The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
—Maya Angelou, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes
Joseph Moore Sr. hated the South.
Born in 1911, my paternal grandfather was the fourth of eight children born to Odelia Richardson Moore and William Moore of Nashville, Tennessee.
Granddaddy witnessed enough episodes of racism to cause him to flee his birthplace.
In the early 1920s, his eldest brother, William, was riding a streetcar when a white woman boarded and demanded that a black woman give up her seat in the colored section. William erupted. Police arrested him, and he served a 30-day chain gang punishment for being an uppity nigger.
Another time William galloped on his horse, Punch, when a group of white boys chased him home. William ran into his house and grabbed a razor blade to protect himself. The boys banged on the front door and accused William of trying to rape a white girl earlier that day.
William’s mother, Odelia, paid a visit to the accuser because she knew the family. The girl professed in front of her mother that teenage William tried to rape her. Incredibly, given the era, the girl’s mother turned to her daughter and said William couldn’t possibly have done so because she had never left the house that day.
Another Moore child, Granddaddy’s older brother McCurtis, faced white brutality and ditched Tennessee out of necessity. After he fought a bunch of white boys, they wanted to kill him. The family hustled McCurtis out of Nashville for New York before the gang showed up on the doorstep. He never returned to live in Tennessee.
Fed-up teenage Joe Sr. ran away to Chicago while in high school to escape the oppressive South. He moved in with Aunt Florence, his father’s sister, and his grandmother Bettie. They were pre–Great Migration migrants, although no one in the family knows why they made their way to Chicago. Joe Sr. worked odd jobs, including at the White Sox ballpark.
Three of my late grandparents voyaged to Chicago as part of the Great Migration, a wave of black Americans who left the South in search of opportunity and a better life. The Goodwins and Moores contributed to building a sturdy black middle class on the South Side. Their family journey is like that of so many black Chicagoans who moved north. Some fled out of fear of southern racial violence, others joined relatives who had already completed the trek or bolted to avoid a life of sharecropping.
Political and economic wealth grew along with culture, and Chicago became the heart of black America. The Great Migration also set the stage for lingering hypersegregation, a division between black and white that has shaped the Chicago experience. It’s as much a part of the city’s legacy as the guitar wailing of Muddy Waters, the powerful words of Richard Wright and the rhythm of the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks.
Frances Harlow Moore, my paternal grandmother, was born and raised in Springfield, Illinois, the Land of Lincoln. Her family had migrated there from Virginia. She ended up in Chicago after visiting an aunt and cousin. After bouncing to Chicago as a teenager, Joe Moore Sr. went to live with his brother in New York but eventually settled back down in Chicago. Joe married Frances and worked as a Pullman Porter and greatly admired union leader A. Philip Randolph. For 40 years he was a member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Granddaddy preferred toiling the longest routes, such as Chicago to Seattle, because it gave him the opportunity to earn more tips, which his daughter, my aunt Joyce, looked forward to counting as a child. The money made a difference in their household. Labor runs in our family, and the practice of good tipping is a result of Granddaddy’s career.
In his later years, Granddaddy served up drinks at the Playboy Mansion, a job he got through the Chicago Urban League. In the 1980s, he took up acting, nabbing roles as a movie extra or in commercials.
On my mother’s side, my grandfather James Goodwin determined after he returned from unloading planes in the South Pacific for the Army in World War II that he wanted to live in either Harlem or Chicago. He represents the second wave of migration, when African American men returned from overseas and didn’t want to suffer segregation down South as they had in the military. During the 1940s, black leaders and the black press demanded equal rights in the Double V Campaign—victory abroad, victory at home. James grew up in Harris County, Georgia, which looks straight out of a set from the film The Color Purple, with its red clay dirt and rural white church accompanied with a backyard family cemetery. The decision to leave came easy because his childhood love, Nina, also a Harris County native, had already moved.
“My father came to Chicago because my mother was here,” my mother, Yvonne, said, laughing. “He was following her. She came because her cousin was here and they were like sisters.”1
This is how the black migrant story worked; it was similar to the immigrant story. Nina’s cousin Clara Kennebrew and husband, L.C., wanted to flee Georgia. L.C. had an aunt in Chicago, so that naturally led the couple to the South Side. They easily enticed Nina up to the Promised Land. An only child whose parents had died, she had nothing to keep her in Georgia.
“My mother said the minute she stepped off the train, she knew where she was and she was happy here,” my mother explained. The feel of the big city, the crackle of the concrete beneath her feet welcomed her. Nina found home when she debarked the train at 12th Street, the beginning of the Black Belt. Concrete must have felt different on her feet than spongy red clay dirt. The bright streetlights and crowds mesmerized the country Georgia woman. Lake Michigan’s ferocious waves clapped against the shoreline. Cold winters allowed her to save up for fashionable wool coats from Marshall Field’s. Public transportation, jitneys and my grandfather in his Buicks or Cadillacs ferried Nina about the South Side, and she never saw the need to get her driver’s license.
