"Chicago's greatest monument to segregation is a 12-foot-tall berm that carries the Burlington Northern Railroad through the Southwest Side. It separates Lawndale, a once-Jewish neighborhood that "turned" in the 1950s, from Little Village, an old Eastern European neighborhood that is now Hispanic. The Poles and Ukrainians established the tracks as a racial barrier, especially after Lawndale went up in flames following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. The custom has persisted with the new residents: South of the tracks, it's 97 percent Hispanic; on the other side of the tracks, it's 89 percent black."
(I work basically nestled into that thing.)
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