Making the Black Metropolis: African Americans in Chicago,
1910-1985
by Davarian L. Baldwin, Ph.D.
“City of the Big Shoulders”
Chicago has been long known as the “City of the Big Shoulders.”[1] By the late nineteenth century,
this manufacturing hub served as an industrial gateway between the well-established cities of finance
in the east and the abundant resources from an expanding western frontier. With increased demands
for workers to man the machines of industrialized mass production, Chicago also became a city of
migrants. By 1890, 14,000 of the city’s one million were black. In 1910, that number rose to 44,000
black residents. But even as late as 1910, African Americans were not completely segregated but
lived throughout the city, with no more than a dozen blocks on the South Side being exclusively
Negro.
While there was no fully segregated black neighborhood, African Americans had already started to
create a robust institutional culture of churches, women’s clubs, a hospital, and a bank. Of special
note was the 1905 founding of Robert Abbott’s Chicago Defender newspaper that would take on a
much greater role, stewarding migrants to Chicago in the next decades of the 20 thcentury.
Abbott’s Defender spoke to a growing black presence, as the slow building trickle of movement out of
the south soon became the tidal wave of the Great Migration. Chicago would never be the same.
“The mecca was Chicago”
Harlem has been heralded as the center of early 20th century black urban life, but when most migrants
connected freedom with the North, “the mecca was Chicago.” The city sat at the center of U.S.
industrial production and consumption. Its Illinois Central Railroad shuttled cargo out from the
ominous “shadows of the stockyards,” meat-packing plants like Armour and Swift, and products from
nearby U.S Steel and the Sears, Roebuck mail order house.[2] These industries simultaneously
received orders back from local sites of consumption along with the harvested raw materials from far
away outposts with an unparalleled efficiency and speed. At the same time, aged tenements became
overcrowded with a city of immigrant workers who grew increasingly frustrated with 100-hour work
weeks, some following the Chicago legacy of the Haymarket bombing and Pullman strike by
joining labor protests. African Americans seized on the same pyrrhic victory; bravely jumping out of
the frying pan of southern Jim Crow injustice only to leap into the fires of Northern “indifference.”[3]
The spirit of Chicago’s freedom was stoked by low-wage, bottom-rung, manufacturing work. Black
laborers largely entered this factory city of hog butchers, stockyards, and steel mills as strikebreakers,
also called “nigger scabs.”[4] Still, they headed to a place where they could walk upright to voting
booths in their 2nd Ward. Before arriving, parents read in the Defender about Wendell Phillips
Academy High School with its modern facilities, integrated classes, and night school programs that,
by 1920, included early courses in "Negro history" and literature. Fans saw the Chicago American
Giants baseball team on their southern tours. Once in the city, workers deposited unfair and meager
wages at Jesse Binga's black-owned bank or bought a policy at the Supreme Liberty Life Insurance
Company. Revelers sent word back about good times at the Pekin Theater or the Dreamland Café.
And therefore, black migrants continued to “quit the south;” not simply fleeing but taking a concerted
stance against inhumanity, now bound for the “promised land” that was Chicago.[5]
By 1910, and especially after 1915, the Great Migration of over 1.5 million African Americans to the
North helped swell the ranks of Chicago’s black citizenry within the increasingly cramped spaces of
what was becoming the so-called “Black Belt.” The Black Belt was a narrow strip of land on the South
Side of the city from 18th Street to 39th Street and bounded by State Street on the east and the Rock
Island Railroad tracks and LaSalle Street on the west. As the population exploded from 44, 130 in
1910 to 233, 903 by 1930, a trend of spatial consolidation restricted the Black Belt’s expansion to the
south, west to Wentworth and a few streets east with some Black residents as far east as Cottage
Grove. Black residents were faced with the “dynamic of choice and constraint,” and therefore, unlike
other immigrants, were more restricted to residential space along the lines of ethnicity instead of
class.[6]
The force of racial zoning practices, restrictive covenants, and racial violence helped materialize the
force of black containment quite clearly. As early as 1911, the Vice Commission of Chicago
highlighted how the city’s red-light district was being intentionally re-zoned into the Black Belt. When
famed sociologist, Robert Park, ventured out from the campus walls of the emerging University of
Chicago (U of C) and into the Black Belt, he made the general claim that the Negro manifests “an
interest in an attachment to external physical things rather than to subjective states and objects of
introspection, in a disposition for expression rather than enterprise and action…He is so to speak, the
lady among races.”[7] Here, the rising field of sociology ignored the intentional decisions of political
actors to push forward “scientific” observations linking blackness and urban vice in ways that shaped
general assessments of land value in the real estate industry and hence justified an ethos of black
containment.
Racial violence became one of the most intimate expressions of black containment as young “athletic
clubs” patrolled neighborhood lines with bats and bricks while more anonymous “neighbors” hurled
firebombs at black homeowners. Between July 1917 and March 1921, fifty-eight homes in Chicago
were bombed, with the predominant victims being south side black people who moved into white
areas, and the black and white agents who sold to them. Some of the worst violence occurred when
black teenager Eugene Williams was stoned to death for accidentally floating across the “imaginary”
color line at the Twenty-Ninth Street Beach. A bloody race riot erupted to maintain white order, but
black folks fought back, adding further resonance to Claude McKay’s timely poem “If We Must Die.”[8]
At the same time, the law of restrictive covenants threatened civil action against anyone that dared
sell, lease, or rent to a Negro outside the tight confines of the Black Belt. The neighboring Hyde Park,
Kenwood, and Woodlawn areas had more available and even less expensive housing, but
organizations like the notorious Hyde Park and Kenwood Property Owner’s Associations called on
employers to deny jobs to black residents who dared “invade” white areas. The general rationale of
covenants was the protection of property values, but these contracts were also dubbed “the University
of Chicago Agreement to get rid of Negroes.”[9] Ultimately, U of C support of such protective
associations resulted in keeping the neighborhoods around the Black Belt racially white.
The housing stock left to black residents was in some of the city’s most dilapidated neighborhoods.
With the force of restrictive covenants, landlords could extract the highest rents for the worst housing
from the most economically disenfranchised population. This reality gave rise to overcrowded housing
in the black community and kitchenettes, where apartments were divided into single rooms, rented
without a lease or ironically a kitchen, sometimes including a hot plate for cooking. By 1919, the Black
Belt suffered a housing shortage while there was abundant surplus in other parts of the city.
To be sure, containment became the shroud cast over the Black Belt. Yet, in the words of historian
Earl Lewis, Chicago’s African Americans boldly turned segregation into “congregation.”[10] Within the
Black Belt existed a dynamic community of pre-existing and newly developing cultural codes, class
antagonisms, and varied visions of freedom. At the literal and figurative center of this emerging Black
metropolis sat the commercial and amusement district known as “the Stroll.” This town square for the
cordoned off black “city-within-a city” was located along State Street from approximately 26th to
39th Street, with its major intersection of theaters, restaurants, dancehalls, and businesses centered
around 35th and State. The Stroll was variably lauded as “The Bohemia of Colored Folk,” and “the
black man’s Broadway and Wall Street;” serving as a public sphere of black possibility piercing
through the shadows of the stockyards and steel mills, bursting from the brick and mortar of
concretized segregation.[11] At the same time, the Stroll was a site of struggle over competing visions
of black community as new migrants changed the physical and conceptual landscape of the city.
