Chicago is one of the most segregated yet diverse cities in America. Chicagoans typically don’t live, work or play together. Unlike many other major U.S. cities, no one race dominates. We are about equal parts black, white and Latino, each group clustered in various enclaves. Chicago is a city in which black people sue over segregation and discrimination, whether it concerns disparities in public schools or not being admitted into hot downtown spots. Some people shrug off segregation because they say racism and white supremacy will still exist. I concur. But segregation amplifies racial inequities. It’s deliberate, ugly and harmful. The legacy of segregation and its ongoing policies keep Chicago divided.
Our mayors have touted and promoted Chicago as a world-class city. The skyscrapers kissing the clouds, billion-dollar Millennium Park, Michelin-rated restaurants, pristine lake views, fabulous shopping, vibrant theater scene, downtown flower beds and stellar architecture tell one story.
Yet Chicago is compromised by the specter of segregation, which is often swept under the rug. We can’t honestly talk about problems such as violence and unemployment without addressing segregation. Throughout the twentieth century, black families faced white violence when they dared to move into white neighborhoods. Redlining, bad mortgages, racial steering and failed school policies led to the northern version of Jim Crow, all of which had a lasting effect. Today more than half of the black population in Chicago lives in only 20 of the city’s 77 communities.1
Early on, I learned that the terms “South Side” and “North Side” were shorthand for “black” and “white.” Before he became a South Side congressman, Jesse Jackson Jr. spoke to my public high school. He didn’t use explicit racial terms, but he told the assembly that he wanted his community to look like downtown and parts of the North Side. The audience cheered; the tacit racial dynamic of which Jackson spoke resonated with black South Side kids.
Still, the South Side is a magical place. It’s the heart of black America, with its miles upon miles of black middle-class neighborhoods and strong political and business legacies. In summertime Chi, the aroma of barbecue wafts from backyard grills and smoky rib joints onto the Dan Ryan Expressway. Chicago is a soulful city that gave us Sam Cooke and Common, Koko Taylor and Chaka Khan. Driving east on 79th Street toward Lake Michigan is a colorful trip: men sipping out of bottles on corners, vibrant businesses, bars, funeral homes, foreboding boarded-up structures, liquor stores, churches, Harold’s Chicken Shacks and sounds of house music dancing in the air. This sense of place is special. I would never want to erase black Chicago.
I found value growing up in my black Chatham neighborhood, and those experiences make me a proud South Side black girl. Identity is wonderful whether you’re South Side Irish, from Koreatown or from the largest Polish community outside of Poland. I wouldn’t move to Chinatown or Little Village, a Mexican and Mexican American area, because I would feel my presence to be disruptive. I love the Indian food on Devon Avenue, Vietnamese noodles on Broadway and Swedish bakeries in Andersonville. The cultural diversity tucked away in Chicago’s ethnic enclaves is worth celebrating. High-poverty black segregation is not.
And even though Harlem, Atlanta, Detroit and Washington, D.C., are home to prosperous black enclaves, it’s Chicago’s South Side that gave the country its first black president. Inspired by Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor, Barack Obama chose to move to Chicago so South Side politics could catapult him to the national scene. In native daughter Michelle Obama I see a woman a generation ahead of me who represents a legacy of high-achieving, confident South Side girls who deftly navigate white and black worlds.
Chicago’s diversity and segregation aren’t unique.
Nate Silver of the statistical website FiveThirtyEight has said that some of the nation’s most diverse cities are also the most segregated:
You can have a diverse city, but not diverse neighborhoods. Whereas Chicago’s citywide diversity index is 70 percent, seventh best out of the 100 most populous U.S. cities, its neighborhood diversity index is just 36 percent, which ranks 82nd. New York also has a big gap. Its citywide diversity index is 73 percent, fourth highest in the country, but its neighborhood diversity index is 47 percent, which ranks 49th. . . . Most cities east of the Rocky Mountains with substantial black populations are quite segregated. There’s not a lot to distinguish Baltimore from Cleveland, Memphis, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Philadelphia or St. Louis.
Sacramento is the most diverse city at the neighborhood level.2
Scholars at Brown University have documented residential segregation across the country. The average white person in metropolitan American cities lives in a 75 percent white neighborhood. Blacks and Hispanics live in neighborhoods with high minority representation. The Chicago metro area ranks number five in the top ten cities with the highest level of black–white segregation, behind Detroit, which claims the number one spot.3
In the Chicago region, segregation also exists because of people’s preferences. According to University of Illinois at Chicago scholar Maria Krysan, who participated in a 2012 discussion on race produced by WBEZ, “Race: Out Loud,” whites prefer no more than about 20 percent African Americans in their neighborhood while blacks prefer closer to a 50 percent split.
