Black Belt (region of Chicago)
Encyclopedia
Slavery
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...
and freedmen
Freedman
A freedman is a former slave who has been released from slavery, usually by legal means. Historically, slaves became freedmen either by manumission or emancipation ....
established the city’s first black community in the 1840s. By the late 19th c., the first black had been elected to office.
The Great Migrations
Great Migration (African American)
The Great Migration was the movement of 6 million blacks out of the Southern United States to the Northeast, Midwest, and West from 1910 to 1970. Some historians differentiate between a Great Migration , numbering about 1.6 million migrants, and a Second Great Migration , in which 5 million or more...
from 1910 to 1960 brought hundreds of thousands of blacks from the South
South
South is a noun, adjective, or adverb indicating direction or geography.South is one of the four cardinal directions or compass points. It is the opposite of north and is perpendicular to east and west.By convention, the bottom side of a map is south....
to Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
, where they became an urban population. They created churches, community organizations, important businesses, and great music and literature. African Americans of all classes built community on the South Side of Chicago for decades before the Civil Rights Movement
Civil rights movement
The civil rights movement was a worldwide political movement for equality before the law occurring between approximately 1950 and 1980. In many situations it took the form of campaigns of civil resistance aimed at achieving change by nonviolent forms of resistance. In some situations it was...
. Their goal was to build a community where blacks could pursue life with the same rights as whites.
Segregation
Especially after the Civil WarAmerican Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
, 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 the 1920s, however, homeowners in the state became pioneers in using racially restrictive housing covenants
Restrictive covenant
A restrictive covenant is a type of real covenant, a legal obligation imposed in a deed by the seller upon the buyer of real estate to do or not to do something. Such restrictions frequently "run with the land" and are enforceable on subsequent buyers of the property...
, which state courts honored. The large black population in Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
(40,000 in 1910, and 278,000 in 1940) faced some of the same discrimination in Chicago 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 groups of people 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 was still receiving tens 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
Housing Segregation
Housing Segregation is the practice of denying African American or other minority groups equal access to housing through the process of misinformation, denial of realty and financing services, and racial steering. Misinformation can take the form of realtors or landlords not giving African American...
had been used, 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, PTAs, 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
Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...
in Shelley v. Kraemer
Shelley v. Kraemer
Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 , is a United States Supreme Court case which held that courts could not enforce racial covenants on real estate.-Facts of the case:...
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 black families, thus maintaining residential segregation
Residential Segregation
Residential segregation is the physical separation of cultural groups based on residence and housing, or a form of segregation that "sorts population groups into various neighborhood contexts and shapes the living environment at the neighborhood level."...
. European immigrants and their descendants competed with African Americans for limited affordable housing.
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 newer, most expensive housing, as they could afford it. After WWII, the early white residents (many Irish immigrants and their descendants) on the South Side
South Side (Chicago)
The South Side is a major part of the City of Chicago, which is located in Cook County, Illinois, United States. Much of it has evolved from the city's incorporation of independent townships, such as Hyde Park Township which voted along with several other townships to be annexed in the June 29,...
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. The Black Belt was formed.
The Great Migration
Boll weevil
The boll weevil is a beetle measuring an average length of six millimeters, which feeds on cotton buds and flowers. Thought to be native to Central America, it migrated into the United States from Mexico in the late 19th century and had infested all U.S. cotton-growing areas by the 1920s,...
infestation ruined much of the cotton industry in the early 20th century. 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
Steel
Steel is an alloy that consists mostly of iron and has a carbon content between 0.2% and 2.1% by weight, depending on the grade. Carbon is the most common alloying material for iron, but various other alloying elements are used, such as manganese, chromium, vanadium, and tungsten...
industries. Between 1915 and 1960, hundreds of thousands of black southerners migrated to Chicago to escape violence and segregation, and to seek economic freedom
Economic freedom
Economic freedom is a term used in economic and policy debates. As with freedom generally, there are various definitions, but no universally accepted concept of 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
Great Migration (African American)
The Great Migration was the movement of 6 million blacks out of the Southern United States to the Northeast, Midwest, and West from 1910 to 1970. Some historians differentiate between a Great Migration , numbering about 1.6 million migrants, and a Second Great Migration , in which 5 million or more...
radically transformed Chicago, both politically and culturally.
From 1910-1940, 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, black 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
Chicago Defender
The Chicago Defender is a Chicago based newspaper founded in 1905 by an African American for primarily African American readers.In just three years from 1919–1922 the Defender also attracted the writing talents of Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks....
