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The history of African Americans in Chicago or Black Chicagoans dates back to Jean Baptiste Point du Sable's trading activities in the 1780s. Du Sable, the city's founder, was Haitian of African and French descent. Fugitive slaves and freedmen established the city's first black community in the 1840s. By the late 19th century, the first black person had been elected to office. The Great Migrations from 1910 to 1960 brought hundreds of thousands of africans from the South to Chicago, where they became an urban population. They created churches, community organizations, businesses, music, and literature. African Americans of all classes built a community on the South Side of Chicago for decades before the Civil Rights Movement, as well as on the West Side of Chicago. Residing in segregated communities, almost regardless of income, the Black residents of Chicago aimed to create communities where they could survive, sustain themselves, and have the ability to determine for themselves their own course in the History of Chicago. According to the U. S. Census Bureau, African Americans accounted for 29% of the city's population, or approximately 800,000 people as of the 2020 census. The metro area had nearly 1.6 million African Americans. The black population in Chicago has been shrinking. Many black Chicagoans have moved to the suburbs or Southern cities such as Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Birmingham, Memphis, San Antonio and Jackson. Chicago also has a foreign born black population. Many of the African immigrants in Chicago are from Ethiopia and Nigeria.

Jean Baptiste Point du Sable was a Haitian of French and African descent. Although du Sable's settlement was established in the 1780s, African Americans would only become established as a community in the 1840s, with the population reaching 1,000 by 1860. Much of this population consisted of escaped slaves from the Upper South. Following the end of Reconstruction in 1877, African Americans flowed from the Deep South into Chicago, raising the population from approximately 4,000 in 1870 to 15,000 in 1890. In 1853, John A. Logan helped pass a law to prohibit all African Americans, including freedmen, from settling in the state. However, in 1865, the state repealed its "Black Laws" and became the first to ratify the 13th Amendment, partly due to the efforts of John and Mary Jones, a prominent and wealthy activist couple. Especially after the Civil War, Illinois had some of the most progressive anti discrimination legislation in the nation. School segregation was first outlawed in 1874, and segregation in public accommodations was first outlawed in 1885. As the 20th century began, southern states succeeded in passing new constitutions and laws that disfranchised most blacks and many poor whites. Deprived of the right to vote, they could not sit on juries or run for office. They were subject to discriminatory laws passed by white legislators, including racial segregation of public facilities. Segregated education for black children and other services were consistently underfunded in a poor, agricultural economy. As white dominated legislatures passed Jim Crow laws to re establish white supremacy and create more restrictions in public life, violence against blacks increased, with lynchings used as extrajudicial enforcement. In addition, the boll weevil infestation ruined much of the cotton industry. Voting with their feet, blacks started migrating out of the South to the North, where they could live more freely, get their children educated, and get new jobs. Industry buildup for World War I pulled thousands of workers to the North, as did the rapid expansion of railroads, and the meatpacking and steel industries. Between 1915 and 1960, hundreds of thousands of black southerners migrated to Chicago to escape violence and segregation, and to seek economic freedom. They went from being a mostly rural population to one that was mostly urban. "The migration of African Americans from the rural south to the urban north became a mass movement." The Great Migration radically transformed Chicago, both politically and culturally. From 1910 to 1940, most African Americans who migrated north were from rural areas. They had been chiefly sharecroppers and laborers, although some were landowners pushed out by the boll weevil disaster. After years of underfunding of public education for blacks in the South, they tended to be poorly educated, with relatively low skills to apply to urban jobs. Like the European rural immigrants, they had to rapidly adapt to a different urban culture. Many took advantage of better schooling in Chicago and their children learned quickly. After 1940, when the second larger wave of migration started, black migrants tended to be already urbanized, from southern cities and towns. They were the most ambitious, better educated with more urban skills to apply in their new homes. The masses of new migrants arriving in the cities captured public attention. At one point in the 1940s, 3,000 African Americans were arriving every week in Chicago—stepping off the trains from the South and making their ways to neighborhoods they had learned about from friends and the Chicago Defender. The Great Migration was charted and evaluated. Urban white northerners started to get worried, as their neighborhoods rapidly changed. At the same time, recent and older ethnic immigrants competed for jobs and housing with the new arrivals, especially on the South Side, where the steel and meatpacking industries had the most numerous working class jobs. With Chicago's industries steadily expanding, opportunities opened up for new migrants, including Southerners, to find work. The railroad and meatpacking industries recruited black workers. Chicago's African American newspaper, the Chicago Defender, made the city well known to southerners. It sent bundles of papers south on the Illinois Central trains, and African American Pullman Porters would drop them off in Black towns. "Chicago was the most accessible northern city for African Americans in Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas." During the riot, 38 people died (23 black and 15 white). Over the week, injuries attributed to the episodic confrontations stood at 537, with two thirds of the injured being black and one third white, and approximately 1,000 to 2,000, most of whom were black, lost their homes. Due to its sustained violence and widespread economic impact, it is considered the worst of the scores of riots and civil disturbances across the nation during the "Red Summer" of 1919, so named because of the racial and labor violence and fatalities.

The increasingly large black population in Chicago (40,000 in 1910, and 278,000 in 1940 It was hard for many blacks to find jobs and find decent places to live because of the competition for housing among different ethnic groups at a time when the city was expanding in population so dramatically. At the same time that blacks moved from the South in the Great Migration, Chicago had recently received hundreds of thousands of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The groups competed with each other for working class wages. Though other techniques to maintain housing segregation had been used, such as redlining and exclusive zoning to single family housing, by 1927 the political leaders of Chicago began to adopt racially restrictive covenants.

