In 1957 Alscenia and John Hodo were among the first Black families to buy a house in Chatham, a neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. They were moving from a West Side apartment with their preschool-aged daughter, Linda. Mrs. Hodo taught in the Chicago Public Schools. Mr. Hodo worked at a steel plant. The family of three settled in a brick bungalow at 8213 South Wabash Avenue and purchased for the living room a snow-white couch (which they kept covered in plastic) that excited young Linda.1

The couple had ventured to Chicago to reap the benefits of the Great Migration, during which between six and seven million Black Americans moved from rural areas in the South to cities in the North, fleeing discrimination, poverty, and segregation and seeking increased economic opportunity. Mrs. Hodo came north from Louisville, Kentucky. Mr. Hodo hailed from Birmingham, Alabama. “Chatham was the crown jewel,” Linda recalled.^[1] South of the historic Black Belt (the narrow area in which Black Chicagoans were officially and unofficially constrained to live), Chatham attracted strivers. There, many educated or solidly working-class Black folk found solace living in midcentury-modern dream houses. They were lit by decorations during the Christmas season. In summertime, fathers wore aprons and hats to barbecue in their emerald yards. Little Linda posed in the venerable Black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, in 1958 (fig. 1). The five-year-old was photographed and dubbed a “hula hoop champ” who twirled an entire block without stopping.^[2] “I remember camaraderie. Chatham felt very familial and safe,” Linda said of her childhood. “We were living a suburban kind of dream within the city. It was lovely, peaceful, and calm.”^[3]2

A few white families lived on the Hodos’ block when they arrived. By 1960 they had all left, not before smiling and waving like characters in Leave It to Beaver to their Black neighbors in the morning. Whites emptied out of Chatham, in the same pattern of “white flight” occurring in neighborhoods across the country.^[4] In 1956, the year before the Hodos moved in, gospel great Mahalia Jackson bought a place a few blocks away from their future home, becoming the second Black person on her block. White neighbors shot up her ranch house and threatened to bomb it, too.^[5]3

Despite these incidents of racist violence, Black Chathamites held their heads high. Pride swelled among Black residents as they moved in, in droves, while racial panic gripped white Chathamites. Even the presence of middle- and upper-class Black families didn’t shake their racism. Linda’s parents talked openly about whites leaving Chatham. “They thought it was stupid,” Linda said. Look at white folks being stupid again, her father would say. 4

The Hodo family were able to move to Chatham because white people didn’t want to live there anymore after the US Supreme Court ruled racially restrictive covenants unenforceable in 1948’s landmark Shelley v. Kraemer case. For decades these legal documents had prevented Black people and other racial or ethnic groups from buying or living in particular properties. In explicit language they declared, for example, that “premises shall not be sold, leased or conveyed to persons of African blood,” that “no part of said premises shall in any manner be used or occupied directly or indirectly by any Negro or Negroes,” and that property “shall not be conveyed or leased to or occupied by any person not a Caucasian.”^[6]5

When neighborhoods racially desegregated after Shelley v. Kraemer, riotous white mobs frequently greeted new Black families. Arson and vandalism were so prevalent that the Chicago Commission on Human Relations responded to the attacks, although they did not want the press to cover the story.^[7] Speculators engaged in blockbusting, also known as “panic peddling,” convincing white homeowners to sell their houses cheaply by arousing fears that The Blacks Were Coming. Real estate agents participated in other underhanded practices. On the West Side, home sellers used contract buying to dupe Black purchasers, who paid down payments in the belief that they were buying a house outright when they were in fact signing an installment contract that left the house in the current owner’s name. Those owners would hide their identities and immediately increase the price—easily evicting the Black families who thought the property belonged to them. In 2019 researchers estimated that contract buying in Chicago during the 1950s and 1960s resulted in $3 billion to $4 billion in lost Black wealth.^[8]6

Well, so what if white people didn’t desire them as Black neighbors. Chathamites did not view white flight as rejection, and a new community flourished. It reminds me of Langston Hughes’s poem “I, Too,” in which white people banish “the darker brother” to the kitchen. There, he “laugh[s], / And eat[s] well.” The poem concludes with the speaker imagining a future moment when his banishers will “see how beautiful I am / And be ashamed— / I, too, am America.”7

