Black Families Came to Chicago by the Thousands. Why Are They Leaving?

The Chicago story of the White family begins in 1956, with 13-year-old Hardis riding a train north with his uncle. They started their journey in Tupelo, Miss. Their destination was Chicago’s Union Station. They were part of the Great Migration, when millions of African-Americans moved north, seeking a better life.

Life in Mississippi had often been grueling. Young Hardis was required to pick cotton, usually bringing in 150 pounds a day. Chicago was an instant wonder, with its skyscrapers and buzzing street life. He and his uncle, who came to Chicago to join family members who had already settled there, arrived days before the city hosted the 1956 Democratic convention.

“I loved it right away,” he said.

When he was 23, he married Velma, a fellow transplant from the South. In 1967, they bought the house on Laporte — a two-flat, in Chicago parlance, on the city’s West Side — for $23,500. They were among the first African-American couples on the block.

But the next year, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and riots tore through Chicago. “That’s when most of the businesses started moving out,” Mr. White said. “Car dealerships, supermarkets. When the business goes out of the neighborhood, that’s the neighborhood.”

White families were fleeing, urged on by unscrupulous real estate agents.

“Things were changing fast,” Mr. White said. “They had rumors going around, telling the whites that blacks were moving in, so they’d better sell their property.”

Some white neighbors vowed to stay, then left anyway. “One guy, three doors down, told me he wouldn’t sell his place just because blacks were moving in,” Mr. White said. “And that’s the last time I saw him.”

The house on Laporte was the center of the White family’s world. Dora, Nesan and Tshena attended school around the corner. Mr. White worked overnights as a meatpacker in an Oscar Mayer plant, stirring vats of sausage in bone-chilling temperatures on the factory floor, and Velma was a nurse at Cook County’s public hospital. More family members — Mr. White’s mother and his sister and brother-in-law and their children — lived in the upper flat.