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Chicago Freedom Movement
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Chicago Freedom Movement
The Chicago Freedom Movement, also known as the Chicago open housing movement, was led by Martin Luther King Jr., James Bevel and Al Raby. It was supported by the Chicago-based Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
The movement included a large rally, marches and demands to the City of Chicago. These demands covered a range of areas beside housing discrimination in the United States, including educational inequality, transportation and employment discrimination, income inequality, health inequality, wealth inequality, crime in Chicago, criminal justice reform in the United States, community development, tenants rights and quality of life. Operation Breadbasket, in part led by Jesse Jackson, sought to harness African-American consumer power.
The Chicago Freedom Movement was the most ambitious civil rights campaign in the Northern United States, lasted from mid-1965 to August 1966, and is largely credited with inspiring the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
During World War I, tens of thousands of African Americans moved to Chicago as part of the many destinations in the Great Migration to urban and industrial centers in the Northeast and Midwest in search of jobs, and to escape the Jim Crow laws and racial violence in the rural South. Large numbers of black migrants to the city resided in the South Side area near the established Irish and German American communities as well as neighborhoods of many recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. As a result, social and racial tensions in the city intensified, as native-born residents, migrants and immigrants fiercely competed for jobs and limited housing due to overcrowding. Tensions eventually simmered into the Chicago race riot of 1919 during the Red Summer era, in which ethnic Irish gangs attacked black neighborhoods on the South Side, leading to the deaths of 23 blacks and 15 whites as well as many arson damages to buildings.
In the 1920s, the Chicago Real Estate Board established a racially restrictive covenant policy in response to the rapid influx of southern black migrants who were allegedly feared in bringing down property values of white neighborhoods. Contractual agreements among property owners included prohibiting sale or lease of any part of a building to specific groups of people, usually African Americans. For the next few decades, blacks were prevented from purchasing homes in certain white neighborhoods in Chicago. Although highly skilled African Americans gained unprecedented access to city jobs, they were not given as many opportunities for work and were often left with less desirable positions, sometimes in dangerous or unpleasant settings. School boundary lines were carefully drawn to avoid integrating the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), and African American children attended all-black schools in overcrowded conditions, with less funding in materials. As a result, many black families were locked in the overcrowded South Side in shoddy conditions.
In 1910, the population of black residents were 40,000. By 1960, it grew to 813,000, fueled by the Second Great Migration of blacks into the city during World War II to work in the war industries and during the post-war economic expansion. The United States Supreme Court ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948 that racial covenant policies were unconstitutional, yet such practice continued without opposition over the next two decades. During the post-war economic boom, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) tried to ease the pressure in the overcrowded ghettos and put public housing sites in less congested areas in the city. The white residents did not take this very well and reacted with violence when black families tried to move into white areas, so city politicians forced the CHA to keep the status quo and develop high rise projects in black neighborhoods. Some of these became notorious failures. As industrial restructuring in the 1950s and later led to massive job losses to the suburbs amidst the white flight, black residents changed from working-class families to poor families on welfare.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the growing discontent among black Americans about their continuous mistreatment in the US culminated into the formation of the Civil Rights Movement. Nonviolent actions led by African-Americans nationwide, such as the court case Brown vs. Board of Education, the Montgomery bus boycott, the Little Rock Nine's enrollment in a segregated school, the Nashville sit-ins, the Birmingham campaign, the Freedom Summer voter registration drive and the Selma to Montgomery marches helped spur federal action that slowly broke down legalized racial segregation in the South.
While much of the attention was focused on the South, little had been paid to the conditions in the North and West. Civil rights activists attempted to expose and contest the inequities of life in Chicago. In 1962, then-University of Chicago student Bernie Sanders organized a 15-day sit-in with other protesters to challenge the university's alleged off-campus segregated residential properties. In October 1963, tens of thousands of students and residents boycotted the CPS due to the segregationist policies of Superintendent of Chicago Public Schools Benjamin Willis, who was notorious for placing mobile units on playgrounds and parking lots to solve overcrowding in black schools. While city authorities made a promise to investigate the conditions raised by civil rights activists, they never made a serious effort to take action. Protests, sit-ins and demonstrations in Chicago continued throughout 1964 and 1965.
