The story of Black generational wealth in Chicago is expansive. From the founding of the city by Black Haitian-American Jean Baptiste Point du Sable to the Great Migration to now, Black people have built Chicago financially and culturally. Yet, due to racist policies that have limited Black people’s access to the tools of building wealth, what is known as “the wealth gap” is vast.
In Chicago, the number of Black households with a net worth of zero is two times that of white households. White-owned businesses, on average, are worth 10 times more than Black-owned businesses. But wealth can go beyond monetary resources or assets. The history of preserving, documenting and nurturing cultural and artistic wealth in the Black community in Chicago is something that is being upheld by artists today who value this alternative definition of wealth.
What are Black people doing to overcome these barriers to wealth building? How do Black families define wealth? How are Black Chicagoans building wealth for future generations?
At City Bureau, we’ve begun answering these questions in order to map the landscape of Black wealth in Chicago. Looking beyond a deficit lens and broadening our definition of what wealth can mean, we’ve profiled people who are building, creating and passing along wealth in their own ways, and we’ve utilized social media to explore the nuance around Black wealth.
Here, you’ll find our work on Black wealth in Chicago, created during a Summer 2018 Reporting Fellowship at City Bureau. We hope others will join us in documenting their own stories to paint a fuller picture of Black Chicago.
— Erisa Apantaku, Olivia Cunningham, Tonia Hill, Arabella Breck and Davon Clark
Editor’s note: The stories in this package that were published prior to January 2020 are reproduced as they were, with original publication dates listed. All new stories were reported in 2018-2019, and fact checked in December 2019.
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