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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
Evanston is an apt choice for a case study of African American housing and home ownership in the suburbs. By 1940, Evanston was home to the largest black suburban community in Illinois (and one of the largest in the Midwest) with 6,026 residents in a total population of 64,000. [5] Equally important, patterns of African American community building in Evanston were similar to those in a whole class of early commuter suburbs. As early as 1910, historian Harold Connolly notes, "typical early affluent suburbs," such as Pasadena, California; East Orange and Montclair, New Jersey; and Evanston, Illinois, were home to some of the largest black communities in these states, and there were smaller black communities in many other elite suburbs (Table One). [6] In the nation's premier suburban region, Westchester County, New York, 11,000 African Americans lived in a dozen different suburbs in 1910, and this number had more than doubled by 1930. In Westchester County and elsewhere, large numbers of service workers, inclu ding African Americans, were part and parcel of the suburbanization process at the turn of the century. [7] As in Evanston, black communities developed in other early commuter suburbs at a historically strategic time. Having been established before the Great Migration and the development of systematic racial discrimination in housing, they were footholds for black suburban growth after 1916, when hundreds of thousands of African Americans began moving north. Finally, patterns of race relations in these suburbs, based as they were on a foundation of domestic and personal service, influenced a history of settlement, home building, and inter-racial cooperation that was distinct from suburban patterns elsewhere.
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Although low incomes and low status occupations characterized black communities in Evanston and other elite suburbs, these places almost invariably offered greater opportunities for black families to purchase their own homes than did neighboring central cities. [8] In Evanston, for instance, nearly a third of African Americans owned their own home in both 1920 and 1930, in spite of black population growth of 136 percent. Among long term residents, the proportion of home owners was even higher. By comparison, fewer than 10 percent of black Chicagoans were home owners in either year. Black home ownership in Evanston declined during the Depression--to about 26 percent in 1940--but home owners remained a majority on a number of streets. Moreover, black Evanstonians in 1940 were almost as likely to own their own homes as middle class and elite whites, who formed the local majority. [9]
Patterns were similar in other affluent suburbs. In Pasadena, California, for example, as many as 60 percent of African Americans owned their own home in 1920, and the proportion remained at 41 percent in 1940 in spite of a decade of economic depression. The comparable rate in Los Angeles was just under one-quarter. In the St. Louis suburbs of Webster Groves and Richmond Heights, Missouri, more than half of African American householders were home owners in 1940, as were almost 40 percent of black householders in nearby Kirkwood. Across the Hudson River from New York, black home ownership in suburbs like Plainfield (40 percent), Englewood (27 percent), Hackensack (25 percent), and Montclair, New Jersey (20 percent) posed a distinct contrast with black home ownership rates of 3 percent in Newark and 4 percent in New York City. Even in several congested suburbs of New York's Westchester County, African Americans were two to three times more likely to own a home in 1940 as those in New York City itself (Table Tw o).[10] Overall, African Americans in domestic service suburbs were far more likely to own a home than those in central cities.
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