Chicago’s Enduring Legacy of the Black and Unhoused

This is Part Two of the Chicago Defender’s series Black and Unhoused: How Segregation Fueled a Homegrown Crisis, which is part of the “Healing Illinois” initiative.& Demetrius France, 55, is just 15 credits shy of earning his Associate’s degree.& “I started college in the early 1990s and studied electrical engineering and aviation at Florida Memorial University.”& When his heart led him to Chicago, he hoped to finish college, too. But life and a few challenges: marriage and separation, unemployment, and children delayed those goals. And now homelessness pushes that goal even further away.& Today, France is a resident of& Inner Voice’s& Systemizing Options and Services (SOS) – Joint Transitional-Rapid Rehousing Program on Chicago’s West Side.& According to a& 2021 Chicago Coalition for the Homeless-US Census analysis, 68,440 Chicagoans experienced homelessness, and 53% of them were Black. This staggering statistic mirrors a trend that dates back to the 1930s when the Chicago Sun-Times (then the Daily Times) reported that there were “50,000 homeless Negroes” living within the nine square miles of Bronzeville that confined the growing population of Blacks due to& race-based& restrictive covenants.& These racist, institutionalized barriers blocked access to communities with affordable quality housing that has endured for nearly...