Researching Glencoe’s Racial Past

Taylor Family posing in Glencoe, IL, c1920s

—By Celia

I came to work at Shorefront through a circuitous series of realizations and referrals. During the summer of 2017, just before I went to college, I was reading Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy on my back porch in Glencoe. I was taken aback by Stevenson’s stories of defending inmates on death row, but equally struck by two of his other ideas: First, that the United States has a long, long way to go in memorializing the horrendous legacy of slavery, and second, that one must be proximate to issues to truly understand them and make a difference.

While reading about the cruelty of systematic incarceration and capital punishment of African-Americans, I couldn’t help but think about to which issues I, a Jewish girl on her back porch in Glencoe, was proximate. Throughout my time in Glencoe’s public schools and New Trier High School, I could count my black classmates on one hand, and had never considered why. Nearly all-white suburbs are not natural; they are the products of deliberate racial discrimination. I had been so close to the issue that I couldn’t see it for what it was. It was time to transform that inability to examine my surroundings to a meaningful proximity, like stepping back from an impressionist painting.

How did my town come to be so white, and what was to be done about it? That was the question I tried to answer with a free summer and the internet at my disposal. I found scans of census records on a genealogy website and hand-counted each black resident from decades of data. Although tedious, I found something important: the black population of Glencoe halved in between 1920 and 1930. What had happened during that time?

I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t know where to go next for my research. I read Robert Sideman’s African-Americans in Glencoe, which illuminated some important sources for me, and interviewed a few residents. I would be starting school soon, and had to table the project to transition to college.

Just a few weeks in, I met Dr. Chatelain, a history professor at my university. She’s regarded as a must-take professor – equally accomplished and devoted to her students. When I told her about my nascent project, she directed me to Shorefront, where she had done research in graduate school. I reached out to Dino, and started to work in the archives when I returned home for the summer.

I really enjoyed organizing sources to be used by future researchers. I categorized letters written by Freedom Summer teachers to their disapproving parents. I sifted through legal notices and memoranda about discrimination by the Noyes Cultural Arts Center. But what interested me the most was a heap of unsorted materials about Glencoe from the 1880s to present day: newspaper clippings, letters, invitations, pamphlets. They proved incredibly helpful in establishing what had happened in my hometown, from its inception to the present. With that arc of history came a set of patterns that made Glencoe the way it is today.

First, Glencoe was always meant to be idyllic. This hasn’t changed much since its founding: Glencoe is situated overlooking a beautiful beach; it’s filled with well-maintained green spaces; the schools are well-regarded and small enough that everyone knows one another; the houses are beautiful and often sell for millions. Such was the vision of its founders, who sought an escape from their busy city lives.

St. Paul A.M.E. Youth Choir practicing for the MLK remembrance in 1983. Photo by Jim Robinson

African-Americans bought property in Glencoe from early on in its history. Morton Culver, a local real estate developer, first sold land to blacks from Chicago in the early 1880s. The St Paul AME Church was founded shortly after in 1884. I found a Chicago Tribune article from the same year about a picnic in Glencoe, an event that drew blacks from the city and a number of surrounding suburbs. The picnickers are reported to have sung, “We’ll rest in this beautiful land, / Just along Michigan’s shore / Sing the song of Moses and the Lamb, / And dwell in Glencoe evermore.”

The vision of a blissful suburb seemed, at this moment, accessible to blacks. The air was fresher and the schools, which had always been racially integrated, were better than the cramped ones in the city.

But Chicago’s white elite was also taking notice of this ideal setting. Wealthy white couples started to pine after lakefront mansions for the weekends, and founded country clubs to entertain them during their stays. Eventually, these weekend visitors began to permanently settle in Glencoe.

A critical mass of them took measures to remove black people from Glencoe. In 1919, the Glencoe Homes Association was founded by residents with the intent to “beautify” the town. It bought properties to be resold with what Robert Sideman calls “zoning-like restrictions” to increase the town’s green space and sell selectively to what it deemed “proper” buyers.

In 1927, Glencoe Homes embarked on a project with the town’s government to build a public park. Rather than using the town’s many vacant lots, it would be located in the middle of southwest Glencoe – where the majority of black families lived. After much opposition, the families were forced to settle. The Glencoe Homes Association published an op-ed in the local paper about their disapproval of the “negro colony,” paraded under the headline: “Prevention by ‘Syndicate’ of Blight to Community Saved Realty Values in Millions.”