The self-described "better class" or "old settlers" showcased the seemingly more uplifting and
respectable businesses, churches, and clubs on the daytime Stroll.[12] The most enterprising old
settlers sought to capitalize on their forced proximity to new migrants, hoping to convert segregation
into a concentrated army of voters, patrons, parishioners, and consumers. At the same time, the
racially restrictive structure of the black community forced all social groups to live in close proximity to
one another. Old settlers, then, both depended upon and distinguished themselves from the black
migrants who they felt reinforced the "lady among races" claim, most clearly embodied in the
nighttime Stroll of leisure and amusement. In fact, after the race riots of 1919, many old settlers
argued that it was the vulgar behaviors and southern ways migrants brought with them "like a
disease" that brought on racial tensions and violence.[13]
A number of daytime institutions and organizations stepped to the fore, fighting to dispel the pervasive
myth that the race was without merit. Black women's organizations compensated for the (in most
cases) outright exclusion of newcomers by Chicago's mainstream lodging homes and social agencies.
The Douglas Center, the Wendell Phillips Settlement, and Ida B. Wells’s new Fellowship League,
among others, offered childcare, educational, and domestic arts facilities to meet the overwhelming
needs of new migrants. Chicago’s black church world added a dynamic sacred sphere; ranging from
5,000 person “old line” Baptist and A.M.E. temples, to storefront Pentecostal and Holiness churches
increasing their own mutual aide services while Pilgrim became the home of Thomas A. Dorsey’s new
“sacred blues,” soon called gospel music.[14]
As the Great Migration increased, bi-racial or white philanthropic and factory-sponsored institutions
such as the YMCA, NAACP, and Chicago Urban League also sought to both provide welfare and civil
rights services, while also reforming leisure spaces and migrant behaviors with the hopes of building
an efficient black labor corps. The all-black Wabash Avenue YMCA never did reach a wide audience,
but it devised a series of leisure activities including glee clubs, baseball leagues, and efficiency clubs
that tied recreation to labor. But still, it was in the basement of the Wabash YMCA that Carter G.
Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) in 1915, offering
positive and fact-based representations of the race with its Negro History Week (later Black History
Month).
The NAACP focused on the battle for equal rights in labor, housing, and public accommodation
through legal redress; even taking the lead in a nationwide call for the censorship of D.W. Griffith’s
infamous Birth of a Nation photoplay. The local Urban League was the most comprehensive and wellfunded bi-racial, “old settler” organization. The League maintained a strong job referral system, prounion stance, and race first advocacy. Equally important however, were the cultural values it
emphasized, reflected by instructional cards and “do’s and don’ts lists published in
the Defender warning migrants to act in disciplined ways desired by potential employers.
The Urban League also became an early training ground for what became the “Chicago School” of
sociology at the upstart U of C. Before acquiring a full time professorship, Robert Park served as the
Chicago branch’s first president at its 1916 founding and created a research department, appointing
his student Charles Johnson as its director in 1917. It was Johnson’s research leadership that gave
shape to the far-reaching work, The Negro in Chicago (1922), to study the causes and consequences
of the infamous 1919 race riot.
Perhaps the most far-reaching and dynamic commentary on Chicago’s new black life came from its
complex network of newspapers and periodicals. The Conservator was supplanted by the middleclass conservatism of Half-Century magazine (later the weekly Chicago Bee) and the economic
radicalism of the Chicago Whip. An ethic of race pride and economic self-determination was
articulated in a diversity of journalistic formats. Newsletters and brochures for Oscar Brown's black
chamber of commerce and its "Sustain Black Business" campaign used the story of John Baptiste du
Sable, a Haitian merchant who is considered the first non-Native American settler in Chicago, to
proclaim black citizens' inherent right to the city and its economy.[15]
Institutional landmarks, including Provident Hospital, the Eighth Regiment Armory, and the
Appomattox Club, were showcased in periodicals as physical symbols of interracial cooperation and
military and civic race manhood in the black metropolis. The Great Migration had catapulted
Abbott’s Defender into the most successful black newspaper in the country; combining a showcase of
daytime institutions, sensational reportage of nighttime events, and an unrelenting stance on racial
justice. All journalists celebrated and exaggerated the productive successes of the daytime Stroll
enterprises of Overton, Abbott, and Binga, who had accumulated enough properties to build a “Binga
Block” alongside his now, charted Binga State Bank. Claude Barnett created his Associated Negro
Press clearing house and a range of black-owned insurance companies, including Supreme Liberty,
hoping to model manly, entrepreneurial race pride for migrants to emulate.
Many went to great lengths to showcase the daytime Stroll activities of insurance and banking as
authentic representations of the respectable black community. But actually it was the nighttime Stroll,
an interconnected leisure world of “sporting” and entertainment that provided the socio-economic and
conceptual base, for transforming the “Black Belt” into the Black metropolis. Better-paying industrial
jobs certainly provided the disposable income for leisure activities; but the nickels and dimes used to
buy drinks in local dancehalls and put on lucky numbers at gambling stations re-circulated back within
the community to support the community dream of black self-sufficiency. At the turn of the twentieth
century, various older lottery games were declared illegal throughout the country, thus paving the way
for the stock market to become the dominant economic system of speculation. However, during the
Great Migration and segregated urbanization, black immigrants from the Spanish- and Englishspeaking Caribbean and migrants from the US South brought versions of "the numbers" or "policy"
(now legalized as state lotteries) to the South Side.
Chicago “Policy Kings” backed theaters, churches, athletic clubs, newspapers, banks, and insurance
companies. These policy entrepreneurs helped power the Black metropolis. It has been said that
when John “Mushmouth” Johnson’s sister married Jesse Binga, it was policy money that helped
support his real estate and banking empire. Robert Motts’ Pekin Theater was known as the cradle of
Negro theater in America. Dan “the Embalmer” Jackson became a 2nd Ward politician, supporting his
prominent Metropolitan Funeral Systems Association and mentoring Robert Cole, who started
the Bronzeman magazine and built a recording studio for Jack Cooper’s pioneering “All Negro Hour.”
The interconnected world of policy and enterprise helped make Chicago the melting pot for jazz and
blues. Once dubbed the “South Side’s Sweetheart,” blues great Alberta Hunter recalled that, “If you
had worked in Chicago and had been recognized there, you were somebody, baby. New York didn’t
count then.”[16] William Bottoms owned the Dreamland Café, featuring Joe “King” Oliver, Louis
Armstrong, and Hunter under one roof. Henry “Teean” Jones helped Frank Leland fund his first
baseball team and opened up the Elite #1 featuring Earl “Fatha” Hines. Finally, Oscar de Priest used
policy dollars, in the form of campaign contributions to galvanize his People’s Movement Club and
become the first black U.S. Congressman from the north.
