Obama's city: Chicago's history of progressive action

Nov 6, 2008, 3:33 GMT

Chicago - A humble, 19th-century brick house nestled within a modern university campus just west of downtown Chicago stands as the only physical legacy of social activist Jane Addams' work with the immigrant communities that gave the city its ethnic flavour.

But the progressive idealism that spurred Addams and other reformers, amid the poverty and social ills of the then-booming industrial city, is echoed by the next president of the United States, Barack Obama, who began his career serving a later generation of disadvantaged Chicagoans in poor, black neighbourhoods on the South Side.

'He's a native son. People would want him to be part of this progressive history,' said Lisa Yun Lee, director of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

It remains to be seen whether Obama will pursue policies to advance at the national level the work started by Chicago activists like Addams and Ida B Wells, an African-American journalist who campaigned in the late 1800s and early 1900s for civil rights for blacks and women alike?

'The jury is still out,' Lee said.

Addams and Ellen Starr founded the Hull House in 1889 to serve the poor and working-class immigrant communities of Greeks, Italians, Irish and Eastern Europeans, drawn to Chicago by the opportunity of work in manufacturing and the city's famous stockyards. Today, several blocks of Greek and Italian businesses and restaurants in the city's Greektown and Little Italy, remnants of the original neighbourhoods near Hull House.

The path of economic and social advancement taken by those ethnic groups would later be followed by the Great Migration of African- Americans from the segregated US South, sometimes met by racial tensions between the newcomers and the established communities. More recently, similar tensions have arisen between blacks and Hispanics, Lee notes.

The work of activists at Hull House, where disadvantaged communities found social and educational opportunities, helped galvanize efforts to change child-labour laws, improve public health measures and ensure immigrant rights.

Lee, an Obama supporter, said that much of the president-elect's call for change from the bottom up, rather than from the top down, has its roots in what Addams and other Chicago progressives advocated.

'Jane Addams would have identified with the sensibility that it's not just red states and blue state,' Lee said, 'but about solidarity of the human race.'