Robert Taylor (Homes)

Robert Rochon Taylor was born in Tuskegee, Alabama in 1899, and studied architecture and business administration at Howard University and the University of Illinois.  During the 1920's and 30's he became a prominent business leader in the growing Black community in Chicago.

Taylor devoted his time to providing banking and mortgage services to Black Chicagoans and to develop clean, safe and affordable public housing in the south side neighborhood of Bronzeville.

He became a strong proponent of scattered site housing, a practice that he believed would help promote racial, residential, and economic integration in what had become a racist and racially segregated city.

In the 1950's, it became clear that the "White Power" City Council intended to promote racial segregation by limiting Black occupancy in public housing to all-Black neighborhoods...a plan he fought against until his death in 1957.

In 1959 under the racist "leadership" of Mayor Richard J. Daley (and with the political support from nearby all-white neighborhoods), construction of a massive public housing corridor in what would become the largest public housing project in the world (the project also included a massive highway system, later called the Dan Ryan Expressway, that would help separate the project from the surrounding white enclaves).  The project would eventually include 28 densely populated, 16-story high rise buildings that would house over 27,000 people.

Despite protests from the Black community against the idea that the project promoted racially segregated neighborhoods which reinforced the preexisting poverty, unemployment, and isolation from social services that had been allowed to foster in previous decades, the "development" was built.

In a painful irony, the Chicago City Council decided in 1959 to name this massive housing project and symbol of institutional racism, The Robert Taylor Homes...a name he would have vehemently opposed considering the racial segregation, marginalization, and oppression that they represented.


Postscript: The Robert Taylor Homes (and lifelong friendships) were completely demolished in 2007 under the "leadership" of Mayor Richard M. Daley (the son of Richard J. Daley).