My two sets of grandparents bought homes and two-flats in South Side neighborhoods that opened up to blacks in the mid-twentieth century. At one point both families owned additional properties as real estate income. My grandmothers weren’t June Cleavers. Like other black women in their generation, they worked.
The Goodwins lived in Woodlawn, just south of the University of Chicago, and across the alley from Emmett Till, the black teenager killed by white men for allegedly flirting with a white woman while visiting family in Mississippi in 1955. James Goodwin hailed from a family of eight brothers and one sister—he was the only one of his siblings to leave Georgia. Every summer my mother, her parents and younger brother journeyed down South to visit relatives. Sometimes those trips proved a culture shock to young Yvonne, who refused buttermilk in her cereal. (I’ve often wondered what our life would have been like had I been raised in Georgia, where almost everyone in the family goes by a nickname. My grandfather was born Jimmie Lee, but his nephews called him Jake. Chicagoans called him James or Jim. Nina’s people called her Dale. She had three first cousins named Nook, Nump and Gump. Don’t ask how people get these names. I figured I’d probably be christened “Peaches.”) As children in Woodlawn, my mother and her next-door neighbor and cousin, Harriette (the daughter of Clara and L.C.), often walked to the nearby Walgreens on 63rd and Cottage to eat in the nice restaurant with booths. The girls enjoyed gazing out the window and saw this experience as a step up from White Castle. But the duo went there, too, with the kids next door to listen to the jukebox.
Granddaddy Goodwin drank Old Style beer and occasionally played the numbers. He loved Mahalia Jackson. He watched the White Sox and Cubs on television. We’re among the rare families that root for both teams and ignore the South Side–North Side rivalry—except when the teams play each other. Then we’re South Side all day. Every day Granddaddy read the Tribune and often called legendary columnist Mike Royko a racist bastard, even though he kind of looked like Royko and they wore the same glasses. Granddaddy was six feet tall and occasionally mistaken for white. Right after I was born, he retired from RR Donnelley, which printed the first known telephone directory, as a printer. I could always count on him to be a real-life Tooth Fairy or kindly slip me $10 just because.
Grandmommy Goodwin worked as a cook in a Chicago public school and, knowing the conditions in which food was prepared in kitchens, consequently hated eating out in restaurants. At home, she cooked delicious oven-baked short ribs and pound cakes. Grandmommy and I rode the “L” train downtown to her favorite store, Marshall Field’s. In 1980, she and my grandfather left Woodlawn for Park Manor, a ten-minute car ride from our Chatham home. I used to love spending the night at their flat, which boasted plastic covers on the living room furniture, pea-green shaggy carpet, Jesus and MLK on the walls. I stayed up late to watch Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and drink Hawaiian Punch.
Grandmommy Moore, who retired as a secretary for a federal agency, picked me up from elementary school and offered me a hot dog on a toasted bun with Grey Poupon before running me to different beauty shops on the South Side to hot comb my thick hair. That was our special time together. She taught me how to make a lemon meringue pie and called me her pride and joy. My paternal grandparents first lived with their three children in Princeton Park, rental town homes on the South Side that were a step above public housing. Then they bought a house in a South Side neighborhood that had transitioned from white to black. Those railroad tips helped them to home ownership.
By migrating to the South Side, all of my grandparents had good lives. At the time, they likely didn’t contemplate the patterns of housing segregation firmly ensconced in the city. Some of the area’s shoddy housing already had been torn down by the time of this second-wave migration. The fact that they were able to buy their own homes enabled them to avoid some of the violence and horrible discriminatory practices that kept blacks in manufactured black ghettos.
But the housing ills still remained on the South Side, deliberate and repeated. Blacks had choices yanked away from them. Housing policies rewarded people for acting in racist ways and offered few incentives to change. As soon as those black migrants disembarked the trains from Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, white Chicago conspired to keep them in their place in the Jim Crow North.
Black Metropolis
Chicago’s black history begins well before the twentieth-century movement of blacks from southern farms to northern factories. It was a black man who founded the modern-day city. Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, a Haitian fur trader, set up a trading post around 1779 on the banks of Lake Michigan. Quinn Chapel A.M.E. Church served as a station for the Underground Railroad. Ida B. Wells brought her radicalism to Chicago in the late 1800s, a time when black institutions such as churches and hospitals began to thrive.
But the Great Migration forever changed the face and fabric of the city. Between 1916 and 1970, Chicago gained more than 500,000 African Americans.
“Over time, this mass relocation would come to dwarf the California Gold Rush of the 1850s with its one hundred thousand participants and the Dust Bowl migration of some three hundred thousand people from Oklahoma and Arkansas to California in the 1930s. But more remarkably, it was the first mass act of independence by a people who were in bondage in this country for far longer than they have been free,” Isabel Wilkerson writes in The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.
