Chicagos Negro :: Free Essays Online

Chicago's Negro When studying urban living spaces, one question that always comes to mind is how a particular urban space or neighborhood came into existence. I have grown up on the South Side of Chicago for the past 19 years in a community known as Pill Hill. My neighborhood, a middle-class Chicago neighborhood, came to gain its name because of all the doctors and health-care professionals who resided in the neighborhood in the 1960’s. In addition, I have also had the opportunity to live outside of the city in a northern suburb known as Highland Park: Along the lakefront of Chicago are some of the most affluent communities in the United States. In both median household income and per capita income, Northbrook, Highland Park, and Wilmette and among the nation’s ten wealthiest communities with a population of about 25,000 or more. There are other salient characteristics of these three communities: they are virtually all white and they have virtually no subsidized housing. (Squires 117) The rigors and din of the city are all but removed from life in Highland Park. Nevertheless, Highland Park, IL has faced its own share of trouble in the past decade for the discrimination that the corrupt local government has plagued minorities with. The living conditions in Highland Park are drastically different from those of the South Side of Chicago in that the average property value of a home in the year 2000 was $662,755 while the average home in Pill Hill sold for $180,323. (Citizens United for Justice) Nevertheless, Highland Park is just a single example of Chicago’s many affluent northern suburbs that developed in the 1850’s. Growing up in the city my entire life and having lived in different socio-economic conditions, I have grown immune to the extraordinary degree of racial segregation present in Chicago. As an African American, I have always felt comfortable living on the South Side of Chicago and not until I had the opportunity to live in both Highland Park and a neighboring suburb, Lake Forest, did I truly know what it felt like to be a minority. Nevertheless, this was not always the case for most blacks. From the early 1900’s, blacks resided on the South Side of Chicago, not by choice, but because of strict discriminatory housing laws that forbade the sale of homes in certain areas to blacks.