THREE
White and Black
CITY AT WAR
On June 14, 1942, an estimated 400,000 Chicagoans marched in a parade that snaked through more than fifty miles of the city’s streets and lasted more than seventeen hours. The event was held to commemorate Flag Day, a holiday that would not attain official status until 1949 but had been celebrated by cities and towns across the nation since at least the 1880s. In fact, Chicago’s first recorded Flag Day celebration was in 1894, when a reported 300,000 children from its public schools rallied around American flags in parks across the city. But this was the first such celebration since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and thus there was a much more pronounced sense of purpose in the air. Coming in the twilight of an era of bitter labor strife, Chicago’s Office of Civilian Defense organized the affair so as to demonstrate the city’s irreproachable spirit of national unity. While few in the labor movement had forgotten the horror of the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937, when police had gunned down ten members of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee on a prairie near Republic Steel, the procession saw nearly every branch of organized labor marching in step with thousands of local manufacturers and business organizations. Moreover, the patriotic spirit on display in this parade was hardly exclusive to the world of business and work. Every neighborhood affiliated with the Office of Civilian Defense marked its proud participation by contributing a float representing some aspect of the Civilian Defense movement.
Chicago was certainly not alone in its enthusiasm for supporting the war effort on the home front. No war in American history had ever witnessed such a clear consensus of support, nor has any since. While World War I saw some 12 percent of draftees refusing to report or deserting training camps, only 0.5 percent tried to avoid serving during the Second World War. Even black leaders who were vocal critics of the American racial order during the war years, calling upon the government to fight racism at home as zealously as it fought fascism overseas, seldom publicly staked out positions opposing the war itself. World War II was already being mythologized as the “good war” even before American troops set foot on overseas battlegrounds. Although some sense of a national mission in the world had been a fixture of American political life since the revolutionary era, World War II was perhaps the first moment when such ideas became popular heartfelt sentiments rather than merely the rhetorical flourishes of statesmen and civic leaders. And they were sentiments felt in the hearts of a range of ethnic Americans who not so long before, in the years prior to the Democratic Party’s New Deal embrace of “new” immigrants and ethnics from southern and eastern Europe, had found themselves on the outside of American mainstream culture and political life. Prohibition, the antivice crusades, and the moral panic around real-life and filmic gangsters in the 1920s and 1930s all reflected the outsider status of these immigrants and their American-born children. But now their association with the “good war” was promising to deliver them into the ranks of “good” Americans, a message Hollywood drove home on the big screen with a spate of war films like Sahara (1943) and Purple Heart (1944) that depicted multiethnic bands of Americans overcoming their cultural differences and pulling together to save the day.1
What was playing out on the streets of Chicago during this Flag Day parade, however, was as much a managed form of civic boosterism as some kind of interethnic solidarity. Regardless of the importance of national unity on the home front to the cause of winning the war, Chicago found itself competing with other industrial cities for a slice of the war production pie being served up by the federal government. Chicago’s industrial production, after all, had not rebounded from the depths of the Great Depression as quickly as that of many other cities across the nation, and some still feared a renewal of the bitter labor conflict of past years. In fact, in the months leading up to the parade, Mayor Kelly had complained publicly that while the city had received defense orders in steel, railway car construction, and food processing, Chicago was still not getting its fair share. Attracting more defense contracts, as Kelly and the Cook County Democratic Party leadership well understood, hinged on demonstrating that Chicago was a city in which employers and employees knew how to work together to keep production flowing smoothly. This became especially critical as its neighbor to the east, Detroit, began to witness a wave of labor disputes, wildcat strikes, and production slowdowns that led a reporter for Life magazine to exclaim, “Detroit can either blow up Hitler or it can blow up the U.S.”2 Chicago, by contrast, would boast at war’s end that not one single labor stoppage had prevented a shipment of goods from going out on time, a situation attributable, on the one hand, to the local influence of the less militant American Federation of Labor, and on the other, to Mayor Kelly’s excellent rapport with union leaders. Kelly had so thoroughly wiped from his hands the blood of the Memorial Day Massacre that in the 1939 mayoral elections a steelworker whose eye had been shot out by police in the affair had gone on the radio to endorse his candidacy. Moreover, Kelly’s tolerance of vice and gambling had earned him the blessings—not to mention the kickbacks—of organized crime kingpins, which also contributed to his appeal to the labor movement.
