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Progress Is Painful: Race Relations And Education In Chicago Before The Great Migration, Matthew D. Bernstein

History ETDs

This thesis is the first work focused directly on race relations and education in Chicago before the Great Migration. Proceeding from the dearth of sources covering black Chicago before the First World War era, I argue three main points. First, I disagree with historians who assert that because African-Americans received certain educational opportunities, this period represented a kind of racial golden age. Only when compared to the South and to the post-World War I period in Chicago, I assert, does the era before 1914 seem racially egalitarian. While members of the black community before the Great Migration were able to …