CHAPTER 2

RED SUMMER

ON SUNDAY, AUGUST 27, 1919, EIGHT-YEAR-OLD ETHEL Payne chased bugs and grasshoppers and put them into mason jars and tin cans with punched-in paper tops that she kept under the porch. It was a blistering hot summer day. Not far from where she played, five young black teenagers sought relief from the stifling heat by jumping a ride on the back of a produce truck heading toward the cooling waters of Lake Michigan. Chicagoans loved their beaches, especially the thousands of working-class families for whom the lake provided inexpensive Sunday recreation. But they didn’t leave their racial attitudes behind. Just like the city, the beaches were segregated.

In South Side, some eleven miles of beaches reaching all the way to Indiana were reserved for whites, leaving only a small stretch of waterfront to its north to serve as the “colored beach.” But the boys went instead to an inlet and boarded a small raft they had made on a previous visit. Paying no attention to the southerly direction in which the draft drifted, they entered troubled waters. Unbeknownst to them, the sanctity of the white enclave had already been challenged earlier in the day by the entry of several black bathers. Mobs had gathered, both black and white, until the whites outnumbered the blacks and the invaders were chased off.

As the raft passed an outcropping that demarcated the segregated beaches, a man by the water’s edge began throwing rocks at the boys. The boys dove into the water to seek protection, but a rock struck fourteen-year-old Eugene Williams on his forehead and he disappeared under the surface. The other teenagers reached shore, ran to the black beach, and returned with the lifeguard, who dove into the water looking for Williams. It was too late.

Using a grappling hook, the police retrieved his body and brought it to the white beach. The surviving boys singled out a white man in the crowd as the rock thrower. But the white police made no effort to arrest the man and thwarted a black officer’s attempts to do so. Word spread quickly across the city. Soon as many as a thousand angry black Chicagoans gathered at the entrance of the white beach, demanding the police turn over the rock thrower and the white officers. A black man discharged his gun and was immediately killed by a jittery policeman.

By nightfall a race war had begun. Armed whites, members of so-called athletic clubs with such names as Ragen’s Colts, Hamburgs, Dirty Dozen, and Our Flag, combed the streets attacking blacks. They took to automobiles and sped through black neighborhoods in the dark, unloading their guns at men, women, and children on the street. Unrestrained by the police, the gangs believed they had license to kill. Unprotected by the police, blacks took their own measures to resist. They stationed themselves behind windows or in the cover of darkened porches and fired back.

The South Side became a battle zone. Confined economically in poor neighborhoods, families were now also trapped by violence. At day, the white gangs expanded their attack to go after blacks returning from work in the stockyards. Black men were dragged from streetcars and assaulted. Few dared to venture out from their homes. At night, entire blocks were enshrouded in darkness as rioters shot out the streetlights and in a silence broken only by the sound of pistol and rifle shots.

The Payne family huddled in their Englewood house. The police designated their neighborhood a “danger zone” when rioting broke out at four different spots within blocks of the family’s house and a police platoon was dispatched to quell the outbreaks. Making matters more terrifying, their father was not home.

All but a few of the Chicago Pullman car porters, cooks, and railroad employees had reported for work when the riot first began. They found themselves imprisoned on their trains, unable to get home. The railroads stopped black workers from debarking in Chicago. “We drew up new running schedules,” said one railroad official, “making the porters and other employees double back out of town instead of resting here.”

Finally, on the third night of violence, Payne got off a New York train. Hiding from marauding mobs, probably using his knowledge of the maze of railroad yards that honeycombed the city, he reached his house just before midnight. Awakened by the sound of his return, Ethel went into the front bedroom, where she found her father loading a rifle. In her innocence, she clasped her hands in excitement. “Shut up,” yelled her father, “get down on the floor.” The street below was enshrouded in darkness broken only by the light of an occasional flashlight or gasoline lamp. Bessie began to sob and pray. “My mother was praying,” said Ethel, “and he was cursing!”

