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 social and economic 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.
Between 1910 and 1920 Chicago's black population almost tripled,
going from 44,000 to 109,000; between 1920 and 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 between 1940 and 1950. The postwar expansion
and the decline of Southern sharecropping caused the black population
to nearly double again, to 813,000, by 1960.
Although 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 overcrowded 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 Metrop-
olis” by the community's boosters—thrived as a cultural, musical, reli-
gious, and educational mecca, 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 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 Mor-
ton, King Oliver, and Louis Armstrong;
Native Son
author Richard
Wright; John H. Johnson, publisher of
Ebony
and
Jet
magazines and
one of Chicago's wealthiest residents; blues musicians Willie Dixon,
5 Lincoln Park
Chicago's most popular residential neighborhood is fashionable Lincoln Park.
Stretching from North Avenue to Diversey Parkway, it's bordered on the east by
the huge park of the same name, which is home to two major museums and one