In Chicago, the black population soared from under 44,103 at the start of the Great Migration to more than 1 million by the end.2
But the city didn’t embrace its new residents and consciously confined them to a black ghetto, the Black Belt on the South Side.
Whites didn’t want to live with blacks, much less beach with them.
On a hot summer day in 1919, a Negro boy took a dip into Lake Michigan to cool off and swam in the “white” part of the waters. A race riot broke out, and the boy drowned during the clash. White youth involved in the rioting belonged to so-called athletic clubs, a gentler, race-friendly way to describe white gangs. Future mayor Richard J. Daley belonged to the Hamburg Club, made up of a bunch of tough white boys. His membership wouldn’t stop him from running the city for two decades; in fact, Daley used his leadership in the club to play Democratic politics and get his pals jobs. Violence swept over Chicago for several days, leaving 38 people dead, 537 injured and 1,000 homeless.3
Two years before the riot, the Chicago Real Estate Board appointed a committee to figure out how to deal with the “Negro Problem.” It adopted a report that recommended each block be filled solidly with buildings, with further expansion confined to contiguous blocks to prevent blacks from resettling in white areas.4
But the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down such a segregationist practice in a 1917 Kentucky case, Buchanan v. Warley. Although that decision didn’t result in a general rollback of de jure segregation or lead to integration, it did stop state and local governments from passing more pervasive and brutal segregation laws like those enacted in South Africa.5
Meanwhile, the court case meant little in Chicago, where the color line may not have been as barbarous as in the South but where blacks still suffered their share of housing inequity and ugly racial strife. The northern land of milk and honey at times was sour.
In the 1920s, the real estate profession incorporated restrictions into its code of ethics and added restrictive covenants to property deeds. Racially restrictive covenants prohibited the sale, lease or occupation of a property by African Americans. These covenants would have a long-lasting effect and shape black neighborhoods for decades to come. The Supreme Court upheld this form of segregation with its 1926 dismissal of Corrigan v. Buckley, a case in which a white woman sold her house to a black family in Washington, D.C. Another white homeowner blocked the sale on the grounds that it violated the restrictive covenant.
By 1930, blacks were spatially isolated to a high degree in American cities, with Chicago leading the way. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation was formed in 1933 as part of the New Deal and provided funds for refinancing urban mortgages in danger of default.6 But the Depression-era government program institutionalized redlining, a practice that excluded blacks by color coding black neighborhoods based on loan risks. The lowest color was red, where blacks lived. Redlining influenced lending practices of the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration of the 1940s with regard to blacks.
Chicago blacks experienced a complicated relationship between the metaphorical two homes—the North that was supposed to be the promised land and the South from which they escaped. As Richard Wright observed in an ethnography of Chicago’s Black Belt for the Works Progress Administration:
In the eyes of millions of Negroes the North has long been a haven of opportunity and justice. Many of those who came north did so to escape the sharp competition of southern white labor, to avoid the persecution of petty officers of the southern law and the persecution of the southern press, and to gain the long-denied right of franchise. . . . The above causes of Negro migration existed long before any exodus of Negroes took place. The more immediate and pressing causes were economic and social. The living standards of southern Negroes were abnormally low. Wages were as low as 50¢ per day. Added to this were the boll weevil pests, floods, storms, all of which augmented the hazards of rural life. Other contributing factors were vicious residential segregation and a lack of school facilities.7
Throngs of blacks traveled North to a vibrant metropolis of the 1920s. The black Chicago Defender newspaper encouraged migration and opposed segregation while stealthily having the publication delivered in the South. Thomas Dorsey birthed gospel music inside the city’s Pilgrim Baptist Church in the 1930s. Chicago’s literary and arts renaissance attracted painter Archibald Motley Jr. The South Side Community Arts Center cultivated Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Catlett and Gordon Parks. Chess Records cranked out R&B hits, and the blues scene boomed. Black-owned banks and other institutions opened and supported the community.
A running narrative about life in the Black Belt romanticizes segregation. Even today people who didn’t live in that era wax poetic about how it was good for the black community because doctors lived next to janitors; we had our own institutions and we existed outside of white people. While all of that is true, it doesn’t provide the complete picture of the insidious nature of segregation. Black people didn’t choose to be separate. White people forced them into second-class citizenry. And that led to substandard housing, overcrowded schools or even white hospitals rejecting black patients. Chicago didn’t have visible “white only” or “colored only” signs glued to public places, but the city designed a way for blacks not to fully participate in the freedoms of the North.
In 1945, St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton published Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, a landmark sociological account of black life and the color line on Chicago’s South Side during the 1930s. Drake and Cayton recognized that the Black Belt wasn’t an accident. Poverty, low-wage jobs, juvenile delinquency and high death rates existed because white people did not want blacks in their neighborhoods.
