In 1837, the year the city of Chicago was incorporated, 77 blacks settled fairly comfortably among the 4170 white Within a few years the editor of the Cairo Weekly Times labeled Chicago "A Nigger-Loving Town, a Sink-hole of Abolition." Although the black population in Chicago was less than 1000 in 1860, it expanded to 812,637 by 1960 following a course mixed with opportunity and hardship.

The first settler on the future site of Chicago was Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable, a black native of Santo Domingo, who erected a trading post consisting of nine buildings around 1779. In the 1840s and '50s Chicago's black population increased through activities the underground railroad, a secret system of barges, wagons, and midnight scheduling, following routes which began at Chester, Alto and Quincy. In 1850 the 350 blacks in Chicago formed themselves into the Liberty Association, a mutual assistance society to resist slave catchers and slavery. Life was bleak but free.

By 1870, 3691 blacks lived in Chicago, 1.2 percent of the population, concentrated south of the Chicago River and on the west side near Morgan Park. With the removal of antebellum racial restrictions, blacks received the vote in 1870, saw the school system desegregated it 1874, and saw discrimination in public buildings and places outlawed in 1885. Perhaps the leading black spokesman for these advances was John Jones, who became the first black elected to the Cook County Board of Commissioners as well as the first black appointed to the Chicago School Board.

Between 1870 and 1890 Chicago's black community expanded to nearly 15,000 persons and looked for leadership to John W. B. Thomas, a teacher, who became the first black to serve as an lllinois state Representative in 1876. In 1891 Provident Hospital was founded by Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, a black surgeon.

Racial stress grew in the 20th century, however, as blacks bore the brunt of white resentment when some of their numbers became strikebreakers in stockyards and teamster strikes in 1904 and 1905. Between 1916 and 1919 more than 50,000 Southern blacks under the encouragement of Robert S. Abbott, editor of the Chicago Defender, came to the city to escape lynchings and to accept jobs in the stockyards, steel mills, and foundaries. Tensions exploded on July 27, 1919, when an incident resulted in a race riot leaving 23 blacks and 15 whites dead, 342 blacks and 178 whites injured. White pressure to contain blacks in the south side ghetto was matched by black population expansion. The NAACP established in Chicago in 1911 protested vigorously against increasing job and housing discrimination.

When the depression struck in the 1930s, Chicago had a black population of more than 200,000 which claimed 40 million dollars in bank deposits, four billion dollars worth of property, and some two million dollars of annual contributions to charity. The depression, however, hit the black community harder than others as its members lost jobs first and found problems of living and attending schools in places of their choice even more difficult. Black political consciousness was best represented by Oscar DePriest of Chicago who was seated in the United States House of Representatives, becoming Illinois' first Negro Congressman in 1929 and the first Negro Congressman from the North since 1901.

The 1940s and '50s witnessed an increase in population, civic attempts to meet black problems, and significant black cultural achievements. The Chicago Mayor's Commission on Race Relations (known as the Commission on Human Relations after 1945) became the first such municipal commission in the United States. In 1950 Gwendolyn Brooks, Chicago poet, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and after the death of Carl Sandburg became poet laureate of Illinois. In the late 1950s the Chicago Urban League was refounded under aggressive leadership.

Frustration and achievement, bitterness and admiration, characterize modern black Chicago. Thus, Dr. Martin Luther King's attempt to integrate housing in 1966 was met by rioting; Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers' radicalism resulted in his death; Ernie Banks' athletic accomplishments and Jesse Jackson's political initiatives meet adulation and respect. The story is one of progress and growth within an unmistakable historical pattern.