I grew up in Chatham and didn’t think much of the neighborhood’s racial composition. By the time my parents bought their Cape Cod–style house in 1974, Chatham’s middle class had been Black for two decades. Being raised in Chicago, I simply accepted by default which neighborhoods were Black and which ones weren’t. And Chatham corresponded to Blackness.8

In junior high I chose Chatham as my subject for a history project. It wasn’t very good. All I did was interview white people who used to live in the community. They reminisced about Seventy-Ninth Street and going to a movie theater. Thus, all I learned was that white people used to live in Chatham, then they didn’t. I didn’t interrogate why the change occurred, which would have introduced me to the phenomena of white flight, segregation, and racism—and the motivations behind them. 9

I later learned that restrictive covenants grew in popularity in Chicago after the 1919 race riot that ensued after a Black teen named Eugene Williams swam in the “white part” of Lake Michigan, was stoned by white people who objected to his presence, and drowned. In the aftermath the Chicago Commission on Race Relations dissected the massacre that ensued during the riot. Charles Johnson, a Black sociologist, led the development of a six-hundred-plus-page report, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot, which recommended that the city not segregate housing.^[9] Chicago proceeded to do the opposite. Waves of Black Southern migrants arrived in the city only to be confined to the Black Belt, where already substandard housing grew overcrowded. The Chicago-based National Association of Real Estate Boards created a covenant template that it shared widely across the country.10

The racist real estate policies being workshopped in Chicago were challenged, notably by Carl Hansberry, a Black real estate broker from the South Side. Hansberry bought a three-flat in the then-white West Woodlawn neighborhood. A white welcome wagon inflicted racial violence on him and his family. A white neighbor, Anna Lee, objected legally. Eventually, in 1940, the case reached the US Supreme Court (Hansberry v. Lee). The Hansberrys won, but only on a technicality: not enough white neighbors had signed the covenant. Still, as a result, five hundred homes became available to Black buyers in West Woodlawn (see fig. 2).^[10] The ordeal influenced Carl’s young daughter Lorraine, who later wrote the play A Raisin in the Sun, about a Black family that faces resistance when they try to buy a home in a white neighborhood.11

In 1950, just seven years before the Hodos moved in, Chatham was 99 percent white; by 1960 the white population had shrunk to 36 percent, and in 1970 it was a mere 0.2 percent.^[11] White flight left Black homeowners the guardians and keepers of newly reconstituted neighborhoods. Before the white people abandoned the area, the federal government had instituted a practice of color-coding neighborhoods to help banks decide whether to grant loans for particular properties, and redlining was born (see fig. 3).^[12] Black neighborhoods were routinely coded red, the lowest grade. Redlining, restrictive covenants, white flight, blockbusting, and contract buying stripped wealth and resources from Black neighborhoods all over the country, Chicago included—robust reminders that segregation is purposeful in its harm. But Black people do the most with the least, and this ethos shaped Chatham and its surrounding South Side neighborhoods, as amply represented in the photographs in this publication. Ingenuity, efficacy, creativity, and grit are hallmarks of Black Chicago. The city is denser than Detroit, more sprawling than Harlem. Neighborhoods such as Chatham, Avalon Park, Pill Hill, Park Manor, Roseland, North Lawndale, and Englewood shifted from white to Black, and new Black homeowners took pride in the architecturally diverse dwellings they owned, be they Prairie Style, frame structures, graystones, Georgian Revivals, or bungalows.^[13] Two- and three-flat buildings allowed owners to rent out a floor and earn income to establish themselves in the middle class. Leafy trees provided a backdrop. Neighbors might look askance at a brown lawn. Block-club notices listed dos and don’ts. Signs calling for no loitering, no car washing, no loud music are as ubiquitous in low-income, working-class, and middle-class Black communities as Donny Hathaway songs. Scholars have observed that these signs are only found in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods.^[14] Indeed, they originated with the block clubs organized by the Chicago Urban League during the Great Migration. Author Amanda Seligman has said that the signs “come out of a longer tradition in Chicago of older, more established African Americans working for racial uplift by regulating the behavior of younger people and newer arrivals.”^[15] The signs remain, demonstrating that Black neighborhoods are defined not by disinvestment but by cohesion.^[16]12

