Restrictive rental covenants, redlining, and other segregating municipal ordinances prevented Black residents, newly-arrived or established, from settling elsewhere in the city (Agbe-Davies 2010:174). Like similar urban and rural enclaves, it became a place of “black agency” (Roberts and Matos 2020:4) where people created and shared opportunities they could not access elsewhere.Īfter the first years of the Great Migration (roughly 1914-1920), the Black population of Chicago increased by 80,000 people (Drake and Cayton 1993:8). The intensification of population and interactions, hemmed in by cultural and legal restrictions, produced Chicago's “Black Metropolis” (Drake and Clayton 1993:12,46), a city within a city. These new arrivals found that, due to a combination of custom, violent white backlash, and, until 1947, legally enforceable housing restrictions, they could generally only settle in a narrow “Black Belt” stretching approximately from 12th Street (now Roosevelt Road) in the north to 31st Street in the south and from Wentworth Avenue in the west to Wabash Avenue in the east (Chicago Committee on Race Relations 1922:107). Yet the neighborhoods where Black people settled did not expand geographically, but instead increased their occupants numerically (Chicago Committee on Race Relations 1922:106). (There are many resources for studying the particular experiences of Black families in Chicago’s Black Belt during the Great Migration.) Chicago alone gained 80,000 Black residents between 19 from this Great Migration (Drake and Cayton 1993:8). Between 19 alone, over 500,000 Black individuals and families made this move (Chicago Committee on Race Relations 1922:79). The years after World War I saw a tremendous internal migration of Americans, particularly Black Americans, from the predominantly rural parts of the South to industrial cities in the North and West in search of improved prospects. Furthermore, in Chicago many of these urban renewal projects were instigated and aided by area universities-the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and, notably for our focus on the Mecca Flats, the Illinois Institute of Technology-which sought to remove “blight” from their expanding campus environs. The discourse of a blighted city space, that must be “healed” via the clearance and removal of the place of disorder (including social forms unacceptable to the middle and upper classes), recurs in the 1920s and 1930s work of the Chicago school of sociology (Haar 2010:45). These laws include the Neighborhood Redevelopment Corporation Act of 1941 (amended in 1953), the Blighted Areas Redevelopment Act of 1947, the Relocation Act of 1947, and the Urban Community Conservation Act of 1953 (Hirsch 2005). In addition to the federal urban renewal program established by the passage of the 1954 Housing Act, Illinois state laws charged the city with removing “blight”-empty lots, dilapidated or abandoned structures, “objectionable” businesses-via eminent domain. Urban renewal refers to the mid-20th-century federal and state programs that built upon the slum clearance legislation of the 19th century, destroying countless historic structures and vital neighborhoods to “ safeguard the value of business centers and property tax bases while providing more modern structures” (Chicago Public Library 2022), though largely without considering community interests.
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