Chicago, long one of the most segregated cities in America, has made measurable progress in integrating its neighborhoods over the past two decades, new census data show.
Even the suburbs, the very places to which many whites fled to escape urban changes, show more integration today than in 1980, an analysis of the data shows.
Back then, for instance, 44 of the city’s 77 neighborhoods were dominated by a single racial or ethnic group–white, black or Hispanic. Today, the number of neighborhoods with a distinct majority is down to 27.
Over the same time, the number of suburbs dominated by a single racial or ethnic group declined from 236 to 158.
While some demographers said they were surprised by the breadth of changes in the city’s neighborhoods, they also cautioned that it would be wrong to suggest that segregation is not still entrenched.. Indeed, even as the region has diversified, there are many towns and neighborhoods where a single race continues to constitute the vast majority of the population.
The change in Chicago neighborhoods, said Jim Lewis, executive director of the Institute for Metropolitan Affairs, “was more improvement than I would have expected.”
“Most of the individual Chicago neighborhoods have shown modest improvement,” Lewis said. “There was slight improvement in black integration.” But, he cautioned, many neighborhoods “remain mostly exclusionary to blacks.”
About 8 in 10 city residents now live in a neighborhood where the level of segregation has eased, at least slightly in some and significantly in others, since 10 years ago, according to an analysis by Roosevelt University and Northern Illinois University.
At the same time, that analysis shows, about 9 in 10 suburban residents live in a community that has become more integrated, though often slightly, since 1980. The analysis is based on the “dissimilarity index,” which social scientists commonly use to gauge how evenly racial and ethnic groups are integrated in an area.
One explanation for the increase in the integration of Chicago’s neighborhoods is that most new residents since 1990 were Hispanic, a group that’s had an easier time than blacks in settling in all-white areas, demographers said.
Also, some neighborhoods like Belmont Cragin on the Northwest Side are in the midst of dramatic racial and ethnic change. These neighborhoods, once dominated by white European immigrants, appear to be diverse because more blacks and Hispanics are moving in while a steady stream of whites are moving out. But experts expect such neighborhoods to return to a segregated state.
Jeanette Miserendino, 78, and her husband moved to Belmont Cragin 40 years ago and still like it, though she says she has trouble understanding why most of her Polish, Italian and Irish neighbors have left.
“I guess they got scared,” Miserendino said. “They didn’t want to accept what was happening to the neighborhood.”
The evidence that things are changing in Chicago, albeit slowly, is an encouraging chapter in the city’s record of racial strife. Some experts say that the progress is so slight that Chicago should remain in what one called “the no-change category.”
Reynolds Farley, a University of Michigan researcher studying integration patterns in the nation’s largest cities, said he expects a number of urban centers to show improvements over the last 10 years–most of which he expects will dwarf whatever progress Chicago has made.
“We’ll see some fairly integrated cities around the country once all this is done,” Farley said. “But Chicago, with its unfortunate history, doesn’t appear to be one of them.”
Chicago’s legacy of segregation is long, storied and often ugly.
In 1919, Eugene Williams, 17, was swimming in Lake Michigan and drifted into a “white” wading area. For this, white bathers stoned him and he drowned. His death ignited a race riot that left 38 dead, 537 wounded and 1,000 homeless.
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In 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. was greeted in Chicago Lawn on the Southwest Side with a barrage of bricks from whites when he led demonstrations calling for open housing.
As recently as 1997, a black youth, Lenard Clark, 13,rode his bike near Armour Square Park, a traditionally white hangout, and was beaten by white youths.
New housing and anti-discrimination laws were written in the 1970s and 1980s to reduce segregation in the city. But those edicts have not been enough to overcome a generations-old mindset, said demographers and social scientists.
“Where people even look for housing has been shaped by this city’s history of segregation and history of racism,” said John Lukehart, a vice president of the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities.
In the suburbs, some communities have desegregated much more quickly than Chicago, in part, because leaders in those communities have made racial and ethnic integration a civic goal and have shaped city policy to achieve it.
In places such as Oak Park, Waukegan and Zion, officials have worked for years to assure diversity, and new census data show they have had success.
Ironically, in some cases, maintaining diversity has meant trying to keep white residents from fleeing because blacks and Latinos are moving up the economic ladder and moving from the city.
Since 1990, five southern suburbs have shifted from white majorities to black. They are Blue Island, Calumet City, Olympia Fields, South Holland and Matteson.
“All the communities here are battling to maintain diversity,” said Rich Zimmerman, South Holland’s village administrator. “We feel a diverse community is a good community.”
While most of the Chicago region remains largely segregated, a handful of suburbs and neighborhoods have achieved racial and ethnic balance.
In Rogers Park on the Far North Side, the population mirrors the overall city’s racial and ethnic makeup–36 percent black, 31 percent white, 28 percent Hispanic and 6 percent Asian. Just down from the local Starbucks is an African hair braiding studio and a few blocks down is a muffler shop that promises “Se Habla Espanol.”
Jill Kempson, a white, 47-year-old former teacher, remembers moving to Rogers Park 10 years ago and getting her first sense of the place’s diversity. She couldn’t get a look at her house-to-be because a Chinese wedding procession was blocking the street. “We thought it was really grand–this is the flavor of the neighborhood,” she said. “This community works. And I don’t know why.”Her husband, Gene Rehmert, recalls some tense moments in the neighborhood. Some kids called him by a racial epithet. Still, he said, most confrontations are “more about noise, or working on cars or types of language that you use in public.”
Some city neighborhoods remain unabashedly segregated, however. One such place is Auburn-Gresham. It was 98 percent black in 1980 and it is 98 percent black today.
Here on a front porch on South Green Street where Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley spent his teenage and early adult years, Mamie Smith looks out on a transformed neighborhood. Gone are the white residents, like Daley’s parents, whose home was eventually sold to a black family just as the neighborhood was changing.
“When I moved here, the neighborhood was mixed,” Smith, 59, recalled. “Come the late ’70s, they were all gone. I don’t see many white people here now, unless they’re delivering something.”
Still, Smith said she can’t rue the lack of racial integration. She’s never known it.
. “Living here for so long, I’ve never really lived around white people,” she said. “It doesn’t bother me because I don’t know any different.”
Smith’s granddaughter, Danielle Anderson, 15, was sitting in a bedroom of the old Daley house when she heard her grandmother’s words. She broke in to disagree.
“I’d feel better if I was around different cultures,” Danielle said. “I have to watch TV to get a feeling about what other people are like. Just to live where I live it gets kind of boring. I see the same people all the time. I want to know a little bit more instead of what I see on TV.”