Drake and Cayton wrote: “Black Metropolis has become a seemingly permanent enclave within the city’s blighted area. The impecunious immigrant, once he gets on his feet, may . . . move into an area of second-settlement. Even the vice-lord or gangster, after he makes his pile, may lose himself in a respectable neighborhood. Negroes, regardless of their influence or respectability, wear the badge of color. They are expected to stay in the Black Belt.8
The ghetto created music, nightlife and faith communities but also abnormally high rental costs, blight and overcrowded housing. This wasn’t unique to Chicago.
Decades later, East Coast sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton observed that black segregation is not comparable to segregation experienced by other racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Sustained levels of black residential segregation is not happenstance. “This extreme racial isolation did not just happen; it was manufactured by whites through a series of self-conscious actions and purposeful institutional arrangements that continue today. Not only is the depth of black segregation unprecedented and utterly unique compared with that of other groups, but it shows little sign of change with the passage of time or improvements in socioeconomic status,” they write.9
* * *
When Lorraine Hansberry, the first black woman to have a play produced on Broadway, penned her groundbreaking A Raisin in the Sun in 1958, she no doubt drew from her experiences as a daughter of the South Side of Chicago. When the playwright chronicled how the Younger family sought to leave their black ghetto for white Clybourne Park, Hansberry understood the trouble of integrating a neighborhood. When Karl Linder of the white home improvement association tried to foil the Youngers’ home purchase, Hansberry wrote with authority, for this was the Hansberry family’s story.
In 1937, her father, Carl Hansberry, purchased a home at 6140 S. Rhodes in the white Woodlawn neighborhood, just south and west of the University of Chicago. Supreme Life, one of the largest black-owned insurance companies in the country, located on the South Side, gave him a loan. When the family moved in, white mobs flung bricks through the windows, and one almost struck eight-year-old Lorraine. Her mother, Nannie, a schoolteacher, patrolled the house at night with a gun.
A white woman named Anna Lee brought a lawsuit charging that a restrictive agreement forbidding sales to blacks in the neighborhood had been violated. Lee filed on behalf of the Hyde Park–Woodlawn Improvement Society, and the circuit court and the Illinois Supreme Court upheld Lee’s assertion. The Hansberrys were forced to move.
The Hansberrys nurtured politics and culture. Lorraine’s uncle taught African history at Howard University. Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, W. E. B. Du Bois and Walter White visited their home.10 Carl Hansberry, a prominent real estate businessman, was no stranger to civil rights. He filed a lawsuit in 1938 against Santa Fe Railway, alleging that the company charged African Americans first-class fares but put them in third-class passenger cars. Hansberry lost. After the Illinois State Supreme Court decision upholding the right of white property owners in the Hansberry case, the official student magazine of the University of Chicago, Pulse, published an editorial about the college’s support of restrictive covenants, arguing that Negroes wouldn’t profit from their dissolution “for chiseling landlords would take over in most cases, returning housing to the previous situation, and if not, ‘vigilante’ committees of whites would precipitate riots and force the Negroes from their community.”
Horace Cayton, coauthor of Black Metropolis, responded in the Defender:
Your statement that Negroes would not profit by a dissolution of restrictions because “chiseling landlords would take over in most cases,” is not sound. The entire Negro community is characterized by “chiseling landlords,” but this does not obviate the fact that nearly 200,000 Negro citizens are forced to live in an area which has housing facilities for only 150,000. I might suggest that the “vigilante” committees of whites whom you assume precipitate riots are the same groups which have been organized and financed by the University of Chicago. If that support was withdrawn neither the continued resistance to the expansion of the area, not the possibility for a riot would in all probability obtain.11
Hansberry v. Lee went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1940. Rows of blacks sat in the session to hear arguments.12 Prominent black attorney Earl Dickerson represented Hansberry. The court ruled in favor of Hansberry and invalidated the racial covenant—but the judges didn’t adduce the unconstitutionality of restrictive covenants; the ruling hinged on a technicality. Anna Lee claimed more than 500 land owners had signed the restrictive agreement, which stated that it would be ineffective unless signed by 95 percent of the area owners. According to Dickerson, the required percentage did not sign the agreement, thus violating the contract. He stated that only 54 percent of the owners had signed.13
Nonetheless, the court decision was a welcomed win, and 500 homes in the contested area opened up to blacks. The overcrowded Black Belt was rupturing, and this small victory allowed blacks to move; this is in part why my grandparents were able to move to Woodlawn in the 1940s. In a Defender column, Carl Hansberry reacted: “I feel that the decision will be of tangible and practicable value to both the white and colored citizens of Chicago, and it gives me the courage to continue to fight for the full and complete citizenship rights of the colored citizens of Illinois.”14
The weight of racism reportedly took its toll on Hansberry. He died a month before his fifty-first birthday in 1946 of a cerebral hemorrhage in Mexico, where he had planned to move the family.
