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Let’s Not Forget: Chicago Had a ‘Black Wall Street’ Too

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

Chicago’s Timuel Black understands. The 103-year-old historian, educator, author and activist has offered generations of journalists, including me, valuable perspectives on how far we have come since the days of the “Black Belt,” as the Chicago Defender and other Black media called the Black South Side where he was born in August 1919, a month after the riot.

“But that (racial unrest) did not deter families — like my father and mother — from bringing us north for three principle reasons,” he recalled in an oral history for the University of Chicago. “To fight back if they were attacked, to be able to vote and to be able to have a better education for their children.”

In other words, they turned oppression into opportunity, as well as they could within the confines of racial segregation, much like the workers and business owners in Tulsa and other “Black Wall Streets” under Jim Crow segregation.

“Your father and mother may work outside” the community, he recalled, “but they would come back to spend whatever they could spend. So the dollar actually turned around in the Black Belt more than six times (on average). So we felt a sense of independence. It was just overcrowded. So we felt a sense of optimism in the community.”

Of course, I don’t want to sound too sanguine about the systemic racism they faced, which lingers today. The community was overcrowded because housing discrimination kept as much as a third of the city’s population, the Black third, confined to about a fifth of the land until recent decades, suppressing the accumulation of Black wealth.

 

Even as opportunities opened up, everyone knew they were starting the foot race from farther behind their white counterparts. Nevertheless, I am encouraged by the relentless optimism recalled by Black. “Though we lived in a period of the depression,” he observed, “we were not depressed.”

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)

©2021 Clarence Page. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.


(c) 2021 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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