Chicago State University: From a Freight Car to the South Side

Chicago State University began in a leaky railroad freight car.

In March of eighteen sixty-seven, the Cook County Board of Supervisors voted to establish a normal school, a teacher-training institution, on a two-year experimental basis. The school opened on September second of that year in Blue Island, Illinois, a southern suburb, with a handful of students crowded into a converted railroad boxcar. The Cook County Normal School, as it was called, was the first teacher-training institution in Cook County and one of the earliest in the Midwest.

The county moved the school to a permanent building in Englewood in eighteen sixty-nine, at the time a village well beyond the edge of Chicago proper. Over the following decades the institution changed names several times and gradually expanded its mission from two-year teacher certification into full undergraduate and graduate programs.

By the mid-twentieth century the city's South Side had transformed dramatically. African American families who had moved north during the Great Migration settled in neighborhoods surrounding what had by then become Chicago Teachers College. When the teachers college split into two branches in nineteen sixty, the south branch eventually became Chicago State College. It became Chicago State University in nineteen seventy-one and the next year moved to its current one-hundred-sixty-one-acre campus at Ninety-Fifth Street and King Drive.

The university sits in the Roseland neighborhood and has historically served first-generation college students, a large proportion of them Black, from the surrounding South Side communities. Its enrollment has fluctuated with the broader financial pressures facing public higher education in Illinois, but it remains an anchor institution on a part of Chicago that has few others.

The freight car is long gone, but the school born inside it has been training teachers and graduating students from Chicago's South Side for nearly one hundred sixty years.