Jacob Lawrence, "The Migration Series, Panel No. 1", 1940-1941, The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation
After Reconstruction, segregationist principles prevailed against formerly enslaved Black Americans. The hardships endured in the South and the promise of employment and opportunity in Northern cities catalyzed the Great Migration. (Wilkerson, 2010)
"I was leaving without a qualm, without a single backwards glance...I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and perhaps, to bloom."
~ Richard Black, Author
"A group of Florida migrants on their way to Cranberry, New Jersey, to pick potatoes, pauses near Shawboro, North Carolina, in 1940", 1940, Library of Congress
"[My family] came for three principal reasons: to be able to fight back if [we] were attacked, to be able to vote, and to be able to have a better education for their children."
~ Timuel Black, Activist
"Map of Illinois Central [Railroad]", 1892, Library of Congress
"Cities Having a Negro Population of 10,000 or More in 1930, With Comparitive Figures for 1920 and 1910, and Percent Increase in White Population, 1910 to 1930", 1935, United States Bureau of the Census
As a result, from 1910 to 1940, thousands of black migrants arrived in Chicago, seeking a better life.
However, in Chicago, the dreams of prosperity were soon deferred as racial tensions escalated. The city's white residents violently resisted integration, culminating in bloody race riots. (Austen, 2018)
"Let's not fool ourselves, we are far from the Promised Land, both north and south."
~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
1919, Chicago Daily Tribune
John T. McCutcheon, "The color line has reached the north", 1919, Chicago Tribune
"We cannot escape our origins, however hard we might try, those origins contain the key—could we but find it—to all that we later become."
~ James Baldwin, Activist, 1955
"Bombs were thrown at the houses of Negroes who moved in, and of real estate men, white or Negro, who sold or rented property to the newcomers...The police had been entirely unsuccessful in finding those guilty, and were accused of making little effort to do so."
~ The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Government Report), 1922
City landlords restricted the migrants into crowded and underprivileged neighborhoods plagued with poverty and crime. They worked in laborious jobs and were treated as inferior citizens. (Wilkerson, 2010)
c. 1930s, Newberry Library
"We were assigned where to live...we were trapped and could not grow, could not get out."
~ Reverend Jesse Jackson
"Home Owners Loan Corporation Map of Chicago", c. 1930s, HOLC
The system of redlining was implemented by the government and the private sector to withold investment to segregated districts, stifling economic development.
"Every colored man who moves into Hyde Park [neighborhood of Chicago] knows that he is damaging his white neighbors' property. Therefore, he is making war on the white man."
~ Property Owners' Journal, 1919-1920
Restrictive covenants maintained stark residential disparities by isolating black tenants from affluence and sources of opportunity.
"Chicago's South Side 'Black Belt'", 1941, Library of Congress
"Types of Negro Housing", 1922, The Chicago Commission on Race Relations
"Houses, black with age and weathered with soot, lean precariously, and their uneven roof lines form crazy-quilt patterns against the sky. Chimneys tilt, eaves sag, rags stick out from broken windows, and doors without knobs stand open. There are few backyards. There can't be, when most of the lots contain two houses."
~ Cabrini Extension Area: Portrait of a Chicago Slum (Chicago Housing Authority Report)
"Practically no new building had been done in the city during [World War I], and it was a physical impossibility for a doubled Negro population to live in the space..."
~ The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Government Report), 1922
As the Great Migration progressed, a crisis unfolded in Chicago. Racist sentiment could no longer confine the growing black population. (Bowly, 1978) Segregation was triggering political and social instability, but racial barriers remained in place.
The debate over the fate of the destitute slums paved the way for public housing.