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... s and whites became a major issue during the twentieth-century. Chicago soon became one of the most segregated cities in America. Though as more blacks started to move into Chicago, there were very few integrated neighborhoods.
The ghetto that existed expanded and turned into a second ghetto. It was during World War I that almost all of the migration of blacks took place in the city. This huge migration continued until the 1920 s when the Depression hit. When the Depression hit people slowly stopped moving into cities, specifically Chicago.
During the beginning of the twentieth-century fifty thousand black migrants came to Chicago to live. In order to keep white neighborhoods, the Chicago Real Estate Board started using deed restrictions and restrictive covenants. This led to African Americans being prohibited to rent or lease homes. Wendy Plotkin soon went to the U. S Supreme Court and told the nation that there should be no restrictions to live in a home. The Supreme Court soon ruled that this was illegal.
This did not stop some people from having African Americans move into their neighborhood, people found other means to keep them segregated. From 1940 to 1960, the areas white population fell from 102, 048 to 10, 792, whereas the number of black residents soared from 380 to 113, 827 (Bile's, 33). The landlords of some homes exploited black renters and buyers. The landlords of slum property would divide their apartment buildings into very small and over priced homes.
Many of the real estate companies would sell homes on contract; this is where people would pay a very low down payment but then have extremely high monthly payments. After World War II the government started giving to Chicago. The government was to have a massive public housing construction and start urban development. This program started to replace private dwellings with public housing and start giving the South Side a new look. Though these projects sounded like a good idea, it left many poor blacks without a home, which started creating the West Side ghetto. Most of this building and reconstruction started when Martin Kennelly was mayor.
Martin Kennelly completely agreed with segregation. He met with members of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) and found out that they started mainly working on building houses in white neighborhoods. In 1949, however, the state legislature passed a law requiring city council approval of public housing sites in cities with populations of more that five hundred thousand (Bile's: Race and Housing in Chicago, 31). Chicagoans soon started to find homes in white communities because they didnt want to live in the ghetto anymore.
When blacks tried to move into white communities, they were met with mobs, real estate firms and a hostile city government. The Chicago Housing Authority was organized to provide temporary housing for those people who couldnt afford a decent, safe and sanitary dwellings. Over time, the notion of temporary housing became lost, and generations of low-income families came to depend upon this government safety net as a permanent way of life. From there, life in public housing degenerated into warehouses for the poor, plagued by crime and welfare dependency. By 1955 when Richard J.
Daley was mayor, the CHA had become a captive authority; and the commitment of Chicago officialdom to racial segregation was complete (Blies: Race and Housing in Chicago, 36). Martin Luther King came to Chicago and was shocked by the site of the apartments and homes that the city was providing. King told everyone that he was going to lead a rent strike if the landlords would not improve the conditions of these homes. Liberals, conservatives, government agencies, and private businesses all played a role in creating and reinforcing the color like separating Chicago neighborhoods (Blies: Race and Housing in Chicago, 37). The African American population started to stand up for their rights as people and demand to have equal rights to own a home and to get an equal access to jobs. As a first step, black Chicagoans and their allies sought to estimate the extent and impact of the discriminatory agreements on African American life in Chicago, a task that generated some controversy (Plotkin, 44).
Over 80 percent of Chicago's land was racial restrictive covenants. Many people that supported and opposed convents started to challenge that 80 percent of homes that were white only neighborhoods. It was soon shown that 50 percent of the residential areas 700 homes where restricted in convents. People went to the Illinois legislature with a bill that would ban convents. By 1934 the Illinois State Conference proposed laws prohibiting race restrictive convents. But it wasnt until 1948 that the U.
S Supreme Court said that it was unconstitutional for anyone to enforce restrictive convents. Chicago was a very highly populated area. It wasnt until the mid 1900 s that thousands of people started to move into Chicago. In the beginning of the twentieth-century Chicago went though three influential mayors, Edward Kelly, Martin Kennelly, and Richard J. Daley. Each mayor had an impact on Chicago and more importantly at the time of segregation.
At the time it was very hard for many and all African Americans to find decent homes in Chicago. Chicago boomed with people and it was hard for some people to find housing. The result of this was black families moved to the white suburbs. When the black families moved there they were met with angry white families, and eventually made the black families go back to the ghetto in Chicago.
Though it didnt just stop there, Real Estate companies and other people even mayors tried to keep areas in Chicago segregated. It was wrong and unconstitutional what people did to African Americans just so they wouldnt move into their subdivision. Today all people are free to move and live wherever they want to be. Unfortunately though this is not true for everyone, there still are people out there in the world today that are still racist and still want to live in an only white community. Through history and though these words people can see how hard African Americans had to fight to find a decent place to live.
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society: Race and Housing in Chicago. Springfield, IL: The Illinois State Historical Society. Vol. 94, No. 1. Bile's, R. , (1995). Richard J. Daley: Politics, Race, and the Governing of Chicago.
DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. Green, P. M. , & Hill, M. G. , (1995).
The Mayors: The Chicago Political Tradition. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Plotkin, W. , (2001). Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society: Race and Housing in Chicago.
Springfield, IL: The Illinois State Historical Society. Vol. 94, No. 1.
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Research essay sample on Segregation And Housing In Chicago
