Black Americans 17Th Century to 21St Century: Black Struggles and Successes

Black Americans

17th Century to 21st Century

Black Struggles and Successes

JOHN H. JORDAN

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Contents

Black-American’s History

Obama’s Early Years

Illinois and Black Americans

The Great Migrations

William L. Dawson

Robert Sengstacke Abbott

John Herman Henry Sengstacke

Joseph Louis Barrow

Elizabeth Bessie Coleman

Willa Beatrice Brown

Nathaniel Adams Nate Cole

Harry Herbert Pace

John Harold Johnson

John Elroy Sanford (Red Foxx)

Harold Lee Washington

Patricia Roberts Harris

Oprah Winfrey

Augustus Alexander Gus Savage

Cardiss Hortense Robertson

Roland Wallace Burris

Carol Moseley Braun

Jesse Louis Jackson, Jr.

During Slavery

Madam C.J. Walker

Benjamin Banneker

Roger Arliner Young

George Washington Carver

Rebecca Davis Lee Crumpler

Rebecca J. Cole

Anthony Overton

Frederick Douglas

Harriet Tubman

Booker Taliaferro Washington

Mary Jane McLeod Bethune

Crispus Attucks

James Armistead Lafayette

Benjamin Oliver Davis, Sr.

Eugene Jacques Bullard

Edward Alexander Bouchet

Daniel Hale Williams

Ernest Everett Just

Charles Henry Turner

David Crosthwait

Frederick McKinley Jones

Benjamin Bradley

Norbert Rillieux

Granville T. Woods

Thomas L. Jennings

Elijah McCoy

Garrett Augustus Morgan, Sr.

Archie Alphonso Alexander

Percy Lavon Julian

Charles Richard Drew

Hiram Rhodes Revels

Sarah E. Goode

John Mercer Langston

Susan Maria McKinney Steward

Joseph Hayne Rainey

Maggie Lena Walker

Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback

The First Black-American Physicians

James Derham

David Jones Peck

James McCune Smith

Harriet E. Wilson

Jupiter Hammon

William Wells Brown

Lucy Terry

Phillis Wheatly

Daniel Alexander Payne

Martin Robison Delany

William Cooper Nell

Charles Lewis Reason

Charles Hamilton Houston

Alexander Lucius Twilight

Fanny Jackson Coppin

Ebenezer D. Bassett

Mary Jane Patterson

Richard Theodore Greener

Mary Eliza Mahoney

Hortense Parker Gilliam

Michael Augustine Healy

Oscar James Dunn

Henry Ossian Flipper

John Stewart Rock

Underground Railroad and Abolitionist

Blanche Kelso Bruce

Macon Bolling Allen

Hattie McDanniel

Sarah Jane Woodson Early

Jack Johnson

Moses Fleetwood Walker

Marshall Walter Taylor

Constance Baker Motley

Edward William Brooke III

Ralph Bunche

Dorothy Dandridge

William Henry Hastie, Jr.

Jackie Robinson

Willie Thrower

Obama Years Part 2

John Baxter Taylor, Jr.

William Harvey Carney

Harry Haskell Lew

George Coleman Poage

Oscar Stanton DePriest

Alain LeRoy Locke

Harlem Renaissance

Robert Wells Bobby Marshall

Samuel Jesse Battle

Georgiana Simpson

Ernest Fredric Morrison

Charles Young

Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander

Frederick Douglass Fritz Pollard

Josephine Baker

William Dehart Hubbard

Eva Beatrice Dykes

Clifton Reginald Wharton

Nina Mae McKinney

Marian Anderson

Oscar Devereaux Micheaux

Robert Todd Duncan

Alice Marie Coachman

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks

James W. Jim Ford

Ella Jane Fitzerald

Arthur Wergs Mitchell

Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm

William Grant Still

Althea Gibson

Earl Francis Lloyd

William Count Basie

Charlotta Amanda Spears Bass

Frederick Wayman Duke Slater

Cora Mea Brown

Wesley Anthony Brown

Esther Rolle

Richard Robert Wright, Sr.

William Henry Lewis

Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones

William Christopher Handy

James Baskett

Leroy Robert Satchel Paige

Robert Clifton Weaver

Thurgood Marshall

Edward Richard Dudley, Sr.

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks

John Jordan Buck O’Neil

Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks

Harold Baron Hal Jackson

Walter Edward Washington

Thomas J. Tom Bradley

Juanita Kidd Stout

John Birks Dizzy Gillespie

Percy Ellis Sutton

The Civil Rights Movement

Toni Morrison

Daniel James, Jr.

Jesse LeRoy Brown

Frederick Clinton Branch

Azie Taylor Morton

Samuel Lee Gravely, Jr.

Donald Angelo Barksdale

Cicely Tyson

Charles Edward Gordone

Samuel George Davis, Jr.

Clennon Washington King, Jr.

Hazel Reid O’Leary

Patricia Era Bath

Sugar Ray Robinson

Carl Burton Stokes

Malcolm X

Sidney Poitier

Ezola Broussard Foster

Jim Crow

Robert Clayton Henry

Sheila Crump Johnson

Charles LeRoy Gittens

Louis Farrakhan Muhammad

Nancy Hicks Maynard

Lee Patrick Brown

The Nation of Islam

David Norman Dinkins

Lillian Elaine Fishburne

Willie Howard Mays, Jr.

