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Rogers Park Celebrating Great Migration Centennial With Music, Student Art

By Linze Rice | February 24, 2016 6:57am
 The Heritage Station Community Garden, 549 W. 63rd St., is located at a former train station previously used by blacks who came to Chicago during the Great Migration.
The Heritage Station Community Garden, 549 W. 63rd St., is located at a former train station previously used by blacks who came to Chicago during the Great Migration.
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DNAinfo/Wendell Hutson

ROGERS PARK — In honor of Black History Month, neighborhood organizers will have art, education, and entertainment on display Sunday to celebrate the centennial of the Great Migration.

From 12:30-2:30 p.m., artwork from students across eight Far North Side schools inspired by the historic event will help fill the Loyola Park Fieldhouse, 1230 W. Greenleaf Ave., as community members take a moment to reflect and appreciate the significance of the Great Migration.

The free event will also showcase dance ensembles and drum performances, and will serve light refreshments.

From 1916-1970, more than 7 million southern African-Americans mass migrated to the north, including about 500,000 settling in Chicago.

Prior to the Great Migration, Chicago's black population was 2 percent, but jumped to 33 percent by the 1970s.

Though people of color who had recently migrated to the north were largely fleeing the south, racial restrictions on public places and discrimination in housing and jobs didn't provide much reprieve for many who had fled early on.

During World War I, immigration into the U.S. slowed and many factory employers in Chicago turned to African-American men as a new, cheap source of labor.

Though not ideal, the shift in labor began to lay a framework for more people of color to find work opportunities in Chicago's industrial fields, many of whom began to set root on the city's South Side.

"The Great Migration established the foundation for black political power, business enterprise, and union activism," according to the Encyclopedia of Chicago. "The Great Migration's impact on cultural life in Chicago is most evident in the southern influence on the Chicago Renaissance of the 1930s and 1940s, as well as blues music, cuisine, churches, and the numerous family and community associations that link Chicago with its southern hinterland — especially Mississippi"

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