Between 1900 and 1910, the African American population rose rapidly in Chicago. White hostility and population growth combined to create the ghetto on the South Side. Nearby were areas dominated by ethnic Irish, who were especially territorial in defending against incursions into their areas by any other groups. As the population grew, African Americans became more confined to a delineated area, instead of spreading throughout the city. When blacks moved into mixed neighborhoods, ethnic white hostility grew. After fighting over the area, often whites left the area to be dominated by blacks. This is one of the reasons the black belt region started. The Black Belt of Chicago was the chain of neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago where three quarters of the city's African American population lived by the mid 20th century. The Black Belt was an area that stretched 30 blocks along State Street on the South Side and was rarely more than seven blocks wide. In the mid 20th century, as African Americans across the United States struggled against the economic confines created by segregation, black residents within the Black Belt sought to create more economic opportunity in their community through the encouragement of local black businesses and entrepreneurs. Many blacks lived in apartments that lacked plumbing, with only one bathroom for each floor.

Between 1916 and 1920, almost 50,000 Black Southerners moved to Chicago, The 1920s were the height of the Jazz Age, but music continued as the heart of the community for decades. Nationally renowned musicians rose within the Chicago world. Along the Stroll, a bright light district on State Street, jazz greats like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters headlined at nightspots including the Deluxe Cafe. The literary creation of Black Chicago residents from 1925 to 1950 was also prolific, and the city's Black Renaissance rivaled that of the Harlem Renaissance. Prominent writers included Richard Wright, Willard Motley, William Attaway, Frank Marshall Davis, St. Clair Drake, Horace R. Cayton, Jr., and Margaret Walker. Chicago was home to writer and poet Gwendolyn Brooks, known for her portrayals of Black working class life in crowded tenements of Bronzeville. These writers expressed the changes and conflicts blacks found in urban life and the struggles of creating new worlds. In Chicago, black writers turned away from the folk traditions embraced by Harlem Renaissance writers, instead adopting a grittier style of "literary naturalism" to depict life in the urban ghetto. The classic Black Metropolis, written by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Jr., exemplified the style of the Chicago writers. Today it remains the most detailed portrayal of Black Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s. From 2008 to the present, the West Side Historical Society under the guidance of Rickie P. Brown Sr. began to document the rich history of the West Side of Chicago. Their research provided proof of the Austin community having the largest population of Blacks in the city of Chicago. This proved that the largest population of blacks are on its west side, when factoring in the Near West Side, North Lawndale, West Humboldt Park, Garfield Park, and Austin communities as well. Their efforts to build a museum on the west side and continuing to bring awareness to Juneteenth as a national holiday was rewarded with a proclamation in 2011 by Governor Pat Quinn.

Chicago's black population developed a class structure, composed of a large number of domestic workers and other manual labourers, along with a small, but growing, contingent of middle and upper class business and professional elites. In 1929, black Chicagoans gained access to city jobs, and expanded their professional class. Fighting job discrimination was a constant battle for African Americans in Chicago, as foremen in various companies restricted the advancement of black workers, which often kept them from earning higher wages. Chicago is home to three of eight African American United States senators who have served since Reconstruction, who are all Democrats: Carol Moseley Braun (1993–1999), Barack Obama (2005–2008), and Roland Burris (2009–2010). Barack Obama moved from the Senate to the White House in 2008.

In the February 22, 1983, the democrats were split three ways. On the North and Northwest Sides, the incumbent mayor Jane Byrne led and future mayor Richard M. Daley, son of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley, finished a close second. the Black leader Harold Washington had massive majorities on the South and West Sides. Southwest Side voters overwhelmingly supported Daley. Washington won with 37% of the vote, versus 33% for Byrne and 30% for Daley. Although winning the Democratic primary was normally considered tantamount to election in heavily Democratic Chicago, after his primary victory Washington found that his Republican opponent, former state legislator Bernard Epton was supported by many high ranking Democrats and their ward organizations. Epton's campaign referred to, among other things, Washington's conviction for failure to file income tax returns (he had paid the taxes, but had not filed a return). Washington, on the other hand, stressed reforming the Chicago patronage system and the need for a jobs program in a tight economy. In the April 12, 1983, mayoral general election, Washington defeated Epton by 3.7%, 51.7% to 48.0%, to become mayor of Chicago. Washington was sworn in as mayor on April 29, 1983, and resigned his Congressional seat the following day.

In the early 20th century many prominent African Americans were Chicago residents, including Republican and later Democratic congressman William L. Dawson (America's most powerful black politician

A 2021 report from the Chicago Tribune said thousands of black families have left Chicago in the past decade, lowering the black population by about 10%. Politico reported that Chicago's once wealthy black community has dramatically declined with the shuttering of many black owned companies. Many blacks leaving Chicago are now recently moving to cities in the U. S. South, including Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Houston, Little Rock, New Orleans, Memphis and San Antonio.

Black people in Chicago are more likely to be victims of homicide.

Foreign born blacks makeup 4% of Chicago's black population.

Around 4,500 Ethiopians lived in Chicago in 2000.

Nigerian people constitute the city's largest African community.

The Chicago Commission on Race Relations. The Negro in Chicago. (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1922). Johnson, John H. Succeeding Against the Odds: The Autobiography of a Great American Businessman (1989) about John H. Johnson.