James Howard Meredith

Robert Lee Elder

Lenora Branch Fulani

Black American Civil Rights Leaders

Roscoe Robinson, Jr.

Sharon Pratt Kelly

Elston Howard

Douglas Wilder

Andrew Young

Phylicia Rashad

Reconstruction era of the United States

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Karen Ruth Bass

William Felton Bill Russell

Willie Lewis Brown, Jr.

Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr.

Condoleezza Rice

Racism In The United States of America

Louis C. Gossett, Jr.

Mae C. Jemison

Riley L. Pitts

Colin L. Powell

William H. Bill Cosby, Jr.

Regina M. Benjamin

Racism In Chicago

Jesse Louis Jackson, Sr.

Desiree Glapion Rogers

Charles H. Fuller, Jr.

Joseph Paul Reason

Ernest Ernie Davis

Lisa Perez Jackson

Slavery In New York

Vanessa Lynn Williams

Ron Brown

Muhammad Ali

Arthur Ashe, Jr.

Michelle Robinson Obama

Robert L. Johnson

Emancipation Proclamation

Susan Elizabeth Rice

Charles Frank Bolden, Jr.

Guion Stewart Bluford, Jr.

Vincent W. Patton, III

Halle Berry

Eric Holder, Jr.

Black Women In History

Diane Judith Nash

Michael J. Jordan

Donnie L. Cochran

Ronald Kirk

Michael S. Steele

Venus Williams

Women In Black-American History Unrecognized

Serena Williams

John Lewis

David Paterson

Tyler Perry

Tiger Woods

Shawna Kimbrell

Black-American Politicians

Barack Obama 44th President of the United States

Is Racism in the United States Dead Today?

Black American’s History started in the 17th century with indentured servitude in British America and progresses onto the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States. Between those landmarks there were other events and issues both resolved and ongoing, that were faced by blacks. Some of these were slavery, reconstruction, development of the black community, participation in the Great Military Conflicts of the United States, racial segregation, and the Civil Rights Movement. Blacks made up the single largest racial minority in the United States, the second largest group after whites in the United States.

The first recorded blacks (Africans) in British North America (United States) arrived in 1619 as indentured servants who settled in Jamestown, Virginia. As English settlers died from harsh conditions, more and more blacks were brought to work as laborers. Blacks for many years were similar in legal position to poor English indentures, who traded several years labor in exchange for passage to America. Blacks could legally raise crops and cattle to purchase their freedom. They raised families, marrying other blacks and sometimes intermarrying with Indians (Native Americans) or English settlers. By the 1640s, several Black families owned farms around Jamestown and some became wealthy by colonial standards.

The popular conception of a race based slave system did not fully develop until the 18th century. The first Black congregation and churches were organized before 1800 in both Northern and Southern cities following the Great Awakening. By 1775, Blacks made up 20% of the population in the American Colonies, which made the second largest ethnic group after the English. During the 1770s, Blacks, both enslaved and free, helped rebellious English colonists secure American Independence by defeating the British in The American Revolution. Blacks and English fought side by side and were fully integrated. James Armistead, a Black American, played a large part in making possible the 1781 Yorktown victory, which established the United States as an Independent Nation. Other Blacks were Prince Whipple and Oliver Cornwell, who are both depicted in the front of the boat in George Washington’s Famous 1776 Crossing the Delaware portrait.

By 1860, there were 3.5 million enslaved Blacks in the United States due to the Atlantic Slave Trade, and another 500,000 Blacks lived free across the country. In 1863, during the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The Proclamation declared that all slaves in states which had seceded from the Union were free.

Blacks quickly set up congregations for themselves, as well as schools, community and civic associations, to have space away from white control or oversight. Southern states enacted Jim Crow Laws to enforce racial segregation and disenfranchisement. Most Blacks followed the Jim Crow Laws, using a mask of compliance to prevent becoming victims of racially motivated violence. To maintain self-esteem and dignity Blacks such as Anthony Overton and Mary McLeod Bethune continued to build their own schools, churches, banks, social clubs, and other businesses.

The Civil Rights Movement from 1954 to 1968 was directed at abolishing racial discrimination against Blacks, particularly in Southern United States. The March on Washington for jobs and freedom and the conditions which brought it into being are credited with putting pressure on President John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Lyndon B. Johnson put his support behind passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and labor unions; and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which expanded federal authority over states to ensure Black political participation through protection of voter registration and elections.

Politically and economically, Blacks have made substantial strides during the post-civil rights era. In 1989, Douglas Wilder became the first Black elected Governor in U.S. History. Clarence Thomas became the second Black Supreme Court Justice. In 1992 Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois became the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Senate. There were 8,936 Black officeholders in the United States in 2000, showing a net increase of 7,467 since 1970. In 2001 there were 484 Black mayors.

On November 4, 2008, Democratic Senator Barack Obama defeated Republican Senator John McCain to become the first Black to be elected President of the United States. At least 95 percent of Black voters voted for Obama. He received overwhelming support from young and educated whites, a majority of Asians, Hispanics, and Native Americans.

Running as the candidate of change, Obama made hope the center of his campaign. His platform focused on advocating for working families and poor communities, education, caring for the environment, and ethics reform.

