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Race, Segregation and the Chicago Housing Authority David T The College of Wooster Libraries Open Works Senior Independent Study Theses 2013 Chicago's Wall: Race, Segregation and the Chicago Housing Authority David T. Greetham The College of Wooster, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://openworks.wooster.edu/independentstudy Part of the African American Studies Commons, and the Urban Studies Commons Recommended Citation Greetham, David T., "Chicago's Wall: Race, Segregation and the Chicago Housing Authority" (2013). Senior Independent Study Theses. Paper 3801. https://openworks.wooster.edu/independentstudy/3801 This Senior Independent Study Thesis Exemplar is brought to you by Open Works, a service of The oC llege of Wooster Libraries. It has been accepted for inclusion in Senior Independent Study Theses by an authorized administrator of Open Works. For more information, please contact [email protected]. © Copyright 2013 David T. Greetham The College of Wooster Chicago’s Wall: Race, Segregation and the Chicago Housing Authority by David Greetham Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of Senior Independent Study Supervised by Jeff Roche Department of History Spring 2013 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements i List of Figures ii Introduction 1 Chapter One: Contestation, Expansion and Confinement: A History of Chicago 8 Chapter Two: Political Hijacking: The 1949-1950 Site Selection Controversy 34 Chapter Three: Trumbull Park: The Collapse of the Chicago Housing Authority 65 Chapter Four: A Pyrrhic Victory: Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority 86 Conclusion 124 Annotated Bibliography 130 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would not have been able to complete this work without the help of my advisor Jeff Roche. Throughout the process, Professor Roche helped me narrow my interests, provided thoughtful questions and responses, and always was ready to suggest ways to make my thesis better. His careful editing and revising allowed me to expand the scope of my thesis beyond what I imagined it would be. Without his help, I would not have been able to complete my Independent Study. I am forever grateful. I must also acknowledge my mother, Carol Greetham, for inspiring my interest in the Great Migration. Her suggestion that I read The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson, cultivated an interest that would inspire my Independent Study. She and my father, Tom Greetham patiently listened to me explain my work and provided many useful comments. Without the funding I received from the Henry J. Copeland Independent Study Fund Grant Awards Committee, this project would be lacking. The money I received allowed me to travel to Chicago and access primary documents on the Chicago Housing Authority. This invaluable information was essential to my Independent Study and I am very thankful for the Committee’s support. Lastly, I must thank fellow students Adam Jankowski, Ian Schoultz, Tim Stehulak, and Mark Federman for always providing support and camaraderie as I progressed through the Independent Study process. i LIST OF FIGURES 1 Distribution of Black Population Chicago, 1910 23 2 Distribution of Black Population Chicago, 1920 24 3 Chicago’s Black Belt 25 4 Stateway Gardens 32 5 Robert Taylor Homes 35 6 Location of Housing Disturbances 41 7 Chicago Ward Map 48 8 Chicago Housing Authority Initial Site Proposals and Council Site Proposals 1949-1950 58 9 Foreign Born and African American Areas of Chicago 59 10 Expansion of the Black Belt 67 11 Black Belt Slum 69 12 Location of Chicago Housing Authority Developments 1946 74 13 African American Population by Census Tracts, 1940 89 14 African American Population by Census Tracts, 1950 90 15 African American Population by Census Tracts, 1960 91 16 Stateway Gardens 96 17 Cabrini Green Extension, 1958 96 18 Chicago Housing Authority Project Map 1938-1970 101 19 Chicago Housing Authority Sites 1981 121 ii iii iv INTRODUCTION On March 11, 2011, the last tower of the Cabrini Green public housing complex crumbled to the ground. The city of Chicago had gradually razed the near North Side project since 1995 but the destruction of the last tower seemed to signal the end of an era. For decades, violence, gangs, drugs, poverty, and deterioration plagued the project. Snipers perched in a high-rise shot and killed two police officers in 1970. Stray gun bullets struck and killed a seven-year-old as he walked to school with his mother in 1992. Vacant units were not repaired or refilled. Gangs and squatters moved in. Elevators were broken and graffiti covered the walls. By the time of its demolishment, Cabrini Green had come to symbolize everything terrible about Chicago public housing. These problems were by no means confined to Cabrini Green. Other projects like the Henry Horner Homes in the West Side and the notorious Robert Taylor Homes in the South Side were afflicted by the same problems. By 1995, Chicago public housing developments made up eleven of the fifteen poorest census tracts in the United States.1 Cabrini Green’s dysfunction is a metaphor for the