This sense of cohesion emerges in the photographs in this publication, which show Black Chicagoans fully enjoying and celebrating the city outside their doors. Robert Earl Wilson’s images of walks under the ‘L’ tracks and young people sunning at the beach highlight forms of everyday leisure that continue to this day. The alleys that line Chicago’s neighborhoods offer spaces for recreation and celebration. As kids in the 1990s, we played fake baseball with tennis racquets in the alley, but in the 1960s and 1970s those alleys were also transformed into makeshift music and dance venues. In the 1970s Valeria “Mikki” Ferrill made photographs of dancers “getting down” at one such venue, The Garage (fig. 4). Also known as The Alley, it was a Sunday improvised music club located in a South Side garage. Its events regularly spilled out into the adjacent alley, and Ferrill’s images of the parties also overflow with Black creativity, joy, and community pride.13

Soulfulness breezes through South Side neighborhoods like the wind off Lake Michigan. The spirits of Frankie Knuckles, Curtis Mayfield, Minnie Riperton, Koko Taylor, and Muddy Waters hover in the City of Big Shoulders. Soul Train launched in Chicago in 1970 on WCIU-TV and cemented itself in the cultural canon, a hipper version of American Bandstand. The Ebony/Jet Building—the headquarters of the Johnson Publishing Company designed by Black architect John Moutoussamy—opened in 1972 with groovy interiors in the tones of the decade. John H. Johnson’s magazines documented Black America, and the downtown headquarters served as a mecca for Black celebrities who happened to be in Chicago (fig. 5). The DuSable Museum of African American History and the South Side Community Art Center were among the first organizations in the United States focused on Black artists and artifacts. Black Chicago is in part a creation of the Chicago Defender, which encouraged relocation to the “Black Metropolis,” as Chicago was known during the Great Migration. Black-owned banks, cosmetic companies, and funeral homes opened. Culture, business, and politics thrived, and photographers such as Robert A. “Bobby” Sengstacke—son of newspaper publisher John H. Sengstacke and grand-nephew of Robert Sengstacke Abbott, who founded the Defender—regularly created images for the newspaper that countered the representations of the South Side that were published elsewhere, giving a more complete picture of the area. Late historian, educator, labor organizer, and activist Timuel Black once told me that, politically and economically, Harlem is not in the same ball game as Chicago. “Here in Chicago we organize our own unions,” he said. “We couldn’t get into white folks’ union, we organize our own.”^[17]
14

Racism motivated action. The murder of fourteen-year-old Chicago resident Emmett Till in 1955 galvanized the civil rights movement, both nationally and in the city. After the Woodlawn native’s lynching in Mississippi, huge crowds attended his funeral on the South Side. His mother, Mamie Till, insisted the world see his mutilated body in an open casket—through photographs published in Jet magazine. Those images fueled a generation of photographers who came to understand their medium as a weapon in the fight for civil rights. Three years later, Black participated in a newly formed organization called the Chicago League of Negro Voters, which challenged city hall’s control over the Negro vote.^[18] Parents marched in the 1960s against overcrowded, segregated public schools on the South and West Sides.^[19]15

Jesse Jackson Sr. moved to Chicago and turned Operation Breadbasket into Operation PUSH in 1971. Its weekly live broadcast from Kenwood on Saturday morning resembled a community church and drew politicians, wannabe politicians, residents, activists, and even world leaders. A decade later, also on the South Side, Louis Farrakhan tapped into the discontent the ravaging Reagan years prompted in Black America by rebuilding the Nation of Islam. Photographer Ozier Muhammad grew up in the Nation and made his first photographs there, during the same years that Ferrill, Ted Gray, and Roy Lewis documented its events for publications such as Muhammad Speaks (see fig. 6).16

From the 1940s through the 1970s, Chicago’s South Side emerged as the capital of Black America, inspiring political and cultural movements that redefined the nation. Martin Luther King Jr. took on the local Democratic machine when Mayor Richard J. Daley audaciously declared in 1963 that “there are no ghettos in Chicago.”^[20]17

King famously moved to the West Side in 1966, at the invitation of the Chicago Freedom Movement, to bring attention to slums and fair housing initiatives. When King marched in the white Marquette Park neighborhood on the city’s South Side, a white mob slung bottles, bricks, and rocks at him. After a rock knocked him to the ground, King said, “I have seen many demonstrations in the South, but I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today.”^[21] The Civil Rights Movement’s nonviolent strategy, developed in the South, struggled mightily in the North, where it was countered by white supremacist protests, such as the one Darryl Cowherd photographed on September 10, 1966 (see fig. 7). Cowherd gained close access to the White People’s March in Gage Park because one of his white high school friends participated and vouched for him. This photograph, and the story behind what made it possible, reveals the complex and uneasy dynamics of Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods.18