“Hello, Bill,” came a voice from below. “Can you come down?” It was a white police officer and, more important, one of the few trusted white neighbors. Payne consented to come out of the house but he brought his rifle. The policeman promised that more officers were on their way to protect the neighborhood. But just then a small white mob appeared out of the darkness. Telling Payne to put down his rifle, the policeman drew his revolver. “I got some pretty good target practice at Belleau Wood,” he told the mob, referring to an epic World War I battle. A clap of thunder and a sudden downpour of rain rendered his threat unnecessary, and the men dispersed. Under the drenching rain, Payne gripped the police officer by both shoulders and thanked him.

Several days later the police gained the upper hand and the violence abated. Chicago had not been alone in experiencing racial violence in the summer of 1919. The season was soon nicknamed “Red Summer” after rioting broke out in more than three dozen cities, mostly whites attacking blacks.

WHEN CALM DID COME, life did not go back to what it had been. The Paynes’ few white neighbors decamped. Before the riots, a white couple from Eastern Europe lived next door, as did another white couple, with French and German ancestry, down the block. By 1930, the block was entirely black except for one lone white couple who had recently arrived from the Netherlands. The same was true throughout Chicago. Whites moved away and landlords further tightened the real estate cordon around blacks, leaving them no choice but to remain in the overcrowded neighborhoods of South Side. The wall of segregation became firmer than ever. As Payne entered her teenage years, her neighborhood was solidly black. “It was sort of an island in the midst of a white sea,” she said.

Excluded from Chicago, African Americans began building their own city within a city. Turning, as one observer put it, “segregation into congregation,” they set about strengthening their own institutions. Several miles to the northeast of the Paynes’ home, Grand Boulevard became the hub of all things black. Here African Americans could purchase anything they needed. One could cash a check at the Binga State Bank, Chicago’s first black-owned bank; pick up a new supply of High-Brown Face Powder from the Overton-Hygienic Company; make a payment on a life insurance policy at Supreme Life; pay respects to a deceased relative at the Jackson Funeral System; consider a new house at the Julian A. Black real estate office; take in a show at the Regal Theater; or hail a cab from the Supreme Taxicab Company. “Because cabs wouldn’t come in,” said one longtime South Side resident, “we created our own.”

An African American newspaper, the Chicago Bee, christened the emerging community Bronzeville. And, as it did with all its other needs, the city within a city created its own vibrant Fleet Street. Two blocks from the Bee, which occupied a magnificent Art Deco building on State Street, the Chicago Defender moved into an equally imposing edifice. Although it was the Bee that gave Bronzeville its name, the older Defender was its newspaper. “The Chicago Defender was the paper,” said Payne. “You couldn’t grow up in Chicago and be black if you didn’t know the Chicago Defender.”

The Defender was the brainchild of Robert Sengstacke Abbott. Born in Georgia in 1868 to former slaves, Abbott had lost his father while still an infant. John H. H. Sengstacke, a German immigrant who had been raised in Georgia, became Robert’s stepfather, and the child was raised in small towns in Georgia. Abbott briefly attended two colleges before pursuing training as a printer at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Virginia, which counted Booker T. Washington among its alumni. After graduating in 1896, Abbott came to Chicago, Illinois, where he earned a law degree from Kent College of Law.

Finding the practice of law in Chicago mostly closed to African Americans, Abbott hit upon the idea of creating a newspaper for black readers. He already had printing skills and experience as a reporter with the Savannah Tribune; his stepfather had once established a newspaper. Converting his landlady’s apartment kitchen into an editorial office, Abbott ordered up a 300-copy press run of the Chicago Defender on May 5, 1905. The four-page, six-column broadsheet weekly was a hit.

TAKING A PAGE FROM Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, Abbott gave his copy a sensational sheen and packed his headlines with a melodramatic vocabulary. Living up to its name, the Defender chronicled every racist injustice, from atrocities such as lynchings in the South to discrimination in the North, under its thunderous motto “American Race Prejudice Must Be Destroyed.”

