For decades, southwest-side Marquette Park was a national symbol of racial bigotry. It’s no longer that today, but neither is it an emblem of togetherness. Marquette Park instead is one of the best examples of the city’s failure to find a path to integration.
In the 1980s, the Marquette Park neighborhood began to change racially. It changed in the customary way: blacks moved in and whites moved out. The area’s Latino and Arab populations also grew. The new residents were generally poorer, and crime in the neighborhood increased with the poverty rate. Because black migration to Chicago from the southern states had greatly slowed by 1980, the pace of racial change in the neighborhood was slower than it had been in many other south-side neighborhoods, but it was inexorable. In 1980, the census tracts near the park were 82 percent white, 11 percent Latino, and 5 percent black; by 2010, they were 6 percent white, 46 percent Latino, and 46 percent black. Most of the Latinos live west of Kedzie (the park’s midline), most of the blacks east of it.