Obama’s Early Years

January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy succeed Dwight Eisenhower as the 35th President of the United States of America.

May 4, 1961, U.S. Freedom Riders begin interstate bus rides to test the new U.S. Supreme Court Integration Decision.

August 4, 1961, Barack Hussein Obama was born at Kapi’olani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii. His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was born in Wichita, Kansas. His father, Barack Obama, Sr. was a Luo from Nyang’oma Kogelo, Nyanza Province, Kenya. The couple married on February 2, 1961, and divorced in 1964.

From age six to ten, Obama attended school in Jakarta, including Besuki Public School and St. Francis of Assisi School. In 1971, Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Armour Dunham. He attended Punahou School, a private college preparatory school, from fifth grade until his graduation from high school in 1979.

Following high school, Obama moved to Los Angles in 1979 to attend Occidental College. In February 1981, he made his first public speech, calling for Occidental’s disinvestment from South Africa due to it’s policy of apartheid. In 1981, he transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in political science, with a specialty in International Relations, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1983. He worked for a year at the Business International Corporation, then at the New York Public Interest Research Group.

Two years after graduating, Obama was hired in Chicago as Director of the Developing Communities Project, a church-based community organization originally comprising eight catholic parishes in Greater Roseland (Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale) on Chicago’s far Southside. He worked there as a community organizer from June 1985 to May 1988.

In late 1988, Obama entered Harvard Law School. He was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review at the end of his first year, and president of the Journal in his second year.

During his summers, he returned to Chicago, where he worked as a summer associate at the law firms of Sidley Austin in 1989 and Hopkins & Sutter in 1990. After graduating with a J.D. Magna cum laud from Harvard in 1991, he returned to Chicago. Obama’s election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review gained national media attention and led to a publishing contract and advance for a book about race relation, which evolved into a personal memoir. The manuscript was published in mid 1995 as Dreams From My Father.

In 1991, Obama accepted a two-year position as visiting Law and Government Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School while he worked on his first book. He then served as a Professor at the University Of Chicago Law School for twelve years as a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996, and as a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004 teaching Constitutional Law.

Obama is married to Michelle Obama, a Chicago native who also graduated from Harvard Law School. Barrack and Michelle met in Chicago, where they both worked for the law firm Sidley and Austin.

Michelle worked in corporate law for three years before pursuing a career in public service. She has worked for the city of Chicago, and she co-founded Public Allies, which helps young adults acquire skills to work in the public sector. In 2005, she was appointed vice president of community and external affairs at the University Of Chicago Medical Center. Barack and Michelle have two daughters, Malia Ann and Sasha.

Illinois And Black Americans

From 1719 to the 1820s, the French had Black slaves. Slavery was banned by the Northwest Ordnance, but was not enforced. When Illinois became a Sovereign State in 1818, the ordnance no longer applied, and there were about 9000 slaves in Illinois. As the southern part of the state was largely settled by migrants from the South, this section was hostile to free Blacks and allowed settlers to bring slaves with them for labor. Pro slavery elements tried to call a convention to legalize slavery, but they were blocked by Governor Edward Coles who mobilized anti-slavery forces, warning that rich slave owners would buy up all the good farm lands. A referendum in 1823 showed 60% of the voters opposed slavery, the efforts to make slavery official failed. But, some slaves were brought in seasonally or as servants as late as the 1840s.

Black Americans in Chicago dates back to Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable’s trading activities in the 1780s. Du Sable is the city’s founder. Fugitives and freedmen established the city’s first Black community in the 1840s.

Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable is widely regarded as the first permanent resident of Chicago, Illinois. In 1779, he was living on the site of present-day Michigan City, Indiana, when he was arrested by the British military on suspicion of being an American sympathizer. In the early 1780s he worked for the British lieutenant-governor of Michilimackinac on an estate at what is now the city of St. Clair, Michigan, before moving to settle at the mouth of the Chicago River. He is first recorded living in Chicago in early 1790, having apparently become established sometime earlier. He sold his property in Chicago in 1800 and moved to St. Charles, Missouri, where he died on August 28, 1818. Perrish Grignon, who visited Chicago in about 1794, is said to have described Point Du Sable as a large man who was a wealthy trader. In 1800 he sold his farm to John Kinzie’s frontman, Jean La Lime, for 6,000 livres; the bill of sale, which was re-discovered in 1913 in an archive in Detroit, outlined all of the property Point Du Sable owned as well as many of his personal artifacts. This included a house, two barns, a horse drawn mill, a bakehouse, a poultry house, a dairy and smokehouse. The house was a 22-by-40-foot (6.7x12m) log cabin filled with fine furniture and paintings.

Point Du Sable married a Potawatomi woman named Catherine some time in the 1770s, they had a son named Jean and a daughter named Susanne.

Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable become known as the Founder of Chicago and the place where he settled at the mouth of the Chicago River in the 1780s is recognized as a National Historic Landmark, now located in Pioneer Court. In 1965 a plaza called Pioneer Court was built on the site of his homestead as part of the construction of the Equitable Life Assurance Society of America building. The Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable Homesite was designed as a National Landmark on May 11, 1976. It is located at what is now 401 North Michigan Avenue in the Near Northside of Chicago; currently Pioneer Court is located on the site. In 2009, the City of Chicago and a private donor erected a large bronze bust by Chicago-born sculptor Erik Blome on Chicago’s magnificent Mile near the Chicago River. In October 2010 the Michigan Avenue Bridge was renamed Du Sable Bridge in honor of Point Du Sable.

