Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
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Chicago & the Great Black Migration
From 1915 to 1960, hundreds of thousands of black S outherners poured into
Chicago, tr ying t o escape seg regation and seek ing ec onomic fr eedom and
opportunity. The so -called “Great Black M igration” radically transf ormed Chi-
cago, both politically and culturally , from an I rish-run city of recent European
immigrants into one in which no g roup had a majority and in which no politi-
cian—white or black —could ev er take the black v ote f or g ranted. Unf ortu-
nately, the sudden change ga ve rise t o man y of the social and ec onomic
disparities that still plague the cit y, but it also pr omoted an en vironment in
which many black men and women could rise from poverty to prominence.
Between 1910 and 1920, Chicago 's black population almost tripled , going
from 44,000 t o 109,000; bet ween 1920 and 1930, it mor e than doubled , t o
234,000. The Great Depression slowed the mig ration to a cra wl, with 278,000
blacks residing here in 1940. But the boom resumed when World War II revived
the economy, causing the black population t o skyrocket to 492,000 bet ween
1940 and 1950. The postwar expansion and the decline of Southern sharecrop-
ping caused the black population to nearly double again, to 813,000, by 1960.
Although jobs in the fac tories, steel mills, and st ockyards paid much bett er
than those in the c otton fields, Chicago was not the paradise that man y blacks
envisioned. Segregation was almost as bad here as it was down South, and most
blacks were confined to a narrow “Black Belt” of overcrowded apartment build-
ings on the S outh Side. But the new mig rants 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, musi-
cal, r eligious, and educational mec ca, much as New York's Harlem did in the
1920s. As journalist and Great Migration historian Nicholas Lemann writes in The
Promised Land: The Great Black M igration and Ho w It Changed America, “Chi-
cago 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; Rob-
ert S. Abbott, publisher of the po werful Chicago Def ender new spaper, who
launched a “Great Nor thern Drive” to bring blacks t o the cit y in 1917; Ida B .
Wells, the crusading journalist who headed an antilynching campaign; William
Dawson, for many years the only black c ongressman; New Orleans-born jazz
pioneers Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, and Louis Armstrong; Native Son author
Richard Wright; John H. Johnson, publisher of Ebon y and Jet magazines and
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cinema, Starbucks, restaurants, and shops. D irectly to the nor th is
Second City.
Walk
north up Wells Street. Small retail shops, florists, cafes, br ead stores, and more line the
street. When you reach the intersection with Lincoln Avenue, turn back and head south
down the opposite side of the str eet. C ross N orth Avenue going south. Kids will be
magnetically attracted to the color ful fish swimming ar ound the front windows of
Old
