Mrs. Block Beautiful: African American Women and the Birth of the Urban Conservation Movement, Chicago, Illinois, 1917–1954

Abstract

This paper elucidates the vital role that African American women played in early 20th century environmental and public health struggles in Chicago. It reveals their fundamental role in launching the first national urban conservation movement in the United States as a means of surviving and optimizing the dismal environmental surroundings that they found themselves forced to contend with in the “land of hope.” It also demonstrates that their efforts were a direct response to the compromised ecological and oftentimes deadly public health conditions in African American communities in the northern United States that would exist for over half of a century. These were horrible conditions that had arisen as a direct result of the legal segregation of African Americans from the white social body through racial covenants and racial zoning in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson. This paper contributes to environmental justice scholarship by showing the historical struggles for environmental equality in American history that existed prior to current struggles and which were bellwethers to the modern environmental justice movement.