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The city ofChicago,Illinois is home to a significantAppalachian population. The Appalachian community has historically been centered in the neighborhood ofUptown. Beginning afterWorld War I, Appalachian people moved to Chicago in droves seeking jobs. Between 1940 and 1970, approximately 3.2 million Appalachian and Southern migrants settled in Chicago and elsewhere in the Midwest. Due toimmigration restrictions in the 1920s, personnel managers in Chicago encouraged working-class migrants from theUpland South to fill those jobs.[1] The culture of Chicago has been significantly influenced by theculture,music, and politics of Appalachia. The majority of people of Appalachian heritage in Chicago are white or black, though Appalachian people can be of any race, ethnicity, or religion.
Between the 1940s and the 1960s, up to 400,000 African-Americans moved to Chicago from theDeep South, mostly from the states of Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. Following theKorean War, around 70,000 white people from the Mid-South moved to Chicago. These white people were mostly from the mountainous Appalachia region ofEastern Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, and West Virginia.[2] By the 1950s and 1960s, the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago had gained a reputation as a "Hillbilly Heaven". For several decades, the neighborhood was locally famous for being an enclave ofwhite Southern migrants, many of whom were from Appalachia. While many Appalachian and Southern migrants settled in other Chicago neighborhoods, the Appalachian population was the densest and the poorest in Uptown. There was still a substantial Appalachian presence in Uptown by the 1970s, but by the 1990s the Appalachian community had largely dissipated.[3]
Carol's Pub, a country-and-western bar established in 1972, is one of the few remaining legacies of the Appalachian community in Uptown.[4]
In the 1960s and 1970s, theYoung Patriots Organization operated in Uptown. The YPO was a socialist, anti-racist organization composed primarily of young,poor white migrants from Appalachia, although membership was open to people of all races. The Young Patriots organized alongside other militant groups such as theYoung Lords and theBlack Panther Party as part of Fred Hampton'sRainbow Coalition. The Young Patriots grew out of a hillbilly street gang known as the Peace Makers and initially wore theConfederate flag, but eventually stopped wearing the flag out of respect for the Black Panthers.[5]
Appalachian migrants to Chicago were overwhelminglyProtestant. Some migrants came from such isolated areas that they had never met anyCatholics orJews prior to migrating to Chicago.[3] AppalachianSouthern Baptists founded numerous churches in Chicago. Chicago only had 9 Southern Baptist Convention-affiliated churches in 1950, but by 1959 that number had increased to more than 70 churches.[1]
Roger Guy,From Diversity to Unity: Southern and Appalachian Migrants in Uptown Chicago, 1950-1970, Lexington Books, Cleveland, 2009.
