Arkansas attorney Lloyd G. Wheeler,[1] moved to Illinois in 1869 to practice law and he, along with 31 other Black lawyers, began to meet informally to plan protests against discrimination in hotels, theaters, and restaurants, and to address judicial elections and school desegregation.
[citation needed] This informal collaboration lasted until 1914, when a younger generation of lawyers decided to form the Cook County Bar Association.
In 1925, CCBA members C. Francis Stradford, Wendell E. Green, and Jesse N. Baker were among the founders of the National Bar Association (NBA).
[4] Black people left the farms and rural areas of the American South to join the military forces of World War I, and to respond to the labor demands of a wartime economy.
Retail shopkeepers formed the Colored Commercial Club of Chicago to promote common interests of members with the use of joint advertising, mutual account adjusting, cooperative business loans, and legal advice.
The Chicago Whip[5] newspaper was founded in 1919 by businessman, William C. Linton, and recent Yale Law School graduates, Joseph D. Bibb and Arthur C. MacNeal.
Historian Christopher Robert Reed described this period as a "metamorphosis" of the black population from being a "barely discernible presence" into a dynamic, revolutionary change.
[7] Reed noted that the 1919–20 edition of Black's Blue Book listed 1,200 black-owned businesses which included five banks, 48 real estate offices, 106 physicians, 40 dentists, 70 lawyers, three insurance companies, six hotels, and 11 newspapers.