This is the point at which Glencoe’s black community halved, the enormous dip in the census data. I had sometimes wondered why Watts Park, where I learned to ice skate and had lacrosse practice, was divided by a street in the middle. Wouldn’t it have made more sense for it to be continuous? But nearly all-white suburbs are not natural; they are planned deliberately.

July 10, 1942 Chicago SunTimes article

Despite this major fracture in Glencoe’s black population, the suburb continued to be relatively more diverse and progressive when compared to its surrounding suburbs. A.L. Foster, a Glencoe resident and then-Executive Director of the Chicago Urban League, won a case to desegregate Glencoe’s public beach in 1942, while Kenilworth didn’t have a single black resident until 1963.

Glencoe became a small enclave for black residents in an otherwise overwhelmingly white sea of suburbia. Mayor Robert Morris initiated programs to encourage African-Americans to apply for the village’s jobs in the mid-1950s, and the Glencoe Human Relations Committee formed to advocate for open housing and more harmonious race relations. When parents of New Trier students formed Concerned Black Parents in 1977, it met consistently where there was a critical mass of black parents: Glencoe. The group pushed for New Trier’s recognition of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and inclusive teaching at the majority white high school.

Newspaper articles I found from this period struck me as odd. There were multiple articles that profiled Glencoe’s black residents as anomalies in their exposure to such a progressive society. In particular, I found this article bold in its claim to Glencoe as a champion of race relations:

February 9, 1977 (Suburban Trib)

“Assumptions on Race don’t Hold; Glencoe’s 6% Black”: The article rebukes the assumption that Glencoe has no black population, but rather a percentage far below the national average. It also acknowledges that “…a black homeowner will have to sell for a bit less than a white homeowner with a comparable house in Glencoe.” It recognizes that the original sale of property to blacks in Glencoe may have been a scheme to resentfully decrease its property value, but it “backfired and for years Glencoe was a primary source for domestic help on the North Shore.” Such “backfiring” refers only to the quality of life for white residents.

While these articles clung to every testimony and long-time residency of black Glenconians, the population has been declining gradually, but consistently, at about 1% per decade since 1930. One woman whom I interviewed cited the exorbitant housing prices as the main reason that her children didn’t raise their families in their hometown – an obstacle exacerbated by the fact that blacks often sold their homes for lower than they were worth. Another black resident wrote to the Glencoe News in 2004 to lament her inability to return to Glencoe because the homes on her childhood block had been torn down to build houses of twice the value. One might be reminded of the Glencoe Homes Association’s calls to beautify the town, and its consequences.

But economics aside, and with a multitude of studies proving that black families are more likely to live in lower-income areas even if they can afford not to do so, other factors influenced this gradual exodus. In a 2004 Glencoe News article entitled “Black Population Dwindles,” advocates cite widespread “‘steering’ [of] prospective homeowners toward communities that fit their demographic.” Carol Hendrix, a co-founder of Concerned Black Parents, witnessed her community leaving Glencoe over time, saying, “…[T]here was an effort by the builders to engineer the neighborhood.” Angela Hatfield, another resident interviewed in the article, said she was virtually certain that a white family would live in her home after her. 

Glencoe is currently 0.7% black. With its green spaces and beautiful beach, its colonial homes and quaint downtown, I can’t help but think of a line from Martin Luther King Junior’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” He writes of the shame and injustice in “when you…see tears welling up in [your six year old daughter’s] eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people.” Glencoe is Funtown. While it wasn’t part of the Jim Crow South, it had been closed off to African-Americans in a gradual, de facto manner. Beyond the public policy implications of this injustice, it’s an affront to the dignity of so many.

In closing, I tried to better understand this issue to which I was so proximate. In doing so, I realized just how much history this suburb, of less than ten thousand residents and five square miles, holds. This history was sometimes subject to the reverberations of events far beyond its own scale – the Great Migration, for example – but, on the whole, was largely influenced by everyday people trying to change their hometown. From Morton Culver to A.L. Foster to Carol Hendrix, these individuals transformed the microcosm that is Glencoe, beyond the purview of anything I would learn about in an American History class. I’m grateful for organizations like Shorefront, that safeguard these local histories, and the legacies of those who sacrificed for their vision of a more equitable society.