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In 2007, I took a job at WBEZ–Chicago Public Media as the South Side reporter set up in a one-woman storefront. It’s a dream job to tell the stories of my communities with the kind of nuance associated with public radio. In covering urban affairs and noticing disparities in my own neighborhood life, I always circled back to segregation as the common denominator. It was easy to connect the dots from housing to education to crime to food access: segregation is the culprit.
Black neighborhoods, regardless of income, fall prey to the perils of segregation. Retail redlining, the practice of businesses declining to come to black communities, is a nascent area of study, but a quick glance at black communities tells the story: businesses, despite high-earning blacks in many neighborhoods, apparently refuse to set up shop if too many African Americans live there. Research shows that this leads to billions of dollars in retail leakage: money doesn’t stay in the black community. The patterns of segregation leave black communities with joblessness, few grocery stores, boarded-up buildings and disinvestment. And higher murder counts. Economic development proves elusive. The only conclusion is that hypersegregated, poverty-stricken areas don’t get the resources that flood into more affluent neighborhoods.
Subprime lending and the foreclosure crisis undermined integration. During the housing bust, racial segregation grew. I don’t believe white people have to be the saviors of communities, but there’s no denying the disparities in the distribution of resources. Immigrants and white ethnics move out of their low-income neighborhoods with the assumption that another ethnic group will move in. The problem is that no other group wants to move into poor black neighborhoods. Well, except other blacks.
According to Princeton University sociologist Douglas Massey:
It’s not about black people wanting to live with white people. It’s about access to all the benefits and resources of American society. Inevitably benefits and resources are unevenly distributed around the metropolitan area. To access them, you have to move. And historically in the United States, poor groups have come in, for example, and they settle in lousy neighborhoods as they move up economic ladder and seek to move up the residential ladder.
African Americans have never been given those first few steps up the ladder because the residential mobility has been so constrained. People are coming around to seeing that as a critical issue.4
U.S. Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says that public acceptance of blacks is slow, and she contrasted the public acceptance of gays because of familiarity.
Once [gay] people began to say who they were, you found that it was your next-door neighbor or it could be your child, and we found people we admired. That understanding still doesn’t exist with race; you still have separation of neighborhoods, where the races are not mixed. It’s the familiarity with people who are gay that still doesn’t exist for race and will remain that way for a long time as long as where we live remains divided.5
America learned a long time ago that separate is not equal. Racial uprisings in U.S. cities in the late 1960s revealed what many blacks already knew: The country was moving toward two societies: one black, one white, separate and unequal.
According to the famous Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, better known as the 1968 Kerner Commission: “Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”6 Not much has changed since then.
That same year the Fair Housing Act was passed to open housing and prohibit discrimination in the private housing market. The act has fallen short because it doesn’t have enough teeth for enforcement. “The fundamental weakness of the 1968 Fair Housing Act was its reliance on individual efforts to combat a social problem that was systemic and institutional in nature. The resulting contest was inherently unequal, so that enforcement efforts were intrinsically flawed and structurally condemned to ineffectiveness,” wrote Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton in American Apartheid. The legislation assumed people knew when they had suffered discrimination. “Conditions in the ghetto have deteriorated markedly since the 1968 Fair Housing Act was passed, and almost every problem defined by the Kerner Commission has become worse.”7
Nikole Hannah-Jones, at the time a reporter for ProPublica, investigated how Democratic and Republican presidents over four decades declined to use billions of dollars in federal funds to fight segregation.8 Despite the Fair Housing Act, no real dent has been made in residential integration. Rarely was money withheld from communities for violation of the act.
The report the Kerner Commission produced continues to be relevant, and we see evidence of it in cities across the country. Black residents in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri, have taken to the streets not just to protest the deaths of Freddie Gray and Michael Brown at the hands of police. Those two locales have something in common with black Chicago communities and other black urban areas: state-sponsored segregation.
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The City of Big Shoulders. Hog Butcher for the World. Loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose. We Real Cool. And you say Chi City. The Jungle. Carl Sandburg, Nelson Algren, Gwendolyn Brooks, Kanye West and Upton Sinclair each imagined Chicago as their muse.
In 1871, the city famously burned in the Great Chicago Fire. Chicago bounced back, though, and grew bigger and better; the resilience of its residents a metaphor for the guts and moxie running throughout the Second City. Urban planner Daniel Burnham made no small plans when he developed the country’s first skyscraper in downtown Chicago or beautified the city with an expansive park system. We have no east side; instead the border is Lake Michigan—the Great Lake so vast that the shores on the other side are invisible. Our skyline is magnificent, mile after mile. The city on a grid is easy to navigate, but it’s massive—which is an asset as well as a deficit. Our wide geography perpetuates separation, physically and mentally.
