Bronzeville

Jazz legend Louis Armstrong, civil rights leader Ida B. Wells and aviatrix Bessie Coleman were among the many prominent African Americans who lived or worked in Bronzeville and left an indelible mark on this South Side community’s development. Today, this former ‘Black Metropolis’ is a treasure trove of historical and cultural landmarks and experiences – a living monument to the generations of African Americans who emigrated here from the South during the Great Migration at the turn of the 20th century.

Bronzeville: A City Within a City

Written by Alan Solomon, with research assistance from the Chicago Neighborhood Tourism Project. 

This is more than a neighborhood. When the Great Migration brought African Americans from the South to jobs in the North early in the last century, many found their way to Bronzeville.

In this South Side community were the entrepreneurs and the musicians and the novelists and playwrights and poets who defined the black urban existence, not only in Chicago but in much of America, rivaled only by New York's Harlem.

The names are familiar: Richard Wright, Louis Armstrong, Lorraine Hansberry, the blues men – Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy and more – publisher John Johnson . . . all lived here or worked here, often both, in what we call Bronzeville. All left a legacy. 

And even though what scholars called the Black Metropolis has expanded beyond Bronzeville's boundaries, exploring the neighborhood as it is today reminds us of its contributions.

Coincidentally, one of the neighborhood’s landmarks honors a man who opposed Abraham Lincoln. Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln's Democratic rival in state and national politics, owned much property here; a monument, similar to the one at Lincoln's resting place in downstate Springfield, marks his tomb at the east end of 35th Street.

The 1928 Victory Monument, on Martin Luther King Drive (formerly South Park Way) at 35th Street, both salutes an African-American regiment in the first World War and signals a sense of inclusion that prevailed despite postwar race riots and continued discrimination in housing and jobs. Here, too, is the Walk of Fame, sidewalk plaques that commemorate influential African Americans – among them, Vivian Harsh, the first black librarian in the Chicago Public Library system; her extensive collection, the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, fills its own wing of the Carter G. Woodson Regional Library, at 95th and Halsted Streets in the Washington Heights neighborhood.

Also on King Drive: more public art, including the poignant but understated Monument to the Great Northern Migration. Ahead on this historic street: fine greystones and redstones, including the homes of civil rights pioneer Ida B. Wells, publisher Robert S. Abbott and congressman Oscar Stanton de Priest. Hansberry ("A Raisin in the Sun"), as an adult, lived a little more than a mile south of Abbott and de Priest. (A childhood home, a three-flat at 6140 S. Rhodes Ave. in the Woodlawn neighborhood, was granted landmark status by the city in 2010.)

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