entire system of public housing in Chicago. The organization responsible for maintaining public housing, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) created a system that concentrated low-income African American families in chaotic, disorganized, and very often violent communities. The CHA’s failed housing policies created a system that segregated and isolated African Americans from the decentralizing metropolitan economy. African Americans living in 1 Ben Austen, “The Last Tower.” Harpers Magazine, May 2012, http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/the-last-tower/1/ (accessed February 14, 2013); Susan Saulny, “At Housing Project, Both Fear and Renewal,” The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/us/18cabrini.html (accessed, February 23, 2013). 1 these projects experienced a living standard most would consider unconscionable in the world’s wealthiest nation. Political manipulation, white residential resistance, and structural design failures all played a role in the evolution of the CHA from providing affordable housing to state enforced segregation financed by the taxpayers. The great irony is the CHA once was an agency determined to create sustainable and integrated communities as a means of social mobility for poor and working class families. A well- intentioned effort to house low-income families went drastically awry. The CHA is now beginning to recognize the system of segregation, violence, and poverty their public housing policies perpetuated. This thesis is a study of the Chicago Housing Authority and how over its career reinforced the segregation of African Americans. Chicago is a city defined by its neighborhoods. The emergence of unique and vibrant neighborhoods, combined with industrial expansion and immigration, are the defining trends woven into Chicago’s long and detailed history. Rising to prominence at the heart of a continental transportation network stretching from the western plains to the eastern cities, Chicago’s neighborhood development, change, and contestation underlie the city’s vibrant history and provide essential background for this study. The contestation of Chicago’s valuable space allowed the city to pioneer methods of racial containment as a mechanism to control neighborhood transition and the city’s escalating population. Throughout the Chicago’s history, waves of immigrants established their own unique and vibrant enclaves across the city. Eventually, these ethnic quarters gradually broke up. The story of one minority group is very different, however. As the number of African Americans in Chicago increased, they were funneled into segregated spaces that 2 would have remarkable durability and permanence. The African American “Black Belt,” a narrow strip of neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago, would be home to some of the largest public housing developments in the city. While Chicago’s South Side African American neighborhoods present a fascinating potential topic, this thesis is not a story of the Black Belt or neighborhood change. Instead, this is a story of how a city institution confined and concealed African Americans to a ghetto, with enduring consequences.2 The abundant literature on race, housing, and the decline of urban America after World War II provides context for this study. One of the foremost works on these topics is American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland by Robert Self. Self describes the rise of the Oakland suburbs and the decline of the inner city through the context of New Deal liberalism and race. Through urban planning and federal and local housing policies, Self describes how African Americans were confined to poor neighborhoods with bad schools, no jobs, and limited access to city services. Thomas Sugrue continues the discussion of urban decline in his account of postwar Detroit, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Sugrue focuses on deindustrialization and white flight as two primary reasons for the decline of industrial cities and the disparities in wealth across racial lines. Competition for jobs and housing from African Americans threatened the Detroit white working class and as African Americans pushed for housing outside the ghetto, whites felt threatened. Sugrue argues that the structural roots of urban poverty and racial inequality started in the 1940s and 1950s. 2 The word “ghetto” in this study is used in its original connotation to refer to an area of a city where a minority group resides due to legal, economic, or social pressures. 3 Neighborhood change, the African American Great Migration and the Catholic Church is the focus of the John T. McGreevy’s book, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth Century Urban North. McGreevy’s book describes the creation of ethnic parishes in cities like Chicago and how these ethnic enclaves changed with the influx of African Americans. The Catholic Church struggled to reconcile with the newcomers and saw their parishes decline as white ethnics moved to the suburbs, leaving behind homes, schools, and churches that once were foundations of a strong community.
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