The Great Migrations from 1910 to 1960 brought hundreds of thousands of Blacks from the South to Chicago, where they became an urban population. They created community organizations, churches, important businesses, and great music and literature. Black Americans of all classes built their community on the South Side of Chicago decades before the Civil Rights Movement. Their goal was to build a community where blacks could pursue life with the same rights as whites.

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.

In the 1920s, however, homeowners in the state became pioneers in using racially restrictive housing covenants, which state courts honored. The large Black population in Chicago (40,000 in 1910, and 278.000 in 1940) faced some of the same discrimination in Chicago as they had in the South. It was hard for many Blacks to find jobs and find decent places to live because of the competition for housing among different groups of people at a time when the city was expanding in population so dramatically.

At the same time that Blacks moved from the South in the Great Migration, Chicago was still receiving tens of thousands of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The groups competed with each other for working-class wages.

Though other techniques to maintain housing segregation had been used, by 1927 the political leaders of Chicago began to adopt racially restrictive covenants. The Chicago Real Estate Board promoted a racially restrictive covenant to YMCA ss, churches, women’s clubs, PTAs, Kiwanis clubs, chambers of commerce and property owners’ associations. At one point, as much as 80% of the city’s area was included under restrictive covenants.

The Supreme Court of the United States in Shelley v Kraemer ruled in 1948 that racially restrictive covenants were unconstitutional, but this did not quickly solve Black’s problems with finding adequate housing. Homeowners’ associations discouraged members from selling to black families, thus maintaining residential segregation. European immigrants and their descendants competed with Black-Americans for limited affordable housing.

Many middle and upper-class whites moved out of the city to new housing. Ethnic whites and Black families occupied the older housing left behind them. The White residents who had been in the city the longest were the ones most likely to move to newer, more expensive housing, as they could afford it. After World War II, the early white residents (many Irish immigrants and their descendants) on the South Side began to move away under pressure of new migrants and with newly expanding housing opportunities. Black-Americans continued to move into the area, which had become the Black capital of the country. The South Side became predominantly black. The Black Belt was formed.

At the turn of the century, southern states succeeded in passing new constitutions and laws that disfranchised most blacks and many poor whites. Deprived of the right to vote, they could not sit on juries or run for office. They were subject to discriminatory laws passed by white legislators, including racial segregation of public facilities. Segregated education for black children and other services were consistently underfunded in a poor, agricultural economy. As white-dominated legislatures passed Jim Crow laws to re-establish white supremacy and create more restrictions in public life, violence against blacks increased, with lynchings used as extra-judicial enforcement.

In addition, the boll weevil infestation ruined much of the cotton industry in the early 20th century. Voting with their feet, blacks started migrating out of the South to the North, where they could live more freely, get their children educated, and get new jobs.

Industry buildup for World War I pulled thousands of workers to the North, as did the rapid expansion of railroads, and the meatpacking and steel industries. Between 1915 and 1960, hundreds of thousands of black southerners migrated to Chicago to escape violence and segregation, and to seek economic freedom. They went from being a mostly rural population to one that was mostly urban. Black-Americans from the rural south to the urban north became a mass movement that radically transformed Chicago, both politically and culturally.

From 1910-1940, most Black-Americans who migrated North 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. Like the European rural immigrants, they had to rapidly adapt to a different urban culture. Many took advantage of better schooling in Chicago and their children learned quickly. After 1940, when the second larger wave of Migration started, black migrants tended to be already urbanized, from southern cities and towns. They were the most ambitious, better educated with more urban skills to apply in their new homes.

The masses of migrants arriving in the cities captured public attention. At one point in the 1940s 3,000 Black-Americans were arriving every week in Chicago, stepping off the trains from the South and making their ways to neighborhoods they had learned about from friends and the Chicago Defender. Urban white northerners started to get worried, as their neighborhoods rapidly changed. At the same time, recent and older ethnic immigrants competed for jobs and housing with the new arrivals, especially on the South Side, where the steel and meatpacking industries had the most numerous working-class jobs.

Ethnic Irish were heavily implicated in the gang violence and the rioting that erupted in 1919. They had been the most established ethnic group and defended their power and territory in the South Side against newcomers: both other ethnic whites and southern blacks. Chicago was a focal point of the great migration and the racial violence that came in its wake. With Chicago’s industries steadily expanding, opportunities opened up for new migrants, including Southerners, to find work. The railroad and the meatpacking industries recruited black workers. Chicago’s Black-American newspaper, the Chicago Defender, made the city well known to southerners. It sent bundles of papers south on the Illinois Central trains, and Black-American Pullman Porters would drop them off in Black towns. Chicago was the most accessible northern city for Black-Americans in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. They took the train north. Between 1916 and 1919, 50,000 blacks came to crowd into the burgeoning black belt, to make new demands upon the institutional structure of the South Side.

