Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920

by Allan H. Spear

Allan Spear explores here the history of a major Negro community during a crucial thirty-year period when a relatively fluid patter of race relations gave way to a rigid system of segregation and discrimination. This is the first historical study of the ghetto made famous by the sociological classics of St. Clair Drake, E. Franklin Frazier, and others—by the novels of Richard Wright, and by countless blues songs. It was this ghetto that Martin Luther King, Jr., chose to focus on when he turned attention to the racial injustices of the North. Spear, by his objective treatment of the results of white racism, gives an effective, timely reminder of the serious urban problems that are the legacy of prejudice.

Genres: History, Sociology, Nonfiction, Race, Cities, American History

254 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

Reviews

[Marvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Black Chicago has a fascinating history and Spear makes that history accessible with a multi-focused approach. Dr. Spear covers churches, neighborhood improvement associations, the early phase of the Great Migration and Republican politics. Spear is unsparing in his blame and clear in outlining the causes of a black ghetto that still has a major role in the policy and politics of modern Chicago. When I was a teenager my grandfather took me to Cabrini-Green. I now have a deeper understanding of the history of the community that made that massive housing project possible.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Allan Spear’s Black Chicago is an academic treatise on Chicago race relations between 1890 and 1920, detailing how segregation came to be the norm. While parts of the narrative can be a tad boring in setting the sociological stage with facts and figures — population by Ward, State of birth, etc. — the interpretation that follows is very interesting. Spear’s work is an outgrowth of his 1965 Yale Ph.D. dissertation.

Part I (1890–1915) lays out the two primary approaches of the era aimed at improving the Negro community in Chicago: Booker T. Washington’s “accommodationist” self-help approach and W.E.B. Du Bois’ more activist approach of striving for integration. It was the success of the former and the implacable white hostility against the latter that was largely the genesis of a concentrated “Black Belt” within the greater Chicago area. Part I details how the resulting isolation shaped every facet of community life.

Part II (1915–1920) discusses how the change in migration patterns caused by World War I exacerbated the problems associated with the Black Belt neighborhood in Chicago. Part II climaxes with the 1919 race riots in Chicago, which Spears postulates was primarily caused by white pushback to Negroes trying to improve their housing.

Spear’s conclusion takes passing note of Dr. King’s involvement in Chicago race relations in 1966, sadly observing that not much had changed in the intervening 45 years. While the self-help approach (essentially the separate but equal movement) experienced some success in the Black Belt, for the most part it was a mirage as it really represented Negroes settling for what they could achieve. The difference between European immigration and the Negro migration is striking – i.e., eastern Europeans being able to rise up and out of their ghettos after a generation or two versus Negroes (as of the 1966 publishing date) still relatively confined to the Black Belt.

This is a nicely nuanced portrait of Chicago race relations emerging around the time of the Columbian World’s Fair and the turn of the century. Since the period under study begins just 20 years after the Chicago Fire, by default it includes the resurgence of the city itself.

[Peyton Whirley · Rating 3 out of 5]

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