Sources:

Sideman, Robert A., African Americans in Glencoe: The Little Migration, © 2009, The History Press, Charleston, SC.

Chicago Sun-Times, “Court Opens Glencoe Beach To Negro Family: Injunction Granted Against Official Of Park District”, July 10, 1942.

Suburban Tribune, “Assumptions on Race don’t Hold; Glencoe’s 6% Black”, February 9, 1977.

Nathan Branch: Early Evanston Settler

— by Rhonda K. Craven

Nathan Branch, edited from a group photo of postal workers c1900. Photo by 20th Century Studios

After the Civil War, a number of blacks moved to Chicago and then to Evanston. Among them were men such as Daniel F. Garnett, Green A. Bell, Andrew Scott and William Ender. Some worked for prominent businessmen and politicians, while others started a variety of entrepreneurial endeavors. In 1870, many of these and others were listed in the Evanston census with their wives and children.

Born a slave in Virginia

Nathaniel Branch, more commonly known as Nathan, is in this number. Born a slave in Virginia to Esther and Nathan Branch in 1828, he had three brothers. His family was split up several times, and he lived in Kentucky and Tennessee, working for different plantation owners. He was a defiant slave who ran away briefly when he was 17, and he had several run ins with his masters over the years. Eventually, he became an overseer at one of the plantations.

When Branch heard about the war, he and his wife escaped to Columbus, Kentucky, where he found the 134^th Illinois Infantry Regiment, as well as Green Bell, another slave who had also escaped. They served as cooks for Company D and in 1864, they were mustered out at Camp Fry in Chicago (the Clark/Diversey/Broadway intersection).

Branch worked two years as a waiter at the Sherman House (Randolph between Clark and LaSalle) in downtown Chicago. He learned to read and attended night school during this time. His first wife had died. He came to Evanston ca. 1867 and worked for various local families. After he married Ellen Gordon of Nicholasville, Kentucky, who had a daughter, Mattie, they continued growing their family. Nathan transferred his church membership from Olivet Baptist in Chicago to the Baptist church in Evanston on July 4, 1869. A Miss Wheeler taught him to write.

In November, 1872, after the Baptist church building had been moved from another location, half the floor collapsed during worship, and many members fell into the basement. Nathan was sitting next to a window in the gallery with other members and visitors. He decided to break through and jump out the window. The next day, he paid for the window repairs.

1705 Lake Street. Photo by Rhonda Craven

Branch, along with Bell, were appointed as lamplighters in July of 1873. A year later, the Evanston Index reported that Branch had brought the first dray (a cart) to town and was “ready to haul to order anything from a box of peaches to a load of lumber.” He was the sexton at the Baptist church and felt privileged that he could ring the bell. Nathan had an express company at Oak Avenue and Church Street near the train depot. The family purchased a home at 1705 Lake St. (now an Evanston landmark) in 1879. He was a participant in the union prayer meeting held at the Presbyterian Church and led a session that same year.

In December, 1880, during his first trip to the South after he had escaped slavery, Branch visited family and friends in Kentucky, including an aunt who had raised him after he was separated from his mother during his teen years. After he encouraged Jordan, one of his brothers, to move to Evanston, Jordan began his own express business.

The Branch family was well-respected in the community

In the summer of 1882, he and other black Baptists participated in union services with black Methodists in a room over the post office on Davis Street west of Chicago Avenue. Branch reported in an Index item published October 14, 1882 that the Baptists voted to organize as a mission on September 29 after the Methodists voted to establish their own church. During the November 8^th Baptist church prayer meeting, Nathan and his wife Ellen were among ten black congregants to request letters of dismission, which they received a week later. The new church was established on November 17 with 20 charter members. It’s been said that Nathan named the church since it was indeed the second Baptist church in Evanston!

For at least 30 years, the two churches continued varying degrees of fellowship. First Baptist provided its facilities, counsel, financial and community support as needed, in part because they still saw Branch as “our brother”. He was invited to the church’s major anniversary celebrations, during which a poem written for the occasion mentioned his service at First Baptist. That ongoing closeness, however, is cited as a reason for the very public church split in 1894 that led to the establishment of the Berean Baptist Church, now known as Mount Zion.

