Redlining Chicago's South Side
Security map drawn 1940; contract selling continued into the 1970sThe Black Belt, South Side Chicago, Cook County, IL
The Black Belt was graded red across the board, so the families confined to it could not get a normal mortgage. They bought on contract instead, at terms designed to take the house back.
Chicago's Black population grew from about 44,000 to more than 275,000 between 1910 and 1940, and racial covenants attached to deeds across the city confined almost all of it to a narrow strip on the South Side known as the Black Belt. When the Home Owners' Loan Corporation mapped the city, that strip was graded D - red - almost without exception, and the Federal Housing Administration would not insure mortgages there.
What replaced the mortgage was the instalment land contract. A speculator bought a house cheaply from a white owner, then sold it to a Black family at two or three times its value with no equity accruing and no deed transferred until the final payment. One missed payment meant eviction and the loss of everything paid in. Researchers have since estimated that Black Chicagoans were stripped of hundreds of millions of dollars this way in the 1950s and 60s. The Contract Buyers League organised rent strikes and lawsuits against it in the late 1960s.
When Black families did cross the covenant line, violence followed: bombings of homes in the 1910s and 20s, and the mob attacks and arson that met integration attempts in Cicero, Trumbull Park and elsewhere into the 1950s. Segregation in Chicago was not an accident of preference. It was written into deeds, maps and mortgage rules.
The shape here is indicative of the Black Belt corridor. Mapping Inequality holds the exact digitised HOLC boundaries.
Sources
- Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal AmericaDigital Scholarship Lab, University of Richmonddsl.richmond.eduDigitised HOLC security maps and the appraisers' own area descriptions, scanned from the National Archives.
- The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated AmericaLiveright (2017)Richard Rothstein's account of federal housing policy as the engine of residential segregation.
- Racial Massacres and the Red Summer of 1919: a research guideLibrary of Congressguides.loc.govContext for the 1919 Chicago violence that enforced the colour line this map describes.