. 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.
Ethnic Irish were heavily implicated in the gang violence and the rioting that erupted in 1919. They had been the most established ethnic group and defended their power and territory in the South Side against newcomers: both other ethnic whites and southern blacks. “Chicago was a focal point of the great migration and the racial violence that came in its wake.” 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
Pullman porters
Pullman porters were men hired by George Pullman to work on the railroads as porters on sleeping cars. Starting shortly after the American Civil War, George Pullman sought out former slaves to work on his sleeper cars.-History:...
would drop them off in Black towns. “Chicago was the most accessible northern city for African Americans in Mississippi, Louisiana, 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.”
Housing
Between 1900 and 1910, the African-American population rose rapidly in Chicago. White hostility and population growth combined to create the ghetto on the South Side. Nearby were areas dominated by ethnic Irish, who were especially territorial in defending against incursions into their areas by any other groups. Most of this large population was composed of migrants. In 1910 more than 75 percent of blacks lived in predominantly black sections of the city. The eight or nine neighborhoods that had been set as areas of black settlement in 1900 remained the core of the Chicago African-American community. The Black Belt slowly expanded to accommodate the growing population. As the population grew, African Americans became more confined to a delineated area, instead of spreading throughout the city. When blacks moved into mixed neighborhoods, ethnic white hostility grew. After fighting over the area, often whites left the area to be dominated by blacks. This is one of the reasons the black belt region started.The Black Belt of Chicago was the chain of neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
where three-quarters of the city's African American
African American
African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...
population lived by the mid-20th century. The Black Belt was an area of aging, dilapidated housing that stretched 30 blocks along State Street
State Street (Chicago)
State Street is a large south-north street in Chicago, Illinois, USA and its south suburbs. It begins on the Near North Side at North Avenue. For much of its course, it lies between Wabash Avenue on the east and Dearborn Street/Lafayette Avenue on the west...
on the South Side. It was rarely more than seven blocks wide. The South Side black belt expanded in only two directions in the twentieth century - south and east. The South Side's "black belt" also contained zones related to economic status. The poorest blacks lived in the northernmost, oldest section of the black belt, while the elite resided in the southernmost section. In the mid-1900s, blacks began slowly moving up to better positions in the work force. During this time, Chicago was the capital of Black America. Many African Americans who moved to the Black Belt area of Chicago were from the Black Belt in the Southeastern region of the United States
Black Belt (U.S. region)
The Black Belt is a region of the Southern United States. Although the term originally described the prairies and dark soil of central Alabama and northeast Mississippi, it has long been used to describe a broad agricultural region in the American South characterized by a history of plantation...
. Discrimination played a big role in the lives of blacks. They often struggled to find decent housing.
Immigration to Chicago was another pressure of overcrowding, as primarily lower-class newcomers from rural Europe also sought cheap housing and working class jobs. More and more people tried to fit into converted "kitchenette
Kitchenette
A kitchenette is a small cooking area.In motel and hotel rooms, small apartments, college dormitories, or office buildings a kitchenette usually consists of a small refrigerator, a microwave oven or hotplate, and, less frequently, a sink...
" and basement apartments. Living conditions in the Black Belt resembled conditions in the West Side ghetto or in the stockyards district. Although there were decent homes in the Negro sections, the core of the Black Belt was a slum. A 1934 census estimated that black households contained 6.8 people on average, whereas white households contained 4.7. Many blacks lived in apartments that lacked plumbing, with only one bathroom for each floor. With the buildings so overcrowded, building inspections and garbage collection were below the minimum mandatory requirements for healthy sanitation. This unhealthiness increased the threat of disease. From 1940-1960, the infant death rate in the Black Belt was 16% higher than the rest of the city.
Crime in African-American neighborhoods was a low priority to the police. Associated with problems of poverty and southern culture, rates of violence and homicide were high. Some women resorted to prostitution to survive. Both low life and middle class strivers were concentrated in a small area.
In 1946, the Chicago Housing Authority
Chicago Housing Authority
The Chicago Housing Authority is a municipal corporation established by the State of Illinois in 1937 with jurisdiction for the administrative oversight of public housing within the City of Chicago...
(CHA) tried to ease the pressure in the overcrowded ghettos and proposed to put public housing sites in less congested areas in the city. The white residents did not take to this very well, so city politicians forced the CHA to keep the status quo
Status quo
Statu quo, a commonly used form of the original Latin "statu quo" – literally "the state in which" – is a Latin term meaning the current or existing state of affairs. To maintain the status quo is to keep the things the way they presently are...
and develop high rise projects in the Black Belt and on the West Side. Some of these became notorious failures. As industrial restructuring in the 1950s and later led to massive job losses, residents changed from working class families to poor families on welfare.
