




When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt won a landslide reelection in 1936, his New Deal political reforms brought forth the Chicago Housing Authority. Chicago’s first three housing projects opened in 1938, with space for 2,378 white families. In 1939, engineers, plumbers, steam fitters, and structural-steel workers broke ground on a forty-seven-acre property that would cost nearly nine million dollars and shelter 1,662 black families. The Homes were segregated in accordance to the federal “Neighborhood Composition Rule,” which required housing developments to mirror the racial composition of the neighborhood they were being built in. Named after the renowned black journalist and social reformer, the Ida B. Wells Homes were composed of two-to-four-story buildings; the community even had space for vegetable gardens. Some 17,544 applications were received, including my great-grandmother’s. Jean miraculously received a housing assignment and she held her head high as she walked through Chicago’s South Side, her three adolescents in tow. They were tired, they were poor, and it was 1941. They had essentially been homeless for a decade when they entered 684 East 39th Street. Between Cottage Grove to the east and South Parkway (now Martin Luther King Drive) to the west, their home had its own kitchen and bathroom. Sisters Norma and Barbara shared a bedroom; their brother, Robert, had his own room; and Jean slept downstairs on the couch. Rent was thirty-six-dollars per month – if one had it. Sometimes, payment arrangements could be made, or neighbors chipped in to help. The Homes were a community and a respite for families during the Depression. Jean’s children took free dance, music, and art lessons at the Abraham Lincoln Center. Norma tapped her pillow at night, practicing her imaginary piano. Barbara dreamed of becoming a professional ballerina. Robert wanted to be a cowboy, like his heroes on the radio. An enumerator from the Sixteenth Census of the United States marked Jean, Norma, Barbara, and Robert Galvin as “Negro” in his wide logbook. The enumerator asked Jean if she worked, to which she replied she had no income. She told the enumerator she’d been married to the same husband since she was eighteen-years-old.
Source: Jane Marchant: A Century of Progress – Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics
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