Chicago, Illinois

By: Jim Mendelsohn

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Chicago, Illinois

Key destination for African Americans traveling from the South to the North during the Great Migration, preeminent location for jazz artists and jazz music in early 1920s, and once known as the most residentially segregated city in the United States.

According to Potawatomi Indians in the early nineteenth century, “The first white man to settle at Chickagou was a Negro.” Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable, an Afro-French trader, began the settlement of Chicago in approximately 1790.

In only fifty years, as Chicago became an important center of commerce for the grain and livestock trades, a vital African American community developed along the banks of the Chicago River. Composed of fugitive slaves fleeing the South and a small number of free blacks, the community acted in defiance of the Illinois Black Code, which required all African Americans to carry a certificate of freedom and post a $1,000 bond. Together with white abolitionists, the black community vigorously protested against slavery, resettled more fugitive slaves from the South, and established important links on the Underground Railroad. By the outbreak of the Civil War (1861–1865), approximately 1,000 blacks lived in Chicago.

Between 1875 and 1893, as Chicago industrialized, the black population increased from 5,000 to 15,000, and the African American community developed its own neighborhood and institutions in the Black Belt, a three-block by fifteen-block area on the Near South Side of the city. Most African Americans were restricted from industrial and skilled labor jobs—unless used as strikebreakers. Nonetheless, a middle class and a small, well-educated elite class emerged as the African American community established businesses, churches, women's social clubs, dance halls, and gambling houses. In 1871 John Jones was elected county commissioner, the first black public official. In 1876 J. W. E. Thomas became the first black state representative from Chicago. The first African American newspaper, the Conservator, was founded in 1878. By the end of the century, the African American elite had begun to speak out forcefully against racial injustice. Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, the most outspoken member on the Afro-American Council, strongly attacked lynching and Booker T. Washington's conciliatory policies toward racial inequality.

Chicago's African American population increased dramatically between 1890 and 1920, when many African Americans moved North to find better jobs and to flee widespread racial violence. By 1910 the black population in Chicago reached 40,000 among 2 million inhabitants; by 1920 it was 80,000, and a second, smaller black neighborhood developed on the West Side. The community developed its own institutions, including a hospital, a training school for nurses, lodges, a bank, a Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) settlement house, and branches of the National Negro Business League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Federated Women's Clubs. In 1905 Robert Sengstacke Abbott founded the Chicago Defender newspaper. Passionate in its call for racial justice and equal rights, the newspaper nonetheless honored Booker T. Washington. In 1915 Oscar Stanton DePriest became Chicago's first black alderman.

Population of Chicago, 1840 to 2000

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Labor shortages during World War I (1914–1918) finally brought black workers into the industrial work force, especially in the meatpacking houses, railway car companies, and steel mills. As the black community expanded in size and wealth, white neighborhoods around the Black Belt tried to contain it through legal restrictions. In the workplace, many unions maintained segregated locals. During an economic crisis in the summer of 1919, a race riot broke out, characterized by mobs of young white men indiscriminately attacking African Americans in the Black Belt. Thirty-eight people died, 500 were injured, and 1,000 persons left homeless, the overwhelming majority of them black.

The prosperity of the 1920s produced a political and cultural renaissance comparable to that in Harlem, New York. Black politicians were elected to city-wide offices and the state legislature. In 1928 Republican Oscar De Priest became the first black elected to the U.S. House of Representatives since Reconstruction. In art, the painter Archibald Motley was nationally recognized for his paintings of city life. Richmond Barthé became well known for his paintings and sculpture of life in Haiti. Oscar Micheaux formed the Micheaux Film Corporation and produced pioneering movies about race.

The community also nurtured a prolific Jazz scene that included New Orleans expatriate Ferdinand Joseph “Jelly Roll” Morton in the immediate postwar years. In 1921, cornetist Joseph (“King”) Oliver also arrived from New Orleans, where his band fused a polyphonic style with the melodic traditions of Chicago's cabarets and dance halls. Louis (“Satchmo”) Armstrong developed his solo, improvisational style with Oliver and with his Hot Five Band, as did pianist Earl Kenneth (“Fatha”) Hines with Jimmy Noone's orchestra. They were often accompanied by vocalists Alberta Hunter and Ethel Waters.

In the Great Depression of the 1930s, African Americans suffered more severely from joblessness and poverty than any other group in Chicago. Grass-roots activism sparked support of black businesses and boycotts of those employers who did not hire black workers. But the overall political strength of the community lost out to a rising Democratic party machine. The New Deal, unionization, and World War II (1939–1945) eventually sparked a recovery that placed African Americans in union jobs and led to the founding of the Negro American Labor Council. While not legal, segregation remained a fact of life.

A new generation of writers and musicians developed between the Depression and the 1950s. Richard Wright, Willard Motley, Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks, and Margaret Walker conveyed, in stark and eloquent terms, their visions of urban black life and of an unrepentant racism in America. Beginning with Hudson “Tampa Red” Whitaker in 1928, Chicago developed a Blues tradition rooted in the acoustical style of the Mississippi Delta musicians; in the 1930s and 1940s, Chicago blues evolved under William Lee Conley (“Big Bill”) Broonzy into the amplified, hard-driving electric style identified with Howlin' Wolf, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, and Muddy Waters.

In the 1940s and 1950s, blacks once again migrated in enormous numbers from the South. The south side community tried to expand but met both legal and violent opposition. The Chicago Housing Authority responded by abandoning neighborhood and racial integration in favor of high-rise housing projects amidst the black community, earning Chicago a reputation as the most residentially segregated city in the United States. By 1962 civil rights groups formed the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) to integrate housing and schools. In 1966, CCCO and Martin Luther King, Jr. launched the Chicago Freedom Movement to push for open housing. Its demonstrations and marches produced only minimal results, but it was one of the first attempts to integrate Northern cities during the civil rights era. Jesse L. Jackson's Operation Breadbasket—aimed at improving employment in the black community—had more success, but the modest improvement from both efforts led to despair and ultimately to devastating riots in 1966 and 1968.

The black nationalist movement was one response to that devastation. The Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) was founded in 1967 and became an important institution in the Black Arts Movement. More militant, political elements of the black community, however, were forcefully crushed. On December 4, 1969, Chicago police raided the local offices of the Black Panther Party and shot to death chapter president Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. An independent commission called the dawn raid an act of “official violence,” and the episode came to symbolize for many the intense opposition to black political power.

In 1983 a coalition succeeded in electing Harold Washington the first black mayor of Chicago. Often undermined by a hostile city council, Washington began to improve conditions and unite the African American community when he died unexpectedly in 1987. His coalition soon dissolved into its constituent parts.

By the early 2000s blacks in Chicago, numbering about 1,600,000, were the largest single ethnic group in the city. Despite some improvements Chicago still ranked fourth among major U.S. cities in black-white segregation; unemployment, substandard schools, lack of housing, and high incarceration rates contributed to crisis-level conditions in some areas. At the same time, however, the city remains a center of both black culture and black entrepreneurship. Chicago, site of the country's first black insurance company, boasts black leadership in such businesses as banking, finance, hair and cosmetics products, advertising, and publishing. Black culture is celebrated in such institutions as the DuSable Museum, ETA Creative Arts Foundation, the Black Ensemble Theatre, and the Bronzeville Children's Museum.

See also Great Migration.

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