Tenant Unions, Rent Strikes, Fighting Foreclosure, and Eviction Blockades: Black Chicago’s Struggle for Housing Justice

When Martin Luther King, Jr. directed his campaign for civil rights and social justice to the North, he came to Chicago.  The fight against slum conditions, poor housing, and residential segregation was at the center of the Chicago Freedom Movement’s agenda.  That racial discrimination and segregation persisted in Chicago long after King’s foray into Chicago politics has led historians to summarily assess the Chicago Freedom Movement as a failure.  But in doing so, the movement for fairness and good housing in Chicago is reduced to the brief period in which King was involved.  Such a narrow focus misses the way in which Black Chicago became a hotbed of tenant and homeowner organizing in the late 1960s, long after King had left the city.  Some of this activity could be linked to organizations that were created as a result of the Chicago Freedom Movement, but others like the Contract Buyers League (CBL) arose in response to the economically predatory relationships born as a result of redlining and the economic exclusion of African Americans from conventional sources of home lending capital. The CBL formed to protest Black homeowners exclusion from the use of traditional mortgages to buy homes. Moreover, the focus on concepts like “Black Power” and “community control” among others, were the context within which Black tenant organizing across Chicago developed—not for “fair housing” in white suburban communities, but for equal housing in Black urban spaces.  Finally, these movements for equality in housing in Black communities demonstrated the way in which racism, redlining, and urban exploitation were not just expressions of white prejudice or generic anti-black attitudes, rather they were demonstrations of a “political economy of residential segregation” in which African Americans were often expected to pay significantly more for inferior housing.