From this vibrant black public sphere came the local “race films”, innovations of William Foster, Peter
Jones, and Oscar Micheaux. When Madam C.J. Walker turned the art of “beauty culture” into a
lucrative “race enterprise” for black women, Chicagoan Marjorie Stewart Joyner became her national
president. At the same time, former judge Anthony Overton made Chicago the home of his lucrative
Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Company with its “High Brown” face powder. Thomas A. Dorsey
fused his time under “Ma Rainey” in the local “race music” world, old-line religious reverence, and the
prayer band styles of street evangelists to help create the gospel sound. Finally, local “race leagues”
gave shape to what became Negro League baseball, largely driven by Andrew “Rube” Foster and his
Chicago American Giants.
During the 1920s the combined forces of containment and congregation powered the dream that
Chicago’s black community could actually become a self-determined city-within-a-city, or what locals
called “the metropolis.” But as the 1920s became the 1930s, the central artery of local enterprise and
amusement had shifted from the Stroll’s 35th and State down to the even more white-controlled
“promenade” at 47th and South Parkway; home to the palatial Savoy Ballroom and Regal Theater. At
the same time, the nationwide economic Depression deflated the dream of an independent black
capitalist world. Yet, the focus on a race conscious vision of agitation, community, and freedom did
not cease.
Bronzeville
When the Great Depression hit, twenty five percent of all Americans were unemployed but at least
half of all Black people were left without work. Still, in the midst of the depression Chicago’s black
community reinvented itself. What mainstream journalists, public officials, and social scientists called
the Black Belt, its residents now renamed “Bronzeville”—arguing that “bronze” was a more accurate
description of resident’s skin tone than “black.” The same old problems persisted in the new
community but this Bronzeville had its own honorary mayor and its own annual Bud Biliken Day
parade. While the idea of Bronzeville maintained the dreams of a black city-within-a city, the literal
bankruptcy of capitalism found many African Americans in Chicago joining legions across the country
exploring the economic textures of black community building or what has been called a “proletarian
style” of political mobilization.[17] But more than simply a facile adoption of Marxist ideals, the
“proletarian style” in Bronzeville witnessed a range of activists, academics, and local residents
demonstrating how race profoundly shaped economic conditions and the lived realities of classconsciousness.
Just a year before the market collapsed, the community embraced the founding of the Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Porters and Maids (BCSP) and its fight for not just better wages but humane treatment
as part of a larger call for racial equality. The next year, the NAACP joined the radical Chicago
Whip newspaper and Egyptian mystic and Black Nationalist, Sufi Abdul Hamid’s Negro Industrial
Clerical Alliance to initiate the “Don’t Spend Your Money Where You Can’t Work” boycott campaign.
This nonviolent direct-action effort secured over 2,000 service jobs for Black workers in Chicago and
was imitated with varying levels of success all over the country. The “Don’t Spend” campaign also
instigated the community appeal for a Ben Franklin drugstore franchise within the Black metropolis
that was opened by the Jones “policy kings” in 1937.
As the Great Depression secured a tighter grasp on the lifeblood of Chicago’s South Side, a growing
“Black Popular Front” of Black middle-class, communist, and assorted race-first activists took to the
streets. Landlords had stepped up their evictions of unemployed African Americans who couldn’t pay
their rent. In response, a growing cadre of “flying squadrons” from the Communist Party’s (CP)
Unemployed Council expanded the ongoing Black collective action of rallying thousands to
sometimes sing spirituals while putting furniture back into homes.
In 1931, over 2,000 people assembled in protest to protect the furniture of seventy-two-year old Diana
Gross. The police seized on the derisively termed “Red Riot,” killing three Black men and arresting
many more under “vagrancy” charges.[18] The crowd rushed the officers and pelted them with rocks.
Black activists reassembled at the open-air forum that had developed in Washington Park and
organized a memorial event. Days later a funeral procession of between 5,000 and 8,000 stopped
traffic while marching down State Street. Leading the group were children carrying banners and signs
protesting child labor alongside pleas for bread. Additional protests at government buildings, relief
centers, and real estate offices persisted until the city enacted a “temporary moratorium” on evictions
with promises of additional unemployment relief.[19]
Even with the end of forced evictions, Chicago’s South Side had been largely hemmed in from all
sides through the city’s notorious enforcement of racially restrictive covenants. But in the 1930s
housing activists, with the help of the Chicago Defender, advanced a political campaign of Black antifascism. In an editorial entitled, “Building Ghettoes,” the paper signaled how irony had reached its full
apex when a Judge, Michael Feinberg, upheld a racially restrictive covenant in the significantly Jewish
neighborhood of Hyde Park, also the home of the “liberal” U of C.[20] Housing activists instigated a
campaign that strategically linked the racial segregation of restrictive covenants with the historically
Jewish residential marker of “ghetto,” and the local Jewish maintenance of the color line, just as Hitler
was marching across Europe. Yet housing was just one plank in a far-reaching platform when the
1936 National Negro Congress (NNC) convened in Chicago.
That February more than 5,000 artists and activists, laborers and leaders, clubwomen and
communists, preachers and politicians rubbed shoulders in a “Black Popular Front” at the famous
Eighth Regiment Armory to convene the NNC. The NNC’s Chicago Council stood at the center of the
new Congress of Industrial Organization’s (CIO) attempts to unionize a largely African American
workforce in the unskilled manufacturing industries of steel, auto, and meatpacking. But as delegates
labored over relevant issues, the specter of Ethiopia arguably loomed largest over the Chicago crowd.
In almost every session, there was discussion of the world’s relative silence around Mussolini’s 1935
invasion of Ethiopia which, for the NNC, encapsulated a larger silence around fascism in democratic
nations, including the U.S. Many were critical of Haile Selassie’s monarchical regime, but still fought
to defend one of the few countries that had pushed back against the European scramble to carve up
Africa. Overnight, defense committees raised money, dockworkers blocked shipments to Italy,
Chicago pilot John “The Brown Condor” Robinson joined Ethiopia’s air force, and many more took to
the streets.[21] Thousands attended Joint Committee for the Defense of Ethiopia meetings and
protested that Chicago mayor Edward Kelley received an award from Mussolini. Marchers took to the
streets even in the face of a citywide ban on Ethiopia protests. Some who couldn’t get to Ethiopia
joined up with the Comintern’s military forces fighting Franco in Spain, where the main character in
Chicago, writer/soldier Oscar Hunt, reminded readers, “This ain’t Ethiopia, but it’ll do.”[22] Even Joe
Louis became a symbol of black anti-fascism. Bronzeville fans cheered his victory over the Italian
Primo Carnera as much or more than his later bouts against German Max Schmeling, long before he
was embraced by the nation at-large. Not surprisingly, the Defender named Haile Selassie and Joe
Louis as the biggest news of 1935.