Yet Chicago’s bid for a leadership role in the national war effort rested not merely on the cooperation of its workforce. The Kelly administration had strived to show from the war’s outset that war mobilization in Chicago did not begin and end on the factory floors. Having moved into its Loop headquarters scarcely one week after the war had been declared, Chicago’s Office of Civilian Defense (OCD) lost little time in launching war bond promotions, enlistment campaigns, salvage collection initiatives, and blood drives. Women planted victory gardens, gathered old kitchen utensils, siphoned off cooking fats, baked cakes for soldiers staying at one of the city’s servicemen centers, and eagerly participated in preparedness drills. The public school system ran a salvaging drive for tin, rubber, and scrap metal that had schoolchildren bringing 1,500,000 pounds of scrap to school in toy wagons and wheelbarrows.
The enormous success of these efforts—Chicago led the nation in enlistments, war bond sales, blood donations, and salvage materials collected—was due, in part, to the fact that the city already possessed a vertical chain of command structure par excellence. Since elections were fought like wars in Chicago, the Democratic Party machine was already set up for regimented, block-level mobilization. Chicago’s OCD thus broke up the city into divisions, zones, and finally blocks, each of which was led by a block captain. The block captain was to be elected and was supposed to hold meetings with his neighbors to apprise them of new developments. The mayor’s office referred to these as “New England town meetings,” but the modus vivendi here was, in reality, much more homegrown.3 That is to say, the roughly twenty thousand block captains in wartime Chicago were much less community organizers than operatives in the chain of command; they enforced participation in blackouts and preparedness drills, helped the OCD investigate the background of citizens, and looked out for draft dodgers, black marketeers, and suspicious characters.4
Chicago’s mobilization plan was so effective that the federal government adopted it as the model for the entire nation. And yet, despite such impressive results and despite Kelly’s frequent lobbying trips to Washington, federal dollars were still not flowing into Chicago at a rate satisfactory to its political and business establishment. That began to change, however, in the second half of 1942, when the city began to see more of the $24 billion that the federal government would spend on military supply orders by the end of the war. This money was divided between more than 1,400 contractors in the Chicago region, leading to a broad-based industrial boom that saw the construction of more than three hundred new manufacturing facilities and the expansion or improvement of nearly one thousand others. Pullman built tanks; International Harvester produced military tractors, torpedoes, and artillery shells; Douglas Aircraft turned out C-54 transport planes; and Dodge-Chicago built engines for the famed B-29 Superfortress bombers in a new plant that employed 31,000 people and cost nearly $100 million. Nor was such high-paced economic activity restricted to the heavy industries. Baxter Laboratories, for example, developed the first sterile, vacuum-type blood collection and storage container, the enormous demand for which required the construction of two temporary plants; its main competitor in that area, Abbott Laboratories, shipped millions of water purification tablets overseas and began the first mass commercial production of penicillin. The communications technology firm Western Electric developed military radar systems, while forty of the city’s electronics factories combined efforts to produce over half the communications equipment utilized by the U.S. military during the war.
This rush of production activity set Chicago in continuous and fast-paced motion, causing far-reaching changes in the usual arrangements and rhythms of family life. Companies that had laid off thousands of workers in the 1930s were now desperate for new hires to operate assembly lines around the clock. With the departure of so many fathers to battlefields overseas, the federal government looked to mothers to help fill the gap in the labor supply. Winning the “good war” was going to take the participation of even middle-aged mothers who had long given up on aspirations for a career, let alone one in the manufacturing sector. Exhorted by government-sponsored posters picturing a sturdy but comely Rosie the Riveter rolling up her blue denim shirt sleeve to expose a flexed bicep beneath the phrase “We Can Do It!,” nearly four million homemakers entered the labor force during the war. For many of these women, the decision to start punching the clock reflected a sense of patriotic duty. For many more, however, it was an act of economic necessity. The Great Depression had ravaged savings accounts and living standards, and the allotment checks that were supposed to sustain the families of servicemen did not go nearly far enough. Yet even though working mothers were vital to the war mobilization and a boon to employers, who paid them 65 percent of what they paid male employees doing comparable work, social conservatives saw them as threatening cherished values of motherhood and female domesticity and ultimately placing the nation’s youth in grave danger. One of the most strident critics of working mothers was director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation J. Edgar Hoover. Having rallied in the 1930s against the nefarious effects of gangster movies on the minds of youths, Hoover now turned to the problem of neglected children on the home front, arguing that “boys and girls” were the nation’s “most priceless . . . asset,” and “their preservation [was] as important as any objective in this war.”5