The Branch family was well-respected in the community. At Second Baptist, he was a deacon and a trustee. In 1888, the post office hired him to carry mail to and from the trains. Soon after, he became the special delivery letter carrier, a familiar figure with his horse and buggy. Ellen and daughter Helen were dressmakers. Sons William and Robert were cooks who later worked for the railroad. Ida was a servant in private homes. Mattie had married George Brown in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1881, and she was an active churchwoman.

A September 1889 fire destroyed the schoolhouse that had served as the church building for six years. In spring, 1890, the congregation purchased an edifice from Second Methodist in North Evanston and planned to move it to a lot Branch owned on Wesley Avenue between Lake and Grove Streets, near his home. He and other church leaders petitioned the village to make this move, but his neighbors wrote a passionate counter-petition, citing the potential fire hazard (the fire department was ill-equipped) and damage to shade trees (house movers had destroyed many of them).

In October, 1890, the congregation sought to purchase from Northwestern University the original lot on Benson Avenue (the current church location) NU had leased to them in 1883. The plan was to have NU purchase Branch’s lot on Wesley; the church would then pay the difference for the Benson lot and move the building there. However, NU declined the original deed in Second Baptist’s name because of property line issues. A revised deed, in Branch’s name, was approved soon after. By December, the church was worshiping in its 20-year-old “new” building on Benson.

Many details about Nathan’s family, his life as a slave, his escape and his time in Chicago and Evanston were included in articles that ran in the Index. At Green Bell’s death in 1890, Branch spoke at length about their shared experiences. In 1897, there was a two-part feature story about his life. Two years later, he went to Macon, GA to find his brother, Lee, after a local businessman met him there, but they were unable to connect. The paper recapped his career when he retired from the post office in 1902 and covered Ida’s wedding to John Sherrod later that year.

Nathan died on March 10, 1911, and the local papers published extensive obituaries. William, who died in 1929, was a cook on the railroad. Ellen was a faithful Second Baptist member through her death in 1934. Robert became a deacon and a trustee after he returned from Colorado. He also died in 1934. There is a photo of him in the church foyer gallery. Helen, who never married, was an organist and a longtime Sunday School teacher. She died in 1970. Ida, another active member, died in 1972. Her husband, John, had attended St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church. Robert’s son, Nathan, died in Evanston in 1975, while living in the family home on Lake Street with his wife and children.

Mittie Conner and Effie Setler, the daughters of Nathan’s brother Jordan, were also involved in Second Baptist’s ministries. Mittie’s daughter, Thelma, who graduated from Evanston Township High School in 1923, worked at Wieboldt’s for many years and was an assistant church organist. Effie’s daughter, Ione S. Brown, was a longtime church clerk and one of the first female trustees appointed at the church. After her death in 1973, the church’s scholarship fund was named after her in recognition of her commitment to help young people get an education, even though she didn’t have biological children of her own.

Although Nathan Branch came to Evanston nearly 150 years ago, his family’s influence is clearly woven into the city’s history!

The Grandmothers. . .My Queens: Laura Belle

—By Bruce Allen King

Laura Belle. Photo courtesy of Bruce Allen King

I have been blessed with having a very close and deep relationship with both of my grandmothers.

Laura Eubanks Hadley, born January 9, 1907 in Charlottesville, Virginia, was the daughter of John Eubanks. She never knew her mother and her father was, from all observation, a white man, but legally classified as a Negro because of that one drop of black blood coursing through his veins. John left his daughter in the care of relatives, one of which was her half-sister Ora Castleberry, who would later become an Evanstonian. Laura “Belle” wouldn’t see her father until her late-teens. She traveled to Pennsylvania and spent time with her dad while in route to Illinois to join her sister Ora in Evanston. Growing up as a farm girl, tending chickens, ducks, the garden, and honing the skills she would need later in life by also taking care of the household chores.

Grandma Laura was a short, slightly built, very light-skinned woman with freckles and straight auburn hair. She could neither read nor write, so she had to live by her very gentle spirit, her very humble nature and ability to perform hard work. She was well aware of who she was in society, but never hesitated to do whatever she had to do to better herself and others. She was a devout Christian and lifelong member of Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church on Clark Street in Evanston. Her laughter was soft and she offered few opinions.