Culture
Between 1916 and 1920, almost 50,000 Black Southerners moved to Chicago, which profoundly shaped the city's development. Growth increased even more rapidly after 1940. In particular, the new citizens caused the growth of local churches, businesses and community organizations. A new musical culture arose, fed by all the traditions along the Mississippi River. The population continued to increase with new migrants, with the most arriving after 1940.The black arts community in Chicago was especially vibrant. The 1920s were the height of the Jazz Age
Jazz Age
The Jazz Age was a movement that took place during the 1920s or the Roaring Twenties from which jazz music and dance emerged. The movement came about with the introduction of mainstream radio and the end of the war. This era ended in the 1930s with the beginning of The Great Depression but has...
, but music continued as the heart of the community for decades. Nationally renowned musicians rose within the Chicago world. Along the Stroll, a bright-light district on State Street
State Street (Chicago)
State Street is a large south-north street in Chicago, Illinois, USA and its south suburbs. It begins on the Near North Side at North Avenue. For much of its course, it lies between Wabash Avenue on the east and Dearborn Street/Lafayette Avenue on the west...
, jazz greats like Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong , nicknamed Satchmo or Pops, was an American jazz trumpeter and singer from New Orleans, Louisiana....
headlined at nightspots including the Delux Café.
Black Chicagoans' literary creation from 1925 to 1950 was also prolific, and rivaled that of the Harlem Renaissance
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke...
. Prominent writers included Richard Wright
Richard Wright (author)
Richard Nathaniel Wright was an African-American author of sometimes controversial novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially those involving the plight of African-Americans during the late 19th to mid 20th centuries...
, Willard Motley
Willard Motley
Willard Motley was an African-American writer, related to the noted artist Archibald Motley. The two were raised as brothers, although in actuality Archibald was Willard's uncle...
, William Attaway
William Attaway
William Alexander Attaway was an African American novelist, short story writer, essayist, songwriter, playwright, and screenwriter.-Early Life:...
, Frank Marshall Davis
Frank Marshall Davis
Frank Marshall Davis was an American journalist, poet, and political and labor movement activist.-Early life:...
, St. Clair Drake
St. Clair Drake
St. Clair Drake was an African-American sociologist and anthropologist.Drake was born in Suffolk, Virginia. Upon graduation from Hampton Institute in 1931, he became involved with The Society of Friends in the south...
, Horace R. Clayton
Horace R. Clayton
Horace R. Cayton, Jr. was a prominent American sociologist known for his studies of working class black Americans, particularly in mid-20th century Chicago, Illinois. Cayton was born in Seattle, Washington and moved to Chicago in 1929 to study sociology at the University of Chicago. He is the...
, and Margaret Walker
Margaret Walker
Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander was an African-American poet and writer. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, she wrote as Margaret Walker. One of her best-known poems is For My People.-Biography:...
. Chicago was home to writer and poet, Gwendolyn Brooks. Brooks is famous for her portrayals of Black working-class life in crowded tenements of Bronzeville
Bronzeville
Bronzeville may refer to:* Bronzeville, a community area of Douglas, Chicago* Bronzeville, a neighborhood in Milwaukee* King-Lincoln Bronzeville, a neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio...
. These writers expressed the changes and conflicts blacks found in urban life and the struggles of creating new worlds. In Chicago, black writers turned away from the folk traditions embraced by Harlem Renaissance
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke...
writers, instead adopting a grittier style of "literary naturalism" to depict life in the urban ghetto. The classic Black Metropolis, written by St. Clair Drake
St. Clair Drake
St. Clair Drake was an African-American sociologist and anthropologist.Drake was born in Suffolk, Virginia. Upon graduation from Hampton Institute in 1931, he became involved with The Society of Friends in the south...
and Horace R. Clayton
Horace R. Clayton
Horace R. Cayton, Jr. was a prominent American sociologist known for his studies of working class black Americans, particularly in mid-20th century Chicago, Illinois. Cayton was born in Seattle, Washington and moved to Chicago in 1929 to study sociology at the University of Chicago. He is the...
, exemplified the style of the Chicago writers. Today it remains the most detailed portrayal of Black Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s.
