Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stayed in an apartment in North Lawndale to highlight the dire conditions in the area and used the experience to pave the way to the Fair Housing Act.

Beginning in the 1960s, riots, housing discrimination, predatory lending, and other social and economic disasters led to many businesses and residents leaving, with waves of job loss, abandoned property, and poverty ensuing.

Community residents formed the grassroots organization the Contract Buyers League in 1968 to combat the discriminatory and predatory housing practices targeting the area.

Once part of Cicero Township in 1869, the eastern section of North Lawndale to Pulaski Road was annexed to Chicago by an act of the state legislature.

These wealthy men, as well as the rest of the Czech residents of North Lawndale, were strongly committed to their neighborhood, and were involved in civic affairs.

In the post-World War I years, the Czechs began leaving the neighborhood for newer housing in the western suburbs of Cicero, Berwyn, Riverside, and Brookfield.

[3] From about 1918 to 1955, Jews, overwhelmingly of Russian and Eastern European origin, dominated the neighborhood, starting in North Lawndale and moving northward as they became more prosperous.

In a span of about ten years, the white population of North Lawndale dropped from 87% to less than 9%, but the number of total residents increased.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. visited North Lawndale and "stayed in an apartment there to highlight the deplorable conditions, which included broken doors and rodent infestations.

"[4] According to the Steans Family Foundation, in the decades following the 1960s:[3] The poverty resulting from the loss of thousands of jobs due to restructuring of industries from the 1960s to the 1980s meant that money was not available for property maintenance.

[3] Writer Jonathan Kozol devotes a chapter of Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools (1991) to North Lawndale.

[3] In the 1990s, the foundation noted signs of revitalization, "including a new shopping plaza and some new housing" associated with Homan Square, stabilization of the declining population, and a rise in new residents, mostly Hispanic.

Assisted by Jack MacNamara, a Jesuit seminarian, and twelve white college students based at Presentation Roman Catholic Church, led by Msgr.

[citation needed] North Lawndale was featured in a video explaining the impact of housing discrimination and predatory lending in Chicago.

Beginning in the mid 1990s, homeowners came to fill approximately 350 affordable housing units, and a new grocery store and the neighborhood's first Starbucks opened.

[13] K-Town is a nickname for an area in Humboldt Park, North Lawndale, and West Garfield Park[note 1] between Pulaski Road and Cicero Avenue in which the names of many north–south avenues begin with the letter K (Karlov, Keating, Kedvale, Keeler, Kenneth, Kenton, Keystone, Kilbourn, Kildare, Kilpatrick, Kirkland, Knox, Kolin, Kolmar, Komensky, and Kostner).

The eleventh mile is the easternmost area in which the plan was widely implemented, as many neighborhoods to the east were already developed and had street names in place.

... K-Town is where my grandfather ... and all the other black folk that flocked to the West Side during the mid-to-late-1950s bought proud brick houses on tree-lined streets with crackless cement sidewalks.

Homan Square was the area that housed a police compound "likened to a CIA black site" in 2012, where people were held without their rights being respected.

[17] The United States Postal Service operates the Otis Grant Collins Post Office at 2302 South Pulaski Road.

[19] Historian Paul Street, citing a 2001 demographic study by Claritas Inc., writes that more than 70% of men aged 18–45 residing in North Lawndale had criminal records.

The initiatives also included providing the residents – with a focus on young men – with social services such as trauma-informed[10] cognitive behavioral therapy and economic opportunities such as job training and legal support.

"[9] The Crime Lab further stated that there is "about 85% confidence that for every dollar invested in a program like READI Chicago, society reaps $3 to $7 in return.

[citation needed] Another Showtime TV series, The Chi, which debuted in 2018 and is set on the South Side of Chicago, films in the neighborhood.