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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

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By 1940, African Americans comprised about one-quarter of Evanston's sizeable domestic service labor force, and domestic and personal service was the dominant job category among black Evanstonians, especially among black women. [14] In contrast to patterns among white suburbanites at the time (both wealthy and working class), more than half of black women in Evanston worked outside the home, and a great majority worked in domestic service. [15] Throughout the prewar period, the daily migration of black women from west side to east side and back again was one of the familiar rhythms of Evanston life, and long before reverse commuting became a national phenomenon, black women waited each morning for the northbound "El" train to take them away from the city and deeper into the North Shore suburbs. For black men, Evanston and Chicago offered a wider range of job opportunities, but service employment still accounted for a plurality of male occupations before World War Two. Black Evanston supported a small profess ional elite, as well as a number of skilled workers and local entrepreneurs, but domestic and personal service overshadowed all other fields. [16]

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Regardless of occupation, African Americans in Evanston placed a high value on home ownership. Property ownership had been among the chief goals of black southerners throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and many brought the value north with them as a piece of their cultural baggage. In the South, proprietorship symbolized hard work and personal uplift in a way evident to every member of the community. It provided a basis for upward mobility, shelter for extended family, and security during times of sickness, accident, or old age. Lastly, it meant a greater degree of independence, which is to say freedom, than any form of tenancy. The historian, James Grossman, has argued that upward mobility through urban industrial labor gradually supplanted the value of home ownership among many southern migrants, but there were clearly many who never surrendered the desire to own a place of their own. As Peter Gottlieb implies in his study of black migrants to Pittsburgh, the difficulty most southern African Americans experienced in buying a home may have contributed to a lasting ambivalence about northern life. More recently, the anthropologist, Carol Stack, illustrates that the desire to own or preserve family properties in the South is among the key values that have attracted northern African Americans back to the rural South since 1970. [17]

In communities such as Evanston, home ownership was not easy to achieve, but it was attainable, and it was a goal toward which many African Americans strove throughout their lives. As early as the 1920s, observers noted the passion with which black migrants pursued home ownership in Evanston. "A leading man in [Evanston's] Negro community," for instance, reported in 1924 that "a large proportion of recent arrivals from the South have $2,000 to $3,000 saved and buy upon arrival." Resident, Louvenia Bell, herself a migrant from Mississippi, recalled that the minister of Ebenezer African Methodist Episcopal Church exhorted old Evanstonians to do like the southerners and buy homes. [18] Oral histories with other black Evanstonians also reflected an orientation toward home ownership. Residents such as Lessie Smith, Milton Harper, Tom Kees, Gussie Booker, Osceola Spencer, Sam Butler, and Henrietta Taylor punctuated their families' histories with instances of home buying and building, often noting the date and cost of purchases. For instance, Booker recounted, without being asked, "we worked up to where we could buy a little house." Likewise, Louvenia Bell ventured that her parents were "the first Negroes to buy a home in North Chicago." Caldonia Martin, in contrast, raised the subject as a means of criticizing her former husband, who had "never wanted property," whereas she eventually bought five homes, collecting rent on four. [19] Although economic reality prevented most black families from owning a home before World War Two, home ownership was clearly a goal toward which many Evanston families worked and saved.

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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