Chicago was one of the most popular destinations during the Great Migration, thanks in large part to The Chicago Defender. The realities of a new life in Chicago varied, with some finding success and opportunities and others being dismayed by the realities of racism and segregation.
Organizations such as the Urban League distributed cards like the ones below offering advice and assistance with housing and employment.
The cold and the noise seemed to beat on me and the big buildings made me feel as if I'd come to live in a penitentiary. Oftentimes, I wished I could run away back home to New Orleans.
But after I got up to Chicago, I stuck. I didn't go back to New Orleans for fifteen years. And whatever I am today I owe to Chicago, because in Chicago the Negro found the open door.
In Chicago, our people were advancing. Not only were they making money they were active in clubs and all sorts of organizations. And I don't mean this was just organizations like the NAACP. There were all kinds of civic organizations and social clubs. The people were church people, but they were talking about different things than we ever did down South—things like getting educated and going into business. The Negro was doing more than just singing and praying, and I began to see a new world.
Many of the black migrants who came to Chicago between 1910 and 1930 became entrepreneurs started businesses. The “Perfect Eat” Shop, a restaurant on 47th street near South Park, was owned and operated by Ernest Morris, who had come to Chicago during the Great Migration.
Like many other cities that grew due to migration, Chicago soon consisted of ethnographic neighborhoods divided by language or race. This map shows the concentration of black neighborhoods.
Chicago's South Side "black belt" contained zones related to economic status. The poorest blacks lived in the northernmost, oldest section of the black belt, while the elite resided in the southernmost section.
As in the South, the church was central to the black community. It was more than just a house of worship. Churches essentially served as community centers where congregates could find help and support.
A group of white children destroy the home of a black family during the 1919 riots.
In 1919, a series of race riots erupted in 22 cities across America. Returning soldiers from WWI, competition for jobs and housing, and ongoing racial and class antagonisms increased tensions in Chicago, culminating in the Chicago Race Riot of 1919. This report from the Chicago Commission on Race Relations attempted to highlight the issues that needed to be addressed.
The relation of whites and Negroes in the United States is our most grave and perplexing domestic problem. It involves not only a difference of race—which as to many immigrant races has been happily overcome—but wider and more manifest differences in color and physical features. These make an easy and natural basis for distinctions, discriminations, and antipathies arising from the instinct of each race to preserve its type. Many white Americans, while technically recognizing Negroes as citizens, cannot bring themselves to feel that they should participate in government as freely as other citizens.
Centuries of the Negro slave trade and of slavery as an institution have created, and are often deemed to justify, the deep-seated prejudice against Negroes. They placed a stamp upon the relations of the two races which it will require many years to erase.
The great body of anti-Negro public opinion, preserved in the literature and traditions of the white race during the long, unhappy progress of the Negro from savagery through slavery to citizenship, has exercised a persistent and powerful effect, both conscious and unconscious, upon the thinking and the behavior of the white group generally. Racial misunderstanding has been fostered by the ignorance and indifference of many white citizens