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. 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 where three-quarters of the city's African-American population lived by the mid-20th century. The black belt was an area that stretched 30 blocks along
State Street on the South Side and was rarely more than seven blocks wide. In the mid-20th century, as African Americans across the United States struggled against the economic confines created by segregation, black residents within the black belt sought to create more economic opportunity in their community through the encouragement of local black businesses and entrepreneurs. Many blacks lived in apartments that lacked plumbing, with only one bathroom for each floor.
Children The demographics of the city were changing in the early 20th century as black southern families migrated out of the south, but while cities like Chicago empathized with the condition of impoverished white children, black children were mostly excluded from the private and religious institutions that provided homes for such children. Those that did take in black dependent children were overcrowded and underfunded because of
institutional racism. Between 1899 and 1945 many of the city's black children found themselves in the juvenile court system. The
1899 Juvenile Court Act, supported by
Progressive reformers, created a class of dependants for orphans and other children lacking "proper parental care or guardianship" but the court's designations of "delinquency" and "dependency" were racialized so black children were far more likely to be labeled as delinquents.
Culture Between 1916 and 1920, almost 50,000 black Southerners moved to Chicago, The 1920s were the height of the
Jazz Age, 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, jazz greats like
Louis Armstrong,
Duke Ellington,
Cab Calloway,
Bessie Smith and
Ethel Waters headlined at nightspots including the Deluxe Cafe. The literary creation of Black Chicago residents from 1925 to 1950 was also prolific, and the city's
Black Renaissance rivaled that of the
Harlem Renaissance. Prominent writers included
Richard Wright (author of
Native Son),
Willard Motley,
William Attaway,
Frank Marshall Davis,
St. Clair Drake,
Horace R. Cayton, Jr., and
Margaret Walker. Chicago was home to writer and poet
Gwendolyn Brooks, known for her portrayals of Black working-class life in crowded tenements of
Bronzeville.
Lorraine Hansberry channeled the experience of her family's attempt to move into a racially-restricted neighborhood on the city's South Side, as well as the broader conditions in working-class Black Chicago, into the renowned play
A Raisin in the Sun - the first play written by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway. 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 writers, instead adopting a grittier, uncompromising style of "literary naturalism" to depict life in the urban ghetto. Furthermore, as compared with the Harlem Renaissance, the Chicago Black Renaissance blossomed without the involvement of well-known intellectuals such as W.E.B Du Bois and without the oftentimes heavy-handed role played by White entrepreneurs and benefactors. In that sense, the Chicago Black Renaissance was substantially more public-facing and approachable to the working class. Indeed, several artists from this area were significantly influenced by Marxist principles and infused their works with a sense of the class-consciousness that the Harlem Renaissance lacked. The classic
Black Metropolis, written by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Jr., exemplified the style of the Chicago writers. Today it remains the most detailed portrayal of Black Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s. From 2008 to the present, the
West Side Historical Society under the guidance of Rickie P. Brown Sr. began to document the rich history of the
West Side of Chicago. Their research provided proof of the Austin community having the largest population of Blacks in the city of Chicago. This proved that the largest population of Blacks are on its west side, when factoring in the Near West Side, North Lawndale, West Humboldt Park, Garfield Park, and Austin communities as well. Their efforts to build a museum on the west side and continuing to bring awareness to
Juneteenth as a national holiday was rewarded with a proclamation in 2011 by Governor Pat Quinn.
Elizabeth Todd-Breland argues that Black education reformers in Chicago developed community-driven strategies from the 1960s onward to address systemic inequities, but these efforts collided with neoliberal reforms that prioritized privatization and corporate models, exposing enduring tensions between racial justice and market-based policies.
Black Christianity Black churches in Chicago have had an outsized influence on Black American spirituality and worship nationally.
Thomas Dorsey assembled the first
gospel music choir, fusing traditional worship with "bluesy" rhythms, at Chicago's
Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church in 1931. The new genre quickly took on throughout Chicago's South Side (and Black America more broadly), helping to establish the careers of legendary singers such as
Mahalia Jackson,
Sallie Martin, and
Dinah Washington, all of whom began singing gospel in Chicago, During and following the
Civil Rights movement, Black churches further served as organizing hubs for fair housing campaigns, school desegregation efforts, and voter registration drives. A background in ministry helped launch the political career of Reverend
Jesse Jackson, who worked closely with
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to establish a frontline office for the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Chicago. Under his leadership, the SCLC brought
Operation Breadbasket to Chicago in 1966, targeting dairy businesses, bottlers, and supermarket chains with boycotts with the aim of creating jobs for African-Americans. Jackson later launched his own economic empowerment organization called Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity), now the
Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, which continues to focus on grassroots advocacy today.
Nation of Islam In the 1930s, the
Nation of Islam (NOI) moved its headquarters to Chicago from Detroit. From their center on the South Side,
Elijah Muhammad and his wife,
Clara Muhammad, organized a new religious movement among Black Americans. Muhammad's message appealed to Black Chicagoans of the 1930s and 1940s who were disillusioned with traditional Protestantism and energized by his claim that African Americans would soon be restored to freedom. In 1960,
Malcolm X, the organization's national spokesperson, founded the newspaper
Mr. Muhammad Speaks, which for a while distributed more than 600,000 copies nationwide.
Black Hebrew Israelites Chicago was historically home to a major organization within the
Black Hebrew Israelite religious movement, which holds that African Americans are the direct descendants of the
Hebrews in the
Hebrew Bible. The
African Hebrew Israelites in Israel originated in Chicago during the 1960s and are widely known for having moved from the United States to Israel (particularly
Dimona) in the 1960s-1970s. In 1981, the initial group of migrants to Israel numbered around 1,200 to 1,500, with the majority of members arriving on tourist visas and remaining after their permits expired. Black Hebrew Israelites maintain a visible presence in Chicago, though more radical portions of the movement have been designated as a hate group by the SPLC for anti-Semitic, anti-white, and anti-LGBTQ views.
Business Chicago's Black entrepreneurial history stretches back to the city's origins.
Jean Baptiste Point du Sable (c. 1745–1818), widely regarded as Chicago's first non-Native settler, was also its first entrepreneur, establishing a prosperous trading settlement on the north bank of the Chicago River that supplied goods across the Great Lakes region. In the nineteenth century,
John Jones arrived in Chicago in 1845 as a self-taught tailor and built one of the city's most successful businesses, becoming one of the wealthiest African Americans in the country. Jones also led the campaign to repeal Illinois's restrictive Black Codes in 1865 and in 1871 became the first African American elected to public office in the state, winning a seat on the
Cook County Board of Commissioners.
Anthony Overton relocated his Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Company from Kansas City to Chicago in 1911 and expanded it into a diversified enterprise headquartered in his purpose-built South State Street building, encompassing cosmetics, banking, insurance, and newspaper publishing. He became the first African American to head a major business conglomerate and, in 1927, the first businessman to receive the
Spingarn Medal from the
NAACP. 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. Binga would go on to spearhead an integration campaign on the South Side that put him at odds with the White establishment, with some even attributing the lethal damage of the
1919 race riots in part to the radical aversion to his efforts. ==Politics==