Black families came to Chicago by the thousands — why are they leaving?
He dressed in a flannel shirt, jeans and a Bears cap, strode out of the rectangular bungalow he shares with his wife and daughter and folded his tall frame behind the wheel of his silver Nissan sedan.
The steady exodus of African Americans has caused alarm and grief in Chicago, the nation’s third largest city, where black people have shaped the history, culture and political life. The population of 2.7 million is still nearly split in thirds among whites, blacks and Latinos, but the balance is shifting. Chicago saw its population decline in 2018, the fourth year in a row. Since 2015, almost 50,000 black residents have left.
But the couple’s other adult daughters, Nesan and Tshena, still live in the family home on Laporte, confident that their neighborhood is showing signs of a turnaround. “It’s an American tragedy,” said the Rev. Marshall Hatch, a pastor on the West Side whose congregants have been disappearing for years, heading to cities throughout the Midwest and the South. “Look at the legacy that the African American community had in national politics, in culture, with blues and gospel and jazz, and sports, from Michael Jordan to Ernie Banks. African American Chicago is being destroyed.
The house on Laporte was the center of the White family’s world. Dora, Nesan and Tshena attended school around the corner. Hardis worked overnights as a meatpacker in an Oscar Mayer plant, stirring vats of sausage in bone-chilling temperatures on the factory floor, and Velma was a nurse at Cook County’s public hospital. More family members — Hardis’ mother and his sister and brother-in-law and their children — lived in the upper flat.
And by Ke’Oisha’s sophomore year, in the early 2000s, Dora had grown concerned about their surroundings. By 2003, no other city in the country had as many homicides as Chicago. Their neighborhood of Austin, a community of aging brick houses, greystones and apartment buildings that occupies a large swath of Chicago’s West Side, had become notorious for its violence.
There is little doubt in Dora’s mind that she did what most parents would do if they had the chance. She pulled her child out of a dangerous environment. She helped set Ke’Oisha on a path to college and a successful career.“I can take it or leave it,” she said, sitting in a high-backed chair in her dining room in Hillside. “I rarely come into the city.”Ke’Oisha White was a teenager whose mother had moved her to the suburbs, and she rankled at the disruption.
“I was like, I’m just going to pray about this,” Ke’Oisha said. “Whoever offers the best job, that’s where I’m going.” There, she found a career that seems boundless. The internship led to a job as a project manager. She bought a house on her own, where she lives with her Yorkshire terrier, Gucci. Tshena had never lived anywhere but that house, and she wasn’t inclined to leave. Her father came to her with a proposal: Would she like to buy it?
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