The U.S. city of Chicago, while socially and culturally diverse, remains deeply scarred by historical racial segregation, which continues to drive urban governance challenges including high levels of gang-related crime and limited access to quality public education, according to local scholars and advocates.
Beneath Chicago's skyline lies the city's South Side, a predominantly African American area that constitutes an integral part of the Illinois metropolis. The area was formed by the legacy of "redlining", a process that impacted many American cities.
Beginning in the 1930s, "redlining" is a discriminatory practice that consists of the systematic denial of services such as mortgages, insurance loans, and other financial services to residents of certain areas, based on their race or ethnicity.
Although the policy was formally abolished decades ago, the de facto "redlined communities" have persisted to this day. Chicago's South Side was one of the most typical areas marked by the city's "red line" at that time.
"When you talk about a city like Chicago, one of the most important things is to understand segregation. The Great Migration actually has two sections, right? White citizens of Chicago were fearful this Black scourge of people were coming to take over neighborhoods or what have you, and they expressed this concern to the mayors and to realtors. So realtors actually devised a system where that disallowed Black people to purchase homes. And it would draw a red line to show where Black people could not buy property, right? So this is known as redlining," said David Stovall, a professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). "About the late 50s, you still had large industry here in Chicago. And Black families could actually work in those spaces. The late 70s, 75 percent of those jobs were gone. Also what happens is the city begins to remove resources, and what has been put in its place is a strong police presence," he added.
Today, the legacy of redlining remains visible. In some cases, a single street can mark a stark contrast in living conditions between its North and South Sides. On the North Side, largely white neighborhoods, the average house price may exceed one million dollars, and schools are well-funded, whereas on the South Side, in African American neighborhoods, property values have depreciated, shootings occur frequently, and educational resources are scarce.
"The quality of life and the wealth on the North Side is extremely higher than the quality of life and the wealth on the South Side. The lack of teachers on the South Side, as opposed to fully staffed schools on the North Side. The buildings, oh my god, the actual physical structures. The South Side has very dilapidated buildings, while the North Side has modern, state-of-the-art buildings," said Marian Patton, development associate at nonprofit organization Raise Your Hand for Illinois Public Education (RYH).
"A lot of families, particularly Black low-income families, left the city, left their neighborhoods. People in leadership have always historically made decisions around, 'well, the South Side is just gonna get less money because, one, all the Black poor people live there.' And they don't want to give them access to the same resources, to the same funding, to the same quality of education or the quality of a building," said Erykah Nava, educational resource equity lead organizer at RYH.
Locals are trying to change the situation and draw more investment for the area's development, starting with changing its image.
"The crime kind of stays in its own proximity. Those who engage in crime have crime happen to them. People make the South Side feel like even if you're just minding your business, something's going to happen to you. That's absolutely untrue. I think that would be the first kind of misnomer I would want to correct about the South Side," said historian Shermann Thomas.
"We want to welcome you to Chicago, to Englewood, right here, where you may hear something, but we want you to come down here and see what it is," said local business owner Corie Luckett.
Chicago's South Side suffers lingering impacts of racist 'redlining' practices