Business
Chicago’s black population developed a class structure, composed of a large number of domestic workers and other manual laborers, along with a small, but growing, contingent of middle-and-upper-class business and professional elites. In 1929, black Chicagoans gained access to city jobs, and expanded their professional class. Fighting job discrimination was a constant battle for African Americans in Chicago, as foremen in various companies restricted the advancement of black workers, which often kept them from earning higher wages. Then in the mid-20th century, blacks began slowly moving up to better positions in the work force.The migration expanded the market for African American business. "The most notable breakthrough in black business came in the insurance field." There were four major insurance companies founded in Chicago. Then, in the early twentieth century, service establishments took over. The African-American market on State Street during this time consisted of barber shops, restaurants, pool rooms, saloons, and beauty salons. African Americans used these trades to build their own communities. These shops gave the blacks a chance to establish their families, earn money, and become an active part of the community.
Achievements
In the early 20th century many prominent African Americans were Chicago residents, including Republican and later Democratic congressman William L. Dawson (America’s most powerful black politician) and boxing champion Joe LouisJoe Louis
Joseph Louis Barrow , better known as Joe Louis, was the world heavyweight boxing champion from 1937 to 1949. He is considered to be one of the greatest heavyweights of all time...
. America's most widely read black newspaper, the Chicago Defender
Chicago Defender
The Chicago Defender is a Chicago based newspaper founded in 1905 by an African American for primarily African American readers.In just three years from 1919–1922 the Defender also attracted the writing talents of Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks....
, was published there and circulated in the South as well.
After long efforts, in the late 1930s, workers organized across racial lines to form the United Meatpacking Workers of America. By then, the majority of workers in Chicago's plants were black, but they succeeded in creating an interracial organizing committee. It succeeded in organizing unions both in Chicago and Omaha, Nebraska
Omaha, Nebraska
Omaha is the largest city in the state of Nebraska, United States, and is the county seat of Douglas County. It is located in the Midwestern United States on the Missouri River, about 20 miles north of the mouth of the Platte River...
, the city with the second largest meatpacking industry. This union belonged to the Congress of Industrial Organizations
Congress of Industrial Organizations
The Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, proposed by John L. Lewis in 1932, was a federation of unions that organized workers in industrial unions in the United States and Canada from 1935 to 1955. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 required union leaders to swear that they were not...
(CIO), which was more progressive than the American Federation of Labor
American Federation of Labor
The American Federation of Labor was one of the first federations of labor unions in the United States. It was founded in 1886 by an alliance of craft unions disaffected from the Knights of Labor, a national labor association. Samuel Gompers was elected president of the Federation at its...
. They succeeded in lifting segregation of job positions. For a time, workers achieved living wages and other benefits, leading to blue collar middle-class life for decades. Some blacks were also able to move up the ranks to supervisory and management positions. The CIO also succeeded in organizing Chicago's steel industry.
Blacks began to win elective office in local and state government. The first blacks had been elected to office in Chicago in the late 19th century, decades before the Great Migrations.
See also
- Black Belt (U.S. region)Black Belt (U.S. region)The Black Belt is a region of the Southern United States. Although the term originally described the prairies and dark soil of central Alabama and northeast Mississippi, it has long been used to describe a broad agricultural region in the American South characterized by a history of plantation...
- Chicago Race Riot of 1919Chicago Race Riot of 1919The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 was a major racial conflict that began in Chicago, Illinois on July 27, 1919 and ended on August 3. During the riot, dozens died and hundreds were injured. It is considered the worst of the approximately 25 riots during the Red Summer of 1919, so named because of the...
- Great Migration (African American)Great Migration (African American)The Great Migration was the movement of 6 million blacks out of the Southern United States to the Northeast, Midwest, and West from 1910 to 1970. Some historians differentiate between a Great Migration , numbering about 1.6 million migrants, and a Second Great Migration , in which 5 million or more...
- Second Great Migration (African American)Second Great Migration (African American)The Second Great Migration was the migration of more than 5 million African Americans from the South to the North, Midwest and West. It took place from 1941, through World War II, and lasted until 1970. It was much larger and of a different character than the first Great Migration...
- History of ChicagoHistory of ChicagoThe history of Chicago, Illinois, has played an important role in the history of the United States. Americans founded the city in 1832. The Chicago area's recorded history begins with the arrival of French explorers, missionaries and fur traders in the late 17th century...
- Racial segregation in the United StatesRacial segregation in the United StatesRacial segregation in the United States, as a general term, included the racial segregation or hypersegregation of facilities, services, and opportunities such as housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation along racial lines...