“Chicago history is often hidden in plain sight in the structures that surround us. From the extraordinary terra cotta-clad buildings standing sentinel over Cottage Grove to the bungalows marching along its side streets, Chatham is full of remarkable stories.
“And perhaps none are so compelling as those told by the instantly recognizable mid-century modern architecture commissioned by the Black professionals that made Chatham their home in the 1950s and ’60s.
“Most Chicagoans are well aware of how the Great Migration and reactions to it shaped our city, yet the numbers are still shocking. In 1910, 40,000 Black people lived in Chicago, with 78 percent of them forcibly concentrated within the geographically tiny ‘Black Belt.’
“Racially restrictive covenants kept them there until 1948, when these were ruled unenforceable by the Supreme Court (they were not ruled illegal, however, until passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968). Slowly, Black folks began to move further south, relocating from neighborhoods being decimated by dubious “urban renewal” projects and redlining, and staking their claims in new ones.
“In 1950, Chatham was less than 1 percent Black. When internationally renowned gospel legend Mahalia Jackson purchased her home in 1956, she was only the second Black homeowner on her block. The Chicago Defender documented the race-based violence she endured. Jackson persevered, and soon more Black homeowners joined her, moving into Chatham’s bungalows and those gorgeous, terra cotta-clad buildings as white tenants flew out toward the suburbs. Other new arrivals made their mark in brick and mortar, building architecturally distinctive mid-century modern homes and cementing Chatham as the center of a vibrant and creative Black middle class.
“Some of them were architects themselves, like the brilliant John Moutoussamy, the first Black architect to design a high-rise building in Chicago. Moutoussamy built a startlingly modern home for himself in Chatham in 1954, then designed a couple more for others. In 1963, Joan and George Johnson, of the eponymous Johnson Products Company, constructed their own striking home steps away from where Mahalia Jackson had experienced such strife less than a decade earlier.
“A few blocks north, Civil Rights activist and attorney Lawrence Smith hired the talented Black architect K. Roderick O’Neal to design his deceptively simple home. The next year, royalty came to Chatham, when restaurateur Helen C. Maybell Anglin—better known as the Soul Queen—established a remarkable presence right next door to Smith.
“Designed by Milton A. Schwartz, an architect behind several distinctive Chatham residences, Anglin’s former home sprawls across its large corner lot organically, integrated into the landscape as if it grew there. The facade is a jumble of stones in tones that complement the colors of the house’s wooden elements. The central, recessed entry is reached by climbing stone steps, and is positioned under a green canopy constructed of exposed wooden beams that open up to the sky above, leaving the entrance bathed in sun-dappled beauty.” (Brown, South Side Weekly, 9/26/25)