History of African Americans in Chicago Totally Explained

Everything about The History Of African Americans In Chicago totally explained

The history of African Americans in Chicago dates back to Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable’s trading activities in the 1780s. Fugitive slaves and freedmen established the city’s first black community in the 1840s. Passing through the late 1800s and on to the 1900s, there were many African American elites who contributed to establishing a home for the blacks in Chicago. Their goal was to build a black community with the same advantages as the white community of Chicago.

Segregation

Especially after the Civil War, Illinois had some of the most progressive anti-discrimination legislation in the nation. School segregation was first outlawed in 1874, and segregation in public accommodations was first outlawed in 1885.. The Great Migration radically transformed Chicago, both politically and culturally. . Also, most of the African Americans who migrated north from 1910-1940 were from rural areas. They had been chiefly sharecroppers and laborers, although some were landowners pushed out by the boll weevil disaster. After years of underfunding of public education for blacks in the South, they tended to be poorly educated, with relatively low skills to apply to urban jobs.
   The masses of new migrants arriving in the cities captured public attention. At one point, 3,000 African Americans were arriving every week in Chicago - stepping off the trains from the South and making their ways to neighborhoods they'd been told about. The Great Migration was charted and evaluated. The north was starting to change, and urban white northerners started to get worried, as their neighborhoods rapidly changed. At the same time, recent and older immigrants were thrust into competition with the new arrivals from the South.
   Ethnic Irish were heavily implicated in gang violence and the rioting that erupted in 1919. “Chicago was a focal point of the great migration and the racial violence that came in its wake.” In the mid-1900s, blacks began slowly moving up to better positions in the work force. Many blacks lived in apartments that lacked plumbing, with only one bathroom for each floor. With the buildings so overcrowded, building inspections and garbage collection were below the minimum mandatory requirements for healthy sanitation. This unhealthiness increased the threat of disease. From 1940-1960, the infant death rate in the Black Belt was 16% higher than the rest of the city.
   Because crime in African-American neighborhoods was a low priority to the police, rates of violence and prostitution were also high. There were also problems associated with poverty.

Culture

Between 1916 and 1920, almost 50,000 Black Southerners moved to Chicago, Then in the mid-20th century, blacks began slowly moving up to better positions in the work force.
The migration expanded the market for African American business. "The most notable breakthrough in black business came in the insurance field."the Chicago Defender, was published there. After long efforts, in the late 1930s the Congress of Industrial Organizations succeeded in overcoming racial discord in two of Chicago’s major industries, steel and meatpacking. Some blacks were then able to move up the ranks to management positions and receive a stable income.
Blacks were even starting to win elective office in local and state government.Further Information

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