Crowd coming out of Regal movie theater. Southside of Chicago, Illinois by Russell Lee, 1941, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USF34-038566-D/Canva
As we prepare for Black History Month, the Crusader examines the heyday of African American progress and explores the declining quality of live in many Black communitites throughout Chicago. In recent years, a reverse migration has taken hold and seen many Black families uproot from northern cities and return South in hopes of securing a future.
In the mid-20th Century, Chicago was referred to as the “Black Business Mecca,” due to its attraction to African Americans looking for opportunity and stability, and because of its concentrated wealth of Black-owned businesses and cultural institutions.
Also dubbed, the “Black Metropolis,” by sociologists Sinclair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Jr, in 1945, Chicago earned its new moniker in the 1960s and lasted roughly until the late 1990. The city of skyscrapers, a glistening Lakefront and swarths of deprivation poverty, became a proving ground for Black entrepreneurs and professionals across the arts and sciences.
The Black Mecca was home to many of the largest and most successful Black-owned banks, publishing firms, manufacturing companies, distribution networks, cultural institutions, insurance agencies, restaurants, advertising firms, churches, motels, nightclubs, grocery stores, gas stations, and real estate agencies in the United States.
It began with the first Great Black Migration in 1910 when Black southerners, two and three generations removed from chattel slavery, relocated to northern cities such as New York, Detroit, Pittsburgh and Chicago to take advantage of turn-of-the century opportunities. The new migrants did well for themselves, as they used their trade skills, creativity, scientific knowledge and self-determination to thwart the pitfalls of Northern racism to carve out thriving communities.
“I went to Chicago as a migrant from Mississippi. And there in that great iron city, that impersonal, mechanical city, amid the steam, the smoke, the snowy winds, the blistering suns; there in that self-conscious city, that city so deadly dramatic and stimulating, we caught whispers of the meanings that life could have,” said famed Native Son author Richard Wright.
“Chicago is the city from which the most incisive and radical Negro thought has come; there is an open and raw beauty about that city that seems either to kill or endow one with the spirit of life,” he said.
During the Second Great Black Migration (1940-1970), somce five million Blacks moved to Chicago and other cities to escape Jim Crow, lynchings and lives of poverty, only to wind up in the bosom of northern apartheid-like conditions. Greeted in the Windy City by hostile white political leadership. labor and business leaders, this group took advantage of concentrated racial segregation by consolidating resources and forging ahead.
Already, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams a Black suregeon and gradate of Chicago Medical College founded Provident Hospital and Training School for Nurses in Bronzeville. Provident was the first Black-owned and operated hospital in America. Until the hospital closed in 1987, it provided training and jobs for thousands of African Americans seeking careers in nursing and health care.
Trailblazing entpreneur Annie Turnbo Malone was the richest Black woman in Chicago. Born in 1869, five years after Emancipation, she went on to create the largest Black-owned hair care products company in the nation. At her height, the philanthropist founded a massive beauty college at 44th and King Drive in 1918, owned hotels and restaurants, took expeditions to Africa, and funded numerous charities and philanthropic causes to aid those trapped in poverty or rendered orphans.
Malone, who died in Chicago in 1957 at Provident Hospital, was also the mentor to Madam CJ Walker. Mollison Elementary School now stands at the site where her Poro College once stood. Mollison is named after Irvin Mollison, the first African American elected as a federal judge in 1945.
Using Turbo’s blueprint, Black male entrepreneurs turned Chicago into a Black haircare and cosmetic industry manfucaturing hub. SB Fuller opened Fuller Products in 1929 with a $50 investment and it became one of the largest Black-owned businesses in the world, and the first to be listed on the American Stock Exchange. Fuller protege George Johnson, founder/CEO of Johnson Products in 1954 and manufactured Afro Sheen and other hair care products. Two other proteges, Edward and Bettiann Gardener, founder/CEO of Soft Sheen Products opened for business in 1964. Both companies operated massive manufacturing plants and employed thousands of people over the years.
Soft Sheen was sold to L’Oreal in 1998 for $130 million later merged with Carson Products. In 1993 Johnson Products was purchased by Florida drug company Ivax Corporation and ten years later resold to Proctor and Gamble (P&G). In 2009, a consortium of Black investors purchased the brand from P&G and continues to work to reestablish its Black marketshare.