Some people argue that segregation aids blacks economically. I’m not nostalgic for Jim Crow, the idea that segregation benefited blacks because of the misguided notion that we had our own and stuck together in intraracial harmony—we were “unified.” But those feel-good images casually dismiss the horrors of Jim Crow. I don’t think integration is the magic bullet either. But I ponder the future of Chicago given its acute segregation, which should be a relic of the city’s well-documented past.
“In some respects, Chicago has exacerbated the problem of segregation, but it’s important at the outset to note that this is really a national problem that goes to the roots of our country when it comes to race relations,” Robert Sampson, a social sciences professor at Harvard University, told me.9
Daily headlines on race, police, black bodies and white privilege barrage us. Black bodies are under attack and viewed as walking weapons. The Black Lives Matter movement boldly confronts white supremacy, police brutality and a racist criminal justice system. An urgent conversation on race brews in a cauldron of vexation: I think about race every day. I see race every day. I see that the conditions of black neighborhoods are often the product of intentional segregation. This isn’t a new topic, but it needs to be dissected and better understood, especially in the wake of protests in Ferguson, Baltimore and other cities faltering under the weight of segregation. A wider conversation about segregation seems to be happening in cities around the country. Ending segregation surely won’t end racism, but its dismantling will provide better outcomes for black people.
This book, written a century after the Great Migration to Chicago began, attempts to showcase a sliver of the South Side by shining a light on contemporary segregation that is informed by history. Even though Chicago’s black West Side wrestles with similar issues, I focus here only on the South Side.
This is also a story of northern racism.
Chapters 1 through 4 concentrate on housing policies in Chicago by explaining how we got to where we are and sharing my own experiences and those of my family. My parents bought a house in a black neighborhood, as did my Great Migration–era grandparents. I bought into the American Dream of home ownership in a black neighborhood and found the stakes are higher and the returns are lower. Black middle-class neighborhoods continue to be vulnerable to crime and bad banking policies. For poor black families, the vertical segregation of Chicago’s notorious high-rise public housing developments, once the world’s largest, has been demolished in favor of horizontal segregation. Chapter 5 examines school segregation through the lens of my busing experience and details the lack of political will to truly integrate Chicago public schools.
Segregation is typically studied through housing patterns and education. The rest of this book examines other ways segregation seeps into our consciousness and realms of our lives: food deserts, black politics and violence. Too often people argue that we have moved toward a class-based society; while race and class are linked, many policies and elements of inequity on the South Side are firmly rooted in race. Throughout, I repeatedly underscore the point of race over class.
As a post–civil rights generation baby, I, and many of my friends, wrestle with race in our fair city today. I love my Chicago. Though I’m polemic, I’m also prescriptive. I conclude the book with solutions from people who struggle with segregation in Chicago. Until we address segregation, racial inequities will prevail. A century of bad segregationist policies can’t be undone in a generation. The lingering effects drag out in black communities and very much inform how neighborhoods still are shaped today. This portrait of the South Side can be applied in many urban milieus across the country. Fair housing laws must be enforced. Integration needs to be of a piece with public education. Low-income and affordable housing should be dispersed throughout metropolitan regions. Members of the real estate industry need better training.
It’s all too easy to throw up my hands and accept the city, broken nose and all, for its designation as one of the most segregated places in the United States. Yet I know the city can treat its residents better. The City of Chicago sponsors the popular Summer Dance, where hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people turn out. Each week in downtown Grant Park a dance lesson is given—from flamenco to African to ballroom—and then it turns into a big DJ/live band party with a makeshift dance floor. In July 2011, the theme was “Soul Train.” Earlier that year the founder of that groundbreaking Chicago television show, Don Cornelius, died. What emerged during the July tribute could easily be characterized as one of the world’s largest Soul Train lines. The diversity, perhaps unremarkable in some other cities, stunned me. All races, homeless people, children, seniors waited their turn to do the robot, some 1970s moves or simply dance to the beat in the legendary Soul Train line. R&B music blared and the park swelled into a giant club scene that spilled out onto the sidewalks. As trite as this sounds, I was so proud of my city. Exuberance lingered in the air of that humid, sticky evening. As I headed back south that night, I couldn’t shake my buoyancy. I witnessed Chicagoans of all stripes communing festively. I imagined Nelson Algren’s quote about the City on the Make, “but never a lovely so real.”