Clarence T. Allen, publisher of the famed Chicago Defender newspaper, sat behind an enormous oak desk in a spacious office with walls covered with framed black-and-white prints, an illustrated timeline of African American culture. The steely smile of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black congresswoman, adjacent to the unnerving photo of Martin Luther King Jr. being pelted by bottles and rocks during his march in Chicago. A who’s who of civil rights luminaries, from A. Philip Randolph to Julian Bond, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Medgar Evers, had been captured at this most courageous moment, frozen in time and now gleaming behind glass-covered frames.
Allen’s great-grandfather had started the newspaper in the early 1900s out of the tiny kitchen in his landlord’s apartment and with an initial investment of twenty-five cents. The first press run totaled three hundred copies, but by the start of World War I, it had become the country’s most influential Black weekly newspaper, and one of the biggest influences to spark the Great Migration that saw more than six million African Americans flee the oppressive South for better opportunities in other parts of the country.
Allen, barely over five feet and not weighing more than a bag of ice salt, stood as I entered. He offered a firm handshake and wide smile. He wore a light blue shirt, gold tie, and suit pants held up by suspenders. His gray mustache and hair shined against the deep blackness of his skin.
“I haven’t seen you since you were knee-high to a grasshopper,” he said, settling back into his chair. “Your mother used to bring you to the tennis courts in your stroller, and you’d get out with a small tennis racquet and run as long as they’d let you. You had a great swing, even then.”
“Well, it’s been a while since I’ve swung on a tennis court. Most of my swings are on the golf course now.”
“So your father tells me. Not exactly his favorite topic.”
“My father always thought he’d be sitting in the player’s box at Wimbledon, watching me in all whites on the grass. But what can you do? Life happens.”
“Fathers can always dream,” Clarence said.
I looked at the large photo hanging behind Clarence’s desk. He and Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black mayor, stood next to each other at a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Two congressmen stood on Clarence’s right, and Reverend G. T. McCaskill, the founder of South Baptist and father of its current preacher, Harlan McCaskill, stood to the left of the mayor.
“Did you know Bishop Thompson?” I asked.
“Not as well as some of the other clergymen, but we were acquaintances,” Clarence said. “I actually went to college with his father. Damn good quarterback at Hampton. Should’ve gotten drafted in the NFL, but back then, they didn’t take players from the Black colleges, and they certainly didn’t want any Black quarterbacks. Keegan was built just like his father, but he never wanted to play. He was more into the social life.”
“How did you hear about his passing?”
Clarence got up, walked over, and closed the door, then sat in a chair next to mine instead of returning behind his desk.
“One of our stringers heard the call over the police frequency,” Clarence said. “He didn’t know it was Keegan, but he heard there was an unresponsive young male who wasn’t breathing and presumed dead in an apartment on Thirty-Fifth Street. The stringer was just a few blocks away, so he got dressed and went to the location. He arrived before the police and got upstairs to the apartment. The guy who lived in the apartment was standing outside, all shaken up. The stringer talked his way into the apartment, took several photographs, then left just as the police and paramedics arrived.”
“Did he know it was Thompson?”
“He didn’t recognize him but saw the man’s pants lying next to the bed and a small envelope sticking out of the back pocket. It had the name Bishop Thompson written across it. When the stringer got home, he looked up Thompson on the internet and realized it was the famous LA preacher. He called my deputy, who called me right away and told me what happened.”
“Who has the pictures?”
“I do,” Clarence said, getting up and walking to a filing cabinet next to his desk. He opened the top drawer and pulled out a folder, then handed it to me before sitting back down.
I opened the folder and pulled out five photographs. A muscular Black man was lying face down on a small bed. He wore what looked like a one-piece wrestling uniform, except it had only one arm strap, and instead of there being shorts, it ended in a tight bikini that didn’t cover the entirety of his bottom. His hands and legs had been stretched apart and tied by leather straps to the bedposts. The next photograph was a close-up of his face. His eyes were open, and his mouth and nose were submerged in what looked like vomit. The third photograph was of a pair of women’s high-heeled shoes resting next to the bed. The fourth photograph focused in on his ankles and the leather restraints. I noticed the becket bend knot right away, the same knot used to tie up Elliott Kantor. The fifth photograph was of Thompson’s wrists and their restraints. They also had been tied by the same knot.
“Not exactly how you’d expect to find one of the country’s most prominent African American preachers,” Clarence said. “In a small, second-floor walk-up one-bedroom above a thrift store in Bronzeville.”
I nodded. “Whose apartment was he in?”
Clarence reached over to his desk and grabbed a piece of paper sitting on top of a stack of magazines. He put on his reading glasses and said, “Guy’s name is Malcolm Boyd. Twenty-eight years old. He’s lived in that apartment for just over two years. He declined to give out any more personal information. He said he came home and found this dead man in his bedroom. He denied knowing the man or ever having seen him before. He wouldn’t answer any more questions and asked the reporter to leave him alone.”
“The story you published didn’t have any of this information,” I said.
Clarence smiled patiently. “Ashe, let me explain something,” he said. “My great-grandfather started this paper because we didn’t have a voice, and because the white media either didn’t cover our stories or, when they did, they were full of lies and bias. They only wanted to talk about us when it was something salacious to report. They didn’t have anything to say about our successful businesses, college graduates becoming doctors and lawyers and teachers. We invented things, and they always found a way to attribute our inventions to someone else. This paper, along with others, like the Amsterdam News, was started so that we could celebrate our people and communicate to others across the country what was happening to our community. Yes, we covered crimes and politics and news that wasn’t always the most uplifting; we are journalists, after all. But my family has always been sensitive to what we publish and how we publish it, as it can have a deep and lasting impact on the image and psyche of our people. The Sun-Times or the Trib would’ve put this story on their front page, embarrassing photographs and all. That’s not what our paper is about. Whatever Thompson was doing in that apartment and who he was doing it with is a private matter. There’s no public good achieved by airing his dirty laundry.”
I nodded. I just didn’t know how long the details of Thompson’s death could be kept out of the headlines. Malcolm Boyd, the man whose apartment he was found in, knew, as did the officers and paramedics who responded. I was surprised the information hadn’t leaked already. Someone had put a lock on it.
“Did your stringer get Malcom Boyd’s phone number?” I asked.
“Yes, Darryl has it,” Clarence said. “He’ll tell you what he knows. I’ve already authorized him to speak freely with you.”
I stood to leave, and Clarence wrote the number on a loose piece of paper, then handed it to me. He said, “Your father says you’re working on another case that’s similar to this, and somehow this might help.”
“I’m not sure yet,” I said. “There seem to be a couple of similarities, but I won’t know for sure until I dig into it a little more. Might be nothing more than a strange coincidence.”
I left the Chicago Defender building knowing full well that those becket bend knots and the cross-dressing connected Bishop Keegan Thompson’s death to that of Elliott Kantor. I just didn’t know how.