Despite the Supreme Court ruling, restrictive agreements continued in Chicago and elsewhere in the United States. But the debate and fight raged on. Blacks organized and whites garrisoned their communities.
The Hyde Park Property Owners, Inc. created a pamphlet on restrictive covenants in 1944 in conjunction with the Federation of Neighborhood Associations, which opposed housing integration. The South Side neighborhood group within University of Chicago borders encouraged property owners to read up on the subject. The group argued that restrictive agreements were:
According to the pamphlet: “Race restrictive covenants do not segregate negroes. They segregate whites. These covenants do not connote prejudice. They have been signed by persons in industrial and professional life whose activities provide employment for thousands of negroes. The living space of negroes is not confined by these agreements.”15
The property owners rested their logic on case precedent. The pamphlet stated:
Race restrictive agreements give protection to a neighborhood, encourage residents to remain in it, stimulate new construction and maintain community morale. They offer permanency of investments, safeguards against the deteriorating influence of undesirable neighbors and good environment for the establishment of homes. They are private contracts between the owners of private property in which the parties agree not to rent or sell such property to certain classes of people. They have been sanctioned by the highest courts of the United States and Illinois.
The pamphlet also listed differences in property values—high on the white North Side, low on the black South Side—to make its case for the restrictions. The association basically endorsed separate but equal. “There may be a city in the United States where negroes are better situated than Chicago but we do not know where that place is. The colored belt on Chicago’s south side occupies as fine a section, geographically, as there is in the city.”
The white property owners saw themselves as sympathetic and altruistic. The pamphlet also talked about new public schools that had been built and how migrating children from the South “have been provided with the same educational opportunities available to all other Chicago children.” As if they weren’t U.S. citizens.
In 1945, the NAACP convened a restrictive covenants conference in Chicago with lawyers from Detroit, Los Angeles and St. Louis in attendance. A year later, the Council Against Racial and Religious Discrimination gathered in a downtown Chicago hotel to figure out how to eliminate restrictive covenants. The two-day summit brought together a wide array of players: the Chicago Urban League, the American Council on Race Relations, members of the Illinois General Assembly, the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP, the YWCA, the Japanese American Citizens League, rabbis, ministers, labor groups, postal workers and lawyers. Earl Dickerson, the black attorney who represented Carl Hansberry, participated.
Conference registration cost $1, and attendees were asked what churchmen, voters, property owners and organized labor could do to end restrictive covenants.
Dickerson, whom J. Edgar Hoover, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, called a communist in 1943,16 instructed the audience on what lawyers could do. Dickerson said that lawyers needed to dwell on the broader aspects of segregation, a social evil, and how restrictive covenants perpetuate the cycle. He argued that the covenants weren’t merely private contracts but powerful tools that threatened the city as a whole because of their unconstitutionality.17
Henry Kohn, an attorney and panel chairman, beseeched property owners who opposed restrictive covenants to educate other property owners. “If, then, all work together to maintain the occupancy standards of the neighborhood, and the physical conditions of the properties, the creation of new slums will be prevented and friction and ill-will between the white and colored residents will be minimized if not eliminated.”
Lawyers and civil rights groups in Chicago and elsewhere kept up the pressure about the appalling nature of housing segregation. They kept pushing the issue of covenants, and in 1948 a case went before the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices finally struck down the restrictive covenants in Shelley v. Kraemer. In this case, the Shelleys, a black family in St. Louis, bought in a white neighborhood controlled by a restrictive covenant. The high court ruled the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection applied in this case to prohibit the enforcement of the covenant, therefore ending this crushing form of racial discrimination. A forerunner to the civil rights movement, the court’s decision had an enormous impact on black America. No longer could white neighborhood groups or powerful institutions endorse or enforce restrictive covenants.
All over the country, neighborhoods opened up. In a mass exodus, black Chicago families left their cramped quarters for South Side neighborhoods that once purposefully excluded them.
But another set of housing obstacles awaited them.
White Flight
If my maternal grandparents had moved from Woodlawn to Park Manor decades earlier instead of in 1980, they undoubtedly would have suffered racial violence.
On July 25, 1949, Roscoe and Ethel Johnson entered their new Park Manor home on 71st and St. Lawrence as the first Negroes on the block. Neither a welcome wagon nor a neighborly pie greeted them. A mob immediately gathered and tried to set the Johnsons’ furniture on fire, burning two mattresses in the process. By nightfall, 2,000 rioters had stoned every window in the house. They hurled oil-soaked burning rags and gasoline-filled containers inside. The Johnsons crawled on their hands and knees to dodge bricks. White people spat on the street, saying “It’s a shame the niggers movin’ in . . . property values will go to hell.”18
Scholar Arnold Hirsch suggests the violence against Roscoe and Ethel Johnson served as a turning point for Park Manor. “Soon thereafter, the First Federal Savings and Loan Association and the Chicago City Bank decided the neighborhood was ‘gone’ and became ‘major lenders’ for blacks entering Park Manor.”19 That change accelerated succession. A white resident said it was easier to move out than to stay. Real estate agents called to see if families wanted to sell. Whites resisted Chicago Urban League efforts to organize block clubs, packed their bags and left en masse. At the same time that black families exited black ghettos, white families refused to be their new neighbors.
