The Early African American Settlement of Chicago, 1833-1870

Abstract

nEARLy two CEntuRIES AftER ChICAgo’S EMERgEnCE as a city of economic promise, two major voices had reason to extol the city’s vitality, each recognizing the African American presence as contributing to Chicago’s prominence. Advertising giant Leo Burnett broadcast in 1985 that Haitianborn and Frenchbred Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable was Chicago’s founder and, importantly, the embodiment of its entrepreneurial and business spirit.1 Three decades later, Crain’s Chicago Business wrote, “[Chicago] is the most important city in the long struggle of AfricanAmericans [for the enjoyment of full citizenship and economic rights], a history that set the stage for the election of the first AfricanAmerican president.”2 What Du Sable represented to the first generations of permanent black settlers to Chicago was freedom’s possibility, while the later emancipation phase in the city’s history manifested it in actuality with the fullest opportunities of citizenship for following generations. The historically documented influence of Chicago’s first permanent, Europeanized settler, Du Sable, might or might not have been directly transmitted to the slowlyarriving black migrants of the 1830s and 1840s. However, it is quite unreasonable that some inkling of his impact on this strategic economic site over a twodecade span between the years 1779 and 1800 was not communicated through exaggerated daytime utterances, along with desolate nighttime storytelling in this frontier setting. It almost seems an imperative given the dearth of recreational activities and the scope of Du Sable’s entrepreneurial and business accomplishments as a proverbial and yet immensely successful “other,” being a “handsome, welleducated Negro.”3