On this date 42 years ago—February 10, 1969—federal district judge Richard B. Austin issued a ruling aimed squarely at a persistent Chicago problem. “Existing patterns of racial segregation must be reversed if there is to be a chance of averting the desperately intensifying division of whites and Negroes in Chicago,” Austin wrote.
Lucky we fixed all that.
But most African-Americans are clustered in two areas, as they were in the 1960s: a massive one on the south side, and a smaller one on the far west side. The south-side section, between Western Avenue and the lake, stretches more than a hundred blocks north to south, from 35th Street to the city limits at 138th. This African-American subdivision of Chicago includes 18 contiguous community areas, each with black populations above 90 percent, most of them well above that. The west-side black section includes another three contiguous 90 percent-plus community areas. Fifty-five percent of Chicago’s 964,000 African-Americans live in these 21 community areas, in which the aggregate population is 96 percent black. Two-thirds of the city’s blacks live in community areas that are at least 80 percent black.
This pronounced, persistent separation of the races would be worrisome, or at least curious, even if separate were equal—which of course it isn’t. The hypersegregated black neighborhoods continue to lead the city in the same wretched problems as in the 60s. In some ways, things are worse. There’s not just a lack of legitimate jobs in these areas today, but also a surplus of people without skills—and more of them have criminal records now as well, from the war on drugs. Predatory lending has multiplied the number of abandoned buildings in these neighborhoods.
In 1971, the Gautreaux case was still inching along in Judge Austin’s courtroom. In March, a month before the mayoral election, the CHA complied with Austin’s order to plan public housing in white neighborhoods as well as black by listing 235 proposed sites in white neighborhoods. But the sites needed city approval. Mayor Richard J. Daley quickly called the proposal “detrimental” and said the units “should not be built.” His Republican opponent, Richard Friedman, declined to guarantee to block the units if elected, noting instead that open housing was “the law of the land.” The Independent Voters of Illinois called Daley “racist” because of his opposition to the sites. But Daley knew “racist” was better in Chicago than “integrationist.” He trounced Friedman. The Tribune observed afterward that Friedman’s campaign had become a “lost cause” because of his stance on the housing list.
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Other ethnic enclaves have existed in Chicago, of course, but they were never nearly as concentrated, and their residents tended to assimilate and disperse fairly quickly. For Chicago’s blacks, dispersal wasn’t an option; given the violence that greeted them when they moved into white neighborhoods, the safest mode of expansion from the black belt was into adjacent neighborhoods. Blacks were met there with bricks and bottles and occasionally bombs, but there was some safety in numbers. Various legal or quasi-legal methods were used to hem blacks in as well, such as restrictive covenants that forbade white property owners in border neighborhoods to rent or sell to blacks.
