How did Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood gets its name? And where are its boundaries?

CHICAGO — Even among Chicago’s many culturally rich and historically significant neighborhoods, Bronzeville truly stands out.

The large community, located on the city’s South Side, has a rich history that stretches back to the turn of the 20th century, according to this piece from the University of Chicago’s Chicago Studies department.

“There is no doubt that Bronzeville has been the center of rich developments and contributions— intellectual, artistic, political, and otherwise — by Black Americans in Chicago,” the piece notes.

Bronzeville is “historically known as the city’s ‘Black Metropolis,'” says Choose Chicago, with “a strong sense of pride in its influential history and cultural scene.”

So, where exactly is Bronzeville, and how did it get its name?

On the South Side

Bronzeville is one of the many neighborhoods and community areas that make up Chicago’s South Side.

But where Chicago’s neighborhoods begin and end, and whether they’re even considered “neighborhoods,” is often up for interpretation.

In the case of Bronzeville, it’s not actually one of Chicago’s 77 designated community areas, which were originally mapped out in the late 1920s by University of Chicago sociologists Ernest Burgess and Vivien Palmer.

Within these community areas, and oftentimes overlapping one or more of them, are the rich tapestry of Chicago’s neighborhoods.

Bronzeville is certainly one of these.

Looking at this community areas map via data.cityofchicago.org, you’ll see that Bronzeville is just east of the Dan Ryan Expressway along East 35th Street, on the other side of the expressway from Rate Field, home of the Chicago White Sox.

Going by this, then, the neighborhood of Bronzeville is nestled somewhere within the “official” South Side community areas of Douglas, Oakland, Grand Boulevard and the Near South Side.

But the best way to draw more exact boundaries of Chicago’s many neighborhoods is probably to just ask the people who live in them.

That was the methodology behind a recent University of Chicago study, the Chicago Neighborhood Project, which Block Club Chicago’s Jamie Nesbitt Golden cites in a very informative piece about Bronzeville that ran in February.

That University of Chicago study, Nesbitt Golden writes, essentially asked residents to define their neighborhood boundaries in order to build a comprehensive map of Chicago’s many neighborhoods.

In this new resident-drawn map, Nesbitt Golden notes, Bronzeville is one large area between the Stevenson Expressway to the north, 51st Street to the south and the Dan Ryan Expressway to the west.

Nesbitt Golden goes on to write that Bronzeville has grown in recent years as people look for more affordable real estate. So that explains, in part, why its residents now consider it to be such a large neighborhood.

Click HERE to learn more about Bronzeville in Nesbitt Golden’s excellent piece for Block Club Chicago.

Why the name?

Regardless of exactly which area you consider to be Bronzeville, there’s no debating how culturally and historically significant it is.

The neighborhood, according to UChicago’s Chicago Studies, got its name in the 1920s and stems from the period known as The Great Migration, which eventually sent millions of Black Americans from the rural South to the more urban Northeast, Midwest and West.

According to UChicago’s Chicago Studies, The Great Migration began sending Black Americans to the Chicago community now known as Bronzeville and its surrounding areas in 1916. By 1920, the number of Black residents in the area had surpassed 100,000.

Sadly, UChicago’s Chicago Studies says, media members started giving these communities derisive names like the “Black Belt,” the “Black Ghetto,” and — even worse — “Darkie Town.”

So, James J. Gentry — an editor working for famous Black entrepreneur Anthony Overton, founder of the Chicago Bee newspaper — proposed the term “Bronzeville” in order to change the community’s identity and instill more pride among its residents, according to UChicago’s Chicago Studies.

That name stuck and became something residents used with pride.

“Thus, the name ‘Bronzeville’ not only represents the community’s residents but represents resistance and the efforts of a community to define itself on its own terms,” UChicago’s Chicago Studies writes.

With its new name in popular use, Bronzeville became more and more densely populated and grew into the center for African-American life and culture in Chicago that it is today.

Perhaps Bronzeville’s most significant event is the annual Bud Billiken Parade, which is the nation’s largest African-American parade, drawing more than a million spectators each August. This year’s Bud Billiken Parade will be the the 96th and is scheduled for Saturday, Aug. 9.

Read more and explore more of Bronzeville HERE via Choose Chicago.