Chicago History Museum: Ella G. Berry: Civic And Political Activist

Press release from the Chicago History Museum:

Heidi Samuelson

2022-02-09

Portrait of Ella G. Berry. Published on in by Elizabeth Lindsey Davis, 1922. CHM, ICHi-177302A

Ella Berry was born Ella Tucker in 1876 in Stanford, Kentucky. Little is known about her father, Dave Tucker, but in 1870, her mother, Matilda Portman, was working as a live-in domestic for a white family. By the 1880s, Matilda had enough to purchase a small piece of property and temporarily stopped working in white households. She had six children—Ella, her sister Maggie, and four sons, who contributed to the family income as laborers. By 1884, Matilda began to relocate the family to Louisville, which is where Ella attended school.

Map of homes bombed in racial conflicts over housing, July 1, 1917-March 1, 1921, published by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations. CHM, ICHi-177153 Chicago mayor Edward J. Kelly, Chicago, 1928. DN-0085926, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection, CHM

Further Reading

• Online experience: Democracy Limited: Chicago Women and the Vote
• Lisa G. Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877‒1932 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
• Wanda Hendricks, Gender, Race, and Politics in the Midwest: Black Club Women in Illinois (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1998).

This press release was produced by the Chicago History Museum. The views expressed here are the author’s own.