Race and Ethnicity
by Drew VandeCreek, Ph.D.

The conclusion of the Civil War and the passage of the Fourteenth Amendments and Reconstruction civil rights acts obliged the state of Illinois to lift its laws prohibiting African-Americans from voting and serving on juries. In this period the city of Chicago began to educate black children alongside whites, and African-Americans gained access to state-funded colleges as well. But blacks made up less than 2% of the population in the North, and many whites remained ambivalent or outright hostile to their struggle for full social equality. Thus African-Americans made slow progress in Illinois and across the North.

Many white workers in Illinois feared competition from African-Americans trying to improve their lot, and worked to restrict blacks to unskilled labor. Many labor unions, with the notable exception of the Knights of Labor, refused to let blacks join. Tradesmen maneuvered to keep African-Americans out of apprenticeship programs. Black artisans migrating from the South often found themselves restricted to a black-only clientele by white consumers anxious about African-Americans' social rise.

Many African-Americans came to central and southern Illinois to work as coal miners. Often mine owners recruited southern blacks to come north and work in mines in order to replace striking white workers. Nevertheless, the United Mine Workers organized integrated, "mixed" locals, and by the end of the nineteenth century over 20,000 African Americans belonged to the UMW.

Many African-Americans, and especially women, worked as servants. Like blacks working as unskilled laborers, they found that they were paid far less than whites for comparable service. This low pay often prevented African-Americans from marrying and starting families until later in life, when they had attained some financial stability. African-Americans in the North also faced a rigid pattern of residential segregation that confined them to specific neighborhoods. Frustrated by the slow pace of social change, African-American leaders like Benjamin Singleton and Bishop Henry McNeal Turner advocated colonization, or blacks' removal to Africa to begin a new society there.

The American legal system did little to help African Americans in this period. In 1883 the United States Supreme Court upheld laws denying African-Americans access to private facilities like trains, theaters and hotels, terming their exclusion a "private wrong" outside the scope of the law. After black activists organized to challenge this ruling, the court upheld the doctrine in 1896's Plessy v. Ferguson, which articulated a doctrine of "separate but equal."

As it grew to become a large city, Chicago became a center of black political and intellectual life. Lucy Parsons married a white man named Albert Parsons. Together they became two of the city's most prominent radical social critics and organizers. Lucy Parsons was a renowned orator, andhelped to organize the Chicago Working Women's Union. In 1891 she began publishing her own newspaper -- "Freedom."1

Ferdinand Barnett graduated from the City of Chicago law school and became the first black assistant state's attorney in Illinois. He also founded and edited the Chicago Conservator, a newspaper devoted to the fight for black equality. In 1895 he married the noted southern political activist, journalist and lecturer Ida B. Wells, who joined him in Chicago.

Born a child of Mississippi slaves in 1862, Wells found education and began teaching school as a teenager. Working as an educator in Memphis, Wells challenged the southern practice of segregated facilities by suing a railroad, and became a journalist devoted to exposing blacks' unfair lot in society. In 1892 three of her friends were lynched by white mobs, and Wells wrote scathing exposes of the practice which received wide national attention. Facing intimidation and violence in Memphis, Wells became a traveling lecturer before marrying Barnett.

Wells confronted the northern reform establishment as well as southern racism. In the 1890s she confronted Frances Willard and the Women's Christian Temperance Union for their support of southern reformers who accepted the practice of lynching. In 1894 she published The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition, which detailed blacks' exclusion from the fair by white organizers. After 1895 Wells largely confined herself to local political causes and raising her family.2

While African-Americans were largely discouraged or barred from taking part in the World's Columbian Exposition, black women did succeed in speaking before the Women's Congress at the fair. One speech, by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper demanded justice for her race and defined the work of middle-class black women in the coming era.3

African-Americans in the North and South were overwhelmingly Republican in politics, but found themselves disappointed as their party's white majority lost interest in the tasks of southern Reconstruction and black social equality. Many turned to private organizations, including churches and social clubs, for the social outlets and status that white society denied to blacks. By the 1890s, middle-class black women especially formed clubs that resembled white women's organizations in their devotion to education, suffrage, temperance, moral reform, and self-help.4

Other new ethnic groups came to Chicago in this period as well. European immigration began again at the conclusion of the Civil War, and Chicago, situated at the western end of the Great Lakes, became a major destination. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 only accelerated immigration to the city by opening up many new positions in the construction trades and other industries devoted to rebuilding the area. Many of the new immigrants came to America from southern and eastern Europe, as well as Ireland.

Many immigrants arrived in cities where friends or family members had already set down roots. This strategy identified favorable locations for immigration, and helped to build new communities. Like African-Americans, many new immigrants faced housing segregation and limited opportunities in business, the trades and unions. Often immigrants responded by asserting themselves in economic sectors largely overlooked by native-born whites.

In the 1870s and 1880s Chicago became a city of newcomers, with a new population that dwarfed the native-born elites who had arrived before the Civil War. This often-unstable mix clashed over issues like the regulation or outright prohibition of alcoholic beverages. Many Yankee reformers such as Frances Willard identified alcohol abuse as a leading cause of poverty, family disintegration, and violence against women. All too often, they believed, men squandered their paychecks on strong drink, leaving their families to starve. But many of the new immigrants came to America from societies in which beer and wine played central roles. German-Americans, outraged at the Republican Party's tilt toward the reformers' position, switched their allegiance to the Democrats in this period.5

Many Irish had come to Illinois in the decades before the Civil War to help build the Illinois and Michigan Canal. In the years after the conflict they formed increasingly strong community organizations, many times around the Catholic Church. The cause of Irish independence from England also informed many groups, including an unfortunate armed sortie into British Canada at the Civil War's close. In the Gilded Age Irish-Americans played significant roles in the formation of labor unions, especially the Knights of Labor. The Irish technique of the boycott gave the Knights and other unions a powerful new tool in their struggle to match the economic, political and legal power of employers.6

Other immigrants brought radical intellectual and political traditions to America. German and Eastern European immigrants played large roles in the organization of Chicago's socialist and anarchist movements. When these movements emerged in the spotlight caused by the Great Strike of 1877 and, especially, the Haymarket Riot of 1886, many middle-class, native-born whites quickly associated radicalism and labor violence with immigrants.7

While some reform groups worked to inculcate immigrants with Yankee virtues of thrift and self-control, Jane Addams' Hull House developed in part to help immigrants to organize themselves. Addams, the daughter of a wealthy Illinois businessman, took up her work in part to learn from immigrants who represented other societies and cultures. By 1892 Illinois had elected its first foreign-born governor, John Peter Altgeld, and immigrant political leaders worked to find roles in Chicago's city government. Nevertheless, many immigrants and their children continued to face discrimination and limited opportunities, and often relied upon their own ethnic communities for social life and business activities.8

1. Ashbaugh, Carolyn. Lucy Parsons: American Revolutionary. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1976.

2. McMurry, Linda. To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells. New York : Oxford University Press, 1998.

3. Schechter, Patricia A. Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880-1930. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

4. Reed, Christopher. All the World is Here! The Black Presence at White City. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

5. Hendricks, Wanda. Gender, Race, and Politics in the Midwest: Black Club Women in Illinois. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

6. Bogart, Ernest Ludlow. The Centennial History of Illinois: Industrial State, 1871-1893. Springfield: Illinois Centennial Commission, 1920.

7. Schneirov, Richard. Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864-97. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998.

8. See "The Dramas of Haymarket" at http://www.chicagohs.org/dramas/.

9. Elshtain, Jean B. Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life. New York: Basic Books, 2002.