When Richard J. Daley was elected mayor of Chicago in 1955, he inherited a city dealing with the issues facing many urban American centers - mainly a decline in manufacturing and industrial jobs and the exodus of middle-class white residents to the outlying suburbs.
Cautious of the feelings of many in the city's white population about racial mixing, the majority of the public housing built between 1946 and 1976 was contained in the square area of the South Loop which was almost an exclusively African-American neighborhood [REF].