Chicago's Home for the Aged and Infirm Colored People: A Paradigm for Examining Changes in African-American Institutional Support‪.‬

Introduction For decades African-Americans, faced with enormous exclusion by the majority population, built hundreds of social institutions to provide basic services for their communities. This process is thought to have infused a strength and cohesiveness in the Black community that was perhaps used to harness resources required to begin the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. However, scholars question the Black community's ability in the post-civil rights era to build such institutions and assume that much of their racial vigor and cohesiveness was lost. This article examines the validity of these assumptions in the context of an elderly home maintained solely by African-Americans for 78 years in Chicago.