What was built
- Established or development period
- 1900s–1920s
- Peak period
- 1920s–1940s
- Who built the community
- Great Migration families and a Black business and professional class confined to the South Side by restrictive covenants.
- Black population
- More than 300,000 Black residents in the Black Belt by 1950.
- Businesses
- Thousands of Black-owned businesses along State, 35th and 47th Streets.
- Financial institutions
- Binga State Bank, Supreme Life Insurance Company and Illinois Federal Savings.
- Churches
- Pilgrim Baptist, Olivet Baptist and Quinn Chapel A.M.E.
- Schools
- Not yet documented
- Hospitals
- Provident Hospital, the first Black-owned and operated hospital in the country.
- Newspapers
- The Chicago Defender.
- Entertainment & cultural institutions
- The Regal Theater, the Savoy Ballroom, the Sunset Café and the South Side Community Art Center.
- Other community institutions
- Not yet documented
- Black land & property ownership
- Black property ownership constrained and concentrated by racially restrictive covenants until Shelley v. Kraemer (1948).
- Economic significance
- The largest Black urban economy in the North and the cultural center of the Chicago Black Renaissance.
What happened
- What happened?
- Beginning in the 1950s, slum-clearance programs, the Dan Ryan Expressway, the Illinois Institute of Technology expansion and the construction of high-rise public housing including the Robert Taylor Homes demolished large portions of Bronzeville and displaced tens of thousands of residents and hundreds of businesses.
- Trigger or precipitating event
- Federal urban renewal funds, expressway planning and institutional expansion.
- Underlying historical context
- Redlining, covenant-driven overcrowding used to justify 'blight' designations, and highway and public-housing siting decisions.
- Method of destruction / displacement
- Urban Renewal · Highway · Eminent Domain · Government Acquisition
- Date or period of destruction
- 1950s–1970s
- Confirmed / documented deaths
- Not yet documented
- Estimated deaths
- Not yet documented
- People displaced
- Tens of thousands of residents across successive clearance projects.
- Homes destroyed
- Thousands of units demolished.
- Businesses destroyed
- Hundreds of Black-owned businesses along the cleared corridors.
- Acres or property lost
- Not yet documented
Afterward
- What happened to the land?
- Expressway right-of-way, public-housing superblocks later demolished in turn, and university campus expansion.
- Was compensation paid?
- Condemnation payments to owners; renters received little or nothing.
- Was the community rebuilt?
- Partially
- What was rebuilt?
- Not yet documented
- Destroyed or displaced again?
- Not yet documented
- Second displacement date
- Not yet documented
- Second displacement cause
- Not yet documented
- What exists there today?
- Landmark buildings, the Bronzeville Walk of Fame, ongoing redevelopment on former public-housing land and continuing displacement pressure.
- Descendant, reparation & restoration efforts
- Bronzeville preservation organizations, landmark designations and community land-trust efforts.
- Historical significance
- The most extensive urban renewal clearance of a Black metropolis in the United States.
Sources
- Book or scholarly workFind
St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis (University of Chicago Press, 1945)
- Book or scholarly workFind
Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto (Cambridge University Press, 1983)
- Source lookupFind
Chicago History Museum collections
- Source lookupFind
Chicago Housing Authority and Department of Urban Renewal records
"Find" opens a focused search for legacy references that do not have a stable link; "Open" goes directly to the source.
Last verified: 2026-09-20. This is a living historical collection. Additional communities and documentation will be added as research and verification continue.