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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

"They said that Evanston, the beginning of it, was for rich people and help and not for colored people to come Out and live ... Evanston is really a high place to live, but we get here and we stay." [1] (Caldonia Martin, Evanston, Illinois, 1972)

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Historians of urban North America are learning more and more about workingclass suburbanization before World War Two. Roger Simon, Olivier Zunz, John Weaver and Michael Doucet sparked interest in the subject in the 1970s, with their discovery of high rates of home ownership among blue collar immigrants in Milwaukee, Detroit, and Hamilton, Ontario--especially on the outskirts of town. More recently, the geographer, Richard Harris, has argued that blue collar suburbanization was even more widespread--perhaps even characteristic of North American suburbs before 1945. In each case, scholars have emphasized the role of informal or "cheap" housing markets and small lending institutions in facilitating suburbanization by workers and their families. Harris, in particular, has demonstrated that self-building was an important means that blue collar families used to overcome modest incomes and become home owners. [2]

One group that has received relatively little attention is African Americans. Although a large body of scholarship has focused on African American community formation in central cities and on black suburbanization since 1960, scholars know very little about how or why African American families made their way to suburbs before that time. They know even less about the way suburban housing markets functioned for those who did. It is the intent of this essay to address this deficiency and to offer concrete evidence about the operation of one of the nation's largest black suburban housing markets before World War II.

Although scholars have paid limited attention to African American suburbanization before World War Two, early black suburbanites formed an important component of the Great Migration. Suburbs attracted a significant proportion of southern black migrants in the inter-war period, comprising about 15 percent of black population growth in the North and West between 1910 and 1940, or approximately 285,000 people. By 1940, as many as 500,000 African Americans lived in suburbs outside the South, almost one-fifth (19 percent) of the African Americans in metropolitan areas of these regions. [3]

Early black suburbanites were similar to African Americans who settled in central cities in several ways, but they also made choices that set them apart. Like city dwellers, most were southern born, low skilled, and poorly paid. They concentrated in industry, unskilled labor, and personal service occupations, and they shared patterns of migration and family structure with city migrants. By contrast, many avoided cities by design, and, like other suburbanites, they built communities that combined elements of urban and rural living. Suburbanites were also much more likely to own their own homes than central city blacks. This is especially notable given the fact that early black suburbanites tended to be poorer than African Americans in central cities. [4] Two questions remain unanswered: how did so many early black suburbanites become home owners, and how did suburban housing markets work to facilitate or hinder this process?

In central cities, most scholars agree, high housing prices and low African American incomes combined with discrimination in housing and mortgage markets to keep rates of home ownership exceptionally low among African Americans. In the suburbs, studies suggest, land was less expensive, but white suburbanites blocked access to their communities, white real estate brokers opposed selling to African Americans in white neighborhoods, and white financial institutions refused to extend credit to non-whites. In the few subdivisions designed explicitly for blacks, African Americans who aspired to own a home often had to build one for themselves through a mixture of paid and volunteer labor and without a mortgage. In cities and suburbs, then, scholarship demonstrates that African Americans faced crippling levels of housing discrimination, especially in the market for home finance. As a result, African American migrants congregated in a small number of city and suburban neighborhoods where they were highly segregated from the rest of the population.

A case study of Evanston, Illinois, a large commuter suburb of Chicago, illustrates that there was more variety in suburban housing markets before World War Two than historians have recognized. Although housing discrimination was a fact of life for African Americans in Evanston by the mid 1910s, Evanston's housing market accommodated rapid black population growth and provided substantial opportunity for black families to become home owners (albeit within strict geographic limits). Moreover, members of the local real estate establishment, including local bankers, played key roles in the process. Given the cushion of racial segregation, white elites supported black suburbanization in Evanston, and African Americans took advantage of the fact to build a community noted for home ownership, residential stability, and economic upward mobility.

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

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