History of African Americans in Chicago
The history of African Americans in Chicago or Black Chicagoans dates back to Jean Baptiste Point du Sable's trading activities in the 1780s. Du Sable, the city's founder, was Haitian of African and French descent. Fugitive slaves and freedmen established the city's first Black community in the 1840s. By the late 19th century, the first black person had been elected to office.
The Great Migration from 1910 to 1970 brought hundreds of thousands of black Americans from the South to Chicago, where they became an urban population. Most Black migrants to Chicago came from Mississippi, Tennessee, and Louisiana, drawn in large part by opportunity in the meat-packing and manufacturing industries as well as ease of access to the city via the Illinois Central Railroad. There they created churches, community organizations, businesses, music, and literature. African Americans of all classes built a community on the South Side of Chicago for decades before the Civil Rights Movement, as well as on the West Side of Chicago. Residing in segregated communities, almost regardless of income, the black residents of Chicago aimed to create communities where they could survive, sustain themselves, and have the ability to determine for themselves their own course in the History of Chicago.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, African Americans accounted for 29% of the city's population, or approximately 800,000 people as of the 2020 census. As per 2023 Census estimates the metro area had just under 1.5 million residents claiming Black alone ancestry, making it the metropolitan area with the fourth-highest Black population after New York, Atlanta, and Washington DC.
After peaking in 1980, the Black population in Chicago is now shrinking, with commonly cited factors including the demolition of public housing, mass closures within the Chicago Public Schools system, health care and food deserts, as well as high unemployment rates. In contrast to the previous century where relatively narrower wage and unemployment gaps attracted Black residents, levels of racial inequality both within Chicago and in relation to other cities have increased for Black residents since the 1990s.
Most Blacks leaving Chicago and Cook County remain within the Chicago region, including in the surrounding collar counties, or in cities such as Hammond and Gary in neighboring Indiana. That said, many Black Chicagoans have also moved further to Southern cities such as Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio.
Chicago also has a foreign-born Black population. Many of the African immigrants in Chicago are from Ethiopia and Nigeria.
History
Beginnings
Jean Baptiste Point du Sable was a Haitian of French and African descent.Although du Sable's settlement was established in the 1780s, African Americans would only become established as a community in the 1840s, with the population reaching 1,000 by 1860. Much of this population consisted of escaped slaves from the Upper South. Following the end of Reconstruction in 1877, African Americans flowed from the Deep South into Chicago, raising the population from approximately 4,000 in 1870 to 15,000 in 1890.
In 1853, John A. Logan helped pass a law to prohibit all African Americans, including freedmen, from settling in the state. However, in 1865, the state repealed its "Black Laws" and became the first to ratify the 13th Amendment, partly due to the efforts of John and Mary Jones, a prominent and wealthy activist couple.
Especially after the Civil War, Illinois had some of the most progressive anti-discrimination legislation in the nation. School segregation was first outlawed in 1874, and segregation in public accommodations was first outlawed in 1885. In 1870, Illinois extended voting rights to African-American men for the first time, and in 1871, John Jones, a tailor and Underground Railroad station manager who successfully lobbied for the repeal of the state's black laws, became the first African-American elected official in the state, serving as a member of the Cook County Commission. By 1879, John W. E. Thomas of Chicago became the first African American elected to the Illinois General Assembly, beginning the longest uninterrupted run of African-American representation in any state legislature in U.S. history. After the Great Chicago Fire, Chicago mayor Joseph Medill appointed the city's first black fire company of nine men and the first black police officer.
Great Migration
Chicago was the "Promised Land" to Black Southerners. 500,000 African Americans moved to Chicago.As the 20th century began, southern states succeeded in passing new constitutions and laws that disfranchised most blacks and many poor Whites. Deprived of the right to vote, they could not sit on juries or run for office. They were subject to discriminatory laws passed by White legislators, including racial segregation of public facilities. Segregated education for black children and other services were consistently underfunded in a poor, agricultural economy. As White-dominated legislatures passed Jim Crow laws to re-establish white favorability and create more restrictions in public life, violence against blacks increased. In addition, the boll weevil infestation ruined much of the cotton industry. Voting with their feet, blacks started migrating out of the South to the North, where they could live more freely, get their children educated, and get new jobs.
