6/15/2023 0 Comments Microcosm world“Between 19, there was not a single area of African American expansion outside of west Evanston, in spite of Black population growth of almost 5,000,” Weiss reports. In effect, they treated a section of west Evanston as open to African Americans, while excluding them from the rest of town,” Weiss wrote.Ĭonfined to land between the sanitary canal and railroad tracks, clear geographic barriers limited Black suburbanization and integration into the rest of Evanston, and it appears this strategy of informal racial zoning was effective. “Evanston’s white real estate brokers apparently developed a practice of informal racial zoning. Evanston wasn’t exclusive in the sense that the town refused to sell homes to Black buyers-in fact, real estate agents encouraged their ownership-but the city was exclusive about where Black families could live. Like Weiss theorized, Evanston differed from adjacent suburbs because the city already had a well-established Black community by the time the Great Migration began. “Unlike many suburbs that sought to exclude African Americans altogether, leading members of Evanston’s real estate establishment played a role in the growth of Evanston’s African American community,” Weiss wrote in his 1999 dissertation titled Black Housing, White Finance. Evanston was in the process of pushing certain groups, as Robinson describes, into specific areas, providing Black families opportunities to own homes but within strict geographic limits. Evanston wasn’t exempt from its own forms of discimination, however. Its opportunities and “safe haven” atmosphere blanketed Black families from the horrific violence they faced elsewhere in the country. “Approximately six million Black people moved from the American South to Northern, Midwestern and Western states 19,” the National Archives wrote.įor those who moved North, many found themselves in major cities like Chicago, and eventually in its surrounding suburbs, particularly Evanston. A culmination of these financial struggles for Black Southerners, in addition to the growing industrial opportunities of the North, generated one of the largest migration movements in the United States, known as the Great Migration. “ there was this long standing tradition in value for ownership that is rooted in Black communities, and that was true in the urban North as well.”Īs Weiss explains, homeownership was deeply valorized within the Black community, but in areas like the American South where lynchings and Jim Crow permeated Black welfare, it was almost impossible to own property and build financial prosperity. “ rooted in the experience of former enslaved people in the South who prevented from gaining property,” Weiss continues. was the root of power, and the absence of property was the root of disempowerment,” San Diego State University history professor Andrew Weiss says. “ extraordinary value for ownership of property. For Black families in particular, home-ownership was a way to generate decades of wealth, making up for the potential wealth lost to chattel slavery. The beginning of the 20th century marked a period in which increasingly high numbers of Americans switched from renting homes to owning them, and Evanston provided both the land to develop houses and the opportunities to be economically successful. “By 1900, there was a demarcation, where there was to push groups of people in certain areas of Evanston, the most visible group being the Black community,” Robinson shares.Īs racist sentiment began to grow in Evanston, so did its population. “Everyone lived everywhere Evanston was very rural before 1900,” Dino Robinson, founder and executive director of Shorefront Legacy Center, an organization aiming to archive the Black history of Chicago’s North Shore, says.Īs larger swaths of African Americans began to migrate into Evanston, things began to change. When Evanston’s Black community began to emerge in the late 1880s, reaching a population of approximately 125 people, they lived amongst a relatively integrated society. Neighborhoods are symbolic of a city’s history, and in Evanston, our neighborhoods are monoliths of a complicated past-one of segregation and progress, of inequity and enfranchisement. On almost every block, there appears to be an ivory-brick church enshrined in old-English handwriting or a house whose porch splinters at the base, a physical representation of its use over the decades. Roots run deep here, and it’s obvious why. From the town’s locational assets-Northwestern, Chicago and Lake Michigan-to its ambitious and business-oriented citizenry, Evanston has garnered a reputation for being one of the most productive towns in the nation.Īt the core of Evanston is its neighborhoods: the life-blood of the city. Since its founding in 1863, Evanston has been perceived as an emblem of opportunity.
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