The history of African Americans in Chicago dates back to Jean Baptiste Point du Sable’s trading activities in the 1780s. Du Sable is the city's founder. Fugitive slaves and freedmen established the city’s first black community in the 1840s. By the late 19th c., the first black had been elected to office.
The Great Migrations from 1910 to 1960 brought hundreds of thousands of blacks from the South to Chicago, where they became an urban population. They created churches, community organizations, important businesses, and great music and literature. African Americans of all classes built community on the South Side of Chicago for decades before the Civil Rights Movement. Their goal was to build a community where blacks could pursue life with the same rights as whites.
Read more about History Of African Americans In Chicago: Segregation, The Great Migration, Housing, Culture, Business, Achievements
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—Ellis Meredith, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 14, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
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—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)
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—Thylias Moss, African American poet. As quoted in the Wall Street Journal (May 12, 1994)
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“Westward the star of empire takes its way.””
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)