“The federal CRA was inspired by a response to redlining and the systematic refusal of financial services to Black residents [in Chicago],” says Illinois State Senator Jacqueline Collins, who recently spearheaded the passage of legislation to strengthen anti-redlining rules in her state. Since 2003 she’s represented the district that includes the predominantly Black neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago where she grew up and still lives today.
Collins and her family moved from McComb, Mississippi to Chicago in the early 1950s. She was just a child. They were part of the Great Migration — six million Black people who fled the Jim Crow south, starting around the turn of the 20th century. An estimated 500,000 of them moved into Chicago. By 1970, there were one million Black people living in the Windy City — one third of the city’s population.