The Johnson family tragedy followed a trend. In the late 1940s and 1950s, white mobs rioted when black families moved into white neighborhoods. Arson and vandalism occurred frequently.
The Chicago Commission on Human Relations responded to attacks but influenced the press to not report on them. “The mayor’s Commission on Human Relations has consistently tried to keep racial violence quiet, thus providing protecting for the mob and offering no insurance that it will not happen again,” some young Roosevelt College progressives charged.20
Elsewhere, as the South Side neighborhood Englewood transitioned from white to black, the city discovered that the way black and white families purchased properties differed.21 Speculators bought homes cheaply from whites who panicked at the idea of living in a racially changing neighborhood. Black families bought houses for a low down payment but had to sign an installment contract that left the title to the house in the speculator’s name. Speculators found a shield with land trusts in which the owner’s identity could be hidden from public record. Later the speculators would jack up the contract price, and monthly payments were high. Sellers never gave buyers a grace period if they missed a payment. Contract buyers were responsible for repairs and didn’t reap the benefits of tax deductions from owning a home. Contract buying happened more frequently on the West Side of Chicago, and in the 1960s, black buyers organized to take action against the exploitation.
During this same period, from 1950 to 1960, many South Side neighborhoods swiftly turned over from white to black. White flight received a boost from the public and private sector. Underhanded real estate agents adopted “blockbusting” and “panic peddling” practices to trigger the turnover of white-owned homes to blacks. Agents would scare whites into selling before it was “too late” and “the blacks” lowered their property values. Sometimes agents might hire black subagents to walk or drive through a changing neighborhood to solicit business or behave in such a way to exaggerate white fears. In turn, worried whites would sell their homes cheaply, and panic peddlers would inflate prices to sell the homes to black families, thus hastening white flight. Racial steering, where agents discouraged white buyers from considering racially integrated neighborhoods or steered blacks away from viewing homes in white suburbs, came next.
Whites indeed sought racial refuge in the suburbs. After World War II, suburban areas received preference for residential investment. In the 1950s, Federal Housing Administration financing favored loans in suburbs, which expedited white flight and the decline of cities.
In the decade and a half after World War II, builders constructed 700,000 new houses in the Chicago metropolitan area. Between 1940 and 1960, suburban acreage doubled. Expressways opened in the region to facilitate travel to the new lily-white suburbs.22
Chicago activists pushed for better housing. In 1963, Mayor Richard J. Daley foolishly declared “there are no ghettos in Chicago.” When Martin Luther King Jr. went to Chicago in 1966 to take on the North, Daley recoiled. He disliked the civil rights leader and scoffed at a “Negro” outsider trying to fix his city. King led rallies against the discriminatory housing market, but he realized that his tactics of peaceful nonviolence didn’t work in the brutal North when whites physically attacked him. Daley and King drafted a summit agreement that had no legal standing. King’s housing activism failed in Chicago, and a gleeful Daley let the door slam behind him.23
Meanwhile, other housing efforts started and sputtered.
In the late 1960s, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development began to support open housing experiments. In response to Chicago-area racial residential segregation, the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities conducted an experiment with a goal of providing a link between black inner-city brokers and white suburban real estate boards.
In 1979, appointed monitor Brian J. L. Berry pretty much summed the project up as an abject failure. He concluded that the well-intentioned program did not achieve its primary goal of transforming a dual housing market into one in which the entire stock of housing in the metropolitan area was available to all citizens regardless of race. Scores of white city residents refused to share their neighborhoods with blacks and retreated to the suburbs. Middle-class black residents found a variety of housing at attractive prices in the city and tossed out the idea of becoming pioneer integrationists in the suburbs.24
One far South Side neighborhood did buck the trend of white flight. In 1970, Beverly was 99 percent white. In 2013, it was 62 percent white. Blacks didn’t migrate there in the 1950s after the Shelley v. Kraemer verdict likely because the housing stock cost more in that Irish-Catholic neighborhood than elsewhere on the South Side. Some whites living in Beverly had already fled neighborhoods that had changed over from white to black, and Beverly signified the end of the road for them.