On other fronts, Darryl Grisham, president of Parker House Sausage Company, became executive director of the Chicago Housing Authority from 1975 to 1983. Parker House had been founded by Judge H. Parker in 1919 and remains in business to date. Dempsey Travis, president of Travis Realty was a mortgage broker, writer and publisher who chronicled Black Chicago’s history.
What led to such prolific prosperity from a people fresh out of cotton fields? Some historians argue that because of Chicago’s segregated systems, African Americans to work to unify, consolidate their resources and carve out a life of hope and prosperity for themselves.
Others note the tremendous influence of the Black Press. The Chicago Daily Defender, founded by Robert S. Abbott in 1905, championed the Great Black Migration. In 1940 Black labor leaders Balm Leavell and Joseph Jefferson founded the Chicago Crusader to advocate for the black working-class. Other Black-owned newspapers included the Citizen, the Independent Bulletin, Muhammad Speaks, Chicago Bee, the Final Call, Windy City Word and scores of the small and specialty periodicals.
Business titan John H. Johnson, publisher of Ebony (1945) and Jet (1951) magazines, opened the doors of Johnson Publishing Company in 1942. He became the first African American to own a business in downtown Chicago in 1971, The building at 820 S. Michigan cost an estimated $8 million. The property was sold to Columbia College by Johnson’s daughter Linda Johnson Rice, in 2010 for exactly $8 million. In 2014 she ceased publication of Jet and two years later sold Ebony to a private equity firm in Texas.
Pervis Spann and Wesley South, co-founders of Midway Broadcasting in 1975 and owners of WVON-AM which began in 1963. Today, WVON remains Black-owned through a licensing deal with iHeart Radio (formerly Clear Channel). Jovon Broadcasting operates TV stations WJYS Channel 62 and was founded in 1981 by Joseph Stroud, and exists today on religious programmimg and infomericals. Oprah Winfrey opened Harpo Studios in downtown Chicago in 1986 after her breakout role in the film, the Color Purple. In 2010 she closed the studio, moved to California and launched the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) a year later.
Between 1970 and 1989, the South Side exploded with a thriving Black middle class and was home to the nation’s largest group of Black millionaires. On the West Side, working-class African American families maintained homes, nationally-recognized restaurants, cultural institutions and remained the standard bearers for advocacy, social justice and local accountability.
Though poverty, a housing crisis and crime began to decimate Black neighborhoods such as Woodlawn, Austin, Englewood and Roseland, the city’s Black middle class continued to grow, buoyed by its independent economic engine and its increasing professional class.
As Margaret Burroughs created the Dusable Museum in 1961 on the South Side, local West Side artists such as Buddy Guy, Otis Rush and Magic Sam blazed a trail as musicians helping to enrich Chicago’s unique blues legacy. Fourteen-year-old musical genius Curtis Mayfield and his friend Jerry Butler came out of Cabrini Green on the near North Side. Baritone Lou Rawls born in 1933 grew up in Ida B, Wells. Other artists such as Nat King Cole, Mahalia Jackson, Oscar Brown Jr., Dr. Thomas A Dorsey, Ramsey Lewis, Muddy Waters, Dinah Washington, Etta James, Sam Cooke thrived in Bronzeville and other parts of the city; while writers such as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Arna Bomtemps, and Lorraine Hansberry shaped Black America’s identity through poetry and prose. Sports legends such as Jesse Owens, Jack Johnson, Night Train Lane, Joe Louis, Ernie Terrell,Ernie Banks, Sonny Liston and Muhammad Ali could be seen walking the streets of Chicago where they lived and raised their families.
Their collective and often competitive efforts led to Chicago being deemed the “Black Mecca” by such Black-owned newspapers and publications such as the Chicago Crusader, Dollars and Sense Magazine, Chicago Defender and the The nationally distributed Jet Magazine.
In addition to its business leadership, the city was home to national Black leadership including Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.’s Operation PUSH, Minister Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, Prince Asiel Ben-Israel’s Hebrew Israelites, Dr. Conrad Worrill’s National Black United Front and the largest branch of the Chicago Urban League. Activists such as Al Raby, Edwin C. Bill Berry, Nancy Jefferson, Gus Savage, Marian Stamps, Addie Wyatt, Charlie Hayes, Lutrell “Lu” Palmer, Alice Tregay, Dorothy J. Tillman, and scores of others fought Chicago’s racist political system to strengthen public education, fight for decent, safe and affordable housing, access to labor unions and unionized jobs,
Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. moved to Chicago’s West Side in 1966 to fight the *housing policies and address the prolific poverty impacting the poorest Blacks in the city. Facing strong opposition from powerful Black churches, led by Rev. John Jackson, King returned South to develop his Poor People’s campaign, but was assassinated in 1968. The Hon. Elijah Muhammad, founder of the powerful Nation of Islam, opened hundreds of Black Muslim-owned businesses, including banks, clothing stores, restaurants, barbershops, schools and other enterprises.
