Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Chicago & the Great Black Migration
From 1915 to 1960, hundreds of thousands of black Southerners poured
into Chicago, trying to escape segregation and seeking economic free-
dom and opportunity. The so-called “Great Black Migration” radically
transformed Chicago, both politically and culturally, from an Irish-run
city of recent European immigrants into one in which no group had a
majority and in which no politician—white or black—could ever take
the black vote for granted. Unfortunately, the sudden change gave rise
to many of the disparities that still plague the city, but it also promoted
an environment in which many black men and women could rise from
poverty to prominence.
From 1910 to 1920, Chicago's black population almost tripled, from
44,000 to 109,000; from 1920 to 1930, it more than doubled, to 234,000.
The Great Depression slowed the migration to a crawl, with 278,000
blacks residing here in 1940. But the boom resumed when World War II
revived the economy, causing the black population to skyrocket to
492,000 from 1940 to 1950. The postwar expansion and the decline of
Southern sharecropping caused the black population to nearly double
again, to 813,000, by 1960.
While jobs in the factories, steel mills, and stockyards paid much better
than those in the cotton fields, Chicago was not the paradise that many
blacks envisioned. Segregation was almost as bad here as it was down
South, and most blacks were confined to a narrow “Black Belt” of over-
crowded apartment buildings on the South Side. But the new migrants
made the best of their situation, and for a time in the 1930s and 1940s,
the Black Belt—dubbed “Bronzeville” or the “Black Metropolis” by the
community's boosters—thrived as a cultural, musical, religious, and edu-
cational mecca, much as New York's Harlem did in the 1920s. As journal-
ist and Great Migration historian Nicholas Lemann writes in
The Promised
Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America,
“Chicago
was a city where a black person could be somebody.”
Some of the Southern migrants who made names for themselves in
Chicago included black separatist and Nation of Islam founder Elijah
Muhammed; Robert S. Abbott, publisher of the powerful
Chicago
Defender
newspaper, who launched a “Great Northern Drive” to bring
blacks to the city in 1917; Ida B. Wells, the crusading journalist who
headed an antilynching campaign; William Dawson, for many years the
only black congressman; New Orleans-born jazz pioneers Jelly Roll
and other courthouse staff accepting payments to make the charges disappear. In
all, more than 50 lawyers and 15 judges were sent to jail—and there was nobody
they could pay to make those charges go away.
Other scandals, wrapping up only one or two politicians at a time, might have
been smaller in scope but have had just as high a profile. Chicago-based Con-
gressmen Dan Rostenkowski and Mel Reynolds did hard time, respectively, for
skimming Congressional office funds and for having sex with a 15-year-old