Some white homeowners feared Beverly’s fate as a new black ghetto if integration happened, but other residents recognized the inevitability of integration. One resident completed flip-chart presentations around Beverly with that very message.25 The community banded together to quell white fears, welcome its new black neighbors and battle the crafty real estate industry. The head of the Beverly Area Planning Association (BAPA), which adopted a new mission statement that celebrated diversity, said, “White families in urban areas must realize they can’t run away from blacks. And they must realize that middle-class blacks and whites both want the same things—good schools, good services, low crime rate. At the same time, blacks are realizing that a neighborhood that is all one race increases the process of deterioration.”26
BAPA convinced homeowners to sign “letters of agency” to prevent unauthorized solicitation from real estate agents. These letters asserted that homeowners had no intention of selling. BAPA kept the letters on file and served “uncooperative” real estate firms with notices to cease solicitation. Homeowners also refrained from putting for-sale signs in their yards. In 1977, my aunt and uncle were among the first black families to move to Beverly and were the first on their block. That year, there, someone threw rocks through the living room window of their tri-level home. They assumed the action was racially motivated.
Beverly isn’t perfect or without racial turmoil. I have a friend whose family moved there in the 1970s, and someone scribbled “nigger” on their garage. The family left the word up for a while to rattle their neighbors into understanding racism. Black boys recall stories in the 1990s of being bullied by white boys and police officers. Nonetheless, Beverly has maintained integration and is viewed as a model in the region. My parents moved to the area in 1996 because they wanted a bigger house and a healthier investment.
In the mid-1980s, Beverly, and a dozen integrated southern and western suburbs, conducted a testing program in which black and white couples of comparable incomes posed as potential home buyers to see how real estate agents treated them. According to BAPA, white testers were discouraged from racially integrated areas and black testers usually were steered away from homes in predominantly white suburbs. My Beverly aunt and late uncle participated as testers and experienced steering firsthand.27
BAPA sued four southwest suburban real estate firms for steering blacks to Beverly only. White clients were told they wouldn’t want to live there because they’d be uncomfortable in an integrated neighborhood. BAPA lost the first case and settled the other four. Real estate agents went through training on better practices and struck back, suing BAPA and accusing the organization of trying to keep suburban brokers from doing business in Beverly and Morgan Park. BAPA prevailed against the lawsuit.
It seems that fear guides housing attitudes in Chicago every decade—a potent combination that leads to bad government policies.
When voters elected Harold Washington as the city’s first black mayor in 1983, many white ethnic communities panicked. The white working-class bungalow belt of the Southwest and Northwest Sides feared blacks would be their new neighbors and cause a decrease in their property values.
In response, they created a program to prevent white flight in the form of three home equity districts in which taxes are collected. The money goes into a fund that functions as a kind of insurance program—homeowners could file a cash claim if the house value dropped upon selling. Initially, Washington supported the tax program, but he changed his mind once black aldermen objected.28
Very few claims have been filed, and most were related to the housing crisis of the late 2000s. But, curiously, the program still exists amid changing neighborhood demographics that include a surge in Latino home ownership. Some communities have a tiny black population. But the home equity districts still collect cash and are flush with it—with little oversight or imagination on how to spend the money. I wouldn’t mind paying a few extra bucks on a tax bill to go into a community pot that could help economic improvement, streetscaping or other neighborhood needs.
* * *
My family doesn’t have many relics of its journey to Chicago. Relatives in Nashville preserved a stack of faded and some illegible letters between them and Chicago loved ones in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. Family members penned correspondence divulging home remedies for sickness, drama with a cousin’s health, wedding announcements and sometimes banalities of life. One letter mentioned my grandfather Joe. His grandmother Bettie Moore and aunt Florence moved from Nashville to Chicago before the official start of the Great Migration. When Bettie didn’t receive a response from her son William and daughter-in-law Odelia, she sent a pleading letter.
May 10, 1927
Mrs. Odelia Moore
Dear Son & Daughter
I thought I would write to you all again. This is my 3rd letter I have wrote to you all and I haven’t heard from you all yet. Why don’t you all write to me. This leave me not feeling so well. But I do trust that this will find you all well and doing well. Well Odelia Sunday was Mothers Day and Joe Edward came to see me. I know him as soon as I looked up and saw. He has eyes so much like William Jr. He gave me 50 cents. . . . 29
Bettie Moore actually had been in Chicago at least ten years when she wrote that letter. She was dying in a nursing home when my grandfather came to see her. Her letter asked for home remedies because she was too poor to pay for the doctor, which speaks to how blacks were living in poverty in Chicago.
My great-aunt Martha Pratt is my family’s oldest living relative in Chicago. She’s a retired public high school math teacher who came to Chicago in the late 1940s when her husband sought greater opportunity for his pediatric dentistry practice. They had been living in Hot Springs, Arkansas—a place too slow and sleepy for an ambitious black couple.
After a bad fall in 2013, Aunt Martha moved into a rehab facility. Her memory is a bit hazy, but she’s alert and aware. “I’m an old chicken,” she told me, laughing.30 “Don’t you hope you get this old.” Silver hair in a French braid, few wrinkles on her smooth peanut butter skin.
