History of African Americans in Chicago

The history of African Americans in Chicago dates back to Jean Baptiste Point du Sable’s trading activities in the 1780s. Du Sable is the city's founder.Fugitive slaves and freedmen established the city’s first black community in the 1840s. By the late 19th century, the first black person had been elected to office.

The Great Migrations from 1910 to 1960 brought hundreds of thousands of blacks from the South to Chicago, where they became an urban population. They created churches, community organizations, important businesses, music, and literature. African Americans of all classes built a community on the South Side of Chicago for decades before the Civil Rights Movement, as well as on the West Side of Chicago. Residing in segregated communities, almost regardless of income, the Black residents of Chicago aimed to create communities where they could survive, sustain themselves, and have the ability to determine for themselves their own course in Chicago history.

Americans

Americans are citizens of the United States of America. The country is home to people of many different national origins. As a result, most Americans do not equate their nationality with ethnicity, but with citizenship and allegiance. Although citizens make up the majority of Americans, non-citizen residents, dual citizens, and expatriates may also claim an American identity.

Overview

The majority of Americans or their ancestors immigrated within the past five centuries, with the exception of the Native American population and people from Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippine Islands who became American through expansion of the country in the 19th century, and American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Northern Mariana Islands in the 20th century.

Despite its multi-ethnic composition, the culture of the United States held in common by most Americans can also be referred to as mainstream American culture, a Western culture largely derived from the traditions of Northern and Western European colonists, settlers, and immigrants. It also includes influences of African-American culture. Westward expansion integrated the Creoles and Cajuns of Louisiana and the Hispanos of the Southwest and brought close contact with the culture of Mexico. Large-scale immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries from Southern and Eastern Europe introduced a variety of elements. Immigration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America has also had impact. A cultural melting pot, or pluralistic salad bowl, describes the way in which generations of Americans have celebrated and exchanged distinctive cultural characteristics.

Great Migration

Great Migration, Great Migrations, or The Great Migration may refer to:

Historical

Chicago

Chicago (ⁱ/ʃᵻˈkɑːɡoʊ/ or /ʃᵻˈkɔːɡoʊ/) is the third most populous city in the United States. With over 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the state of Illinois and the Midwest. The Chicago metropolitan area, often referred to as Chicagoland, has nearly 10 million people and is the third-largest in the U.S. Chicago is the seat of Cook County.

Chicago was incorporated as a city in 1837, near a portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River watershed, and grew rapidly in the mid-nineteenth century. The city is an international hub for finance, commerce, industry, technology, telecommunications, and transportation: O'Hare International Airport is the busiest airport in the world when measured by aircraft traffic; it also has the largest number of U.S. highways and rail road freight. In 2012, Chicago was listed as an alpha global city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network, and ranked seventh in the world in the 2014 Global Cities Index.As of 2014, Chicago had the third largest gross metropolitan product in the United States at US$610.5 billion.

Shimer College

Shimer College (pronounced ⁱ/ˈʃaɪmər/ SHY-mər) is an American Great Books college in Chicago, Illinois. Founded in 1853 as the Mt. Carroll Seminary in Mount Carroll, Illinois, the school became affiliated with the University of Chicago and was renamed the Frances Shimer Academy in 1896. It was renamed Shimer College in 1950, when it began offering a four-year curriculum based on the Hutchins Plan of the University of Chicago. Although the University of Chicago parted with Shimer (and the Hutchins Plan) in 1958, Shimer has continued to use a version of that curriculum. The college left Mount Carroll for Waukegan in 1978, moving to Chicago in 2006.

Its academic program is based on a core curriculum of sixteen required courses in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. All courses are small seminars with no more than twelve students, and are based on original sources from a list of about 200 core texts broadly based on the Great Books canon. Classroom instruction is Socratic discussion. Considerable writing is required, including two comprehensive examinations and a senior thesis. Students are admitted primarily on the basis of essays and interviews; no minimum grades or test scores are required. Shimer has one of the highest alumni doctorate rates in the country.