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BRONZEVILLE VERSUS HYDE PARK-KENWOOD |
The Expansion
| In the late 1940s, African-American migrants continued to move to Bronzeville in record-breaking numbers. The 1940 population of the area increased to 103,256 from 87,005 in 1930 of whom ninety-eight percent were African-Americans. By 1950, the population increased to 114,557 then African-Americans comprised ninety-nine percent of Bronzeville.29 Therefore, the growing neighborhood needed to expand to accommodate these newcomers. |
The Illinois Central Railroad. Land of Hope. |
Bronzeville started to permeate the borders of Hyde Park-Kenwood, the neighboring elite community of University
of Chicago, and Bronzeville. Previously, the neighborhood used restrictive covenants to keep African-Americans
from owning and renting. In the late 1940s, this method of discrimination was considered politically unfavorable.30 With the
end of restrictive covenants, the African-Americans who had the financial resources moved from Bronzeville into
Hyde Park-Kenwood. Slowly and steadily, block by block, more Bronzeville families saturated this invisible racial
barrier and moved into Hyde Park-Kenwood.
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University of Chicago |
The Hyde Park-Kenwood neighborhood consisted of a very prestigious community. The expansion of Bronzeville into
this neighborhood was not well received by the aristocrats of this small village. As Robert Dentler and Peter Rossi
reported in their book The Politics of Urban Renewal, "The faculty of the University of Chicago settled in
the area, attracting as fellow residents a population of highly educated professionals and businessmen."31 The residents
wanted to keep the heavy concentration of poor African-Americans out of this community. They did not want to have
their "property values impaired" and the "character of their neighborhood changed" because
of this influx of migrants.32
The trend of the decaying, older urban neighborhoods frightened the residents of Hyde Park-Kenwood. In the Hyde
Park-Kenwood Urban renewal Years, Muriel Beadle, the wife of a University of Chicago professor, mentions the community's
fear of their transition in comparison to these neighborhoods:
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Young kids playing, Black and White on the borderline of a neighborhood in Chicago. American Memory. |
Older neighborhoods in Chicago and in other urban cities had grown progressively more blighted until they had been flattened by bulldozers as part of slum-clearance programs; neighborhoods invaded by Negroes had gone from all white to all Negro, remaining interracial only during the years of transition. 33 |
Also, the fear of race problems caused the residents to worry about the future of their neighborhood with the presence of African-Americans. They felt that the riots of 1919 could be repeated on a larger and deadlier scale if the migrants were allowed to move into this area.34
This changing neighborhood encouraged many white residents to move to the suburbs. The expansion and the threat
of the African-Americans expanding into white neighborhoods, such as Hyde Park-Kenwood, encouraged what is known
as "white flight."35 In the 1950s, the white middle class fled to the suburbs just as the black migrants started to
seek housing in their exclusively white neighborhoods. Massey and Denton, the authors of American Apartheid, argued
that "withdrawal to the suburbs provided a more attractive alternative to the defense of threatened neighborhoods
and led to a prevalence of flight over fight among whites in racially changing areas."36 From the years of 1940 to 1950, Hyde
Park experienced a 206 percent increase in its African-American population. Kenwood experienced a whopping increase
of 1,142 per cent!37
Many African-Americans, from Bronzeville and those with intentions of moving to Bronzeville, searching for housing moved further into Hyde Park-Kenwood with the evolution of time. The Brown versus Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954 expedited residential succession in this neighborhood.38 This decision outlawed segregation in the public schools. Therefore, the schools in the Hyde Park-Kenwood neighborhood would at this point have to integrate their school system. As a result, some of the white residents moved out of the this neighborhood "for the kids" and "especially for the educational and social superiority of smaller and more homogenous suburban school systems."39 Around the mid 1950s, the busing system that allowed integration of the public school system only included the schools in the city. It did not include busing children to the suburban schools. By moving to the suburbs, this allowed many whites to continue the practice of racial exclusivity.
Not all of the white urban middle class of Hyde Park-Kenwood participated in the flight to the suburbs. There were still many who wanted to remain in this area. As Massey and Denton addressed, "They were often tied physically to the city by large capital investments, spatially immobile facilities, and long standing traditions."40 Many of the University of Chicago's personnel remained remarkably stable in their preference for Hyde Park-Kenwood as a residential area. "For the faculty member or the researcher the community offered many advantages: location, relatively inexpensive housing, congenial society, and good schools."41 The residents of Hyde Park-Kenwood tried to reverse what they deemed the "irreversible" and solve the problem of spreading blight in their neighborhood. To help with this encroachment, they turned to the federal government for relief.42
In order for these private interests to be served, they looked to government
programs such as the Urban renewal program to solve the spread of blight before their neighborhood could be harmfully
affected. Urban renewal was a program managed by the federal government that provided funds for the rehabilitation
and redevelopment of decayed urban neighborhoods. It encouraged private enterprises along with governmental assistance
to remedy the serious housing shortages by means of the clearance of slum and blighted areas and by providing affordable
housing in its place.43
