The Great Migration of African American Peoples

A number of reasons drove African Americans away from the South to go to the North. Some of these reasons include unsatisfactory economic opportunities, the drop in the price of cotton, and harsh segregationist laws. When African Americans could not take this level of abuse, they started moving North, causing an event which is known as the Great Migration. The Great Migration, which was the event where nearly six million African Americans moved from the south to the north, happened nearly a century ago. Despite this extended period of time, African Americans have still been bound to Bronzeville, where the majority of African Americans moved when they came to Chicago, with no upward mobility. This paper is a critical deconstruction of Bronzeville through the sociological themes of gentrification, the dual housing market, redlining, restrictive covenants, food deserts, and educational inequality.

According to the book ‘Gentrifier’ by John Joe Schlichtman, Jason Patch, and Marc Lamont Hill, the word “gentrification” focuses on older and challenged neighborhoods of low-income residents and neighborhoods that are becoming desirable to the rich, causing the prices to live in these neighborhoods to rise, robbing the previous residents of the ability to remain in the towns they have grown up in (Schlichtman). To prove this point, take Bronzeville as an example. Being a predominantly Black neighborhood, a few years ago, you would not see places such as Starbucks or Mariano’s, but now, are some of the first stores you see entering the neighborhood. This causes low-income, locally-owned stores to resort to shutting down due to the increased competition by these stores, and the rising prices of owning a store in that neighborhood due to gentrification.

Gentrification is painfully obvious with the introduction of Starbucks and Marianos. There is no reason why multi-billion dollar corporations would put stores in Bronzeville, a high-risk area, if they did not see the potential to make a profit and get more people into buying their products. By getting the people of Bronzeville hooked onto the uber-expensive coffee and other drinks offered by Starbucks, gentrification started. This starts a sort of domino effect that causes multiple multi-billion or million-dollar retailing corporations to move there as well, raising prices and effectively shutting down local businesses, and causing civilians to move out due to inflated rent. Although these inflated prices are way too high for the local African Americans to afford, Bronzeville is still easily affordable by the immensely wealthy white people, who want to move in due to the “low” prices and the addition of their favorite stores such as Starbucks, causing African Americans to move out and allow more white people to come in.

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According to ‘Urban Renewal or Urban Removal’ by Anton Miglietta, the ‘Dual Housing Market’ is the system that gives white people in a place an advantage of buying homes over African Americans. Basically, when buying homes, white people would have much lower prices and a much larger choice of what type of home they could get, whereas an African American with the same circumstances would for no reason other than their skin color, pay higher prices with much less choice on the type of home they could get.

The Dual Housing Market is basically built on the concept that African Americans have a certain number of choices on where they have the ability to live while white people have the free choice to live wherever they want, with the added bonus of having to pay less than an African American with a similar background. Areas such as Bronzeville are available to white people to live in but any area with a majority being white people, African Americans would have an exponentially more difficult time in trying to purchase a home. Even in Bronzeville right now, African Americans are only given a limited amount of places where they can buy homes, making it virtually impossible for African Americans to have a free choice of where they want to live in their own area, much less move to another area such as Bridgeport.

A major reason why concepts such as the Dual Housing Market and Restrictive Covenants is to help keep white people in power by allowing them to maintain their socioeconomic status. The reason for this is because usually, neighborhoods that are considered safe and posh to live in are predominantly white, which means that if anyone wants to move up in the housing market, they would typically move into a neighborhood that is predominantly white, disrupting the social order that white people have set for themselves. To prevent this disruption of white people, these concepts were put into place so that African Americans were restricted from gaining access to these neighborhoods for a fair price.

According to ‘Urban Renewal or Urban Removal’ by Anton Miglietta, a concept similar to the Dual Housing Market is “Restrictive Covenants”. Restrictive Covenants is essentially an agreement between anyone selling homes and anyone helping them to sell homes that certain homes may not be sold to African Americans, Hipics, or basically anyone that is not “white”. This, along with the Dual Housing Market allowed white people to maintain their hold on the nice neighborhoods and prevented other races from disrupting their “way of things”. These concepts basically allowed white people to keep their areas nice and well maintained while areas such as Bronzeville suffer heavily, with homes on the brink of collapsing due to poor infrastructure. An example of this is the next door neighborhood, Bridgeport. Bridgeport has well maintained roads with multiple homes that are in the million dollar range, with immaculate front gardens and balconies, while homes, which for the majority are apartment buildings, in Bronzeville has dying grass, poor infrastructure, drunk people lying on the streets, and overall giving off a poor presence. By enforcing the concepts of Restrictive Covenants and Dual Housing Market, the area of Bridgeport is able to keep African American people from Bronzeville out of their all-white neighborhood.

