This “Second Wave” of housing segregation was created not by the racial prejudice of Chicago residents or realtors against Hispanics, but by government, both local and federal. In fact, the Chicago Political Machine is empowered by federal legislation to create segregated neighborhoods.
Chicago has long been known as the oldest and most powerful political machine in the U.S. What is not so well-known is that “Daley’s modern Chicago was built … on an unstated foundation: commitment to racial segregation”. In 1959 the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights called Chicago “the most residentially segregated large city in America”.
To this day, the majority of Chicago’s African-Americans live in the same areas they have occupied for the past 100 years. Ethnic maps from 1920 and 2000 support this point. In 2000, 35 years after passage of the Civil Rights and Fair Housing Acts, it was found that for the city to be integrated in housing and education, 90% of the black residents would have to move.
James Q. Wilson noted that Chicago has a black submachine, a political entity that could not exist without the larger white-controlled political machine. The two largest black population areas now make up the two black congressional districts. They are represented by African-American Congressmen Jesse Jackson, Jr. and Bobby Rush. Jackson’s district is 67% black, Rush’s 64%. It is this machine structure that made the original black segregation possible and is now used to create the Hispanic submachine.
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