Within a decade of its founding, the weekly’s circulation exceeded 50,000. But the actual number of readers was far greater. “Copies,” said one reader, “were passed around until worn out.” African Americans in the South dared not receive the Defender through the U.S. mail. To do so would tip off watchful whites that they were reading the incendiary sheet, banned by law in some communities. Instead, the paper devised another system to get its issues into the hands of its Southern subscribers. It formed an alliance with Pullman porters, rewarding them financially with payments and editorially with coverage. Each week the men would get bundles of the Defender, store them in their personal lockers on the trains, and drop them off at barbershops and churches along their Southern routes. By 1920, two-thirds of the newspaper’s 130,000 circulation was outside of Chicago. The Defender’s national readership was considered so threatening to racial order that the U.S. government military intelligence created a 64-page report on its circulation growth, complete with maps, as if charting the progress of an invading force.

The Defender was no more solely a Chicago newspaper than the New York Times was merely a New York newspaper. It was America’s black newspaper. Southern readers were fed an endless diet of stories about the prosperous life that awaited blacks in Chicago, accompanied by graphic reminders of the horrors at home. It sparked a migration fever. In turn, the Defender fueled it by providing hard-to-find transportation and resettlement information and each week covered the migrants’ arrivals in Chicago. “I bought a Chicago Defender, and after reading it and seeing the golden opportunity, I have decided to leave this place at once,” wrote a Tennessee man. As a poem the Defender made popular exclaimed:

             I’ll bid the South good-bye

             No longer shall they treat me so,

             And knock me in the eye.

             The Northern States is where I’m bound.

In short, Chicago became the Promised Land.

AS ETHEL PAYNE NEARED the completion of her years at Copernicus Elementary School, the city completed the construction of Lindblom Technical High School. Towering over the squatting wooden bungalows of West Englewood and consuming an entire block, the massive stone edifice was fronted by stout Ionic limestone columns and ornamented in Beaux-Arts style. It was an emblem of civic pride. “The finest high school in the country,” proclaimed the Chicago Tribune.

Just as its design was inspired by Chicago’s new passion for Classical Revival–style architecture, triggered by the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, its education philosophy reflected the fashionable progressive notions of Chicagoans like John Dewey. It offered the usual array of vocational classes in pharmacy, automobile repair, and printing, as demanded by the business community, but the centerpiece of its curriculum was a four-year college prep program.

Lindblom’s facilities and top-notch faculty were intended for white students. But because Payne’s house fell two blocks inside its enrollment district, this educational paradise was open to her. Reaching the school, on the other hand, was not easy. Payne’s parsimonious parents were unwilling to pay the daily fare for the streetcar that rattled down nearby Sixty-Third Street. So instead Payne had to walk the mile to the school and cross Loomis Boulevard, a frontier line past which blacks were not welcomed. “And when you crossed it, boy, you were in all-white territory,” Payne said. She endured taunts, epithets, and the occasional rock thrown at her. “Sometimes I stood my ground, sometimes I got a bloody nose from fighting,” she said. “But that was the way it was.”

It was not much easier for Payne inside the building. She was only one in a handful of black teenagers among the 2,500 students roaming the cavernous, high-ceilinged halls. And there was little sentiment that they were welcomed in their ranks. Only the year before, rough play in a basketball game against a Negro school emptied the stands and sparked a brawl involving more than 200 students. Razors and revolvers were flashed in the melee before police reached the gymnasium. The blame for any violence of this sort was always put on the black students. “White parents are cautious about stirring up trouble,” said one principal, “for they know the emotional tendency of the colored to knife and kill.”

ETHEL PAYNE FOLLOWED LINDBLOM’S college prep curriculum, taking history, English, algebra, geometry, botany, French, and four years of Latin, a requirement her mother, the former Latin instructor, placed on each of her children. But she struggled academically. “I think it was because I was under stress and trauma all the time,” Payne said. She was also, by her own admission, “a daydreamer.” However, to Bessie’s delight, history and English appealed to her, especially English. “My mother, early on, discovered that I had a flair for words and writing, and she encouraged that,” Payne said.

Miss Dixon’s English class provided a second endorsement. A compact woman with black hair parted and drawn back and somewhat masculine features, Margaret Dixon had come to Lindblom from Oak Park, where she had been a favorite teacher of the teenaged Ernest Hemingway, whose novels The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms had just turned him into a household name. The veteran teacher had left her mark on students. “I don’t believe I ever had any professors at Dartmouth or Illinois who were better instructors, and I majored in English,” recalled one of her Oak Park students. Filled with a kind of nervous energy, she talked rapidly and loudly, pushed students to make creative use of their imaginations, and left little doubt about her opinion of a student’s work. “She was,” said another student, “salty in her criticism, proud and full of praise for our efforts, and quite ready to rip at what was not good.”

