I 
114TH CONGRESS 
1ST SESSION 
H. R. 904 
To authorize the Secretary of the Interior to conduct a study to determine 
the feasibility of designating the study area as the Black Metropolis 
National Heritage Area in the State of Illinois, and for other purposes. 
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 
FEBRUARY 11, 2015 
Mr. RUSH introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee 
on Natural Resources 
A BILL 
To authorize the Secretary of the Interior to conduct a 
study to determine the feasibility of designating the 
study area as the Black Metropolis National Heritage 
Area in the State of Illinois, and for other purposes. 
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representa-
tives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, 
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE. 
This Act may be cited as the ‘‘Black Metropolis Na-
tional Heritage Area Study Act’’. 
SEC. 2. FINDINGS. 
Congress finds the following: 
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(1) The Black Metropolis area on Chicago, Illi-
nois’ South Side has a cohesive and distinctive his-
tory as well as an important streetscape that distin-
guishes the area as worthy of designation as a Na-
tional Heritage Area. 
(2) The historic features of Chicago’s Black 
Metropolis predate the Great Migration of 1916– 
1919 and illustrate its influence on African-Amer-
ican life in Chicago and the Nation as a result of 
this demographic phenomenon in which 500,000 Af-
rican-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’ ‘‘Wall Street’’, the area 
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produced two of the largest Black banking op-
erations in the Nation in the Binga State and 
Douglass National Banks and scores of smaller 
businesses ranging from print shops to res-
taurants 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 area as part of the 29th In-
fantry 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 
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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