Restrictive Covenants and the Dual Housing Market have created such a divide that no one would be able to say that these two areas are so nearby each other. They literally look as if though they are from two different worlds. It is as if Bridgeport is the epitome and defining area of what a city in a first world country should be like while Bronzeville is similar to how we perceive city in a third world country to be like, even though they are just blocks away. The racial makeup of the two areas are similar to the analogy given that they look as if though they are from different worlds or countries. In Bronzeville, you see mostly African American people while in Bridgeport you see almost all white people, showing a huge discrepancy in the way the racial makeup is between two areas which are merely blocks away. This is made even more evident because African Americans are essentially not allowed to move to better areas due to Restrictive Covenants and the Dual Housing Market.

According to the book ‘The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation’ by Natalie Y. Moore, “Redlining” is a concept which excluded African Americans by “color coding them based on loan risks” (Moore 53). Basically what this means is that if an African American attempts to obtain a loan in order to buy a home in an area with many African Americans, that person would not be able to get the loan because it is seen as putting the loaning corporations at risk by the federal government. Due to this, many people were forced to rent out apartments in the apartment complexes that took up the majority of Bronzeville, rather than houses since those were more expensive and more exclusive.

Redlining is basically another concept similar to the Dual Housing Market and Restrictive Covenants put into place by the Chicago Housing Authority to keep African Americans out of the predominantly white neighborhoods such as Bridgeport. The concept of Redlining effectively put African American areas as “risky”, not allowing loans to be given to African Americans who were trying to purchase homes in the areas that they are already restricted to, putting even more pressure on African Americans and not allowing them to have upward mobility. This is because since the area is already “risky” there is no guarantee that the person receiving the uninsured loan would be able to pay it off. This causes African Americans to not be able to purchase homes in African American areas such as Bronzeville, unless it is without a loan, forcing the majority of African Americans to rent out apartments.

According to the book ‘The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation’ by Natalie Y. Moore, a Food Desert is a “large geographic area with no or distant grocery stores, combined with an abundance of fast food joints” (Moore 158). This means that people in food deserts would have to resort to high calorie, saturated trans fat dense foods such as chips, candy, and soda. Bronzeville does not have any grocery stores, with corner stores resembling grocery stores the most. This puts Bronzeville in the category of being a Food Desert, which means that the already oppressed and confined people of the area are put at risk of coronary heart failure, diabetes, and having a stroke among many other health related risks. Other than the corner stores where a person can obtain chips, candy, or soda, people can have meals at restaurants such as McDonalds, which are already fairly unhealthy, putting people even more at risk of health problems.

Because Bronzeville is a Food Desert, this means that people living in the area would have to leave in order to get nutritiously beneficial foods from different areas. This also means that the majority of a person's day would go by in obtaining food for his or her family so that they can eat healthily, as opposed to the health risk inducing food that is abundant in their area. Since organic and healthy food is more expensive than fatty foods such as McDonalds, and out of the range of the majority of people in Bronzeville, these families receive food stamps from the government. A food stamp is basically a coupon of money for buying nutritious food for the families which qualify. However, in order to obtain these healthy foods, as stated above, people would have to leave Bronzeville and spend their day looking for groceries, people would also have to save up for gas or transportation so that they could afford to even go ands get these foods. Food stamps also allow families to purchase chips, soda, and candy from the stores already present in the areas. Food stamps help both the seller and the people using food stamps, helping stores earn up to $5,000 in food stamp revenue per week as stated in the book ‘The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation’ by Natalie Y. Moor.

As stated above, living in a Food Desert has unforeseeable health risks, including but not limited to obesity, diabetes, stroke, heart attack, and cancer. All of these can occur from eating nutrient deficient foods such as chips, candy, and soda. According to the book ‘The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation’ by Natalie Y. Moore, nearly 20% of Chicago currently live in Food Deserts, with nearly 385,000 of those people being African American (Moore 158). This means that over ⅓ of people living in food deserts are children, leading to them growing up with immense health issues.

