Founded by a Black settler, built up by the Great Migration and the home of the blues and house.
The First Settler
Chicago's first non-Native permanent resident was a Black man. Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, of Black African and possibly European descent, settled on the north bank of the Chicago River near its mouth in the 1780s. The city has named a school, museum, harbor, park and bridge after him, and in 2021 Lake Shore Drive was renamed in his honor.
The Great Migration And Bronzeville
Robert S. Abbott founded the Chicago Defender in 1905, and its editorials and stories of successful Black Chicagoans helped persuade a generation to leave the rural South. Thousands came for industrial jobs, and on the South Side, Bronzeville became the Black Metropolis, one of the nation's most significant concentrations of Black businesses and culture.
The journalist and activist Ida B. Wells lived there, as did Louis Armstrong and Lil Hardin Armstrong, who played the neighborhood's clubs. The poet Gwendolyn Brooks became the first Black American to win a Pulitzer Prize. In 1929 the Defender's organization started the Bud Billiken Parade, now one of the largest parades in the country.
The Blues And House
The blues came north with the migrants from the Mississippi Delta and went electric in Chicago. Muddy Waters, often called the father of Chicago blues, arrived in 1943, and labels like Chess Records helped spread the sound.
Forty years later the city did it again. At the Warehouse, a club whose crowd was mostly Black gay men, Frankie Knuckles was resident DJ from 1977 to 1982, and house music grew out of Chicago's Black queer underground in the early 1980s. Knuckles is often called the Godfather of House.
City Hall And The Museum
In 1961 Margaret Taylor-Burroughs and others founded what is now the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center, which moved into a building in Washington Park in 1973. In 1983 Harold Washington was elected Chicago's first Black mayor, and he served until his death in office in 1987.
Black Chicago Today
On the South Side and across the city, Black-owned restaurants, salons, record shops and brands are part of everyday Chicago.
Shop Black-owned businesses in Chicago on CashBlack.
Photo Credits
The DuSable Museum in Washington Park. Photo: The original uploader was TonyTheTiger at English Wikipedia . ( Original text: en:User:TonyTheTiger ), CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons