering their opinions on a proposed village "diversity statement," has resigned her position after six years on the board.

Buchanan said she believed trustees with lighter skin were disqualified from offering opinions on the text of the statement, which seeks to apologize for the behavior of white Americans on behalf of the village.

"You have been white from birth," Buchanan told then-fellow trustees Dan Moroney and Deno Andrews, a a board meeting in October 2019, her first year in office. "Why are you arguing what is a system of oppression? You've never experienced one, so shut up! I don't want to hear from you! Just stop Dan, just stop Deno. You are not oppressed and people in Oak Park are and we are trying to recognize that as a community."

Buchanan also told then-Oak Park Mayor Anan Abu-Taleb, a Palestinian immigrant, that he also couldn't have an opinion on the statement.  

"Your skin is light enough. Stop it!," she said.

"I'm so tired of hearing two white men tell us what systems of oppression are," Buchanan said. "This is like if you guys wanted to tell us what it's like to have a menstrual cycle."

One of those men, homebuilder Moroney, who served on the Oak Park Village Board from 2017-2021, took issue with Buchanan.

"I think if we reduce these conversations to 'nobody cares because you are a white male,' I don't think we're doing this right," Moroney said.

Daughter of a prominent Presbyterian pastor

A UIC professor, Buchanan, 65, is the daughter of former Fourth Presbyterian Church pastor John Buchanan, who died in February.

The church is famous as the setting of the 1997 feature film "My Best Friend's Wedding," starring Julia Roberts, Dermot Mulroney and Cameron Diaz.

Rev. Buchanan attracted national acclaim pushing the Presbyterian Church to ordain gay and lesbians, which it allowed in 2011. 

She spent her early childhood in south suburban Dyer, Indiana while her father worked as a student pastor before moving with him to Lafayette, Indiana, where she attended elementary and middle school. 

At 13, she moved to Columbus, Ohio where she attended high school. In 1980, she enrolled at Denison University in suburban Columbus, where she studied physics and played violin with two classmates in a group they called the Susan Violin Trio.

Buchanan is a lifelong political activist who, in 1983, joined a group of fellow Denison University students who traveled to Washington, D.C. to support the  socialist, Soviet Union-backed Sandinistas seeking control of Nicaragua. 

Buchanan was arrested in June 1985 during a pro-Socialist demonstration at the Ohio State Capitol Building in Columbus, according to published reports.

Buchanan was last re-elected to the Oak Park Village Board in April 2023. Her term expires in April 2027.