The Record · Chapter Six

The Line on the Map

Nobody had to riot to draw the line. They used a contract, then a federal map.

By Jason C. Wandel and Claude for Chicago Register · Monday, October 19, 2026

This is the stretch from 1913 to 1945, when the seats stopped being drawn around canals and railroads and started being drawn around people, block by block, on a map. Last time Morgan’s men counted out 341 board seats and a lawyer bought nine thousand acres of Indiana sand for a mill. The mills and the yards needed hands. The hands came north.

Between 1916 and 1919 Chicago’s Black population went from about 44,000 to about 109,000. That’s an increase of about 150 percent in three years. People came up from Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana on the Illinois Central, the railroad Stephen Douglas wrote into being. The Chicago Defender, the city’s Black newspaper, told the South there was work up here and a little more room to breathe.

There was work. In the stockyards, the packers hired Black men, and more than once they hired them to break strikes by white union men. So the yards set two groups of workers against each other and the owners kept the difference. That’s the split, run on people instead of land.

On July 27, 1919, a 17 year old named Eugene Williams was floating on a railroad tie in Lake Michigan off 29th Street. He drifted past an invisible line in the water that marked the white beach. A white man on the shore threw rocks at him. Eugene Williams drowned. A white police officer arrested a Black man instead of the one who threw the rocks.

The city burned for about a week. Thirty eight people died, 23 of them Black and 15 white. 537 were hurt. Somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 people lost their homes, most of them Black. Irish athletic clubs from around the yards, Ragen’s Colts among them, did a good share of the attacking. Some of them put on blackface and set fires in the Lithuanian and Polish neighborhoods back of the yards, trying to turn those families against their Black neighbors. Mayor William Hale Thompson waited four days to ask for the National Guard. The one man tried for Eugene Williams’s death was acquitted.

When it was over, the governor appointed a commission, Black and white members together, and it wrote a long report called The Negro in Chicago. It came out in 1922. Read it today and it names nearly everything that came next. Housing. Jobs. Police. Who got to live where.

Nobody had to riot to draw the next line. They used a contract.

Through the late 1910s and early 1920s, homes of Black families on the South Side were bombed, and so were the homes and offices of the agents and bankers who sold to them. Then the people who ran real estate found a quieter way. In 1926 the Supreme Court let private racial covenants stand. In 1927 the Chicago Real Estate Board sent speakers all over the city pushing one model covenant, a clause written into the deed that said the house could never be sold or rented to a Black family.

The man who drafted that model covenant was Nathan MacChesney. He sat on the Chicago Plan Commission. That’s the same commission that sold Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago to the public and put a textbook version of it, Wacker’s Manual, in front of Chicago eighth graders for more than twenty years.

Same commission. One hand wrote the schoolbook. One hand wrote the covenant.

By the 1940s roughly half the city’s neighborhoods were covered. The Chicago Defender said covenants had replaced bombs and riots. It didn’t need a mob anymore. It needed a lawyer and a stack of paper.

Meanwhile, over at ComEd, Samuel Insull was building the biggest paper tower in the country.

Through the 1920s he stacked holding companies on top of holding companies, each one owning a piece of the next, with Insull Utility Investments and Corporation Securities at the top. He sold the stock to his own customers and his own workers. Between 1919 and 1921 the number of Illinois people holding his stocks and bonds went from about 50,000 to nearly 500,000. Plenty of them were the same people paying him for their lights.

In 1932 it all came down. Losses ran on the order of $750 million, most of it from small investors. Insull left the country and ended up in Greece. He was brought back in 1934, tried and acquitted. In 1935 Congress passed the Public Utility Holding Company Act to stop anybody from stacking paper like that again.

The company at the bottom of the stack was ComEd. Same company that’s in your power bill today.

Now the Depression. And here’s where the line got drawn by the government.

In 1933 a University of Chicago graduate student named Homer Hoyt finished a study called One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago. In it he ranked races and nationalities by what he called their effect on land values. In 1934 the brand new Federal Housing Administration hired him to help write its rules on who was a good risk for a home loan. In 1939 his report for the FHA called keeping races apart a necessity. In 1940 the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation finished its map of Chicago and graded most of the city down. The neighborhoods where Black families lived were colored red, whatever they earned.

Look at that chain. The man who measured Chicago’s land prices wrote the federal lending rules. Then the rules made his ranking come true, because the neighborhoods marked as bad risks couldn’t get loans, so they lost value, which proved the ranking. Hoyt invested in real estate himself.

That’s the pen, and it’s the strongest version we’ve found. Write the grade, then lend by it.

On May 30, 1937, more than a thousand steelworkers, their wives and their kids walked from a picnic toward the Republic Steel mill in South Chicago to set up a picket line in a strike for a union. Chicago police opened fire. About 40 people were shot, most of them in the back or the side, an 11 year old boy among them. Ten died. Dozens more were clubbed. A Paramount cameraman filmed almost all of it, and Paramount sat on the film, saying it might cause riots in theaters. A U.S. Senate committee led by Robert La Follette Jr. got hold of it, screened it, and blamed the police. A coroner’s jury called the killings justifiable homicide. No officer was ever charged.

That field sits on the Southeast Side, down by the mills along the Calumet. Three generations of one of this paper’s families worked those mills, South Works and Gary Works and Inland. Men like them were the ones walking that day. They’re the reason we don’t write this one from the cheap seats.

Force showed up the same way it did at Pullman in 1894 and on the beach in 1919. When somebody was winning something worth stopping.

Now the wins, because we print them.

The steelworkers lost that day on the field. Within a few years they won their union and most of what they marched for. What held it was numbers. Thousands of men who kept showing up.

And in 1937 a Black real estate man named Carl Hansberry bought a house in Washington Park, a neighborhood covered by a covenant. His neighbors sued to throw him out. A mob came to the house, and someone threw a chunk of concrete through the window. His daughter Lorraine was eight. Hansberry took it to the Supreme Court, and in 1940 he won in Hansberry v. Lee. The court ruled on a narrow legal point and left covenants standing for eight more years. But he stayed in the house.

Nineteen years later Lorraine Hansberry put that fight on a Broadway stage. A Raisin in the Sun, a Chicago family trying to move into a neighborhood that didn’t want them. It was the first play by a Black woman ever produced on Broadway.

He won a seat in the neighborhood. She won a seat in the room where America tells its stories. That’s paper and a judge for him, and the story for her. The architecture didn’t change. Two people took seats inside it anyway.

So here’s our question. Who drew the line around your block, and did anybody ever erase it, or did they just stop saying it out loud?

Next comes the money that came after the war, and what the city did with it.

The scoreboard

Read it yourself

Sources