On one of my Sunday visits, Aunt Martha greeted me with “Give me a little sugar, girlfriend” before asking me to flip the television to the Chicago Bears football game. I wanted to jog her early memories of the South Side.
In 1935, Martha, then 14, stayed the whole summer with Aunt Florence, a devout Catholic.
“I just wanted to come to Chicago. Chicago sounded big to me—a country girl from Nashville, Tennessee.” Martha didn’t remember what neighborhood her aunt lived in. I imagine how Chicago must have looked to her, a place where she could roam freely in a way she could not in her native Nashville. Plus she was only 14. For Martha and others who came North, Chicago offered emotional freedom.
Martha did remember spending her days walking around a shopping area. “I’d window shop and look at myself in the mirror in the windows and say ‘here I am in big old Chicago.’ I was very proud of that trip.”
The city and family influenced her. Martha returned to Nashville a Catholic, changed her middle name from Ritter to Rita after the saint and declared herself no longer a Baptist. But Martha never thought she’d one day live in Chicago.
By the time she moved to Chicago as an adult, Martha believed the city offered her greater opportunity. In Hot Springs, Arkansas, she was offered only middling teaching positions or the opportunity to work in the bathhouses. “I don’t think I’d be nearly as far along. The opportunities were greater here. I lived better,” she told me.
Martha still owns her house in a formerly white neighborhood on the South Side—“I never thought of living in a white neighborhood. You don’t ask for trouble”—has a handsome retirement and played tennis and bridge for years.
Despite its benefits, the North presented its share of problems and, at times, angered my grandparents.
In the 1960s, my grandmother walked my teenage father to a neighborhood store to apply for a job bagging groceries. The store would not provide an application because they were “not hiring colored.” Dad ended up working as an usher at Orchestra Hall. Our cousin Roberta, well-traveled and sophisticated, sang with the symphony choir and got him that job. Once on a family vacation to Michigan, Joe Sr. pulled over to a roadside cafe to purchase a cup of coffee. When they wouldn’t serve him, his children thought he was going to blow up. Anger puts it mildly. He had to be calmed down, my father recalled.
Granddaddy Moore and Grandmommy Goodwin didn’t particularly care for the South and eventually either limited their visits or stopped going altogether. I never once knew my grandmother to travel back. Once my mother and Granddaddy took the three of us children to Georgia for a Goodwin family reunion. When we pulled up to Grandmommy’s old house, which was dilapidated by then, my mother advised me not to take photos because Grandmommy wouldn’t be interested in traveling down memory lane.
Joe Sr. continued to visit his mother and take his family to Tennessee. When he did return, he couldn’t shield his children from second-class citizenry that repulsed him.
One Nashville summer during the 1950s, my father and his younger brother wandered out of a five-and-dime store. They were old enough to read but younger than ten. “We were thirsty and we saw these two water fountains. One said ‘colored’ and one said ‘white,’” my father remembered. The brothers looked at each other and asked what that meant. “And I said ‘I don’t know. But remember, Mama said things are gonna be different down here and we’re used to drinking white water.’” They interpreted the Jim Crow signs to mean white water as clear and shunned the “colored” water. As their lips touched the “white” water, “that’s when Uncle Johnny and Daddy picked us up from the back and held us,” my father recalled. “And I must admit, looking back, that was the first time I’ve ever seen fear in the eyes of my father and my uncle. They were looking around and we had no idea what was going on. They took us home and I remember Grandma Moore said something like ‘were you followed?’”31 Odelia Moore had plenty of experience shepherding her sons out of the South because of white violence and didn’t want that for her young northern grandsons.
My grandparents lived the American Dream. The Great Migration provided opportunities for their progeny not afforded to them. Their children were first-generation college graduates, and their legacy trickles down to their grandchildren.
When I graduated from Howard University in 1998, Granddaddy Goodwin was the only grandparent who attended. My grandmother Nina had Alzheimer’s and my other grandfather was too sick. My paternal grandmother, Frances, had died of cancer in 1988. James Goodwin flew to the ceremony and said he would have walked to Washington, D.C., to see me graduate. Afterward, I heard him brag to neighbors back in Chicago about all the black people he saw walk across the stage. My diploma meant the world to a man who never finished third grade.
He died in 2004, almost a year after my grandmother Nina. Joe Sr. died in 1999.
All four of my grandparents are interred at the historic Oakwood Cemetery on the South Side. Jesse Owens, Ida B. Wells and Harold Washington are buried there, in the largest Confederate burial ground in the North. Granddaddy Goodwin would have preferred to be buried in the Georgia cemetery behind the white church in the country with his siblings and parents, but my grandmother didn’t want her remains in the South. Georgia was no longer her home. Chicago was.