It is from my Grandma Laura that I was gifted with oral history

Arriving in Evanston in late 1927, she did odd housekeeping jobs, sometimes “staying on the place”, as a live-in housekeeper. Soon after she met and married Lawrence Michael Hadley, an Evanston High School graduate, charismatic, dashing and very street wise. Within the first five years of the Depression she bore four children: Norwood, Delores, Nadine and Peter.

Grandma Laura struggled against amazing odds; those of our racially troubled society, with great poverty and few skills to overcome it, in addition to a troubled and dysfunctional marriage. Despite it all, she never uttered a bad word against anyone. In fact, she would cease to talk when the conversation became negative and driven by deprecating gossip. If you came to her with negativity, she would, without hesitation, say, “Don’t come tome with that he said, she said, who shot John!” All got the message.

It is from my Grandma Laura that I was gifted with oral history. Her memory was phenomenal, many times down to the day and most times even remembering what the weather was on any given past event.

If the truth be told, I think all people have their favorites, even parents and grandparents. It was apparent who her favorite grand boys were. I was not one of them, but I NEVER felt slighted in anyway. Her love was that great and complete.

Grandma Laura had an intense love for gambling, particularly “the horses”. Her off days from “the place”, she and her friend and companion Roosevelt Reeves, aka “Toby”, would take us to Arlington Racetrack to the north and Washington Park to the south. Sportsman’s “trotters” were their least favorite, but would fill the need for enjoyment many evenings. The experience was one that has given me smiles and personal laughs to this day. I would watch with great joy at the gestures and animated conversation, as she and Toby would pick and choose the day’s winners. On those days when they would win “big”, the ride home was full of laughter, songs and ice cream cones.

On our family trips to Pennsylvania to visit her dad, whom she doted over with great pride and pleasure, she would show us the point where the Allegheny and the Monongahela rivers merged behind her dad’s tiny house. I would watch with wonder and listen, mesmerized, to her dad and his many tall tales. The one that has stuck with me all my life was the story about his coming to Pennsylvania from Virginia.

He, in a drunken brawl, killed a man and ran up into the hills surrounding McKeesport, PA to escape the law. On the road up into the hills, he was met by the constable who asked him if he knew of a man called John Eubanks. My great-grandfather replied, “Oh yeah, I know that ole nigga, he’s down the mountain.” Knowing that “John Eubanks” was classified a black man and him looking like a white man, he used this ruse to make his escape. My great-grandfather was eventually caught and served out his time on the chain gang and lived out his life without further trouble with the law.

Grandma Laura’s love was shared with countless Evanstonians

My grandmother, most of my life, went to night school at ETHS to learn to read and write. I remember her great excitement upon being admitted to night school when I was in the second grade. Despite the fact that she always had two jobs and many times three and four, she would never miss school on an evening she was not working. Her great desire to learn was apparent because she would forgo the night races in order to go to night school. But, know this . . . thanks to the local bookie at Jack Pass’s store on Church Street, she was able to get her bet in and still go to school.

Many, many years later, she called me with great excitement and joy in her voice. She was then living at Ebenezer Primm Towers and I lived across the alley on Garnett Place. She told me to come quick because it was very important. I ran across the alley to meet her at the back door. She took me into her apartment and asked me to sit. She went to her room and brought out her checkbook. I thought she wanted me to write out a check for her, something I had been doing for many years. Instead, she sat down with pen in hand and began to slowly write the needed words on her check. Finished she beam with great pride. I cried with joy and we celebrated with her favorite . . . a cup of extremely strong black coffee.

Years after that, I graduated from college. My grandmother was sitting on the couch when we arrived at my dad’s for the graduation dinner. . . which I was tricked into cooking. As I entered and gave her my obligatory hug and kiss, she handed me a ballpoint pen with a congratulations card. I said thanks and read the card. I said thanks again and was about to move to greet others when she asked me, “Brucie, do you know why I gave you a pen?” I told her that I figured it was because I had graduated. She said, “Yes Brucie, but more importantly, you can read and write and because you can, you should always carry a pen with you”.

Grandma Laura’s love was shared with countless Evanstonians of all ages, races and socio-economic status. She would introduce herself to those she shared bus rides with, telling them proudly of her “boys”, Roy Jr., Bruce, Dion, Brian King and Joel Hadley.

Of all of my relatives and loved ones who have passed on, Grandma Laura has been the closest to an angel I’ve yet to meet. I am truly the better for all of my encounters and circumstances in life, because of her.

