The neighborhood is named for Stephen A. Douglas, Illinois politician and Abraham Lincoln's political foe, whose estate included a tract of land given to the federal government.

The community area also contains part of the neighborhood of Bronzeville, the historic center of black culture in the city, since the early 20th century and the Great Migration.

[9] In 1922, Louis B. Anderson, a Chicago alderman, had the architects Michaelsen & Rognstad build him a house at 3800 South Calumet Avenue.

[10] Key figures in the area include: Andrew "Rube" Foster, founder of the Negro National Baseball League; Ida B.

Wells, a civil rights activist, journalist and co-organizer of the NAACP; Margaret Taylor-Burroughs, artist, author, and one of the co-founders of the DuSable Museum of African American History; Bessie Coleman, the first black woman pilot; Gwendolyn Brooks, poet laureate and first black American awarded the Pulitzer Prize, as well as, other acclaimed authors and artists of the Chicago Black Renaissance; actresses Susie Garrett, Marla Gibbs and Jennifer Beals; acclaimed R&B singers Minnie Riperton, Sam Cooke and Lou Rawls; and cornet player and jazz bandleader King Oliver.

[12] The Bronzeville community features in various literary works set in Chicago, including Richard Wright's Native Son, Gwendolyn Brooks' A Street in Bronzeville, Lorraine Hansberry's stage play A Raisin in the Sun, Leon Forrest's There is a Tree More Ancient than Eden [The Bloodworth Trilogy], Bayo Ojikutu's crime novel 47th Street Black, and Sara Paretsky's detective mystery Blacklist, part of the V. I. Warshawski series.

[13] Originally a five-building, 1677-unit public housing project erected in 1962 by Michael Reese Hospital, Prairie Shores has been adapted as a market rate, middle-class community.

[19] Furthermore, urban renewal projects led by the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) contributed to the displacement of over 18,000 individuals from Bronzeville.

[20] The turn of the 21st century saw the CHA enact its Plan for Transformation, resulting in the demolition of many of the public housing projects erected in the prior decades.

[21] Beginning in the 1990s, however, Bronzeville and Douglas began to see renewed interest from middle- and upper-income black professionals attracted to its past.

[22] This trend has continued in recent times, with Douglas finally turning the corner on population growth in the 2020 census with an increase of 11.3% over the past decade.

Notably, researchers have identified that Bronzeville contains two of the 193 census tracts nationally that achieved a remarkable decrease in poverty with minimal displacement of the existing communities between 2000 and 2015.

[24] Furthermore, commentators have noted that Bronzeville is unique among Chicago neighborhoods in that the majority of gentrification has been driven by the black middle class.