Payne fell under Dixon’s spell. “She encouraged me to write, and she asked me to do little short stories.” Seeking a subject for a composition, Payne wandered out of her neighborhood and headed northeast to Maxwell Street, well-known for its open-air pushcart market manned by Eastern European Jews. Although the neighborhood was now inhabited mostly by African Americans, Jews continued to remain an important presence on the street. There she found a quiet spot to sit, notebook in hand, taking it all in. “I thought the people on the row were like characters out of a book,” Payne said. She was happy simply recording what she saw. “You could smell the fish frying, you could smell meats cooking and hear the banter that would go on from upstairs and downstairs, as the women sat in the yard and did the quilting.”

At home she read aloud from her efforts to describe what she found on Maxwell Street to anyone in the family willing to listen. Her mother, who was a good writer herself, was a patient listener and would occasionally offer a criticism. “It usually was on grammatical construction more than content,” said Payne. “I don’t think she ever criticized what I was trying to say, so much as she wanted me to have it correct in punctuation and grammatical patterns.”

Payne’s story about Maxwell Street was published in the school newspaper. But despite her journalistic contribution to the paper, joining its staff was not an option for Payne. “It just wasn’t the code at the time,” she said. “It just wasn’t. So the fact that I have even had this accepted was really something.”

One day as English class began, Dixon handed Payne back some of her work. Dixon had scribbled illegibly in the margins. Payne approached her desk. “Miss Dixon, what did you write?” she asked. Smiling, Dixon replied, “Your handwriting reminds me of another pupil I used to have when I taught in Oak Park, Illinois,” referring to her now-famous student.

It was, for Payne, a treasured affirmation.

ONE MONTH AFTER PAYNE started her new life at Lindblom, her father came home from work complaining of a headache. Forty-six years old, strong, and physically fit, William was rarely ill. But this time was different. He soon developed a fever and a rash that turned patches of skin a brownish gray. The pastor’s son, who had just graduated from medical school, was called to the house. He concluded that William had contracted a bacterial infection known as erysipelas, or more commonly called Saint Anthony’s fire, perhaps from the soiled linens on his train runs. In addition, his kidneys were failing. There was little that could be done in the preantibiotic days of the 1920s.

Thelma, the second-oldest child, who was now twenty years old and nicknamed the Boss by her father, mounted the stairs to peek in the room where their father lay. None of the other children were permitted to see him because the doctors feared his condition was contagious. He asked Thelma if she had taken care of the bills that he wanted paid. “I said yes, and he seemed satisfied,” she recalled. “To the last, he was a responsible person looking after the needs of his family.”

On the evening of February 2, 1926, at a few minutes before ten, William Payne died. Ethel couldn’t cope. “It was my first real encounter with death, because people didn’t die that fast in Englewood,” she said. “I was so hysterical about it that a neighbor took me in and kept me.” She even avoided the funeral three days later at St. John’s. “I just couldn’t deal with the idea of death. It was just too alien to me.”

The following month was the snowiest on record in Chicago. Bessie faced a future with six children and no husband to provide for them. William had left a small life insurance policy, and thankfully, the house was paid for. But the loss of his wages was devastating. Bessie’s only remaining income came from her job teaching Sunday school at St. John’s and from her hobby of painting china. Alice, the oldest child, was working at a dressmaking shop, and Thelma, the second eldest, was employed as a public school teacher. Lemuel left school and took a job as a runner with an insurance company but continued taking classes at night. Ethel remained at Lindblom.

In the fall of 1929, Ethel posed for her yearbook photo with a large corsage of small white flowers, her hair tightly combed back, exposing her earrings, and a long strand of pearls falling across her open-necked dress. On January 31, 1930, she received her diploma in a midyear commencement held to accommodate students who entered the school in the winter rather than in the fall. But no inspiring oration or uplifting recessional music could lift the pall cast by the descending economic storm.