The “proletarian style” also gave shape to an outpouring of Black arts and letters, later called the
Chicago Black Renaissance that combined community building, direct action, and artistry. Even
during the worst parts of the Depression, black Chicagoans had to fight against their systematic
exclusion from the jobs and resources intended for public relief. At the same time, the Comintern
continued reaching out to black workers, while also supporting the culture and politics of Black
America as the work of an oppressed nation.
The Works Progress Administration (WPA) began to slowly open up positions to African Americans
with their Negro Studies Project and Slave Narrative Project. The Federal Writers Project’s
voluminous “Negro in Illinois” study employed major black Chicago writers to chronicle the African
American experience in Illinois from slavery to the Great Migration. Chicago’s Julius Rosenwald Fund,
named after Sears & Roebuck president Julius Rosenwald, also began developing Negro university
centers in the South and awarded approximately a thousand fellowships to young scholars; especially
U of C-trained social scientists studying race relations. Some argued these lucrative grants were
largely awarded to keep black culture workers from going communist but, while instrumental, funders
could never fully control the range of expression that came from local artists and scholars.
Richard Wright’s leadership over the “Negro History and Culture” panel at the NNC, helped incubate
what became the South Side Writers Group (SSWG) that included Arna Bontemps, Margaret Walker
and Marion Perkins, who met at the progressive Abraham Lincoln Center. This group embodied a
larger turn to “naturalist” representations of everyday black urban life, a vision most clearly expressed
in their creative manifesto, a “Blueprint for Negro Writing.”[23] The SSWG also joined the larger
protest against the racially exclusive appointments of artists at the WPA’s Illinois Arts Project. Wright’s
1940 Book-of-the-Month Club selection,Native Son, became the most celebrated product of this
collective art project. Visual artists also brought new brushstrokes to this new art of everyday black life
when Archibald Motley combined Guggenheim awards and WPA money to create his nighttime
compositions, including Black Belt (1934) and Street Scene (1936). Local visual arts also included the
work of renowned social realist Charles White, sculptor Elizabeth Catlett, and muralist William Scott.
Richard Wright also teamed up with a second generation of black social scientists, at the U of C to
challenge Robert Park’s ideas about race, class, and the city. Before Wright, Edward Franklin Frazier
had soundly dismissed the “lady among races” formulation with his 1932 work, The Negro Family in
Chicago. He agreed that Black culture had fallen victim to “social disorganization,” but argued that
racism was the cause and not simply racial deviance.[24] Wright then went on to work with social
science graduate student Horace Cayton on his long-form photo essay Twelve Million Black
Voices and the data that ultimately became Cayton and St. Clair Drake’s masterwork Black
Metropolis. But Wright was not alone, as Katherine Dunham fused dance and anthropological study,
at the U of C and Northwestern, to interpret the moods and rhythms of black life throughout the
African Diaspora. These works were also vigorously discussed during one of librarian Vivian Harsh’s
popular “Book Review and Lecture” forums or at the Parkway Community House where, as director,
Cayton combined services, lodging, and a “People’s Forum.”
Black women were especially adept at blending culture making and community building. Olive Diggs
led an all-female staff over the Chicago Sunday Bee newspaper where subscribers could read weekly
installments of Native Son. Shirley Graham (Du Bois) directed the W.PA.’s Federal Theater Project,
where the plays of Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes were performed in local churches, schools,
and parks. Black teachers coordinated with Woodson’s Association for the Study of Negro Life and
History (ASNLH) to create history clubs and build a meaningful black curriculum for their students.
Bronzeville dramatists took center stage in the country’s “little theater” movement through Chicago’s
Ethiopian Art Theatre, the Little Princess Theatre, and the Masque Players.
Irene McCoy Gaines served as president of the Chicago and Northern District Association of Colored
Women’s Clubs (CNDA) that maintained family relief and services, supported the Scottsboro and
Ethiopia defense campaigns, and created a history department that came out of local black teacher
activism. Black women artists, activists and educators demonstrate how Bronzeville’s cultural output
was the product of a unique blend of protest politics alongside community, WPA, Rosenwald, and
even policy gambling support that would underwrite two of the signature events of the era.
The 1940 American Negro Exposition was a national showcase held at the Chicago Coliseum to
commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. The Exposition offered
grand installations covering Agriculture, Labor, Sports, Religion etc., built on the organizing acumen of
Claude Barnett and Arna Bontemps, while featuring the work of White, Catlett, Dunham, Cayton and
Frazier, among others. Later that year, artist Margaret Burroughs (Taylor Goss) started a “Mile of
Dimes” campaign and Black society matron Frances Moseley Matlock coordinated a lavish Artists and
Models Ball at the Savoy Ballroom to offer matching funds for the W.P.A.-sponsored South Side
Community Art Center (SSCAS). This center became a vibrant showcase of black artistry where
William Scott and Elizabeth Catlett took up residence; Gwendolyn Brooks, musician Nat King Cole,
and Dunham were among many who congregated in the gallery; and photographer/filmmaker, Gordon
Parks, maintained a darkroom in the basement. From here, Brooks went on to capture the Pulitzer
Prize for Poetry with her book Annie Allen.
To be clear, Chicago’s city streets were not just the inspiration for the cultural renaissance but also its
source. Mahalia Jackson added texture to Thomas Dorsey’s gospel music whereby its call and
response structure gave voice to the voiceless. The Pentecostal temples of Clarence Cobb and Elder
Lucy Smith broadcast this new sound across the airwaves to save souls, as the depths of depression
seemed to grind up black lives. The same backbeat powered the tales of urban life found in the blues
of Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Minnie, and Sonny Boy Williamson. The Negro Leagues East/West allstar extravaganza of the 1930s was held yearly at Comiskey Park, outselling its major league
equivalent with brash showmanship and superior play. Basketball also finally captured the
imagination of the masses when the Savoy Big Five were renamed the Harlem Globetrotters (yet
never from Harlem) and beat the Harlem Rens to claim the 1940 World Championship Invitational at
the Chicago Stadium.
Spirits were further lifted when World War II turned Chicago into an attractive “Arsenal of Democracy”
where factories and docks were retrofitted for war-related production.[25] The pull of wartime
prosperity and the push of mechanized cotton harvesting created another mass exodus of black
southerners that overshadowed the so-called Great Migration. Over 280,000 new black migrants filled
the already cramped spaces of the South and increasingly West sides of the city between 1940 and
1960.
Bronzeville had become the capitol of black America. The meatpacking and steel industries slowly
opened up and black median incomes in Chicago grew to the highest in the country, except for
Detroit. But Chicago was also the home of the Chicago Defender, Johnson
Publishing’s Ebony magazine, the electrified blues, U.S. congressmen William Dawson, and boxer
Joe Louis. Still, restrictive covenants, dilapidated schools, and race riots persisted, while federallyfunded defense spending did not mandate equal access to jobs or put an end to racial discrimination
in segregated armed forces or defense worker housing.