Industry buildup for World War I pulled thousands of workers to the North, as did the rapid expansion of railroads, and the meatpacking and steel industries. Between 1915 and 1960, hundreds of thousands of black southerners migrated to Chicago to escape violence and segregation, and to seek economic freedom. They went from being a mostly rural population to one that was mostly urban. "The migration of African Americans from the rural south to the urban north became a mass movement." The Great Migration radically transformed Chicago, both politically and culturally.
From 1910 to 1940, most African Americans who migrated north were from rural areas. They had been chiefly sharecroppers and laborers, although some were landowners pushed out by the boll weevil disaster. After years of underfunding of public education for blacks in the South, they tended to be poorly educated, with relatively low skills to apply to urban jobs. Like the European rural immigrants, they had to rapidly adapt to a different urban culture. Many took advantage of better schooling in Chicago and their children learned quickly. After 1940, when the second larger wave of migration started, blacks migrants tended to be already urbanized, from southern cities and towns. They were the most ambitious, better educated with more urban skills to apply in their new homes.
The masses of new migrants arriving in the cities captured public attention. At one point in the 1940s, 3,000 African Americans were arriving every week in Chicago—stepping off the trains from the South and making their ways to neighborhoods they had learned about from friends and the Chicago Defender - at the time the nation's most influential Black weekly newspaper, with more than two thirds of its readership base located outside of Chicago. The Great Migration was charted and evaluated. Urban White northerners started to get worried, as their neighborhoods rapidly changed. At the same time, recent and older ethnic immigrants competed for jobs and housing with the new arrivals, especially on the South Side, where the steel and meatpacking industries had the most numerous working-class jobs.
With Chicago's industries steadily expanding, opportunities opened up for new migrants, including Southerners, to find work. The railroad and meatpacking industries recruited black workers. Chicago's African-American newspaper, the Chicago Defender, made the city well known to southerners. It sent bundles of papers south on the Illinois Central trains, and African-American Pullman Porters would drop them off in black towns. "Chicago was the most accessible northern city for African Americans in Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas." They took the trains north. "Then between 1916 and 1919, 50,000 Blacks came to crowd into the burgeoning black belt, to make new demands upon the institutional structure of the South Side."
1919 race riot
The Chicago race riot of 1919 was a violent racial conflict with White Americans against black Americans that began on the South Side on July 27 and ended on August 3, 1919. During the riot, 38 people died. Over the week, injuries attributed to the episodic confrontations stood at 537, with two thirds of the injured being black and one third White, and approximately 1,000 to 2,000, most of whom were black, lost their homes. Due to its sustained violence and widespread economic impact, it is considered the worst of the scores of riots and civil disturbances across the nation during the "Red Summer" of 1919, so named because of the racial and labor violence and fatalities.Segregation
The increasingly large black population in Chicago faced some of the same discrimination as they had in the South. It was hard for many blacks to find jobs and find decent places to live because of the competition for housing among different ethnic groups at a time when the city was expanding in population so dramatically. At the same time that blacks moved from the South in the Great Migration, Chicago had recently received hundreds of thousands of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The groups competed with each other for working-class wages.Though other techniques to maintain housing segregation had been used, such as redlining and exclusive zoning to single-family housing, by 1927 the political leaders of Chicago began to adopt racially restrictive covenants. The Chicago Real Estate Board promoted a racially restrictive covenant to YMCAs, churches, women's clubs, parent teacher associations, Kiwanis clubs, chambers of commerce and property owners' associations. At one point, as much as 80% of the city's area was included under restrictive covenants.
The Supreme Court of the United States in Shelley v. Kraemer ruled in 1948 that racially restrictive covenants were unconstitutional, but this did not quickly solve blacks' problems with finding adequate housing. Homeowners' associations discouraged members from selling to other families, thus maintaining residential segregation. European immigrants and their descendants competed with African Americans for limited affordable housing, and those who didn't get the house lived on the streets.
In a succession common to most cities, many middle and upper-class Whites were the first to move out of the city to new housing, aided by new commuter rail lines and the construction of new highway systems. Later arrivals, ethnic Whites and African-American families occupied the older housing behind them. The White residents who had been in the city longest were the ones most likely to move to the newer, most expensive housing, as they could afford it. After 1945, the early White residents on the South Side began to move away under pressure of new migrants and with newly expanding housing opportunities. African Americans continued to move into the area, which had become the black capital of the country. The South Side became predominantly Black, and the black belt was solidified.