HISTORY
Why Is Chicago So Segregated?
BY JACQUELINE SERRATO
C
hicago is one of the most segregated cities in the United States. Over the last century, an array of political and cultural forces have created clear lines of division between racial groups. These demarcations were shaped by racist sentiments toward Black residents and non-whites and manifested through urban planning, housing policies, discriminatory banking, and other practices—all effectively confining people from different demographic groups to certain parts of the city. Despite the simplicity of Chicago’s famous grid system, designed for flat land and seemingly equitable on a map, residents of Chicago have never been equally dispersed or had the same freedom of movement and belonging. From the beginning, Chicago’s demographic makeup was segregated by race and ethnicity along neighborhood boundaries and the physical features of the built and natural environment. Native American tribes—the Potawatomi, Odawa, Sauk, Ojibwe, Illinois, Kickapoo, Miami, Mascouten, Wea, Delaware, Winnebago, Menominee, and Mesquakie—were forced out of what is now Chicago by early French and British settlers. After Chicago’s incorporation by Yankees in 1837, European immigrants flocked to the city through the early 1900s; Irish, Jewish, Polish, German, Italian, Czech/Bohemian, Swedish, and Lithuanian immigrants among them. At one point, Chicago boasted the largest Irish population and the second-largest Polish population of any city in the world. In the early years of the twentieth century, Chicago was the fastest-growing city in the U.S. Many immigrants were fleeing poverty and war, with many others coming to Chicago in pursuit of economic prosperity. Chicago’s position as the hub of a vast railroad system enabled a bustling industrial economy that was teeming with job opportunities in its stockyards, factories, and steel mills. Later, this hotbed of activity attracted rural migrant workers from places such as Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the southern United States—from which racist discrimination and violence drove more 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
¬ FEBRUARY 24, 2022
AN APARTMENT FIRE AT STATEWAY GARDENS BEFORE IT WAS DEMOLISHED. PHOTO BY PATRICIA EVANS
than 500,000 Black Americans to Chicago. Maps of Chicago’s early ethnic composition show that immigrants and their descendants lived in clusters. A 1920s map by sociologist Frederic M. Thrasher placed the Polish and Bohemian enclaves throughout the entire West Side, including the Lower West Side near Halsted Street; Germans occupied the northern lakefront, with Jewish people settling north of Madison Street and also along the southern lakefront. A more detailed 1950s map showcases crowded clusters of Irish, Italian, and smaller ethnic groups establishing new communities across the city. Black residents did not enjoy the same geographic freedom. The first waves of Black migrants fleeing the Jim Crow South were relegated to a vertical strip of land near Lake Michigan. Up until the 1940s, Black residents were confined to this corridor, better known as the Black Belt, which ran along State Street roughly between Roosevelt Road (12th Street) and 79th Street. The growing Black population eventually formed settlements farther south and up north in isolated and undeveloped areas along the Kinzie rail lines, Roosevelt, and the North Branch of the Chicago River. These segregated communities maintained a tense coexistence until 1919, when racist white hostility bubbled over. The 1919 Race Riots, which were part of the racial violence seen across the country during a period known as the Red Summer, were provoked by an attempt to enforce segregation in the waters of Lake Michigan. At a beach near 29th Street, a white man began throwing rocks at Black boys who were swimming at a perceived whites-only beach, drowning seventeen-year-old Eugene Williams. Black communities protested, and the strife culminated in five days of violence that left thirty-eight dead—twentythree Black and fifteen white Chicagoans. Another 537 were injured, more than half of whom were Black.