African Americans used the war to remind the world that fascism existed both at home and abroad.
The massive Chicago Council of Negro Organizations (CCNO) organized rallies and rent strikes
amidst wartime prosperity and in 1941 Irene Gaines threatened to organize a mass protest to
Washington D.C. for jobs, before A. Philip Randolph’s more well-known March on Washington
Movement that year. The Pittsburgh Courier and Chicago Defender followed with a powerful “Double
V” campaign for victory against fascism abroad and victory against racism at home. In 1942, the nonviolent, civil disobedient Congress of Racial Equality formed in Chicago, enacting “Freedom Rides” in
the South and sit-ins to protest northern segregation as early as 1947.
Horace Cayton maintained a national column in the Courier focusing on the war beyond the frontline
and the factory floor, highlighting the “Hitler which lives in” America and the need to situate local
conditions within anti-colonial struggles across the globe.[26] Under the editorship of Olive Diggs, the
largely female staff at the Chicago Sunday Bee included full-page spreads of the military contributions
of Black soldiers and Women’s Army Corp members. Writer Richard Durham and his radio plays for
the Urban League program “Destination Freedom,” spoke out against unequal housing conditions and
one of his 1949 shows featured a scene in which two European men visiting the United States
observed that black neighborhoods reminded them of “Nazi ghettoes.”[27] To be sure, housing and
land development remained critical sites of struggle in the postwar period.
Riots and Urban Renewal
Municipal government agencies, private institutions, and regular citizens deployed a combination of
vigilante violence practices and policy decisions to both remove black residents from valuable land
and relocate them into increasingly segregated public housing. Chicago’s South Side community had
witnessed no significant increase in housing development since the 1920s and existing units lacked
basic amenities like running water, toilets, or centrally radiated heat. A 1945 Chicago Planning
Commission report revealed that 300,000 men, women, and children on the South Side were packed
in a space meant to reasonably accommodate 225,000 people. The Chicago Urban League appealed
to federal intervention in the form of public housing. TheChicago Housing Authority (CHA) built the
black-only Ida B. Wells, Robert Woods, and Altgeld Gardens housing projects. The Wells
development faced relentless opposition from the courts and neighborhood associations in the
adjacent Kenwood, Oakland, and Hyde Park neighborhoods. Altgeld Gardens was racially isolated
near the white South Deering and Roseland neighborhoods, where tenants could not use the local
hospital and shopping centers.
Urban Leaguers also pushed for the “open occupancy” of the Jane Addams, Julian Lanthrop, and
Trumbull Park homes on the South Side. Residents and activists had to fight against the racial
quotas, segregation within projects, and white violence that came with the push to integrate public
housing. Just as Robert Taylor became the first African American appointed to the CHA, white
citizens surrounded housing projects with a riotous frenzy of “self-defense". At Addams, Fernwood
Park, and Airport Homes, black residents were met by thousands of white vigilantes brandishing rocks
and Molotov cocktails while looting homes and stoning the police that tried to maintain order. Trumbull
Park became a catchall phrase for the years of white violence inflicted on black newcomers to this
South Deering project. But local disorders were just the most sensational acts of resistance against
black neighborhood expansion. A small black victory in the private housing market inspired the new
policy strategies of slum clearance and urban renewal as more polite forms of institutional
segregation.
Bronzeville continued to burst at the seams when a number of affluent Black families convinced
property owners to sell in the “white island” area of Washington Park to the west of Hyde
Park.[28] White sellers benefitted from the inflated prices they could extract from black buyers, while
such small numbers did not violate a ninety five percent white occupant stipulation on the covenant.
The white landowners sued and lost the U.S. Supreme Court case of Hansberry v. Lee (1940). The
decision did not pronounce restrictive covenants illegal but declared that a ruling against one property
no longer applied to other properties in the association, thus making area-wide enforcement costprohibitive. The Hansberry v. Lee (1940) case not only provided the inspiration for his daughter
Lorraine’s play A Raisin in the Sun, it also preceded the landmark Shelley v. Kramer (1948) case—
rendering racial covenants unenforceable. But as racial covenants lost force, local segregationists
pioneered the new tools of slum clearance and urban renewal to hold the line on black community
growth.
In 1947, the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council (MHPC) passed the Illinois Blighted Areas
Redevelopment Act. What was soon called “urban renewal” allowed the new Land Clearance
Commission to purchase properties in areas deemed “blighted” and then sell the land, at a discounted
rate, to private developers. The Commission’s first project condemned a long-established, well-kept,
and largely owner-occupied black neighborhood because it sat on highly lucrative lakefront land.
When the city razed the neighborhood, developers built the middle-class “Lake Meadows” housing
complex with rents far beyond the budgets of former residents. The accompanying Illinois Relocation
Act dispersed funds to build public housing for a mere 15% of those displaced. Moreover, the
Relocation Act gave the City Council veto power over the site selection of public housing, which
meant that vacant land in white areas was ignored to make sure that any public housing for black
Chicagoans was restricted to already-overcrowded black neighborhoods. The Housing Act of 1949
drew heavily from Illinois’s “urban renewal” policies but it added federal dollars for local projects.
Chicago became a major benefactor.
The U of C remained the major landholder in the Hyde Park neighborhood to the southeast of the
expanding Black community. At first, the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference attempted to
allow racial integration and control property values by only allowing black middle class residents.
Black protest did galvanize around Hyde Park. Yet more affluent black residents were willing to enter
Hyde Park and uphold the continued segregation of the black working class. The Conference still
failed to stave off white panic selling until the U of C swept in and deployed a new strategy of
“conservation” to contain black residential expansion.
A series of U of C or Hyde Park-controlled “urban renewal” policies allowed deteriorating white areas
to be rehabilitated while Hyde Park’s majority black sections were demolished. The conservation plan
left the area with 4,000 less housing units and little that was affordable. A few years later, the South
Side’s Beverly neighborhood responded to fears of white panic selling a little differently. The Beverly
Area Planning Association (BAPA) encouraged homeowners to sign “letters of agency” to prevent the
unsolicited advances of real estate agents trying to buy properties at low, panic-induced cost. BAPA
served agents with a notice to cease solicitation and discouraged homeowners from putting “For Sale”
signs in their yards.[29] Beverly’s planners eased the transition of middle-class black families into the
neighborhood without a complete racial turnover towards re-segregation.
South Side’s poorest black families, however, were collectively priced out of the new market and by
1960, contained in a solid corridor of high-rise public housing units. The boundaries, once fortified by
firebombs and legal contracts, were now reinforced by the concrete and steel of “vertical ghettoes”
along State Street from 22nd Street to 51st Street, alongside highway construction of the Dan Ryan
Expressway. The powerful new amplified blues sound coming from Chicago’s Veejay, Cobra, and
Chess Records even gave the longing for a better set of urban arrangements its own soundtrack.
