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Chicago

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

John E. Coons
John E. Coons*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
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Extract

The racial pattern in Chicago is illustrative of the problem facing all urban centers of the North. By 1964 nearly all of Chicago's 930,000 Negroes were grouped in racially homogeneous residential areas of the South, West, and Near North Side of the city. In the decade between 1950 and 1960 alone, the Negro population had increased by 320,000 or 52.5%. During this same period a net 399,000 white residents left the city, many resettling in suburban areas. This transformation has continued with the Negro community now constituting at least 26% of Chicago's total population.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , November 1967 , pp. 80 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © 1967 by the Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

Editors' Note: Adapted, by the staff of the Law & Society Review, from the report entitled “Race and the Public Schools of Chicago,” 117 pp. The study was conducted for the United States Office of Education in 1965.

References

1. Since no racial count was made and the “sending” schools were white, Negro, and integrated, it is impossible to ascertain the racial composition of the transferees. It is peculiar that no racial headcount was made of the transferring students. This was a unique opportunity to determine the extent to which white students use transfer privileges to escape Negro and integrated schools. A communication from the Office of the Superintendent suggests that such a tally “would involve racial records of children as individuals and these are not kept because of the State of Illinois law.” Why the children could not be tallied anonymously as a group is not explained. This is precisely what is done in the annual headcounts.

2. Webb v. Board of Education, Civ. No. 61C1569 D.C., N.D. Ill.

3. As of August 1967, the case was still pending on the passed case calendar.

settlement had succeeded in establishing that racial imbalance does exist

4. E. Banfield, Political Influence (1961).

5. One irony of the Board's action is that the radical new plan which unabashedly embarrasses racial quotas was accepted despite the decision by the Illinois Supreme Court just weeks before which held unconstitutional that section of the Illinois Armstrong Act which provides that racial distribution be a consideration in school zoning. See the editors' postscript in the Evanston study for a discussion of this decision, Tometz v. Waukegan City School District, Docket No. 40292, Agenda 237.