Chatham, The Soul Queen, and Covenants: A Conversation with Cristen Brown

Throughout the early twentieth century, racially restrictive covenants confined Chicago’s Black residents to the city’s crowded “Black Belt.” In her recent article for South Side Weekly, “Best Former House of Royalty: Mid-Century Modern Home of Soul Queen Helen C. Maybell Anglin,” Cristen Brown illustrates how the dismantling of these race-based covenants created new opportunities for Black homeownership and fostered architectural innovation in the South Side neighborhood of Chatham.

In this conversation, Cristen Brown reflects on what inspired her to tell Chatham’s story, how the Chicago Covenants Project deepened her understanding of the neighborhood’s past, and why she hopes readers will see the city and its buildings with renewed curiosity and care.

Helen C. Maybell Anglin poses in front of her Chatham home, 1974. (Source: Perry C. Riddle, Chicago Sun-Times collection, Chicago History Museum)

What drew you to write about the Chatham neighborhood?

“I'm a huge building nerd. I spend a lot of time photographing, researching and talking about buildings. I especially love exuberant, creative architecture, and Chatham is full of it. But more than that, Chatham is a neighborhood where every block seems to pulse with history and every building has a story to tell. These stories are layered into the built environment, and sometimes your clue about where to go digging is an architectural style that stands out for one reason or another. In Chatham, these mid-century modern homes are strikingly different from anything else in the neighborhood, and I had to know more. What I found when I started researching was so incredible that I needed to share it.”

How did the Chicago Covenants Project inform or deepen your understanding of the neighborhood’s history?

“As a Black Chicagoan, the work of the Chicago Covenants Project is not abstract. It helps to flesh out my own family’s history in this city. Whether they were moving to Chicago from the West Indies or the deep south, all branches of my family ended up living in the “Black Belt,” confined there by a mix of codified racism in the form of redlining and/or racially restrictive covenants. My great-grandfather couldn’t even bury his wife in the closest cemetery because of discriminatory practices that restricted where Black people could be laid to rest. So there’s definitely an anecdotal understanding of how this worked in our city.  

The Chicago Covenants Project, however, gives us the hard data needed to understand broader patterns of how racially restrictive covenants were deployed across Chicago, which in turn gives us greater context for Black movement throughout the city–or the lack thereof. It’s not until the covenants were ruled unenforceable in 1948 that you begin to see us slowly move into other neighborhoods. First those directly adjacent to the ‘Black Belt,’ and later those a little farther south, like Chatham. Having the details on this is imperative to understanding why Black professionals showed up in Chatham just a handful of years after that 1948 decision, and is also helpful in terms of extrapolating why they may have ended up in that neighborhood specifically.”

What do you hope readers take away from this story?

“I am fascinated by the way Chicagoans express themselves through the built environment, from the most famous skyscrapers downtown to modest homes in our farthest flung neighborhoods. Every building tells a story, and I want people to look around their neighborhoods and find the stories. I want them to recognize and celebrate the beauty that surrounds them, even when no one else does. I want them to find the stories that explain the past and inform the future, and I want them to share what they discover so that we can learn too.”

Read Brown’s article “Best Former House of Royalty: Mid-century modern home of ‘Soul Queen’ Helen C. Maybell Anglin — Chatham” in South Side Weekly.

Cristen Brown photographing Chicago-area architecture. (Source: author provided)