African Americans in Omaha, Nebraska - Neighborhoods

Neighborhoods

Early African American neighborhoods in Omaha included Casey's Row, a community of housing for African-American families, most of whose men worked as railroad porters at the nearby Union Pacific Railroad. The steady jobs on the railroads were considered good work, even if some men had greater ambitions. In the 1880s, Omaha's original "Negro district" was located at Twentieth and Harney Streets. The Near North Side, located immediately north of Downtown Omaha, is where the majority of African Americans have lived in Omaha for almost 100 years. Originally the community had mostly European immigrants: Germans, Italians and Jews and gradually drew more African Americans. In pre-1900 Omaha, the city's cemetery was always integrated.

The community became more racially segregated soon after the Omaha Race Riot of 1919. During that event an African-American worker named Will Brown was lynched by a white mob outside the Douglas County Courthouse. After the mob finished with Brown, they turned against the entire population of African Americans in the Near North Side; however, their efforts were thwarted by soldiers from Fort Omaha. In the following years the city began enforcing race-restrictive covenants. Properties for rent and sale were restricted on the basis of race, with the primary intent of keeping the Near North Side "black" and the rest of the city "white". These agreements were held in place with redlining, a system of segregated insuring and lending reinforced by the federal government. These restrictions were ruled illegal in 1940.

During the 1930s, the Federal government built housing projects for working families: the Logan Fontenelle Housing Projects in North Omaha and a similar project in South Omaha. Both were intended to improve housing for the large working-class community, whose majority then were immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe and their descendants. With job losses and demographic changes accelerating in the late 1950s and 1960s, the project residents in North Omaha became nearly all poor and low-income African Americans. By the early first decade of the 21st century, each of these facilities was torn down and replaced with public housing schemes featuring mixed-income and supporting uses.

African-American neighborhoods in Omaha have been studied extensively; the most notable reports include Lois Mark Stalvey's Three to Get Ready: The Education of a White Family in Inner City Schools, and the 1966 documentary film A Time for Burning. This movie featured the opinions of the young Ernie Chambers. A barber, Chambers went on to law school and has been repeatedly elected to represent North Omaha in the Nebraska State Legislature for more than 35 years.