Between 1900 and 1910, the Black-American population rose rapidly in Chicago. White hostility and population growth combined to create the ghetto on the South Side. Nearby were areas dominated by ethnic Irish, who were especially territorial in defending against incursions into their areas by any other groups. Most of the large population was composed of migrants. In 1910 more than 75 percent of blacks lived in predominantly black sections of the city. The eight or nine neighborhoods that had been set as areas of black settlement in 1900 remained the core of the Chicago Black-American community. The Black Belt slowly expanded to accommodate the growing population.

As the population grew, Black-Americans became more confined to a delineated area, instead of spreading throughout the city. When blacks moved into mixed neighborhoods, ethnic white hostility grew. After fighting over the area, often whites left the area to be dominated by blacks. This is one of the reasons the black belt region started.

The Black Belt of Chicago was the chain of neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago where three-quarters of the city’s Black-American population lived by the mid-20th century. The Black Belt was an area of aging, dilapidated housing that stretched 30 blocks along State Street on the South Side. It was rarely more than seven blocks wide. The South Side black belt expanded in only two directions in the 20th century, south and east. The South Side’s black belt also contained zones related to economic status. The poorest blacks lived in the northernmost, oldest section of the black belt, while the elite resided in the southernmost section. In the mid-1900s, blacks began slowly moving up to better positions in the work force. During this time, Chicago was the capital of Black Americans. Many Black Americans who moved to the Black Belt area of Chicago were from the Black Belt in the Southeastern region of the United States. Discrimination played a big role in the lives of blacks. They often struggled to find decent housing.

Immigration to Chicago was another pressure of overcrowding, as primarily lower-class newcomers from rural Europe also sought cheap housing and working class jobs. More and more people tried to fit into converted kitchenette and basement apartments. Living conditions in the Black Belt resembled conditions in the West Side ghetto or in the stockyards district. Although there were decent homes in the Black sections, the core of the Black Belt was a slum. A 1934 census estimated that black households contained 6.8 people on average, whereas white households contained 4.7. Many blacks 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.

Crime in the Black-American neighborhoods was a low priority to the police. Associated with problems of poverty and southern culture, rates of violence and homicide were high. Some women resorted to prostitution to survive. Both low life and middle class were concentrated in a small area.

In 1946, the Chicago Housing Authority tried to ease the pressure in the overcrowded ghettos and proposed to put public housing sites in less congested areas in the city. The white residents did not take to this very well, so city politicians forced the Chicago Housing Authority to keep the status quo and develop high rise projects in the Black Belt and on the West Side. Some of these became notorious failures. As industrial restructuring in the 1950s and later led to massive job losses, residents changed from working class families to poor families on welfare.

Between 1916 and 1920, almost 50,000 Black Southerners moved to Chicago, which profoundly shaped the city’s development. Growth increases even more after 1940. In particular, the new citizens caused the growth of local churches, businesses and community organizations. A new musical culture arose, fed by all the traditions along the Mississippi River. The population continued to increase with new migrants, with the most arriving after 1940.

The black arts community in Chicago was especially vibrant. The 1920s were the height of Jazz Age, but music continued as the heart of the community for decades. Nationally renowned musicians rose within the Chicago world. Along the Stroll, a bright-light district on State Street, jazz greats like Louis Armstrong headlined at nightspots including the Delux Cafe.

Black Chicagoans’ literary creation from 1925 to 1950 was also prolific, and rivaled that of the Harlem Renaissance. Prominent writers included Richard Wright, Willard Motley, William Attaway, Frank Marshall Davis, St. Clair Drake, Horace R. Clayton, and Margaret Walker. They expressed the changes and conflicts blacks found in urban life and the struggles of creating new worlds. In Chicago, black writers turned away from the folk traditions embraced by Harlem Renaissance writers, instead adopting a grittier style of literary naturalism to depict life in the urban ghetto. The classic Black Metropolis, written by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Clayton, exemplified the style of the Chicago writers. Today it remains the most detailed portrayed of Black Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s.

Chicago’s black population developed a class structure composed of a large number of domestic workers and other manual laborers, along with small, but growing, contingent of middle and upper class business and professional elites. In 1929, black Chicagoans gained access to city jobs, and expanded their professional class. Fighting job discrimination was a constant battle for Black Americans in Chicago, as foremen in various companies restricted the advancement of black workers, which often kept them from earning higher wages. Then in the mid-20th century, blacks began slowly moving up to better positions in the workforce.

The migration expanded the market for Black American business. The most notable breakthrough in black business came in the insurance field. There were four major insurance companies founded in Chicago. Then, in the early 20th century, service establishments took over. The Black American market on State Street during this time consisted of barber shops, restaurants, pool rooms, saloons, and beauty salons. Black Americans used these trades to build their own communities. These shops gave the blacks a chance to establish their families, earn money, and become an active part of the community.

In the early 20th century many prominent Black Americans were Chicago residents, including Republican and later Democratic congressman William L. Dawson, and boxing champion Joe Louis. America’s most widely read black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, was published in Chicago and circulated in the South as well.

After long efforts, in the late 1930s, workers organized across racial lines to form the United Meatpacking Workers of America. By then, the majority of workers in Chicago’s plants were black, but they succeeded in creating an interracial organizing committee. It succeeded in organizing unions both in Chicago and Omaha, Nebraska, the city with the second largest meatpacking industry. This union belonged to the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which was more progressive than the American Federation of Labor. They succeeded in lifting segregation of job positions. For a time, workers achieved living wages and other benefits, leading to blue collar middle-class for decades. Some blacks were also able to move up the ranks to supervisory and management positions. The Congress of Industrial Organizations also succeeded in organizing Chicago steel industry.

