DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Housing

Block: Black Metropolis

Time Period: 20th century

Issue: Racial segregation, restrictive covenants, redlining

Parties Involved:

Neighborhood councils

Chicago Housing Authority

National Association of Real Estate Boards

Chicago Real Estate Board

Home Owners' Loan Corporation

 

The Scoop:

 

At the beginning of the twentieth century Chicago was one of the fastest-growing cities. It was considered the gateway to freedom for thousands of black Americans after the Civil War. 

Since the early twentieth century Chicago’s neighborhoods had started to be racially segregated as African-Americans only allowed to live in certain areas of the city. By 1910, 78 percent of black Chicagoans lived in chain of neighborhoods on the South Side which became known as the Black Belt. The community resented that name and later on changed it to Bronzeville, which they felt was a better representation. During the first half of the twentieth century Bronzeville became home to countless artists, writers, and people who shaped this nation including Gwendolyn Brooks, Louis Armstrong, Muddy Waters, Ida B. Wells, Lorraine Hansberry, and Bessie Coleman, among others. 

World War II brought on a second wave of migration from the South as war production created new jobs. A general shortage of housing in Chicago made finding a home difficult for all Chicagoans, but African-Americans had the extra burden of being forced in the overcrowded and overpriced designated black neighborhoods. As the city’s black population tripled between 1940 and 1960 more and more people tried to fit into converted “kitchenette” and basement apartments. Philanthropists and private organizations developed subsidized housing for poor and low-income residents, and later on the Chicago Housing Authority created public housing projects. However,


Morning (in Bronzeville), 1946, Chicago, Wayne Miller.      they were all restricted to the areas                                                                                                                 that had already been designated as black neighborhoods. Attempts to move into adjoining white neighborhoods sparked violent reactions not only from local residents but from city politicians. From 1916 until 1948, racially restrictive covenants were used to keep Chicago's neighborhoods white. The Chicago Real Estate Board used legally binding covenants attached to parcels of land to prohibited African Americans from using, occupying, buying, leasing, or receiving property in certain parts of the city. Additionally, the National Association of Real Estate Exchanges, whose national headquarters was in Chicago, had created the ethical practices for realtors, including a commitment to not selling properties that would change the racial make-up of a community during the first half of the century. Adoption of the evaluations of the Home Owners' Loan Corporation by the Federal Housing Authority which instituted a redlining policy by developing color-coded maps of American cities that used racial criteria to categorize lending and insurance risks further incapacitated home mobility for African-Americans.

 

The Struggle:


While there were a range of uprisings against unfair housing policies in the 1930s and 1940s, they represented more individual efforts than a larger cohesive movement.  

  

By the mid-1960s the emergence of grassroots movement protesting school policies had laid the foundation for fair-housing protests as demands for racial justice. During the summer of 1965 the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations staged daily marches. By September the CCCO had joined forces with Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Together they launched the Chicago Freedom movement during the summer of 1966 to end housing discrimination in Chicago.  After a summer of open-housing campaigning Mayor Richard J. Daley had announced that the marches would stop and city leaders promised to promote fair housing, however, the Daley administration’s promises were never fulfilled.                                                             From Francis Miller's photo essay  about

                                                                         racial discrimination in the northern US, 1957, Chicago.

 

In the 1970s, mortgage lenders in Chicago were accused of racial bias, as mortgage redlining. Chicago's anti-redlining activists in Chicago spearheaded reform, leading the nation in identifying and addressing the redlining issue. Protests and lobbying led to the passage of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975 and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977.

 

 

Current View:

 

Once the racially restrictive covenants were declared unconstitutional African Americans settled in many of the neighborhoods that were once restricted, however, Chicago is still considered one of the most segregated cities. While Bronzeville is now divided into various communities that have increased in racial diversity it is still remembered as a landmark of African-American history. Bronzeville continues on its leading transformation, most recently as a mixed-income community.

 

 

 

 

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.