Black Housing, White Finance: African American Housing And Home Ownership In Evanston, Illinois, Before 1940 - Statistical Data Included

Journal of Social History, Winter, 1999 by Andrew Wiese

Several factors supported black home ownership in Evanston before World War Two. First, Evanston contained a substantial amount of vacant land on the eve of the Great Migration, which was open to African Americans who wished to buy or build new homes. Second, local whites made no concerted effort to block African American settlement in a segregated, "black" section of the suburb. In fact, they often facilitated the process. Whites from Evanston and Chicago built new homes for African Americans, and they provided mortgages and construction loans that supported the growth of the black community. Finally, African Americans themselves went to great lengths to become home owners, and they used a variety of means to achieve this goal, including do-it-yourself home building. Without challenging the overall limits of racial segregation, they emphasized home ownership and economic mobility within their own community, and they enjoyed modest success.

Ironically, evidence suggests that racial segregation in Evanston facilitated black suburbanization. Although the development of residential segregation in the suburb testifies to the unease local whites felt about black migration, the establishment of clear geographic limits to black community building appears to have calmed white fears. Race relations in Evanston were structured by a high degree of inequality that favored (and flattered) local whites and minimized conflict through patterns of paternalism and deference symbolized by the relationship of domestic service. [11] Separated as they were by income, occupation, and power, as well as clear geographic barriers, such as railroad tracks and a wide sanitary channel, African Americans posed little threat to the social status or perceived property values of Evanston's economic elite. Meanwhile, as workers, they provided services that were in high demand. As a result, the dynamics of local race relations combined with the aspirations of black southerners t o shape a housing market that both supported black home ownership and accommodated the growth of a large black community in an otherwise affluent and white suburb.

Domestic Service Suburb: Evanston, Illinois

Located just north of Chicago, Evanston began to attract white commuters before the turn of the century. Beach ridges offered compelling views of Lake Michigan, lake breezes moderated the summer heat, and, after 1883, improved rail service provided convenient transportation to the central business district. As wealthy Chicagoans caught the commuting habit, they transformed Evanston from a college town of 4,200 in 1880 to a bustling commuter suburb of 25,000 by 1910. [12]

Although whites were the suburb's most obvious residents, Evanston's African American community was as old as the village itself. Evanston's first black residents arrived in the 1850s, and by 1880, approximately 125 African Americans lived in Evanston. They held jobs ranging from the skilled trades to domestic service, but as Evanston and nearby suburbs mushroomed with white commuters, the availability of domestic service work attracted a growing number of black migrants. By 1910, Evanston's black community was home to 1,100 people, and the suburb had become the domestic service hub for Chicago's affluent North Shore. It had also developed migration chains linking it with black communities in the South, and as the Great Migration poured black southerners into the Chicago area during the next three decades, African American Evanston grew six-fold. [13]