The Great Replacement: Chicago
This is the fourth in a series about the continuing disappearance of whites from American cities. Many people still pretend that The Great Replacement is a myth or a conspiracy theory, but the graphs that accompany each article in this series prove them wrong. Every city has a different story but all have seen a dramatic replacement of whites by minorities.
Chicago was once American socialism's heartland. It was Saul Alinsky's base. It hosted the International Socialist Review. Eugene Debs called it "the paragon city." "CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!" screams the socialist organizer at the end of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.
It was also the place where the Old Left's dreams collapsed in the face of racial reality. Martin Luther King Jr. famously suffered a crushing defeat when white workers and union members turned out to oppose his desegregation efforts. Chicago police, backed by Democrat mayor Richard Daley, brawled in the streets with New Left demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. By the next year, the Black Panthers were promising to "kick [the] asses" of the mostly white Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) radicals and bring a new consciousness to the city and to America.