Blacks began to win elective office in local and state government. The first blacks had been elected to office in Chicago in the 19th century, decades before the great Migrations.

William L. Dawson, was a Black American politician and lawyer who represented Chicago, Illinois for more than 27 years in the United States House of representatives.

William Levi Dawson born in Albany, Georgia in 1886. He attended the local public school and graduated from Albany Normal School in 1905, which prepared teachers for lower schools. He went on to graduate magma cum laud in 1909 from Fisk University, a historically black college in Nashville, Tennessee. There he joined Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. He moved to Illinois in 1912 to study at Northwestern University Law School in Evanston.

After the entry of the U.S. into World War I, Dawson served overseas as a first lieutenant with the Three Hundred and Sixty-fifth Infantry of the United States Army from 1917 until 1919. After returning home, he was admitted to the bar in 1920 and commenced private practice in Chicago.

He began his political career as a member of the Republican Party in 1930 as state central committeeman for the First Congressional District of Illinois. He held this position until 1932. He then served as alderman for the second ward of Chicago from 1933 until 1939 and as a Democratic Party committeeman after 1939.

Dawson was elected as a Democratic Representative from Illinois to the Seventy-eight and the thirteen succeeding Congresses, serving from January 3, 1943 until his death. During his tenure in the House, he was a vocal opponent of the poll tax, which in practice was discriminatory against poorer voters, preventing many blacks from voting. He is credited with defeating the Winstead Amendment, which would have allowed members of the U.S. Armed forces to opt out of racially integrated units after World War II.

Robert Sengstacke Abbott, was a Black American lawyer and newspaper publisher. Born on November 24, 1870 in St. Island, Georgia to former slave parents. Abbott was still a baby when his father, Thomas Abbott died. His mother, Flora Abbott later met and married John Sengstacke, who came to Georgia from Germany in 1869. Sengstacke’s background was remarkable: his father was a wealthy German merchant immigrant who in 1847 had purchased the freedom of a slave woman, from the auction block and subsequently married her; John, their child, was sent to Germany to be raised there. John returned to the States and met the Germany speaking Flora, got married and raised Abbott with a large family background in cross-race successes. John was a Congregationalist missionary who wrote: There is but one church, and all who are born of God are members of it. God made a church, man made denominations. God gave us a Holy Bible, disputing men made different kind of disciples.

Abbott went on and studied the printing trade at Hampton Institute from 1892 to 1896. At Hampton, he sang with the Hampton Quartet which traveled extensively. He received a law degree from Kent College of Law, Chicago in 1898, but because of race prejudice in the United States was unable to practice, despite attempts to establish law offices in Gary, Indiana, Topeka, Kansas, and Chicago, Illinois.

In 1905 he founded The Chicago Defender with an initial investment of 25 cents. The Defender, which became the most widely circulated black newspaper in the country, came to be known as America’s Black Newspaper and made Abbott one of the first self-made millionaires of Black American descent. The unique point in history when the Chicago Defender was becoming popular allowed it to be successful. Tension was building in the years surrounding World War I. Blacks were migrating from the south to the industrial centers of the north that were in great need of workers to manufacture goods for the war. Also stories from previous migrants to the north were trickling down to the south and giving hope to the people of the south. Sengstacke, through his writings in the Chicago Defender captured those stories, encouraged people to leave the south for the north. In fact, he even set a date, May 15, 1917, for when the Great Northern Drive, a name he coined for the event to occur. In Sengstacke’s weekly, he should pictures of Chicago and gave plenty of space for classifieds for housing and wrote how awful a place, the South was to live in comparison to the idealistic North, a place of prosperity and justice. This persuasive writing, thereby made this journal probably the greatest stimulus that the migration had.

Senstacke, was a fighter, a defender of rights. He had ideals as and exceptions of his race that he fought his whole life to help them become a reality. In fact, he created a list of nine goals, of which created the Defender’s bible:

1. American race prejudice must be destroyed

2. The opening up of all trades-unions to blacks as well as whites

3. Representation in the President’s Cabinet

4. Engineers, firemen, and conductors on all American railroads, and all jobs in governments

5. Representation in all departments of the police force over the entire United States

6. Government schools open to all American citizens in preference to foreigners

7. Motormen and conductors on surface, elevated and motor bus lines throughout America

8. Federal legislation to abolish lynching

9. Full enfranchisement of all American citizens

The Chicago Defender not only encouraged people to migrate north for a better life, but to fight for an even better lifestyle once they get there. The slogan of the paper and number one of the Defender’s bible, American race prejudice must be destroyed, is an excellent example of what he thought the paper was capable of and what the ideal experience of a Black American or any American should be.

