In the mid- to late-19th century, this part of Chicago's South Side was settled by waves of English, Scottish, Irish, German, and Jewish immigrants, and as the city's most prosperous quarter it featured grand mansions along Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive and nearby streets. African Americans, previously restricted to the nearby original Black Belt, began moving into the area in the late 19th century, and the Great Migration between 1910 and 1920 brought thousands more, driven by Northern industrial demand, Southern oppression, and racially restrictive housing practices elsewhere in Chicago. In response to racial barriers, blacks built a self-sufficient community with its own business, social, and political structure that gained national recognition as Bronzeville, the Midwest's Black Metropolis, and reached its zenith in the 1920s as a national center of African-American economic and social life. The intersection of State Street and 35th Street became known as the Black Wall Street, and prominent African-American-owned businesses built and occupied the Binga State Bank, Overton Hygienic Co., Douglas National Bank, and Victory Life Insurance Co. buildings, while Robert Abbott made the Chicago Defender one of the nation's most influential African-American newspapers and other publications such as the Chicago Bee strengthened the community's media voice. Bronzeville's cultural heyday lasted through the 1940s, when it became an incubator of Chicago Jazz and Chicago Blues, with venues including the Sunser Cafe, Grand Terrace, and the Regal and Metropolitan theaters hosting performers such as Louis Armstrong and Dinah Washington, while Thomas A. Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson advanced gospel music in black churches and writers and poets including Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks were associated with the neighborhood. Yet racial tensions escalated after the drowning of Eugene Williams, a black youth who entered the whites-only 29th Street beach swimming area in the summer of 1919, and the riot that followed lasted two weeks and caused 38 deaths. The Great Depression damaged Bronzeville's economy, speculators subdivided and neglected buildings during housing shortages in the 1930s and 40s, the Ida B. Wells Homes opened in 1938 with promises of better living conditions, and later public housing efforts revealed how good intentions could go wrong. Urban renewal projects in the 1950s cleared housing regarded as among the nation's worst, but slow replacement development destroyed whole segments of the community, and over the next 30 years decline deepened as businesses closed and middle-class families left. Today, Bronzeville is undergoing a renaissance as its historic legacy and architecture inspire residents to restore it as a showcase of urban life.