During his 1966 Chicago civil rights campaign, King spent a day making stops around the city to promote an upcoming massive rally at city hall against segregation in housing and education. “Racism is genocide…based on the affirmation that God made a creative error,” King said at one of the stops. At the Robert Taylor Homes, a public housing development, King received his greatest ovation; ten thousand listened to him speak.^[22] The event was captured by Sengstacke, who photographed King from behind to capture the leader’s view (fig. 8). At the time, the Taylor Homes represented a new day in housing for Black Chicagoans.^[23] Built along State and Federal streets between Thirty-Ninth and Fifty-Fourth, the twenty-eight buildings containing a total of 4,300 units replaced some of the slums of the Black Belt, its modern high rises with elevators supplanting old, overcrowded structures. The placement of the Taylor Homes was intentional. White Chicago city council members did not support racially mixed public housing, so this development, like some others, ended up in a Black neighborhood. Racial and economic segregation—on top of a string of bad public policies compounded by unemployment—led to social and fiscal disorder at the Taylor Homes in the 1970s. The city tore the development down decades later.
19

King’s visit to Chicago for an open housing campaign made perfect sense: The Great Migration promised fantastic opportunity, but Black families suffered from the racism of Northern Jim (and Jane) Crow. Housing segregation is deliberate and keeps Chicago divided. A common mythology and argument against racially desegregated housing was the idea that “people want to live around people like them”—a proposition that ignores the public and private actors who conspired to put African Americans in second-rate and racially segregated housing by charge, not choice. Another common myth said that the 1968 riots following King’s assassination destroyed the West Side. And indeed the busy Madison Street corridor erupted in anger. Nine people died; three hundred were injured. Businesses burned. The East Garfield Park neighborhood withered and never recovered. But while it is true that riots devastated the area, that is not the full picture. In 2020 ProPublica investigated and found generations of government and private sector neglect.^[24] Reporters examined government initiatives and ownership history of commercial properties and found that programs such as Model Cities and enterprise zones failed, leaving the community open to speculators who did not stimulate development. But it is much easier to blame the people living in the neighborhood for their conditions.20

If Black middle-class neighborhoods struggled under the weight of segregation, public housing neighborhoods fought harder for crumbs. Hazel Johnson, the mother of the environmental justice movement, worked to improve Altgeld Gardens, the public housing development on the southern edge of the city, in which she lived. The two-story row houses contrast sharply with the vertical high rises of developments like the Taylor Homes, but this did not mean that they fared better. In the 1970s Johnson learned that her community had the highest cancer rate of any area in the city. Her own husband died of the disease. Johnson’s research and investigation led to the discovery that Altgeld was built on a landfill that had polluted the area’s air and water. In response she founded the People for Community Recovery, organizing and training Altgeld residents to conduct lead testing and health surveys to hold the government accountable.^[25] Johnson identified the polluters who had literally dumped on a Black community they thought no one would care about. Her grassroots work has reverberated in the decades since.
21

In 1980 Chicago was a few years away from electing Harold Washington its first Black mayor. Soon after, Jesse Jackson Jr. would throw his hat into the ring for president, using his Chicago Rainbow Coalition as a base. And 1980 was also the year that the Black population peaked in Chicago, at 1,187,905 residents. By 2017, it had declined to 797,253—a 32.9 percent decrease.^[26] Researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago reported these statistics in 2019 in an effort to bring facts to the population loss narrative about Black Chicago. While no one reason can explain the phenomenon, researchers have pinpointed racial inequality as the main culprit. The legacy of racist housing and school policies devised in the previous century—plus related problems around food access, policing, and unemployment—persisted even as a new crop of public policies actively perpetuated the cycle of segregation.22

Opportunity and inequity have always coexisted in Black Chicago. That reality no doubt influenced the photographers whose work this publication features, whether they captured a rally led by King or a church lady with a tambourine, beach frolicking or a parade. This is Black Chicago. This is the place the Hodos settled. This is home.23