Using the Chicago Defender, Sengstacke fought for his cause. He remembered the history of his nation, especially in his arguments concerning interracial marriage. He wrote Miscegenation began as soon as the African Slaves were introduced into the colonials population and continued undated to this day. What more, the opposition to intermarriage has heightened the interest and solidified the feelings of those who resent the injunction of racial distinction in their private and personal affairs. He believed that if laws were to restrict one’s personal choice in a mate then it was in pure violations of the constitution and the decision on two intelligent people to mutual love and self-sacrifice should not be a matter of public concern. Sengstacke also published a short lived periodical called Abbott’s monthly. The defended actively promoted the northward migration of the black southerners, particularly to Chicago; indeed, its columns not only reported on, but helped bring about the Great Migration. The Defender’s circulation reached 50,000 by 1916; 125,000 by 1918, and more than 200,000 by the early 1920s. A key distribution network for the newspaper were the Black American railroad porters (who by 1925 came to organize as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters).

John Herman Henry Sengstacke, was a Black American born in Savannah, Georgia to Alexander Sengstacke on November 25, 1912. At a young age, John worked for the Woodville Times, which was owned by his grandfather and later his father Alexander Sengstacke.

His uncle Robert Senstacke Abbott, founded The Chicago Defender in 1905 and was the publisher, trained John to be heir of this newspaper. The Chicago Defender was a widely read black newspaper. John’s uncle paid for his education at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, where he graduated in 1934. It was then that he became Vice President and General Manager of The Robert S. Abbott Publishing Company. In 1940, Robert Abbott died and John Sengstacke inherited his uncle’s newspaper.

In 1956, Sengstacke had another huge milestone in his career; he turned his weekly newspaper into a daily newspaper. At that time, The Chicago Defender was the nations largest Black American owned daily paper. He also purchased a chain of newspapers; the Pittsburghh Curier, Tri-State Defender, and Michigan Chronicle. John Sengstacke died on May 28, 1997.

Joseph Louis Barrow, was the World Heavyweight Boxing Champion from 1937 to 1949. He was better known as Joe Louis. He was born May 13, 1914 in rural Chambers County, Alabama. His father Munroe Barrow and mother Lillie Reese Barrow, both were the children of former slaves, alternating between sharecropping and rental farming.

In 1926, Louis’s family moved to Detroit, Michigan. As an alternative to gang activity, he began to spend time at a local youth center, 637 Brewster Street.

Joe Louis’s amateur debut was in early 1932, came as a light heavyweight at age 17. After his debut, a loss to future Olympian Johnny Miller, Louis compiled numerous amateur victories, eventually winning the club championship of his Brewster Street Recreation Center.

In 1933, Louis won the Detroit-Area Golden Gloves Novice Division Championship for the light heavyweight classification against Joe Biskey. By the end of his amateur career, Louis record was 50 wins against 4 losses, with 43 knockouts.

Joe Louis’s professional debut came on July 4, 1934 against Jack Kracker in the Bacon Casino on Chicago’s south side. Louis earned $59.00 for knocking out Kracker in the first round. Louis won all 12 professional fights that year, ten by way of knockouts.

Joe Louis is considered to be one of the greatest heavyweights of all time. He helped elevate boxing from a nadir in popularity by establishing a reputation as an honest, hardworking fighter at a time when the sport was dominated by gambling interests. Louis’s championship lasted 140 consecutive months, during which he participated in 27 championship fights. In 2005, Louis was named the greatest heavyweight of all time by The International Boxing Research Origination, and was ranked number one on The Ring List of 100 greatest punchers of all time.

Louis’s cultural impact was felt outside the ring. He is widely regarded as the first Black American to achieve the status of a nationwide hero within the United States.

Elizabeth Bessie Coleman, was born January 26, 1892 in Atlanta, Texas. Her father George Coleman and mother Susan Coleman were sharecroppers, their life’s were filled with dirt roads, tenant farms, and incessant labor. When she turned eighteen, Bessie took all her savings and enrolled in the Oklahoma colored Agricultural and Normal University in Langston, Oklahoma. She was able to complete only one term before she ran out of money and was forced to return home. But there was no future for her in her home town, so she went to live with her brothers in Chicago while she looked for a job.

In 1915, at the age of twenty-three, Coleman moved to Chicago, Illinois. It was with high hopes that she escaped the oppressive Jim Crow south and headed to Chicago.

Bessie lived with her brothers Walter, a Pullman porter, and John, who was frequently unemployed. After perfecting her skills as a manicurist, Bessie worked in barbershops in an area known as The Stroll which was teeming with diverse activities such as banking, stylish shops and restaurants. She was an avid reader, and one of Bessie’s idols at the time was Robert Abbott, the Editor and Publisher of The Chicago Defender.

Her brothers Walter and John had served in France during World War I and returned safely home, only to witness 1919 Chicago battered by the worse race riot in Chicago’s history. By then Bessie had been in Chicago for nearly five years. During that time, she had moved north, learned a trade and supported herself, watched her brothers return from war and survived a race riot. As the summer of her 27th year ended, she was still looking for a way to amount to something. Her brother John made teasing remarks about French women flying and having careers, Bessie decided she would become a flier.

Bessie’s yearning to amount to something was now a driving force in her goal to become a pilot. When she couldn’t find anyone to teach her to fly, Bessie took the advice of publisher Robert Abbott and prepared herself to attend aviation school in France. Having secured funding from several sources and received a passport with English and French visas, she departed for France in November of 1920. Bessie completed in seven months, a ten month course at the Ecole d’Aviation des Freres Caudon at Le Crotoy in the Somme. Learning to fly in a French Nieuport Type 82, her schooling included tail spins, banking and looping the loop. She received her license from the renowned Federation Aeronautique Internationale June 15, 1921.