A MOVE TOWARD THE POLITICAL FRONT
Long after Republican John W. E. Thomas became the first African American elected to the Illinois General Assembly in 1879, Oscar De Priest was elected to the U.S. House representing the 1st Congressional District in 1929 and served until 1935. He was the first Black member of Congress post-Reconstruction and had been the first Black elected to the City Council representing the city’s most powerful predominantly Black 2nd Ward in 1915.
Depriest was succeeded by Arthur Mitchell who in 1934 became the first Black Democrat elected to Congress. He served until 1943 when powerful Democrat William L. Dawson assumed the seat at the start of the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement and served until 1970. In 1959, Chicago elected its first Black alderman from the West Side with Republican Ben Lewis of the 24th Ward. Shortly after winning his second term in 1963, Lewis was assassinated while sitting in his West Side ward office—a murder mystery that remains unsolved.
Olympian Ralph Metcalf, a Democrat, was elected to represent the powerful 1st Congressional District in 1971 where he served eight years, before dying in office. He was a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus. It should be noted that the 1st Congressional District, once called a super majority-minority district, has elected 18 consecutive African Americans to the position, more than any other state.
Attorney Anna Langford, a noted Civil Rights activist representing Englewood, became the first Black woman elected to the Chicago City Council in 1971. John H. Stroger, a former public school teacher, was elected Cook County Board President in 1994 after being considered the most powerful Black Democrat in Illinois. His son, Todd Stroger ran the county in 2006 for one four-year term. In 2010, Toni Preckwinkle became the first woman and second African American to serve as president of the county Board. Before that, Cecil Partee became the first African American elected Cook County State’s Attorney in 1989 by appointment, after a long career in politics.
Another public school teacher, Jesse White was first elected to the Illinois House in 1974. In 1998 he became Illinois’ first Black Secretary of State, after serving in other governmental capacities over the years. He retired in 2023 as the longest-serving Secretary of State in Illinois history.
Samuel Nolan was the first Black to serve as interim head of the Chicago Police Department in 1979; he served for one year. Fred Rice was the first Black person to serve as a permanent superintendent* of police after being appointed by Mayor Harold Washington in 1983. The city’s first Black mayor then appouinted LeRoy Martin as police chief shortly after re-election to his second term. Terry Hillard served as top cop from 1998 to 2003, followed by Eddie T. Johnson, who was appointed in 2016. David Brown began serving in the role in 2020, followed by current police superintendent Larry Snelling appointed in August of 2023.
As the city’s Black political power surged, research shows Chicago had a minimum of eight Black-owned savings and loans, as well as a plethora of insurance companies between 1960 and 1970, including Supreme Life Insurance Company, Seaway National Bank, Drexel Bank, Independence Ban and South Central Bank. Banks and other financial institutions flourished after the path was paved by Binga Bank at 36th and State Street, founded in 1908 by Jesse Binga.
Binga was known as a staunch advocate for Black rights and his home and businesses were bombed several times by white racists. After taking losses following the 1919 race riot which destroyed numerous Black churches, Binga Bank eventually failed during the Great Depression in June 1930. It was seized by the Auditor General of the State of Illinois after Binga refused to seize churches and homes of its customers impacted by the white supremacist attack.
As W.E.B. Dubois once noted, “The slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back toward slavery.” Whites and their allies were determined to keep Blacks oppressed, subjugated and relegated to second-class citizenship.
Black townships and predominantly African American cities thrived as economic centers. But many set upon and destroyed by mobs of wild, jealous and crazed white citizens: Atlanta (1906); East St. Louis, Illinois (1917), the 1919 Red Summer which impacted Chicago, Washington, D.C.,, Omaha, Bebraks and Elaine Arkansas; Tulsa (1921(; Harlem, New York (1935); Detroit (1943); and Hayes Pond in Maxton, North Carolina (19580. When Blacks began to rise up against the blatant injustices they faced in urban cities, including police brutality, riots broke out in Harlem (1964); Watts/Los Angeles (1965); Detroit (1967); following the King assasination Chicago, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. went up in flames in 1968; Miami (1980), Los Angeles (1992); Cincinnati (2001); Ferguson, Missouri (2014), Baltimore (2015); Milwaukee (2016); in Charlottesville in 2017 after far-right white men stormed the city; and in 2020 Minneapolis, Portland and Kenosha after murder of George Floyd.
