“While we may never know the wide array of explicit reasons why hundreds of thousands of black Chicagoans over the past few decades have decided to no longer make Chicago home, the report makes a rather strong suggestion of the bucket into which we can toss that multitude of individual choices: racial inequality,” Loury wrote. By 2016, the city had lost 350,000 black residents, according to the report. For decades, in some cases, these policies have exacted a great toll on the residents of Chicago’s black communities.”Īfter decades of population growth, the number of black residents peaked in the 1980s at 1.2 million before a sharp decline. “The report highlights clear examples including the city’s massive transformation of public housing, its punitive onslaught of fines and fees, overly aggressive policing, and sweeping closures of public schools. “At its worst, Chicago has become a hostile environment for black people - and public policy has played a role,” wrote Alden Loury, senior editor of the Race, Class and Communities desk at WBEZ and a former publisher of The Chicago Reporter. But once here, they found a new set of inequities and the population has been on decline since. A recent study suggests systemic inequality has kept large segments of Chicago’s black population entrenched in decades-long poverty and puts a new perspective on Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s ambitious plan to end the scourge in a generation.īetween the Great Migration and Growing Exodus: The Future of Black Chicago?, a report from the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, describes a city that ballooned beginning in the 1930s as black people migrated north to avoid the constraints of the Jim Crow south reaching its pinnacle in the ‘80s.
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