CHANGING CULTURAL RULE SYSTEMS AND RACE RELATIONS
This essay compares the changes in cultural rule systems regulating race relations in Chicago and the strategies used by white and black groups to alter those relations between 1890 and 1920 and in the American South between 1954 and 1968. In Chicago during this period, a pattern of de facto segregation of and discrimination against the black population was largely in place by 1890. It intensified during the succeeding thirty years, as whites responded hostilely to the growing migration of blacks from the South, especially during the wartime boom of 1915-1918. In contrast, a de jure system of segregation and discrimination had been in place for more than 75 years in the South at the time the civil rights struggles there erupted after 1953. The strategies employed by blacks in Chicago varied, reflecting ideological struggles within the black leadership there, and the growing size and changing socioeconomic composition of the black population, but gradually moved toward greater black solidarity and control over its own affairs. That movement, despite some gains, failed to alter the eliminate the isolation of the Southside ghetto. In the South, a new generation of civil rights leaders, many of them younger, wrested control of the black movement for liberation away from previous quiescent leaders and led a partially successful struggle for the realization of black civil rights.
Creation of the Black Ghetto in Chicago's South Side (1890-1915)
The small black community in Chicago increased from 1,000 in 1860 to 15,000 in 1890 (Spear 5 and 11). It was composed of free blacks and mulattos, most of whom were domestic servants or worked in subordinate service jobs. Most of them lived in the Southside, with some racial mixtures there and elsewhere. Spear said that "the sympathy that many white Chicagoans expressed for the Southern slaves were not often extended to local Negroes" (6)....