page_title: West Side, Chicago
section_title: 1960s to 21st century
hierarchical_section_title: West Side, Chicago / History / 1960s to 21st century
caption_attribution_description: English: Paseo Boricua, Chicago. Division Street (Paseo Boricua), facing east from Mozart Street, one-half block west of California Avenue.
context_page_description: The West Side is one of the three major sections of the city of Chicago in Cook County, Illinois, along with the North Side and the South Side. The West Side consists of communities that are of historical, cultural, and ideological importance to the history and development of Chicago. On the flag of Chicago, the West Side is represented by the central white stripe.
  The West Side has gone through many transitions in its ethnic and socioeconomic makeup due to its historic role as a gateway for immigrants and migrants as well as its role for funneling poorer residents away from the wealthier lakeside neighborhoods and central business district. Today, the West Side consists of large communities of widely middle class, working class, low-income, and poverty-stricken African American, Puerto Rican, and Mexican residents; some small communities of blue-collar, lower middle class and middle class white residents of historically Polish, Italian, Czech, and Greek, descent; and newer communities of middle-class and upper-middle class white residents created by gentrification.
context_section_description: White flight and blockbusting drastically changed the demographics of the West Side by the 1950s. Throughout this decade, many white Chicagoans moved to the suburbs in a planned move by investors who, through scare tactics and instigating racial antagonism, encouraged white Chicagoans to sell their city homes and buy homes the investors built in the suburbs. By 1960, Chicago recorded its first ever population drop. However, Black and Latino residents began filling the West Side to its maximum. Black areas of the West Side began to experience highly impoverished conditions moving into the 1960s. Many residents moved into housing projects that were built throughout the West Side the previous decade, the main housing projects being ABLA and Henry Horner Homes in the Near West Side, Rockwell Gardens and Harrison Courts in East Garfield Park, and Lawndale Gardens in Lawndale/Little Village. Many of these housing projects became predominantly Black and poor. The Chicago Housing Authority was known for its segregationist policies and lack of building maintenance, and police brutality was very frequent. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, the Blacks of the West Side rebelled in anger against the oppressive system made more apparent by King's murder. Long stretches of businesses along Madison Street in Garfield Park and Austin and along Roosevelt Road in Lawndale, the majority of which were owned by whites, were looted and burned down. Mayor Daley ordered 10,500 police and 6,700 National Guardsmen into the West Side, ordering "to shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand... and... to shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting any stores in our city."
  During the late 1960s, the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party had its headquarters on the West Side on Madison Street near Western Avenue. The chapter chairman, Fred Hampton, helped his chapter establish a free breakfast program for children as well as free health clinics for the community. Hampton was murdered in his sleep in a planned raid by Chicago police and the FBI on the party's West Side apartment on Monroe Street in December 1969. Over 5,000 people attended Hampton's funeral. The drug epidemic began sweeping through the West Side in the 1970s, and crime continued to climb. Unlike the South Side, there weren't large middle, upper-middle, or affluent Black communities that developed on the West Side. They existed by block or in small pockets, mostly in the Austin neighborhood closer to the suburb of Oak Park. Black representation of the West Side in Congress began in the 1970s with the placement of George W. Collins in the seat of Daniel J. Ronan who died in 1969. After George W. Collins was killed in a plane crash at Midway Airport in 1972, his wife Cardiss Collins was elected to Congress, making her the first Black female representative from the Midwest.
  Puerto Ricans displaced by gentrification and city-backed urban renewal projects in Lincoln Park began moving to West Town and Humboldt Park by the thousands during the mid-late 1960s. In 1960, West Town had a Latino population of 1%. By 1970, that number had grown to 39%. Polish residents, who remained less upwardly mobile than the West Side's former German and Russian Jewish immigrants, remained in relatively large numbers in West Town centered around Catholic parishes. Humboldt Park began to see larger influxes of Puerto Ricans as the 1960s ended. In 1966, the first major urban Puerto Rican rebellion in the U.S. happened on Division Street, an event later known as the Division Street Riots As the 1970s began, Humboldt Park suffered from poverty, crime, and gangs, leading to another uprising in 1977. To combat this, Puerto Rican community members across the West Side created social service organizations such as the Latin American Defense Organization (LADO) and the Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center. The Young Lords, a former street turf gang from Lincoln Park, turned into a human liberation group, becoming warriors for the community by fighting further 
caption: Steel Puerto Rican flag at Division Street/Paseo Boricua and California Avenue in Humboldt Park.
exif: {"Image XResolution": "150", "Image YResolution": "150", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ReferenceBlackWhite": "[0, 255, 128, 255, 128, 255]", "Image ExifOffset": "162", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "499", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "333"}