Muddy Water’s “I Can’t Be Satisfied” captured the dual sense of angst and ambition as African
Americans underwent “Urban Renewal.” With black residents locked into physical place, the
educational policy of “neighborhood schools” further reinforced segregation. The landmark Brown v.
Board of Education of Topeka helped set off a southern Civil Rights revolution. Chicago’s black
community sent down eager soldiers in the army against Jim Crow, but the 1955 Mississippi murder
of Chicago’s young Emmett Till brought the Southern force of Jim Crow home in an intimate way. Still,
Chicago’s own segregated schools sparked enough outrage to spark a local “Freedom Movement” for
housing, jobs, and education.
Chicago Freedom
The Greater Migration, between 1940 and 1960, had exacerbated the problem of already
overcrowded schools in black neighborhoods, while white schools often had empty seats. Chicago
Public Schools Superintendent, Benjamin Willis, made black students share books and take classes
in hallways, temporary trailers (called “Willis Wagons”), and even abandoned warehouses rather than
integrate schools.[30] Many black schools held two shifts of half days in order to teach all of the
students restricted to overcrowded districts. Outraged parents called for the transfer of black students
to empty seats in white schools, organized sit-ins at the Board of Education, and demanded the
ouster of Willis.
The Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) helped galvanize a series of boycotts
in 1963, 1964, and 1965 where hundreds of thousands of black students stayed out of Chicago public
schools, some attending “Freedom Schools” at area churches and others taking to the streets to raise
awareness about educational injustice. These boycotts ran in complete defiance of a legal injunction
and sidestepped the 1965 criticisms from the NAACP and their call to focus on the presidential
election after John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Despite growing political tensions, the collective
action around education helped lead Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference to make Chicago their first northern campaign in the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement.
Between 1965 and 1967, the SCLC and the CCCO joined forces as part of what they called
the Chicago Freedom Movement, fighting to “end the slums” and open occupancy of the city’s
housing to all residents. Chicago posed a unique challenge to the movement. It was the most
segregated community in the North, earning the moniker “Birmingham of the North.”[31] At the same
time, Chicago’s black leadership was largely neutralized by Richard Daley’s political machine as both
the city’s mayor and chairman of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee. Congressman
William Dawson was so beholden to Daley for patronage that he attacked King as an outside agitator.
Still, Chicago Freedom activists thought that Daley’s broad reach meant he could either undercut the
Freedom Movement or, if compelled, help enact substantive change. But in 1966, King and his wife
Coretta moved into a rundown slum building on the West Side to strategically avoid the established
South Side black leadership within Daley’s machine. But the West Side was a perfect location for
another reason. Urban Renewal had forced many of the city’s poorest black residents to join new
migrants in the North Lawndale, Near West Side, and both East and West Garfield neighborhoods.
This new West Side ghetto was controlled by ward officials with “ghost addresses” and absentee
landlords, while housing the largest concentration of the city’s welfare recipients.
A 1965 riot on the West Side took place at the same time as LA’s Watts arose in flames and
challenged the idea that nonviolent direct action was the singular response to white control of black
neighborhoods. Still, the Freedom Movement forged ahead with a block-by-block organizing
campaign; talking with gang leaders, forging tenants’ unions, taking control of slum buildings, and
creating a job training and referral program. But unlike segregated Southern streetcars and lunch
counters, the “end of slums,” did not make for a concrete rallying cry. A rally at Soldier’s Field yielded
only 40,000 of the expected 100,000 attendees, but Mahalia Jackson and Stevie Wonder offered
powerful performances and King led a mile march to city hall where he posted demands on the door
including; desegregated schools, increased garbage collection, building inspection in slum areas, and
new public housing outside existing ghettoes.
The next year, another West Side riot erupted over a fire hydrant battle between black children and
white police amidst a ninety-degree day and white-only public swimming pools. In this struggle over
community control, black youth pushed for a more aggressive vision of Chicago freedom. For two
months in the summer of 1966, freedom activists staged rallies outside discriminatory white real
estate offices and led “open occupancy” marches to all-white neighborhoods likeMarquette Park and
Gage Park. White residents responded with violence. In Gage Park, King was hit in the head with a
rock and the Blackstone Rangers street gang became the marchers’ sole defense when police
refused to protect and serve. National media captured the violence and Daley was forced to call a
summit meeting with activists.
Chicago Freedom leaders agreed to halt marches, based on Daley’s promise to end segregation and
improve housing conditions. But the agreement was so vague, offered no means of enforcement, and
was never vetted by the larger black community. Many local leaders felt betrayed and went forward
with a march into the notoriously racist suburb of Cicero just weeks after young Jerome Huey had
been murdered by white teens when job hunting in the area. Approximately 300 marchers went into
Cicero with no commitment to non-violence, throwing rocks and bottles back at angry whites. It was
clear that non-violent direct action was not a one size-fits-all approach to black liberation, especially
when strategies were not effectively tailored to local conditions. Most white leaders in Chicago
supported open occupancy as long as they could continue to devalue the land and yet inflate the
prices when neighborhoods became majority black.
The larger Chicago Freedom movement may have failed to meet its grand ambitions but local
activists forged ahead. Working-class black women at public housing developments directly attacked
the CHA’s inept management and inadequate services for residents by creating childcare programs,
laundry facilities, and sometimes forging cross-class alliances with their home owning neighbors, to
push for municipal accountability. Women tenants throughout the city also mobilized to build library
branches in public housing communities throughout the decade. In 1968, federal courts upheld the
suit of Dorothy Gautreaux and other public housing tenants, who charged the CHA with selecting
public housing sites almost exclusively within black neighborhoods.
At the same time, black South Siders joined West Side homeowners in their fight against
unscrupulous contract selling practices. The Federal Housing Administration deemed black people a
financial security risk and therefore both public and private lenders refused to insure their mortgage
loans (redlining). The equation between blackness and financial risk forced neighborhood property
values down with even a small minority. Such financial arrangements subjected prospective black
buyers to purchase “on contract”—agreements through installment payments where the seller holds
title until paid in full. Many contract sellers could buy low from whites fleeing potential black neighbors
and then sell to black buyers at three or four times the price they paid from panicked whites.
In response, African American homebuyers organized a Contract Buyers League, where members
refused payments in contract strikes and filed two federal anti-discrimination cases. They failed to
persuade the courts, but the strikes resulted in renegotiated contracts for hundreds of black families.
The dual actions of black public housing tenants and homebuyers spoke to a larger shift in political
vision that merged civil rights strategies with community-based activism and ideas about selfdetermination.
