On May 4, 1921, the Chicago Real Estate Board took a decisive step to enforce racial segregation in housing. In a unanimous vote, the Board resolved to expel any of its members who sold or leased property to Black families in neighborhoods occupied by white residents. The Board’s president, M. L. Smith, publicly affirmed his strong support for maintaining strict segregation across Chicago and backed efforts to bar Black families from the vast majority of available housing in the city.
This action occurred against the backdrop of the Great Migration, one of the largest internal migrations in American history. Beginning after the Civil War and intensifying in the early 20th century, white mobs in the South carried out widespread racial terror, including lynchings and other forms of violence, targeting millions of Black Americans during the Reconstruction era and beyond. Seeking safety, economic opportunity, and freedom from constant threat, more than six million Black people left the South between roughly 1910 and 1970. Many headed to northern and midwestern industrial cities such as Chicago, dramatically increasing the Black population in these urban centers.
In Chicago and other destination cities, Black migrants encountered systemic and often violent opposition to integration. White residents, real estate professionals, and local institutions actively worked to confine Black newcomers to specific areas. During the 1920s, the Chicago Real Estate Board and affiliated white real estate agents played a central role in this effort by promoting and organizing “neighborhood covenants”—legally binding contractual agreements among property owners that prohibited the sale or rental of homes to Black people.
A standard template for these restrictive covenants was drafted by a lawyer serving on the Chicago Planning Commission. The language was explicitly racial, barring anyone with “1/8 part or more negro blood” or “any appreciable admixture of negro blood” from buying or renting in designated neighborhoods. The Board actively circulated this template and mobilized white homeowners to adopt the covenants en masse.
On the same day as its expulsion vote—May 4, 1921—the Board made clear that members who sold property to Black buyers in blocks where the owners were all white would face immediate removal from the organization. Far from being a one-time measure, this policy launched a sustained decade-long campaign. The Board organized speakers who toured Chicago neighborhoods to promote residential segregation and worked aggressively to expand the use of restrictive covenants to reserve nearly the entire city for white residents.
Board president M. L. Smith advocated for a limited expansion of housing options on the South Side—areas where Black residents were already concentrated—while expressing the view that “if you provide the places, the negroes will segregate themselves.”
By the late 1920s, these efforts had produced an extensive web of restrictions. According to the Hyde Park Herald, the covenants extended “like a marvelous delicately woven chain of armor” across large portions of the South Side, stretching from the northern edge of Hyde Park at 35th and Drexel Boulevard through Woodlawn, Park Manor, South Shore, Windsor Park, and many other white communities. By the end of the decade, approximately 90 percent of Chicago’s neighborhoods were covered by such covenants, severely limiting housing options for Black residents and institutionalizing residential segregation.
White real estate organizations, homeowners’ associations, and politicians in Chicago continued to defend and maintain these patterns of segregation well into the second half of the 20th century, long after the 1948 Supreme Court ruling in Shelley v. Kraemer declared racially restrictive covenants legally unenforceable.