The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot by The Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Photo-about 1919.
Like most major cities in twentieth-century America, Chicago was rigidly segregated. African Americans were clustered primarily in Chicago’s Near West Side and in the South Side’s Black Belt, a strip of land that stretched from about Twenty-Eighth to Seventieth Street in 1940 and inexorably expanded as blacks flocked to the city.
Chicago’s black population had been burgeoning in these two neighborhoods ever since the beginning of the Great Migration, when vast numbers of southern blacks moved to northern states and California, starting near the end of World War I and gaining steam in a second wave after World War II. In the 1940s and ’50s, three million blacks fled north7 from the daily degradations and abuses of the Jim Crow South. Hundreds of thousands headed to Chicago, where the black population nearly tripled from almost 278,000 in 1940 to more than 812,600 in 1960.8
Like my parents, many whites remained unaware that this massive population shift was underway—or the reasons behind it. They just knew they didn’t want African Americans moving into their white neighborhoods.
Most whites were certain that blacks brought decay and dilapidation into every community they entered. When I was young, we sometimes drove through African American neighborhoods, on our way elsewhere, and witnessed blight firsthand: sagging porches and dirty windows; no grass, only twisting weeds in dusty front yards; ill-clad little children playing in the street with no evidence of nearby adults.
A ferocious white backlash erupted when blacks moved into an all-white area.
In July of 1953, a black couple purchased a home in all-white South Deering, on Chicago’s South Side. For months, white crowds protested and rioted, hurling bricks, shooting off pistols, and attacking and injuring black passers-by. One of the picketers proclaimed to a CBS reporter that she didn’t want blacks in her community because “every place they’ve taken over, they’ve turned into a slum.”9
Whites were certain blacks would devastate their communities—and alongside that, would destroy whites’ greatest investment: the value of their homes. In her epic book about the Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson writes:
It was an article of faith among many people in Chicago and other big cities that the arrival of colored people in an all-white neighborhood automatically lowered property values. That economic fear was helping propel the violent defense of white neighborhoods.
The fears were not unfounded, but often not for the reasons white residents were led to believe.10
Years later, I learned that the real culprits behind the decrepitude and the lowering value of white homes were the policies of the federal government, in alliance with the real-estate and mortgage sectors. In the 1930s, the newly created Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), along with the Federal Housing Administration and other government agencies, began ranking communities to assess their creditworthiness, from A (green), the highest, through D (red), the lowest.11
“If a neighborhood had black residents, it was marked as D, or red, no matter what their social class or how small a percentage of the population they made up. These neighborhoods’ properties were appraised as worthless or likely to decline in value. In short, D areas were ‘redlined’ or marked as locations in which no loans should be made for either purchasing or upgrading properties.”12
The FHA supported these biases. It relied on color-coded maps to determine “the present and likely future location of African Americans and used them to determine which neighborhoods would be denied mortgage insurance.”13 FHA insurance was typically denied to buildings in these redlined areas. Without mortgage availability, whites couldn’t sell their homes, except to blockbusters, unscrupulous real-estate agents who used race-baiting to scare whites into selling fast and cheap for cash. The blockbusters then sold the property to African Americans at sometimes two to three times the value of the building. Homes to blacks in the redlined areas were usually sold “on contract,” meaning the deed to the property remained with the seller, who could repossess the home after even one missed payment.
White families like ours didn’t consider the rampant employment discrimination that reduced blacks’ incomes, meaning most could afford only older properties, already in disrepair when purchased. Little money remained for upkeep.14 With the husband and wife often both working to pay off their contract, and no loans available, neither the time nor the money existed for repairs.
Then there was the insidious role segregation itself played in the decay whites observed. The thirty thousand African Americans arriving in Chicago each year during the 1950s15 were forced into the limited housing stock of strictly delineated black neighborhoods in the Black Belt and Near West Side. Toilets broke. Closets were turned into makeshift kitchens. With so many people crammed into inadequate housing, buildings and community infrastructure crumbled under the strain.
But most whites never made the connection. White homeowners judged what they observed, placing blame for run-down homes and lowered property values in racially changed neighborhoods squarely on the new residents. Consequently, white homeowners believed they had a strong economic incentive to keep blacks out.