Chatham History Brief

In 1889 after Chatham was annexed to Chicago as a part of the Village of Hyde Park and the Town of Lake, there was an influx of railroad workers for the Illinois Central Railroad seeking a good place to live, accessible to transit to the downtown area from the rural and small town vicinity--they were mainly, Hungarian, Swedish, Italian, Irish, Polish, and German immigrants... But change came in about 1950 with Marquette Road as the color line, with a growing migration of southern blacks, and so did the neighborhood. In the early 1950s, Blacks began to migrate further south into areas such as Chatham.