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Chicago Freedom Movement
The Chicago Freedom Movement, also known as the Chicago open housing movement, was led by Martin Luther King Jr., James Bevel and Al Raby. It was supported by the Chicago-based Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
The movement included a large rally, marches and demands to the City of Chicago. These demands covered a range of areas beside housing discrimination in the United States, including educational inequality, transportation and employment discrimination, income inequality, health inequality, wealth inequality, crime in Chicago, criminal justice reform in the United States, community development, tenants rights and quality of life. Operation Breadbasket, in part led by Jesse Jackson, sought to harness African-American consumer power.
The Chicago Freedom Movement was the most ambitious civil rights campaign in the Northern United States, lasted from mid-1965 to August 1966, and is largely credited with inspiring the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
During World War I, tens of thousands of African Americans moved to Chicago as part of the many destinations in the Great Migration to urban and industrial centers in the Northeast and Midwest in search of jobs, and to escape the Jim Crow laws and racial violence in the rural South. Large numbers of black migrants to the city resided in the South Side area near the established Irish and German American communities as well as neighborhoods of many recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. As a result, social and racial tensions in the city intensified, as native-born residents, migrants and immigrants fiercely competed for jobs and limited housing due to overcrowding. Tensions eventually simmered into the Chicago race riot of 1919 during the Red Summer era, in which ethnic Irish gangs attacked black neighborhoods on the South Side, leading to the deaths of 23 blacks and 15 whites as well as many arson damages to buildings.
In the 1920s, the Chicago Real Estate Board established a racially restrictive covenant policy in response to the rapid influx of southern black migrants who were allegedly feared in bringing down property values of white neighborhoods. Contractual agreements among property owners included prohibiting sale or lease of any part of a building to specific groups of people, usually African Americans. For the next few decades, blacks were prevented from purchasing homes in certain white neighborhoods in Chicago. Although highly skilled African Americans gained unprecedented access to city jobs, they were not given as many opportunities for work and were often left with less desirable positions, sometimes in dangerous or unpleasant settings. School boundary lines were carefully drawn to avoid integrating the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), and African American children attended all-black schools in overcrowded conditions, with less funding in materials. As a result, many black families were locked in the overcrowded South Side in shoddy conditions.
In 1910, the population of black residents were 40,000. By 1960, it grew to 813,000, fueled by the Second Great Migration of blacks into the city during World War II to work in the war industries and during the post-war economic expansion. The United States Supreme Court ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948 that racial covenant policies were unconstitutional, yet such practice continued without opposition over the next two decades. During the post-war economic boom, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) tried to ease the pressure in the overcrowded ghettos and put public housing sites in less congested areas in the city. The white residents did not take this very well and reacted with violence when black families tried to move into white areas, so city politicians forced the CHA to keep the status quo and develop high rise projects in black neighborhoods. Some of these became notorious failures. As industrial restructuring in the 1950s and later led to massive job losses to the suburbs amidst the white flight, black residents changed from working-class families to poor families on welfare.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the growing discontent among black Americans about their continuous mistreatment in the US culminated into the formation of the Civil Rights Movement. Nonviolent actions led by African-Americans nationwide, such as the court case Brown vs. Board of Education, the Montgomery bus boycott, the Little Rock Nine's enrollment in a segregated school, the Nashville sit-ins, the Birmingham campaign, the Freedom Summer voter registration drive and the Selma to Montgomery marches helped spur federal action that slowly broke down legalized racial segregation in the South.
While much of the attention was focused on the South, little had been paid to the conditions in the North and West. Civil rights activists attempted to expose and contest the inequities of life in Chicago. In 1962, then-University of Chicago student Bernie Sanders organized a 15-day sit-in with other protesters to challenge the university's alleged off-campus segregated residential properties. In October 1963, tens of thousands of students and residents boycotted the CPS due to the segregationist policies of Superintendent of Chicago Public Schools Benjamin Willis, who was notorious for placing mobile units on playgrounds and parking lots to solve overcrowding in black schools. While city authorities made a promise to investigate the conditions raised by civil rights activists, they never made a serious effort to take action. Protests, sit-ins and demonstrations in Chicago continued throughout 1964 and 1965.