Chicago State University: The South Side's University, Born in a Railroad Boxcar

In eighteen sixty-seven, in a leaky railroad freight car somewhere in Cook County, a teacher training school began that would eventually become the only public university on the South Side of Chicago.

The institution that became Chicago State University was founded through the initiative of John F. Eberhart, the Commissioner of Schools for Cook County, who had observed that rural county schools lagged far behind those in the city of Chicago in the quality and preparation of their teachers. He persuaded the County Commissioners to hold a trial training institute in eighteen sixty, and when it succeeded he began pushing for a permanent institution. The Cook County Normal School formally opened in eighteen sixty-seven as a permanent institution in Englewood, then a village well south of Chicago's city limits.

Normal schools of the era had a singular purpose: to train teachers according to a standard, or norm, of professional competency. What made this one distinctive was its location. As Chicago grew and absorbed the surrounding villages, the institution found itself planted in the South Side, in neighborhoods that by the early twentieth century were home to waves of Black migrants from the American South. Unlike many comparable institutions of the era, Chicago State admitted African American students without condition, making it the first university in Chicago to do so unconditionally.

The school changed its name to Chicago State College in nineteen sixty-five and to Chicago State University in nineteen seventy-one, a year before it moved to its current one hundred sixty-one-acre campus in the Roseland neighborhood. Today it serves a student body that is predominantly African American, a reflection of both its location and its long history as one of the few institutions in the region that opened its doors without discrimination.

From a freight car to a campus, from a county normal school to a state university, Chicago State's one hundred sixty years run through the whole arc of Chicago's growth and racial geography.