Bronzeville, The Black Metropolis

Between nineteen sixteen and nineteen seventy, more than five hundred thousand Black Americans left the Deep South and came to Chicago. They came from Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia, from sharecropping farms and turpentine camps and towns where the rules of daily life were enforced by violence and where the law provided no protection. They came on the Illinois Central Railroad, which ran from New Orleans straight north to Chicago's Twelfth Street Station. They came because the Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper distributed on that same railroad network, had been telling them for years that Chicago was different. Sometimes it was.

They settled on the South Side, in a corridor of neighborhoods that whites would sell to Black buyers, because deed restrictions and real estate covenants and bank redlining confined them there. The corridor extended roughly from Thirty-First Street south to Sixty-Third, between State Street and Cottage Grove Avenue. It was called the Black Belt by its detractors, and the Black Metropolis by sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, who published their landmark study under that name in nineteen forty-five.

The Bronzeville neighborhood at the heart of the belt was, by any honest measure, one of the most culturally productive communities in twentieth-century America. Louis Armstrong played his first Chicago engagements here. Nat King Cole grew up here. Mahalia Jackson built her gospel career here. Ida B. Wells, whose anti-lynching journalism had made her the most dangerous woman in the South, spent her later decades here. Gwendolyn Brooks wrote the poems here that would make her the first Black author to win the Pulitzer Prize. The Chicago Defender, published from Bronzeville, was more widely read in Mississippi than any white newspaper in the state.

All of this happened inside a forced confinement. The Black Metropolis was not a choice of community; it was a community built inside a cage of law and violence, and it flourished in spite of those conditions rather than because of any benevolent arrangement.

Beginning in the nineteen fifties, the city demolished much of Bronzeville's physical fabric. The Dan Ryan Expressway cut through the corridor. The Robert Taylor Homes public housing project was built on cleared land that had been working-class Black neighborhoods. The logic of urban renewal redistributed poverty without addressing the policies that had created it.