Washington, Harold (1922–1987)

The Social and Political Context

Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a Haitian trader of African descent, built the first permanent settlement on the Chicago River in 1779; however, more than 200 years would pass before the city elected its first mayor of African heritage.

African Americans migrated from the South in two distinct waves, from 1840 to 1900 and from 1910 to 1920, seeking work and economic liberation. The second wave became known as the “Great Migration,” as African Americans from the rural South streamed into major U.S. cities in the North in search of better jobs that could provide both a decent living and a measure of dignity. They believed that the industrialization in the North would offer a fair marketplace for their manual labor skills.

In Chicago, African Americans were contained, both socially and politically, within a narrow band of land that sociologists Sinclair Drake and Horace Cayton described in their book of the same name as the “Black Metropolis.” This area, geographically labeled the “Black Belt,” was created by segregation and de facto residential restrictions. By the early 1920s, some 300,000 African Americans lived in the area between 31st Street on the north and 63rd Street on the south and between State Street and Cottage Grove Avenue on the west and east. By 1925, the Black Belt had become the recognized center of Black business, politics, and culture. It was the natural spawning ground for Black political movements. The area elected Oscar DePriest as Chicago's first African American alderman in 1915 and sent him to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1928.

As a tenet of Chicago's Democratic machine politics, racial and ethnic groups maintained areas of influence primarily through small-item decisions about street sign placements, garbage pickup, and other municipal service matters overseen by party leaders in the fifty city wards. Expenditures for schools, neighborhood infrastructure, and parks were tightly controlled by the mayor's office and unevenly distributed, first, among the White wards and then, generally following much agitation, to the “darker wards.” A desire for increased influence over larger municipal matters, those that were affecting poor African American and Latino areas disproportionately, sparked rumblings of discontent.

...