The unregulated reach of the Daley machine and unrelenting acts of police violence, helped spur a
local call for “Black Power” and community self-control. When King was assassinated in 1968, over 48
hours of rioting rocked Chicago and Mayor Daley gave police the authority to “shoot to kill…shoot to
maim.”[32] That same year, Daley attacked anti-war demonstrators at the Democratic National
Convention with the overwhelming force of police and National Guardsmen. 1968 was also the
founding year of the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League (AAPL). The AAPL engaged in what they
called “Black Power Policing,” to protect their community from anti-black racism within the Chicago
Police Department.[33] Jesse Jackson’s SCLC’s South Side–based civil rights group, Operation
Breadbasket, also continued their campaign for the community-control of schools, food buying clubs,
and an end to racism in the criminal justice system. Breadbasket also joined with the re-named Black
P Stone Nation (Blackstone Rangers) street gang to block construction sites until black men were let
into all-white trade unions. Chicago’s vision of Black Power also took shape in the form of a unique
iteration of the national Black Panther Party.
The Illinois Black Panther Party (ILBPP) opened its headquarters at 2350 West Madison on
November 1, 1968. The Illinois branch was explicit that their black revolutionary vision meant to unite
all poor people. They patrolled the streets, hoping to organize street gangs, fight police brutality, and
end black-on-black violence. In the first few months ILBPP membership expanded from its original
forty to over 300; selling the Panther newspaper, serving the free breakfast program for children, and
offering free medical care. But after the “Bloody Summer” of 1968, charismatic ILBPP leader Fred
Hampton, seized on the opportunity to build a larger united front against the Daley machine.
In 1969, the ILBPP forged a powerful “Rainbow Coalition” with the Black P Stone Nation, the white
Students for a Democratic Society, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, the white Appalachian migrant
Young Patriots, and white working class members of Rising Up Angry. The Rainbow Coalition was an
unprecedented, multi-racial, coalition led by poor, black youth. This united front posed a legitimate
threat to the normal operation of Chicago’s political establishment and subsequently Hampton and
Mark Clark were assassinated during an FBI-orchestrated police raid in 1969. Chicago’s black
community certainly suffered from the loss of this young leader, but his death could not subdue the
larger call to “decolonize” black lives in Chicago as part the larger fight of African people across the
globe.
Colonies throughout the African Diaspora were discarding the shackles of European rule, and African
Americans embraced a diagnosis that U.S. cities suffered from an “internal colonialism” that required
a similar revolutionary movement in mind and body.[34] Alongside the ILBPP, a range of
organizations called for an end to “colonial” relations between black neighborhoods and the world that
“massa” Daley made. The Chicago version of the national “Black Arts” Movement joined the call for
black people to establish their own publishing houses, magazines, journals, theaters, and arts
institutions where black ideas and images would not be controlled by white power.
The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) supported an innovative blend of
jazz, classical, and international music experimentation and exhibition. The AACM ran its own music
school in the Parkway Community House and remained committed to musical self-determination, with
no funding from the government or private foundations. In 1967, the Organization of Black American
Culture (OBAC) created the black hero themed “Wall of Respect” mural on 43rd and Langley. The wall
became a site of performances, meetings, and cultural events while also sparking a nationwide
movement of “people’s art.” Several of the artists went on to form AfriCOBRA (the African Commune
of Bad Relevant Artists).
This new blending of culture and politics changed the outlook and aesthetics of many artists. Chicago
Black Renaissance legend, Gwendolyn Brooks decided to end her relationship with powerful Harper &
Row publishers and gave her books to black-owned Broadside in Detroit and Haki Madhubuti’s (Don
L. Lee) Third World Press in Chicago. Hoyt Fuller also renamed his Johnson Publishing
Company’s Negro Digest magazine Black World and Margaret and Charles Burroughs renamed their
Ebony Museum of Negro History and Art the DuSable Museum of African American History. OBAC
also started its own literary journal Nommo, while Val Gray Ward’s Kuumba Players offered a new
black performance aesthetic blending improvisation and audience involvement.
Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam (NOI) had preached a unique Islamic theology of black racial
pride, bodily discipline, and economic self-determination in Chicago since the 1930s. But in the late
60s, the NOI’s Muhammad Speaks newspaper gave young, talented, non-Muslim writers, like Leon
Forrest and radio veteran Richard Durham, the chance to write stories not covered in other white or
black run papers. They reported on everything from the Cicero march and the founding of the AAPL,
to political corruption within the Democratic political machine. The combined force of Black Power and
Black Arts offered a general critique of white supremacy but, in Chicago, that included a continued
challenge to Daley’s supreme authority. Hampton’s “Rainbow Coalition” would have a second life.
Rainbow Coalition Revived
Mayor Daley’s unexpected death in 1976 instigated a mad struggle to seize municipal control of
Chicago. Illinois House Representative Harold Washington ran a failed campaign in the special
election to find a mayoral replacement. As a Roosevelt University student, Washington had helped
found the Chicago League of Voters in 1959, as part of a call for a Negro-controlled, political voice
independent of machine party politics. In the Illinois House, Washington ran up against Daley’s ire
when he supported the AAPL and ignored the “idiot cards” directing legislator’s appropriate votes on
every issue.
After his first mayoral defeat, Washington was reluctant to run again. But black residents felt betrayed
by Mayor Jane Byrne’s empty promises and also saw the rise of the New Republican Right and the
Reagan Revolution as a direct threat to black lives at the local level. Addie Wyatt’s Coalition of Black
Trade Unionists and Jackson’s renamed Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity), pointed
out the deafening silence around a domestic policy amidst urban economic inflation and rising
unemployment. When the Republican Party discussed “open shop” work sites, public service cuts,
county electoral districts, and “Empowerment zones” it all sounded like an attack on increasingly
multi-racial, working-class cities, to the benefit of largely white suburbs. These new political
arrangements ignited a call for mobilization amongst Chicago’s African Americans.
Washington’s 1983 run for mayor grew from a long standing, but transformed, African American
political and economic base powered to drive a progressive alliance. But Washington did not confine
his appeal to black Chicagoans; he revived the Hampton vision of a multi-racial, grassroots “Rainbow
Coalition,” led by black organizing. He brought together many factions to build a campaign
independent of the Democratic Party, to embrace diversity and rally around a broad vision of ending
political corruption. Democratic leaders endorsed Republican Bernard Epton’s openly racist campaign
and Harold Washington forged ahead to become Chicago’s first African American mayor.
The same Democrats in the City Council fought him at every turn. The epic political battles were
dubbed “Beirut on the Lake,” in light of the bloody civil war unsettling Lebanon at the time.[35] Still,
Washington’s anti-racist coalition managed to institute an ethics reform program, institute freedom of
information rules, build affordable housing, and his Affirmative Action policies opened up government
leadership positions to women and people of color. Washington’s reconstruction of machine party
politics mirrored the creation of an appropriately named “House” music culture, with its reclamation of
abandoned Chicago warehouses and the drum machine remixes of the city’s black gay youth. Hope
was in the air, even for the most marginal and black. Unfortunately, Washington suffered a massive
heart attack and died shortly after winning his second term in office.