Big Momma and ‘dem” Made Their Way to Cook and Clean . . .

Katherine Jenkins (back Left) c1940 courtesy of Pricilla Giles

—By Doria Johnson

America is known as a country of suburbs, and the evolution of them during the 20^th century is usually thought of in terms of elite, white enclaves. Some were industrial suburbs, which attracted factory and unskilled laborers. Some were, like Evanston, known as ‘domestic service suburbs’, which means Black people, and a few other minorities, were living and working within close proximity to wealthy employers. Their presence often drew attention once they reached 10-12 % of the population, according to sociologists, because only then do they compete with white people for services, jobs, and resources. Before those number, minorities often enjoyed a seamless integration into the communities, at least in terms of school attendance, medical care and recreational facilities. However, tolerance changed drastically as the influx of the Great Migration brought tens of thousands of southern African Americans to the north and western United States.

In step, in the early 20^th century, white Evanstonians joined their southern brethren and too demanded separate facilities—a northern-version Jim Crow. Suddenly, but not surprisingly, African Americans in Evanston found they needed to establish institutions to provide their community with social services, medical care, employment agencies, and childcare. Like neighboring Chicago’s Black Belt migrants, Black Evanstonians would invent and fund their own benevolent institutions to answer the needs of its citizens, sometimes designed specifically for women migrants—who were especially in demand as maids, cooks, and child care providers to the elite. The press did not fail to take note of the activities and developments within the burgeoning Black community in its midst. There were more Black-owned newspapers in 1920 than now, but sometimes Blacks were interesting subjects in white-owned media. In 1925, The Evanston Review, reported simply, “Dr. Garnett, colored, dies.” In 1926, an article entitled “Helping the Colored Girls” appeared:

An unpretentious social enterprise which has proved its place in Evanston. . . This provides a home with wholesome surroundings for working colored girls. The backers of the home discovered the need here less that 2-years ago, and straight-way set about filing it. 200 girls have been given homes while they earned their living. The support of the home is interracial. Its usefulness in the community is unquestioned. Its needs are moderate. It should never have to ask a second time for what little it require.

North Shore Community House

The benevolent institution that granted the funds for the North Shore Community House provided perhaps the most important support Black working girls needed according to the white community—a stable environment in “wholesome surroundings” situated in the vicinity of the stately mansions where they were employed. Evanston and the wealthy North Shore inhabitants welcomed their servants into the community, but not in their hospitals, YMCA’s or churches.

The burgeoning Black community built its own infrastructure

The paternalistic concern of the white community regarding the “Negro problem” is evident— In 1926, articles began to appear in The Evanston Review advocating the need for a Negro hospital. A white women’s club boasted Evanston Hospital’s capabilities as a state of the art institution, and at the same time emphasized the need for a Colored hospital. The article also credited the white clubwomen for their extraordinary efforts to secure a Black hospital. Another piece entitled “What the Colored Folks Need,” tried to garner public support for a separate Black hospital. A week later, it appears that Blacks were overtaxing the system so that the hospitals became overcrowded and were forced to turn patients away. It is interesting to notice how the tone of the articles appears to show genuine concern for the African American community’s needs, alongside a growing sentiment among whites for segregated facilities. In the meantime, the migrants were busy building their own institutions without much apparent desire to frequent the white institutions, thus avoiding the paternalism and rejection of white folks, who felt they knew best how to direct the trajectory of Black folks’ lives.

The burgeoning Black community built its own infrastructure, supported by its cohesiveness, developed in the South well before Emancipation. The migration opened new opportunities to build institutions, like medical facilities, outside of the restrictions of southern Jim Crow, and controlled and constructed largely by efforts of the African American community’s women. In 1914, Dr. Isabella Garnett, daughter of pioneer Daniel Garnett, and Dr. Arthur Butler opened the Evanston Sanitarium, in the heart of Evanston’s Black Westside neighborhood. In 1930, Community Hospital opened (the only institution of its kind dedicated to serving north shore Blacks and minorities outside Chicago’s Cook County Hospital.) Both institutions had an interracial board of directors, a nod to the white community’s encouragement to construct separate hospitals for “Negroes.” Dr. Elizabeth Webb Hill organized the Woman’s Auxiliary of Community Hospital in 1939. She also became Illinois’ first Black woman hospital chief of staff in 1943. Dr. Hill led the accreditation efforts with the state and successfully raised the funds to build a new hospital, which became the central institution serving the medical needs of Evanston’s Black community until 1975. Literally thousands of Evanston’s African Americans were born, and died, in Dr. Hill’s care.

