Genealogy

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Ari and Ted Richards dream of a safe place to raise their young family. So do Tia Brown and her husband Donnell. Pastor Ricky Brown wishes for a truly integrated faith community. Chris Javier hopes for a Chinatown free of anti-Asian hate. Each of these Chicagoans, and many others, have found their goals more challenging to achieve because of a tradition that has insinuated itself into so many aspects of their everyday lives: segregation.

A new city advertising campaign spotlights a tried-and-true source of civic pride – Chicago’s history as the birthplace of innovations that changed the world. It’s an effort to lure travelers to the City of Big Shoulders as a tourism lull caused in part by the COVID-19 pandemic continues. The spot touts examples of homegrown points of civic pride.

The City of Chicago and its Board of Education have a long history of perpetuating segregation, starting with an 1863 city ordinance that required Black and White students to attend separate schools. Segregation in Chicago’s public schools only intensified when Chicago’s Black population boomed due to the influx of Black Americans from the South in the first half of the twentieth century, and it has been reinforced in the twenty-first century through strategic policy decisions, privatization, and neglect.

Chicagoans are on edge. Two years into the pandemic and emerging from a year in which there were 836 homicides in the city, civic morale is sinking. While multiple factors are no doubt in play, fear of violent crime tops the list.