Concerns voiced by social conservatives about the sanctity of traditional gender roles quickly became subsumed by a more generalized sense of anxiety about the state of the nation’s youth. With so many fathers away fighting the war and mothers increasingly entering the workforce, Americans worried about who was watching the children after school. A range of problems arising from this lack of supervision materialized in the mainstream press—from “latchkey children” locked alone in their homes to “victory girls” engaging in casual sexual adventures with soldiers out of a misplaced sense of patriotic duty, to juvenile delinquents carousing all night with street gangs. As a vital war producer and key stopover for servicemen travelling between the coasts, Chicago was touched by these trends as much as any city, and the local press reported on such issues as if they were, as Hoover believed, matters of national security. Criminologists urged police to crack down on the immoral activities of victory girls, who threatened to spread an epidemic of venereal disease through the ranks of servicemen, and to impose curfews in order to keep wild youths off the streets. One article on the “alarming” increase in the juvenile delinquency rate in the Chicago Tribune went so far as to claim that divorce and delinquency were “breaking up Chicago homes far faster than battle front casualties.”6
Such hyperbole in one of Chicago’s more sober newspapers suggests that the various incarnations of the youth problem taking the stage during World War II were more symbolic than real. Despite the public outcry about latchkey children, wild youths, and victory girls, the citywide juvenile delinquency epidemic that experts kept predicting never really materialized. Even the moderate rises in juvenile delinquency rates that were recorded in wartime Chicago could have merely reflected changes in law enforcement practices and data collection methods that occurred in response to the increasing perception of a juvenile delinquency problem.7 Moreover, all the attention paid to the mothers who heeded Rosie the Riveter’s call was somewhat exaggerated. In fact, while the labor force participation of women between the ages of 35 to 44 showed significant gains, the change was relatively minimal for women in the prime childbearing years of 20 to 34.
Rather than indicating actual behavioral changes among youths, the wartime delinquency crisis reflected uncertainties and anxieties linked to the realities of everyday life on the home front. Chicagoans, it should be remembered, received daily reminders of the sacrifices being made by soldiers. By the second half of 1943, as death tolls rose precipitously, hundreds of memorial plaques were hanging on street sign poles, and residents across the city were assembling in parks and on street corners to pay their tributes to fallen soldiers. Around this same time, moreover, the draft began to draw even more fathers and sons into service, creating more and more agonized mothers and guilt-plagued brothers. While such circumstances characterized cities across the nation, the intensity of Chicago’s war mobilization campaign seemed particularly effective in reaching into communities and turning the force of neighborly scrutiny upon those failing to carry their load. How else to explain the city’s national leadership in enlistments and war bond purchases? Mayor Kelly’s management of Chicago’s wartime labor force was so extensive that in January 1943 he organized a Noise Abatement Commission to ensure that war production workers were not awakened by unnecessary noises.
Yet as successful as Chicago’s OCD had been in the first few years of the war, it could not prevent the malaise that spread throughout the city beginning around the summer of 1943. With factories running at full throttle day and night and a sizable segment of the labor force trying to adjust to eight-hour night shifts starting at 11:00 P.M., Chicago newspapers began to report on poorly attended civil defense meetings and waning interest in war bond and salvage drives. In addition, the class tensions that had been subsumed by civic boosterism and patriotism in the initial years of the war began to resurface—not at work but in the sphere of consumption, as working-class Chicagoans began to complain that their more wealthy neighbors were buying restricted commodities on the black market and hoarding them. Once again, much like the delinquency crisis of this same moment, it is difficult to know the extent to which the circumstances being reported by the press actually reflected shifts in consciousness and behavior. Such stories could have been placed on the desks of editors by a mayor’s office worried about indiscipline and apathy in the ranks. That the OCD was thinking along these lines was revealed in February 1944, when it created the Committee for Patriotic Action to help pick up morale around the city, a move suggesting that the malaise being covered by the local media was palpable. In view of the physical and psychological conditions characterizing daily life on the home front—the gut-wrenching concern over loved ones overseas, the disruptions in lifestyles and household routines, the grinding work regimen, and the heightened sense of patriotic duty owed in view of those risking their lives for the country—it would have been surprising if Chicagoans had reacted in any other manner.