Harold Washington’s legacy is vast, shaping the tone and some of the grassroots substance of Jesse
Jackson’s “Rainbow Coalition” presidential runs in 1984 and 1988. The excitement surrounding
Washington’s 1983 election also lured a young Barack Obama to work as a community organizer in
Chicago two years later. Obama’s U.S. Presidential victory rode the wave of Chicago’s progressive,
coalition-building legacy, but he went on to govern with a more conservative ethic of corporate
subsidies and black personal responsibility. Black Chicago has continued to struggle, first under the
new political machine of Daley’s son and now Obama’s former Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel.
The public schools are more segregated, violence at the hands of black youth and the police is at
record levels, and working-class African Americans sit on the margins of the city’s economic
development, while being disproportionately targeted by the dangerous sub-prime housing market.
Still, the history of African Americans in Chicago is one of building effective, independent institutions
that drive coalitions to effect change. This consistent story of powerful community building, of making
and re-making the black metropolis, will serve as a powerful archive of both pitfalls and possibilities
for Chicago’s black community builders to come.
Footnotes
[1] Carl Sandburg, “Chicago,” Poetry 3:6 (March 1914), 191. [OpenURL]
[2] E. Franklin Frazier, ‘Chicago: A Cross Section of Negro Life,” Opportunity (March 1929),
73 [OpenURL]
[3] Mecca quote comes from James Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the
Great Migration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, 4. On indifference, see, Richard
Wright, 12 Million Black Voices (1941). New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002, 99. [OpenURL]
[4] Quoted in James Grossman, “The White Man’s Union: The Great Migration and the Resonance of
Race and Class in Chicago, 1915-1932,” in Joe William Trotter ed. The Great Migration in Historical
Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class and Gender. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1991, 96. [OpenURL]
[5] See, Darlene Clark Hine. Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-construction of American History.
Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 40 [OpenURL]
[6] See Grossman Land of Hope, 127.
[7] See Park, “Education in its Relation to the Conflict and Fusion of Cultures: With Special Reference
to the Problems of the Immigrant, the Negro and Missions,” Publication of the American Sociological
Society XIII, (1918) reprinted in Park Race and Culture, Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 282. [OpenURL]
[8] See, Drake and Cayton Black Metropolis, 66 [OpenURL] and Claude McKay, “If We Must
Die,” The Liberator 2 (July 1919), 21. [OpenURL]
[9] See, “Building Ghettoes,” Chicago Defender (Oct 2, 1937), 16
[10] Earl Lewis. In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth Century Norfolk,
Virginia Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, 90 [OpenURL]
[11] “The Bohemia of Colored Folk,” Whip, August 15, 1919; “State Street ‘The Great White
Way,’” Chicago Defender, May 11, 1912; and “31st and State Streets,” Chicago Defender, February
12, 1910.
[12] Old Settler is a term that goes back to a Chicago club founded in 1902. However I’m using Drake
and Cayton’s more general idea that old settler refers to anyone “who lived in Chicago prior to the
First World War.” See, St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton.Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in
a Northern City. New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1945, 66-67 [OpenURL] and “History of Chicago Old
Settler Club, 1902-1923,” 4, pamphlet in Dunmore Collection, DuSable Museum.
[13] Quote from E. Franklin Frazier. The Negro Family in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1932, 112 [OpenURL]
[14] Michael Harris. The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban
Church. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, 128 [OpenURL]
[15] See “The Chicago Black Chamber of Commerce” pamphlet in the Vivian Harsh Collection at the
Carter G. Woodson Regional Branch, Chicago Public Library.
[16] See, Frank Taylor. Alberta Hunter: A Celebration in Blues. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987,
48 [OpenURL]
[17] Drake and Cayton. Black Metropolis, 738. [OpenURL]
[18] “Three Slain in Street Duel with Cops,” Defender (August 8, 1931): 1 and 3; “Chicago Police
Murder Three Unemployed Negro Workers,” The Liberator (August 8, 1931) 1 [OpenURL]; “Reds
Here Foment Rent Plot,” Chicago Daily Tribune (August 6, 1931), 1; and “Reds Riot; Three Slain by
Police,” Chicago Daily Tribune (August 4, 1931), 1;
[19] “Unemployed March on Chicago’s South Side,” Chicago Defender (August 14, 1931), 3 and Beth
Thompkins Bates. Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925-1945.
Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2001, 111-112. [OpenURL]
[20] “Building Ghettoes,” Chicago Defender (Oct 2, 1937), 16.
[21] Red Ross, “Black Americans and Italo-Ethiopian Relief, 1935-1936,” Ethiopia Observer 15, no. 2
(1972), 123. [OpenURL]
[22] Robin D.G. Kelley, “‘This Ain’t Ethiopia, But It’ll Do’: African Americans and the Spanish Civil
War,” in Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New York: The Free Press,
1994, 124. [OpenURL]
[23] Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” New Challenge 11 (1937), in Angelyn Mitchell
ed. Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem
Renaissance to the Present. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994: 97-106. [OpenURL]
[24] Jonathon Scott Holloway, Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph
Bunche, 1919-1941. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002, 128 [OpenURL]
[25] Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “The Great Arsenal of Democracy,” (Delivered December 20,
1940),http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fdrarsenalofdemocracy.html
[26] Horace Cayton, “Hitlerism,” Pittsburgh Courier (May 19, 1945).
[27] “Segregation—Incorporated,” Destination Freedom (transcript), August 28, 1949, 7. Richard
Durham Papers, Box 3, Vivian Harsh Collection, Chicago Public Library.
[28] See, Chicago Defender (May 7, 1927) and Drake and Cayton. Black Metropolis,184. [OpenURL]
[29] Beverly Moore, “In Chicago’s Beverly neighborhood, integration is no accident,” WBEZ 91.5
Chicago (March 26, 2014)http://www.wbez.org/series/curious-city/chicagos-beverly-neighborhoodintegration-no-accident-109922
[30] Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “Challenging Jim Crow Schools in
Chicago,” socialistworker.org (February 22, 2012)http://socialistworker.org/2012/02/22/jim-crowschools-in-chicago and Dionne Dans. Something Better for Our Children: Black Organizing in Chicago
Public Schools, 1963-1971. London: Routledge, 2003, 29. [OpenURL]
[31] Quoted from Beryl Satter. Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate
Transformed Chicago and Urban America. New York: Picador, 2010, 176 [OpenURL]
[32] “Shoot Arsonists: Daley,” Chicago Tribune (April 16, 1968), 1.
[33] Tera Agyepong, “In the Belly of the Beast: Black Policemen Combat Police Brutality in Chicago,
1968-1983,” The Journal of African American History 98:2 (Spring 2013), 254. [OpenURL]
[34] While discussed much earlier, a full application of the term “internal colonialism” is found in
Stokely Carmichael Charles Hamilton. Black Power. New York: Random House, 1967. [OpenURL]
[35] “Sneed and Lavin Inc.,” Chicago Tribune (August 7, 1984), 12
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© Adam Matthew Digital