The reason that Bronzeville is a Food Desert is because of the aforementioned reason that Restrictive Covenants have determined that Bronzeville is a high risk area, which means that if a grocery store opens a chain in this area, they have a high chance of losing their money. Natalie Y. Moore said that many chains do not want to come into African Americans communities such as Bronzeville due to high retail leakage. Retail leakage occurs when stores spend more money on goods than local businesses sell, usually due to people traveling to a neighboring town to buy goods. According to a report, Bronzeville leaks nearly $150,000,000 this way per year. Another reason why grocery stores refuse to open up a chain in Bronzeville or food deserts like this is because they would be losing money by opening up a chain there since many people in these areas are already used to getting nutrient deficient foods from places like McDonalds or the local corner store.

According to ‘Bad Boys: Public Schools and Making of Black Masculinity’ by Ann Arnett Ferguson, it is assumed that Education Inequality is a concept where it says that children of a race which is not white living in non white neighborhoods going to non white schools are given less money and less privileges along with lesser amenities as opposed to white children going to predominantly white schools. This basically means that being white gives an unforeseen advantage which puts them above other races.

CPS, or Chicago Public Schools, in African American neighborhoods such as Bronzeville have very low funding from the federal government. Due to the fact that there is such low funding for schools where the majority of students are students of color, equivalent schools which are predominantly white have much better facilities to educate their students as well as provide them with extracurricular activities. Since they aren’t able to get as many resources and do not have the facilities that other schools do, the children begin to suffer in nearly every aspect, from extracurriculars to education. For example, Phillips Academy in 2011 had 12% of their students meeting testing standards where the CPS average was 29%. Philips also showed an overall lower ACT score and a lower average attendance. One can infer that Phillips Academy's main purpose is to teach students to work jobs as followers, and not leaders as done so in equivalent schools where white children are more abundant.

This inequality in education and funding is due solely to the skin color of the children who attend the schools. Due to their darker skin colors, it is generally believed that these children are not capable of handling and reaching the role of a leader. This made the higher ups in the school districts believe that these childrens education do not matter as much as white childrens. This made crime a huge problem in Philips Academy, who tried to police the children as much as possible because of this. This actually caused children to enjoy being sent to the punishing room where they are able to express themselves, since the strict schooling did not allow the children to act how they wished to. Because of the strictness and low funding and nearly no extracurricular activities, children are not creative and are effectively limited to being followers and workers.

However, there is an option for students to instead attend the highly selective Chicago Military Academy High School which allows for a better education along with extracurricular activities, which many students long for. Having higher test scores, graduation rate, and more college transfers than Philips Academy, it is extremely difficult to get a Bronzeville child to get into this Military academy. Even though these children are being given much better levels of education than Philips, the Military Academy can still be seen as giving its students education which would only allow them to be followers and workers.

To conclude, it can be concluded from the deconstruction of Bronzeville through sociological themes that all the problems mentioned above are all interconnected. In order to get areas such as Bronzeville out of the hole that they are in, steps need to be taken. By being in the first stages of gentrification, Bronzeville is being put at risk of having no African Americans in a few years, getting rid of one of the major places where African Americans are allowed to live. The Dual Housing Market and Restrictive Covenants, two concepts which combine an agreement certain homes may not be sold to African Americans, Hipics, or basically anyone that is not “white” and where white people would have much lower prices and a much larger choice of what type of home they could get.

These two concepts result in people of color not being able to go to different areas and become restricted to certain places. What makes it worse is Redlining, which prevents African Americans from obtaining loans, which significantly reduces the amount of people who are able to attain a home, which is one of the biggest factors in the American Dream. This puts African Americans to only being able to rent, degrading them further. On top of this, redlining also persuades major chains from opening up grocery stores in these areas, creating a food desert, leading to many health related risks and problems. All these problems which seem unrelated are in fact leading to the downfall of the African American community in Chicago, and effectively, everywhere in the country.

In order to prevent the unnecessary crushing of the African American community, there should be an abolition of these practices and there should be a movement which is transferring those who can move out of these communities to move out and making these areas into ethnic enclaves. The concepts of Dual Housing Market and Redlining and Restrictive Covenants are preventing African Americans from moving into better areas, and as a whole, are hindrancing the advancement of cities and humankind in the long run.

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