Black Housing, White Finance: African American Housing and Home Ownership in Evanston, Illinois, Before 1940

A case study of African American housing and home ownership in Evanston, Illinois, a railroad suburb of Chicago, illustrates that there was a greater variety in suburban housing markets before WWII than historians have recognized. Housing discrimination was a fact of life in early, affluent suburbs, such as Evanston, by the mid-1910s, yet housing markets in these suburbs often accommodated black population growth and comparatively high rates of black home ownership, albeit within the limits of segregation. In Evanston, members of the local real estate establishment played key roles in the process--building, selling, and even financing housing for African Americans. Black suburbanites, for their part, made exceptional efforts to become home owners, in some cases even building their own homes (owner-building). In Evanston and other suburbs where patterns of local race relations were built on a foundation of domestic service, white paternalism combined with the aspirations of black southerners to shape housing markets that supported black home ownership and accommodated black community building in otherwise affluent and white suburbs.