Domestic service suburbs sprang up along the railroad and trolley lines around major cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Baltimore. The cities’ most wealthy and elite white citizens preferred these chic addresses, as opposed to cramped city life. These suburbs, with their sprawling mansions, and manicured lawns were accessed only by rail, which made it difficult for white residents to obtain much-needed goods, services, and servants. As a result, these suburbs conveniently contained “bustling communities of shopkeepers, mechanics, industrial workers, and the servants who made it possible to live comfortably in the palatial homes that made these places famous.” The sheer numbers of the Great Migration allowed African Americans access to these service jobs, and increasingly, Black laborers provided the workforce. Evanston became both work and home to the low-wage service workers, but their post-migration experiences would be somewhat different from their counterparts just eleven miles away in Chicago’s “Black Belt.”

Evanston’s Black community began to build and own their homes at three times the rate of Chicago’s Black Belt, a reflection of their ability to use their North Shore affluent location, job stability, higher incomes and access to better educational facilities to their advantage. The white power elite, and real estate brokers, allowed Black homeownership in Evanston namely for two reasons; first, Black people were relegated to specific areas, and secondly, whites enjoyed the cushion of segregation which shielded them from potential Black neighbors, and shielded their high property values from depreciation. The availability of vacant land, coupled with no concerted effort by the white community to prevent Black homeownership, allowed African Americans to own homes at the same rates as whites. While the bulk of Evanston’s African Americans were service workers and domestics, the desire to own their own homes began in the South, and they carried the desire with them to the North. Moreover, the dependable domestic worker economy of Evanston’s Black women certainly supported, and financed, homeownership among Black families.

Many residents came from the Abbeville, Greenwood and McCormick areas of South Carolina. It is difficult to ascertain the first Abbevillian to migrate to Evanston, and plenty of current residents lay stake to that claim. Some folks boast that not only did their family come first, but also that they offered a link of the chain that facilitated many other families’ arrival. Most will admit, however, that their grandmothers and great grandmothers “did day work,” meaning they worked as domestics and service workers in white folks’ homes throughout the North Shore. The Evanston Review printed an obituary in September 1925 of Mrs. Sarah Crump, born in Abbeville in 1881, who came to Evanston in 1901. Records indicate other early migrants from the Abbeville area, such as M.D. Morris, a Black minister who died in 1911, and whose body was taken to Abbeville for burial. When Mrs. Louis White passed away in 1912, her body was also returned to her former home in Abbeville. The migration of African Americans from the South did not begin with the Great Migration, for scores of Black people left the South in the post-Civil War years. However, most historians agree that the momentum certainly picked up in 1916. Evanston’s in-migration was no different.

African Americans established a stable Black community on Evanston’s West Side

The railroad commuter suburbs, in the United States, grew rapidly from 1910-1940, both in population and in building construction. Therefore, ten years is a long time during the development of the suburbs in the United States in this period. The population of African Americans increased significantly, so much so, that the 1920 census only really provided a snapshot of the actual days it was enumerated in Evanston. People were moving in daily. Already, the Black populace had more than doubled from the 1910 census and the city was “startled and surprised” by new “racial problems the Polish and Negro populations present.” The Black population continued to grow and by 1924, the U.S. Post Office reported 8,000 Blacks in Evanston; the Chamber of Commerce reported 5,000 and the Evanston Associated Charities estimated 7,000—up significantly from 2,522 enumerated in 1920. Exact numbers aside, it is safe to say that African Americans were approaching the magical ten percent ratio that made white citizens both concerned and nervous. In Evanston, Black women’s residency was disproportionate to Black men in the early century, and by 1920, women were 55 percent of the African American populace. This lopsided balance was typical of domestic service suburbs. Black women’s employment secured the stability of Black migrant families and their determination to continue to support the familial unit was evident with the sheer numbers of women that appeared on the North Shore.

