History of African Americans in Chicago

The history of African Americans in Chicago or Black Chicagoans dates back to Jean Baptiste Point du Sable's trading activities in the 1780s. Du Sable, the city's founder, was Haitian of African and French descent. Fugitive slaves and freedmen established the city's first Black community in the 1840s. By the late 19th century, the first black person had been elected to office.

The Great Migration from 1910 to 1970 brought hundreds of thousands of black Americans from the South to Chicago, where they became an urban population. Most Black migrants to Chicago came from Mississippi, Tennessee, and Louisiana, drawn in large part by opportunity in the meat-packing and manufacturing industries as well as ease of access to the city via the Illinois Central Railroad. There they created churches, community organizations, businesses, music, and literature. African Americans of all classes built a community on the South Side of Chicago for decades before the Civil Rights Movement, as well as on the West Side of Chicago. Residing in segregated communities, almost regardless of income, the black residents of Chicago aimed to create communities where they could survive, sustain themselves, and have the ability to determine for themselves their own course in the History of Chicago.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, African Americans accounted for 29% of the city's population, or approximately 800,000 people as of the 2020 census. As per 2023 Census estimates the metro area had just under 1.5 million residents claiming Black alone ancestry, making it the metropolitan area with the fourth-highest Black population after New York, Atlanta, and Washington DC.

After peaking in 1980, the Black population in Chicago is now shrinking, with commonly cited factors including the demolition of public housing, mass closures within the Chicago Public Schools system, health care and food deserts, as well as high unemployment rates. In contrast to the previous century where relatively narrower wage and unemployment gaps attracted Black residents, levels of racial inequality both within Chicago and in relation to other cities have increased for Black residents since the 1990s.

Most Blacks leaving Chicago and Cook County remain within the Chicago region, including in the surrounding collar counties, or in cities such as Hammond and Gary in neighboring Indiana. That said, many Black Chicagoans have also moved further to Southern cities such as Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio.

Chicago also has a foreign-born Black population. Many of the African immigrants in Chicago are from Ethiopia and Nigeria.