The bill making Juneteenth an Illinois state holiday passed both houses of the General Assembly unanimously before Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed the measure into law. That was June of 2021.

Shortly thereafter, President Joe Biden signed federal legislation making Juneteenth a national holiday.

“I’m pleased to see the federal government join Illinois in recognizing Juneteenth as an official holiday, offering all Americans a day to reflect on the national shame of slavery and the work we must do to dismantle systemic racism,” Pritzker said at the time.

Chicagoans interested in doing that “work” should take stock of Chicago’s legacy of segregation. From racially restrictive covenants to redlining to contract buying to white flight to inequitable school investments to racially disparate mortgage lending, segregation has been — and remains — a common factor in Chicago’s story of systemic racism.

Movements to address those ills have changed policies, enacted laws and won lawsuits, but the practice of racial segregation remains strong in Chicago. Living in segregated spaces continues to be a defining characteristic in the lives of many Black Chicagoans.

• RELATED STORY
• Race, Class & Communities

New development and job growth are still more prevalent in areas where white people live

read more

WBEZ has reviewed data measuring segregation and analyzed additional data about racial demographic change. Here are a few takeaways from the numbers and analyses.

America’s most segregated city between whites and Blacks

In terms of segregation between white and Black residents, Chicago is the most segregated city in America, according to data from Brown University.

Chicago’s white-Black dissimilarity index has declined from 90.61 in 1980 to 80.04 in 2020, according to the Brown University data. Dissimilarity index is a measurement of the percentage of either group, in a given pair, that would have to move in order for the two groups to be evenly distributed in any given area.

However, Chicago’s 2020 figure for white-Black segregation ranked first among all cities, of any size, for which data was available. Chicago has ranked first among big cities for decades — Cleveland had a higher mark in 1990 — but smaller cities have posted higher figures in previous years.

Black residents remain the most segregated among all Chicagoans

While racial segregation has diminished some in Chicago, what hasn’t changed is that segregation measurements for other racial and ethnic groups — white, Asian and Latino — is always highest with Black Chicagoans. Between the groups, the highest levels of segregation are between Asian and Black Chicagoans, and the lowest are between Asian and white residents.

Segregation doesn’t stop at Chicago’s borders

Racial demographic patterns similar to those witnessed in Chicago can also be seen in the surrounding suburbs, which account for more than 70% of the region’s population of more than 9.6 million.

Two portions of the Chicago metropolitan statistical area — a 14-county area spanning parts of Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin — ranked in the top 10 among metro areas for white-Black segregation in 2020, according to the Brown University data.

The Chicago-Naperville-Evanston metropolitan division, defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as Cook, DuPage, Grundy, McHenry and Will counties in Illinois, ranked fifth. The Gary metropolitan division, which covers Jasper, Lake, Newton and Porter counties in northwest Indiana, ranked sixth.

Throughout the metro area, the Black population is clustered in distinct areas: the South and West sides of the city; the south and near west suburbs; and in and around Gary in northwest Indiana. Pockets of Black population are also found in and around DeKalb, Evanston, Hammond, Joliet and Waukegan.

Black residents throughout Illinois often live in heavily-segregated areas

Illinois ranked first among all states in the nation in the share of Black residents living in census tracts that are at least 90% Black, according to a WBEZ analysis of 2020 census data.

More than one in every four Black residents in Illinois lives in a census tract that’s at least 90% Black. However, back in 1990, that percentage was more than twice as high — about 56%, according to the WBEZ analysis.

For Cook County and downstate St. Clair County, those figures were about 36% and 32% in 2020, respectively, ranking them among the nation’s top 10 counties.

For Chicago, in 2020, nearly half of the city’s Black residents lived in a census tract where at least 90% of its residents were Black.

Majority Black areas are the most entrenched

To study how the racial demographic makeup of census tracts changes over time, WBEZ analyzed census data from 1990 to 2020, normalized to the same census tract boundaries.

Dating back to 1990, the WBEZ analysis shows that among all Chicago census tracts with a racial or ethnic majority, Black census tracts were the least likely to change over the decades.

Among the roughly 370 majority-Black census tracts in Chicago in 1990, nearly 90% of them remained majority Black in 2020, a higher proportion than for census tracts that were majority Asian, 75%; majority Latino, 61%; or majority white, about 68%.

Alden Loury is the data projects editor for WBEZ. Follow him at @AldenLoury.