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The seat of Cook County in northern Illinois on the Lake Michigan shore, Chicago was the home of Temple No. 2, the headquarters of the Nation of Islam when the movement came to national prominence. The city, which industrialized in the late nineteenth century, became a significant destination for migrants from the South. This migration continued into the twentieth century, and the city's Black population doubled in the decade leading up to 1920. In time, the city's Black community established the NAACP, the National Negro Business Leagues, the Federated Women's League and a number of other civic organizations, and the prominent Chicago Defencder newspaper was founded. The 1930s witnessed a growth of grassroots activism that in turn supported the unionization of African Americans through the Negro American Legal Council. Indeed, despite a long history of racial violence, including the infamous riots of the so-called Red Summer of 1919, the city's Black population increased. From a quarter of a million inhabitants in the 1930s (7 percent of the city) the number grew to more than eight hundred thousand in 1960, as a consequence of a post-World War II migration wave. Chicago's expanding Black ghetto--the South Side--became the source of the burgeoning membership of the Nation in the 1950s and '60s.
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