Following the political assassinations of Malcolm X (1965), King (1968), and Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton (1969), African American leaders collectively seemed lost, bewildered and divided. Sensing the shift, many gathered in Gary, Indiana, for the National Black Political Convention, where they agreed to shift Black America’s focus to politics. This led to a succession of Black men being elected mayor of various cities.
The 1972 political convention to date remains ast the country’s largest independent Black political gathering in U.S. history, with more than 8,000 people in attendance. Jackson attended the convention with his two grade-school age sons, Jesse and Jonathan, both of whom would later go on to be elected to represent the 2nd Congressonial District and 1st Congressional District of Illinois in 1995 and 2023, respectively,
Ironically, as Black Chicago’s political power grew, its economic infrastructure seemingly began to crumble. After the election and re-election of the city’s first Black mayor in 1983 and 1987 respectively, African Americans locally and nationally began to focus on national politics after the Black electorate had fully transitioned into the Democratic Party. Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Congress in 1968, ran for president in 1972. Jackson ran two high profile presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988, winning five primaries in his first race, and 11 primaries and caucuses in his last one.
Jackson’s successes led to scores of African Americans being elected to state houses, congressional seats and local offices. It also solidified Black Voting power and the strongest block in the Democratic Party. Chicago subsequently sent three African Americans to the U.S, Senate: Carol Moseley Braun (1993-1999) Barack Obama (2005-2008) and Roland Burris (2009-2010), who was appointed to the position by then Governor Rod Blagojevich, leading to statewide white backlash and a special election.
By then, Black Chicago had been struggling to keep its head afloat. When Washington died suddenly after sipping a cup of coffee as he sat at his City Hall desk, it was if most African Americans metaphorically jumped in the grave with him. Political infighting led to a loss of the fifth floor to whites which in turn fostered a complete collapse of the African American independent business and support systems.
The crack epidemic, aided by President Ronald Reagan’s agents who funneled cocaine and gun into urban communities across the country, took Chicago by the throat. This new crisis led to spikes in property crimes, mental health crisis and breakdown in otherwise stable family units. Chicago experienced the highest levels of violence with homicides reaching 970 in 1992.
This led to the rise of the prison industrial complex which saw thousands of young Chicagoans, mostly Black and Latino, ushered into Cook County Jail, state and federal prisons. Not to be outdone, the crack crisis was the kissing cousin to the AIDS/HIV crisis. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the Windy City had one of the highest HIV infection rates in the nation, with 40 percent of drug addicts using needles testing positive.
In the meantime, Black churches began shifting away from “liberation theology,” which galvanized African Americans into civil rights campaigns and self-sufficiency, toward a “prosperity gospel,” which refocused Christian church goers into conservativism, individualism and the pursuit of material “blessings.”
Once dubbed the Promised Land, and “Black Mecca,” Chicago’s Black neighborhoods slowly morphed into a divided, disinvested wastelands. All but one Black-owned banks remain. Jewels of the South and West sides are sprinkled with abandoned storefronts, vacant lots and people who are homeless, addicted and unable to afford stable housing.
Once boasting a African American population of 1.2 million people (40% of the total population), in 2024 to just over 800,000 residents, representing only 29% of the city’s 2.7 million people in total. Researchers believe the rapid decline in the city’s Black population is a direct result of a loss of jobs, gentrification, property crimes and overall violence.
Today, the former Black Mecca, was undermined by disinvestment, discrimination and devaluation that has people who live in predominately Black communities are denied them access to capital, credit, and public services.
In 2024, Black homeowners and entrepreneurs continuously face barriers to obtaining loans, mortgages, and insurance, limiting their ability to build wealth and improve their properties. Despite the hundreds of African Americans elected to political power, the neighborhoods of their constituents are targeted by predatory practices such as redlining, subprime lending, and foreclosure, stripping them of their assets and equity.
Moreover, though loved and loathed, Black has been neglected by public policies and programs that have favored white and affluent areas, resulting in poor infrastructure, unstable public schools, and inadequate health care.
(Reporting made possible by the Inland Foundation and the Crusader Newspaper Group)
