(1) The Black Metropolis district on Chicago, 
Illinois’ South Side has a cohesive and distinctive 
history as well as an important streetscape that dis-
tinguishes the area as worthy of designation as a 
National Heritage Area. 
(2) The historic features of Chicago’s Black 
Metropolis District predate the Great Migration of 
1916–1919 and illustrate its influence on African- 
American life in Chicago and the Nation as a result 
of this demographic phenomenon in which 500,000 
African-Americans migrated to the North in search 
of work and other opportunities, with 50,000 of that 
aggregate relocating in Chicago. 
(3) The Black Metropolis, as a setting, wit-
nessed some of the finest accomplishments in Afri-
can-American contributions to Chicago, the State of 
Illinois, and the Nation, while its legally and socially 
proscribed citizens challenged their environment and 
their Nation to fulfill its promise as a place of op-
portunity for all. 
(4) These contributions and accomplishments 
fall into the following main categories: 
(A) BUSINESS
AND
ENTREPRENEURIAL 
PURSUITS.—With State Street developing as 
the Black Metropolis District’s ‘‘Wall Street’’, 
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the area produced two of the largest Black 
banking operations in the Nation in the Binga 
State and Douglass National Banks and scores 
of smaller businesses ranging from print shops 
to restaurants to clothing stores to hair salons 
and barbershops. 
(B) CULTURE
AND
AESTHETICS.—The 
area emerged as a musical mecca ranging from 
jazz to gospel to delta and urban blues to 
rhythm and blues and was home for institutions 
such as the George Cleveland Hall Branch Li-
brary, which nurtured literary giants such as 
Langston Hughes, the South Side Community 
Arts Center, and the DuSable Museum of Afri-
can American History and Culture. 
(C) EDUCATION.—The area includes the 
first public secondary school in the State of Illi-
nois built specifically to accommodate the edu-
cational needs of African-American students, 
which opened in 1934 at 4934 South Wabash 
Avenue and was named in honor of Chicago’s 
first non-native inhabitant and trader, Jean 
Baptiste Pointe du Sable, a Black man from 
Haiti, and whose illustrious graduates include 
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Nat ‘‘King’’ Cole and Chicago Mayor Harold 
Washington. 
(D) GOVERNANCE
AND
POLITICS.—From 
its political bases in the area’s Second Ward 
and the First Congressional District, Chicago’s 
Black Metropolis proved itself a political center 
for all African-Americans, producing the first 
African-American to sit in Congress in the 20th 
Century, the Honorable Oscar DePriest, as well 
as the first African-American Democratic con-
gressman, the Honorable Arthur W. Mitchell, 
succeeded by Honorable William L. Dawson, 
the Honorable Ralph H. Metcalfe, the Honor-
able Bennett M. Stewart, and the Honorable 
Harold Washington, later the city’s first elected 
African-American mayor, and the Honorable 
Charles A. Hayes. 
(E) HEALTH
CARE.—The area includes 
Provident Hospital, founded in 1891 by the 
brilliant African-American surgeon Dr. Daniel 
Hale Williams and site of the first successful 
suturing of the human heart by Dr. Williams in 
1893. 
(F) LABOR.—The area was home to mil-
lions of unskilled and semi-skilled African- 
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American workers, including the packinghouse 
workers who arrived during the Great Migra-
tion and constituted 25 percent of the stock-
yards work force during World War I, and the 
Pullman porters who represented a full 20 per-
cent of the Nation’s African-American work-
force during the early 1900s. 
(G) MILITARY LIFE AND PATRIOTISM.—Af-
rican-American men enlisted in the Union Army 
on the grounds of Camp Douglass within the 
Black Metropolis District as part of the 29th 
Infantry Regiment of the United States Colored 
Troops, and a generation later trained at the 
Eighth Regiment Armory nearby before em-
barking for France as part of what President 
Wilson referred to as the great crusade to 
‘‘make the world safe for democracy’’ during 
the World War I. 
(H) 
RECREATION
AND
COMPETITIVE 
SPORTS.—Early on, the Nation’s most popular 
sports: baseball, boxing, football, track and bas-
ketball, enjoyed support from the Black Me-
tropolis’ population and drew participants who 
earned widespread recognition such as Rube 
Foster, a native Chicagoan, who founded the 
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Negro Baseball League and its local team, the 
American Giants. 
(I) RELIGION
AND
CHURCH
ACTIVISM.— 
The area includes Quinn Chapel African Meth-
odist Episcopal (A.M.E) Church, an antebellum 
center of abolitionist activity, and a major sta-
tion on the Underground Railroad, and with 
emancipation, there was another religious move-
ment to provide and protect the civil rights of 
all citizens led by Black Metropolis churches 
such as Quinn Chapel and Bethel A.M.E. 
(J) SOCIAL JUSTICE AND CIVIL RIGHTS.— 
It was from within the Black Metropolis Dis-
trict in the early 20th century that Ida B. 
Wells-Barnett waged her crusade for justice for 
African-Americans and women and worked to 
establish the first National Association for the 
Advancement of Colored People branch in that 
group’s national network in 1912. 
(K) STREETSCAPES.—The area includes 
many historic locations, including those along 
State Street and 35th Street, ranging from the 
Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Building at 
3617 South State Street and the Chicago Bee 
Building at 3647 South State Street (both des-
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