When Bessie returned to the United States to pursue her new flying career, she knew she must have publicity to attract paying audiences. She created an exciting image of herself with a military style uniform and an eloquence that belied her background. Her first appearance was in an air show on September 3, 1922 at Curtiss Field near New York City. The show, sponsored by Robert Abbott and the Chicago Defender, billed Bessie as The World’s Greatest Woman Flyer. More shows folled around the country including Memphis and Chicago. On June 19, 1925, Bessie made her flying debut in Texas at a Houston auto racetrack.

At the end of April in 1926, Bessie’s Jenny arrived in Jacksonville. On the evening of April 30th, she and her mechanic took the plane up for a test flight. Once aloft, the plane malfunctioned and the mechanic, who was piloting the plane from the front seat, lost control of the plane. Bessie fell from the open cockpit several hundred feet to her death.

Willa Beatrice Brown, was born January 22, 1906 in Glasgow Barren County, Kentucky. As a high school teacher in Gary, Indiana, and after moving to Chicago, Illinois a social worker, She felt her talents were being wasted. She wanted something with more challenges and adventures in her life. Especially if they could be found outside the limited fields normally open to Black Americans.

Willa Brown decided to learn to fly, studying with Cornelius R. Coffey, a certified flight instructor and expert aviation mechanic at one of Chicago’s racially segregated airports. Willa earned her private pilot’s license in 1938. Brown and Coffey got married and later established the Coffey School of Aeronautics at Harlem Airport in Chicago, where they trained black pilots and aviation mechanics.

Together with Cornelius and Enoch P. Waters, Willa Brown helped form the National Airman’s Association of America in 1939, whose main goal was to get black aviation cadets into the United States military. As the organization’s national secretary and the president of the Chicago branch, Brown became an activist for racial equality.

She continually lobbied the government for integration of black pilots into the segregated Army Air Corps and the Federal Civilian Pilot Training Program, the system established by the Civil Aeronautics Authority to provide a pool of civilian pilots for use during national emergencies. When congress finally voted to allow separate-but-equal participation of blacks in civilian flights training program, the Coffey School of Aeronautics was chosen for participation in the Civilian Pilot Training Program.

Willa Brown eventually became the coordinator of War-Training Service for the Civil Aeronautics Authority and later became a member of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Women’s Advisory Board. She was the first Black female office in the Civil Air Patrol and the first Black woman to hold a commercial pilot’s license in the United States. Her efforts were believed to be responsible for the creation of the Tuskegee Airmen, which led to the integration of the U.S. Military Service in 1948. She was instrumental in training more than 200 students who went on to become Tuskegee pilots. Willa Beatrice Brown, died in Chicago in 1992. Among some of her honors include being inducted into the Military Aviation Hall of Fame of the State of Illinois.

Nathaniel Adams Coles was born in Montgomery, Alabama March 17, 1919. At the age of four, his family moved to Chicago, Illinois. There his father, Edward Coles, became a baptist minister. Nate King Cole learned to play the organ from his mother, Perlina Coles, the church organist. His first performance, at age four, was of Yes! We Have No Bananas. He began formal lessons at the age of twelve, eventually learning not only jazz and gospel music, but also European classical music, performing, as he said from Johann Sebastin Bach to Sergei Rachmaninoff.

Nat King Cole was an American musician who first came to prominence as a leading jazz pianist. Although an accomplished pianist, he owes most of his popular musical fame to his soft baritone voice, which he used to perform in big band and jazz genres.

Cole had three brothers, Eddie, Ike, and Freddy. The family lived in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. Cole would sneak out of the house and hang around outside the clubs, listening to artists such as Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, and Jimmie Noone

He participated in Walter Dyett’s music program at Du Sable High School. Inspired by the playing of Earl Hines, Cole began his performing career in the mid 1930s while still a teenager. Adopting the name Nat Cole. His older brother, Eddie Cole, a bass player, soon joined Cole’s band, and they made their first recording in 1936 under Eddie’s name. They were also regular performers at clubs. In fact Cole acquired his nickname King performing at one jazz club, a nickname presumably reinforced by the otherwise unrelated nursery rhyme about Old King Cole. He was also a pianist in a national tour of Broadway theater legend Eubie Blacke’s revue, Shuffle Along. When it suddenly failed in Long Beach, California, Cole decided to remain there. He would later return to Chicago in triumph to play such venues as the famed Edgewater Beach Hotel.

In January 1937, Cole married dancer Nadine Robinson, who was also in the musical Shuffle Along, and moved to Los Angeles. The trio consisted of Cole on piano, Oscar Moore on guitar, and Wesley Prince on double bass. The trio played in Failsworth throughout the late 1930s and recorded many radio transcriptions. Cole’s role was that of paino and leader of the combo.

During World War II, Wesley Prince left the group and Cole replaced him with Johnny Miller. Miller would later be replaced by Charlie Harris in the 1950s. The King Cole Trio signed with the fledgling Capitol Records in 1943. Revenues from Cole’s record sales fueled much of Capitol Record’s success during this period.

Cole’s first mainstream vocal hit was