The Jim Crow Legacy of Evanston, Illinois: How Segregation Shaped a “Progressive” Suburb

Foster School Fourth Grade Class of 1948

Introduction: Jim Crow North of the Mason-Dixon Line

Evanston, Illinois, often describes itself as a progressive suburb: a place of academic prestige, civic engagement, and social conscience. Yet beneath that image lies a history of systemic racial segregation. The mechanisms differed from the blunt laws of the Jim Crow South, but the results were strikingly similar.

Through zoning, mortgage risk mapping, hospital admission policies, school districting, and even hotel access, Evanston created a racial geography that confined Black families to specific neighborhoods, limited their wealth, and circumscribed their civic belonging. The legacy remains visible in the Fifth Ward’s economic profile, in the city’s health and education disparities, and in its ongoing efforts to address reparations.

The Making of the “Black Triangle”: Zoning and Real Estate Segregation

Evanston’s Jim Crow order began not with a law but with a zoning map. In 1919, the city hired the St. Louis firm Harland Bartholomew & Associates to design its first comprehensive zoning plan. The result was a textbook example of racialized urban planning disguised as land-use regulation.

The 1921 ordinance concentrated commercial and industrial designations around west Evanston, the same area where most Black residents lived, while preserving single-family zoning in the lakefront and university-adjacent neighborhoods. That plan formalized segregation without ever mentioning race.

Private developers soon followed with racially restrictive covenants, clauses in deeds that barred home sales to non-white buyers. Even after the Supreme Court ruled such covenants unenforceable in 1948, the damage had been done.

By the 1930s, the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) graded mortgage risk in color-coded maps. Evanston’s Fifth Ward was marked “D—Hazardous,” effectively redlining Black residents out of access to fair credit. Those maps were the bureaucratic handwriting of segregation, creating a structural wealth gap that persists today.

Beaches, Public Belonging, and the Geography of Exclusion

Until 1931, Evanston’s public beaches were explicitly segregated. After the city repealed formal racial bans, it implemented a “fee beach” system, charging access at specific lakefront sites. The effect was segregation by class proxy.

White residents could afford season passes to well-maintained beaches; Black residents were directed to the single “free beach” or discouraged from using it altogether. What appeared to be open access was, in practice, economic exclusion rooted in race.

Schools: Foster, King Lab, and the Long Road Back to the Fifth Ward

In education, Evanston mirrored national trends of token integration that preserved white advantage. Foster School, opened in 1905, became an all-Black elementary school by the 1930s. For decades, the district refused to hire Black teachers, perpetuating a two-tier system of instruction.

In 1967, officials closed Foster altogether and bused Fifth Ward children to majority-white schools across town under the banner of “voluntary desegregation.” The burden of busing fell entirely on Black families, and the Fifth Ward lost its neighborhood school for over half a century.
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In 2024, after decades of activism, District 65 broke ground on a new Foster School, set to open in 2026, an acknowledgment of how displacement and policy had combined to erode community institutions.

The Evanston Sanitarium Opened in 1914 to Serve Black Residents' Health Care

Health Care Segregation: Race Codes and the Rise of Community Hospital

Segregation in health care was among the most visible and damaging aspects of Evanston’s Jim Crow legacy. Until the 1950s, Evanston Hospital and St. Francis Hospital either refused to admit Black patients or restricted them to limited wards.

In 1914, Dr. Isabella Garnett, one of Illinois’s first Black female physicians, responded by opening the Evanston Sanitarium and Training School inside her home. It later became Community Hospital of Evanston, serving as the only medical institution that reliably treated Black patients from the North Shore.

White hospitals maintained race-coded admissions forms, which was an ostensibly bureaucratic way to segregate care. While the practice was not as formalized as in the South, “race” appeared as a category on hospital intake records and often determined placement, treatment, and staff assignments.

Community Hospital remained the center of Black medical care until its closure in 1980. Its end symbolized both progress and loss: desegregation made a separate facility unnecessary, but the Fifth Ward lost a trusted, community-run institution in the process.

Hotels, Travel, and the Color Line of Hospitality

Racial boundaries in Evanston extended into the hospitality industry. When Martin Luther King Jr. visited in 1958 to speak at Beth Emet The Free Synagogue, local hotels refused him lodging. King spent the night in the synagogue’s basement, a vivid reminder that Jim Crow was not confined to the South.

During that era, Black travelers relied on The Negro Motorist Green Book, which listed hotels and restaurants safe for African Americans. While few Evanston establishments appeared, the pattern was clear: Black visitors often had to stay in Chicago or at small boarding houses that quietly defied discrimination.

Evanston’s hotels, such as the North Shore and the Orrington, catered to a predominantly white clientele and operated with unspoken exclusionary practices. The city’s self-image as a liberal enclave did little to change who could sleep comfortably within its limits.

The Persistence of Structural Inequality

Each sector (housing, education, health, and hospitality) reinforced the others. Redlined mortgages kept Black families confined to low-equity neighborhoods, limiting tax revenue for schools and amenities. Segregated hospital access compounded health disparities. Restricted lodging and beach access signaled who truly belonged in public life.

Even after formal barriers fell, path dependence continued to maintain inequality. Property appreciation, intergenerational wealth transfer, and lingering zoning restrictions perpetuated the exact racial boundaries established a century ago.

Repair and Reckoning: Evanston’s Municipal Reparations

In 2019, Evanston became the first U.S. city to enact a municipal reparations program. Funded through a local cannabis tax, it offers $25,000 housing grants to Black residents who have been harmed by past discrimination. The initiative targets the same years, 1919 to 1969, when the city’s own zoning, lending, and real estate practices enforced segregation.

The Restorative Housing Program began issuing grants in 2021, later expanding to allow direct cash options. Though modest in scale, it represents a civic acknowledgment that structural harm requires structural repair.

The city’s partnership with local archives, such as the Shorefront Legacy Center, ensured that the program was grounded in documented history, rather than a symbolic apology. Yet debate continues about whether housing grants alone can bridge a century-long wealth gap.

Continuities and Lessons

Evanston’s Jim Crow legacy was built not on explicit racial laws but on administrative decisions, zoning categories, hospital codes, and credit ratings that appeared neutral while producing segregation.

Today, the city is experimenting with the inverse: administrative repair. By targeting policy levers, land use, school investment, and direct compensation, Evanston aims to reverse the machinery that once confined its Black citizens.

Whether that effort succeeds will depend on how thoroughly the city addresses wealth inequality, educational equity, and access to healthcare. Symbolism is easy; structural equity requires dismantling the very mechanisms Jim Crow created.

Conclusion: Facing the Mirror of a “Progressive” City

Evanston’s story complicates the myth that segregation was a southern aberration. The city’s zoning ordinances, school closures, hospital admissions, and hotel refusals show how northern liberalism coexisted with systemic exclusion.

The same tools that once enforced racial separation, policy, planning, and bureaucratic discretion, now offer a path toward redress. But proper repair will demand more than commemorations or cash grants; it will require rebuilding the physical and institutional infrastructure that Jim Crow destroyed.
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Evanston is not merely a case study in discrimination. It serves as a living laboratory for how a city can confront its own contradictions and perhaps lead the nation in translating acknowledgment into action.