New York City had become black America's cultural center by the 1920s, and the black community of Harlem in upper Manhattan was home to the artists, writers, and jazz musicians who made up the cultural movement called the Harlem Renaissance. By 1940, however, Chicago had begun to challenge Harlem's position as the nation's leading black community. Between 1915 and 1940, the city's black population had grown from 50,000 to 277,000, and over 60,000 more arrived during World War II, drawn by the increased job opportunities in wartime manufacturing. Postwar prosperity had brought that number to almost a half million by 1950.
The Black Belt. Like other cities with large immigrant populations, Chicago was a mosaic of ethnic neighborhoods. Poles, Italians, European Jews, Irish, and other groups had settled among their own ethnic kind, both happy to be in somewhat familiar surroundings and pushed by exclusion from other areas. Most of Chicago's blacks lived in the area known as the South Side, a strip extending south along State Street from the Loop, the city's central business area. A Raisin in the Sun is set on the South Side, where Lorraine Hansberry was born and where her family lived in the 1930s.
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