African Americans established a stable Black community on Evanston’s West Side, constructed purposely within the framework of the lessons they learned in the South. They would be best served, they felt, if they could inculcate purchasing “in the community,” leaving themselves less vulnerable to surveillance and violence and at the same time, supporting Black businesses. They could build their own institutions that would provide life and death essential services, such as medical care. In addition to Black churches, they opened businesses, such as Madame H.M. Taylor’s Hair Dressing salon, Twiggs print shop, and Hansom’s Cab. They also attended Evanston’s integrated schools, and offered services, such as Laura Owens’ dressmaking service, that provided much of what they needed, besides employment.

For example, in 1926 The Evanston Review reported the opening of a “colored” nursery. Many of Evanston’s Black women did “day work” and needed childcare, so women formed a Black co-operative, The Community Union. Mrs. Martha Twiggs, a wealthy African American woman and wife of Twiggs print shop owner, William Twiggs, became the group’s president and probably was the chief financial backer of the daycare center. Located in the heart of Evanston’s Westside, domestics could drop off their children as they headed east towards the train that would take them to their jobs as domestic workers throughout the North Shore. One resident commented that the main thoroughfare, Emerson Street, looked as if Black women were walking in a parade each weekday morning as “Big Momma and ‘dem” made their way to cook and clean in white folk’s homes. The women, domestic workers on the North Shore, shared an occupation that many Black migrants found available to them upon their arrival in their new urban homes. They used their wages to bring remaining family members to safety “up North”, and perhaps as a stepping-stone to something better.

Gathering of Women in Evanston c1930s. Shorefront photographic collection

For the Black women of Evanston, domestic work was plentiful and dependable. White people in the affluent suburbs, such as Evanston, purchased more than their majestic abodes, they bought a way of life. The elite desired leisurely lifestyles that called for many caretakers, and domestic laborers were the answer. The wealthiest employed a whole staff, but the middle class also employed some form of domestic assistance. This insatiable need for maids and chauffeurs helped to create large African American neighborhoods in suburbia, and women were disproportionably service workers. In 1920, Black women were one-third of the workers nationwide, but in the elite suburbs, like Evanston, they represented between 40 and 50 percent of laborers, thus their work was more dependable and could support the family, if necessary. The informal network, known as the chain migration, depended on women and their work both inside and outside the home and played a large role in facilitating the migration of African Americans from the South.

Sources: Excerpt of the work of Shorefront Resident Scholar and Historian Doria Johnson (PhD Candidate, University of Wisconsin, Madison) examining the influx of Black women workers into Chicago’s north shore, Evanston in particular, during the early 20^th century.

Lake Forest: An Early North Shore African American Community

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Samuel Dent Livery located at 179 Deerpath Road

The growth of the African American communities in Chicago’s suburban North Shore was unique. Instead of first settling in Chicago, most early settlers came directly to these North Shore communities. Throughout the century, many families shared common links in several northern suburban communities.

As early as 1834, Lake County had an African American presence. During the 1860s, Lake Forest showed signs of a slow growing African American community. This evidence is best exemplified by the establishment in 1866 of one of the oldest (if not the oldest) church on the North Shore. In 1870, the census recorded 20 African American residents and by 1900, 56. The 2000 census data recorded 213.

Octavia and Julian Mathews owned and operated a restaurant on Western Avenue

The African Methodist Episcopal Church was established in 1860 and stood on the corner of Maplewood Road and Washington Road. It attracted members and visitors throughout Lake County and operated until the 1920s. A second African American church, the First Baptist Church, was organized in 1900. The congregation has met in its church building on Oakwood Avenue since 1903. Churches played an active part in the community life. Job opportunities, decent housing and education proved to be a desirable draw for Lake Forests’ early African American community.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, most African Americans held positions in service-capacity jobs related to the local estates or educational institutions. Their children attended the local public schools. After living in Lake Forest for a time, a number of families employed their entrepreneurial know how and established their own businesses. Octavia and Julian Mathews owned and operated a restaurant on Western Avenue near the present day Market Square. In addition, the family ran a livery business and trained horses at a local country club. Samuel Dent owned and operated a livery business until his death in 1890. Walker Sales (1865-1919) became the second police officer in Lake Forest working the night shift. The McIntosh and Casselberry families established waste management companies, portions of which are still in business today.

Most of the early sites related to the African American community have been razed for new development. A few historic homes, Samuel Dent’s stable and the First Baptist Church still stand today.

Source: From Shorefront’s “North of Chicago” traveling exhibit. Photo courtesy of the Lake Forest Lake Bluff Historical Society.