Ida B. Wells Homes

Category: Housing

Completed with federal funding in 1941, the Ida B. Wells Homes were the first public housing project for Chicago's African American residents. According to St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, the Wells homes represented a long-unrealized "dream of respectable lowers [lower-class] who wanted to make the mobility step to lower middle class. Its 2,000 families are the envy of the whole South Side." (Drake and Cayton, p. 660).