BLACK MIGRATION AND WHITE RESPONSE
Chicago was surely not alone in translating this social upheaval into concerns over its children. The wartime juvenile delinquency crisis was national in scope—a matter taken up by a U.S. Senate subcommittee chaired by Florida senator Claude Pepper in November 1943. That many of the testimonies before this subcommittee tended to place the blame for wayward youths on working mothers revealed the extent to which anxieties about children intermingled with uncertainties surrounding the new place of women in the workforce. Yet working women and wild children were not the only forces turning the world upside down during the war years. In fact, the hearings of the Pepper Committee were prompted, at least in part, by another situation that was threatening public safety and unity on the home front. The summer of 1943 had witnessed the explosion of major race riots in three key war production centers—Los Angeles, Detroit, and New York—and the outbreak of near riots in numerous other cities where the higher wages offered by war production employers had drawn hundreds of thousands of African American migrants from the rural South. Once again America’s youths moved to the center of discussions about another wartime social problem. However, in the case of America’s race problem, as it presented itself to the country in 1943, the correlation with youths was not so abstract. The riots in Los Angeles, commonly referred to as the “Zoot Suit Riots,” featured mobs of young white servicemen hunting down and beating Mexican and black youths clad in stylish, baggy zoot suits, which flaunted rationing restrictions on textiles and emblematized the affiliation of their wearers to a nightlife scene that valorized “kicks” over patriotic duty. In Detroit, zoot suiters and white teens clashed for weeks around the city before a skirmish between black and white youths in a crowded park ignited a three-day riot that resulted in thirty-four fatalities. And in New York, rumors surrounding a police bust gone wrong in a Harlem flophouse brought thousands of young blacks into the streets, with zoot suiters, according to many eyewitnesses, leading the way.8
The riots of the hot summer of 1943 were among the first spasms of a much broader and longer-lasting movement of white resistance to the massive flow of Southern black migrants to the urban North and West. Pushed from the South by the mechanization of cotton farming and the collapse of cotton prices on the world market in the 1930s, black migrants packed all they could carry and boarded trains heading to big war production cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and New York. Believing they would find good jobs, better schools, and a friendlier racial climate, many migrants viewed such destinations as the “promised land.” Referred to by historians as the “Second Great Migration,” this demographic shift began in the early 1940s and continued through the 1960s, dramatically reconfiguring the landscape of American politics in the process. The estimated five million blacks relocating from the South to the North and West between 1940 and 1970 accomplished nothing short of urbanizing the vast majority of the black population, nationalizing the problem of race, transforming the cultural landscape of the urban North, and redefining party politics throughout the country.
In the postwar decades the Democratic Party would begin staking its electoral hopes on strategies that sought to align blacks, the white working class, and liberals behind federal programs that promised solutions to racial and social inequalities, and its Republican Party foe would increasingly rally its base behind values of individualism, color blindness, small government, and the free market in order to fend off the challenges of racial liberalism. On the local level, moreover, metropolitan politics would never be the same again. Big city mayors—those of Chicago perhaps most of all—would have to figure out the calculus of attracting black votes and losing white ones, and middle-class suburban residents would turn towards the politics of erecting barriers between themselves and inner-city blacks. The geographical and demographic swelling of black ghettos in the urban North between the 1940s and the 1970s paralleled their expansion in the American psyche. Blues, jazz, funk, soul, disco, hip hop, rap, gangs, drugs, prostitutes, riots, poverty, unemployment, welfare, immorality, fear, and hate circulated through dark ghettos that most Americans would increasingly view only through the prism of the mass media or through the windows of cars speeding safely above them on highway overpasses such as Chicago’s Skyway, constructed between 1956 and 1958 to swiftly convey automobiles over communities like Greater Grand Crossing, whose black population would increase from 6 to 86 percent in a single decade as whites fled the advancing ghetto.
Edward Kelly was one of several Chicago mayors to tangle with the prickly politics of race within this shifting landscape, and his downfall would come, in part, because he underestimated just how intensely many white Chicagoans loathed the idea of having blacks as neighbors. In a somewhat ironic twist, while the city of Chicago would go on to have one of the more tumultuous and eventful histories of race relations in the two decades following the Second World War, it was spared a spectacular explosion of racial violence in the spring and summer of 1943—even though there was no lack of sparks to ignite the fuse. In May 1943, for instance, just about three weeks before the Los Angeles riots, two white police officers shot a sixteen-year-old black student several times in the back after he allegedly hurled rocks at them. If that was not enough, shortly after the incident the boy’s father received a note threatening the same fate for him if he did not “keep his mouth shut” and move from his home in the South Side’s Morgan Park neighborhood.9 Days later, hundreds of angry citizens gathered to protest the boy’s slaying but ended up heeding the pleas of a local black minister to refrain from violence. Then, just hours after the stories of race warfare in the Motor City had hit the streets of Chicago, police responded to a call from Hyde Park, where a mob of white youths armed with shovels, pick handles, and other weapons had taken to the streets in search of some blacks who had allegedly threatened them on their way to the beach.10 A few days later, Horace Cayton observed that African Americans were “arming” themselves in case of rioting, and two social workers on the Near West Side reported that Mexican adolescents were discussing the riots and “waiting” for something to happen. Another community worker, a representative of the Hyde Park Neighborhood House, remarked on the “changing attitude of white boys,” noting that several of those he was in contact with had taken to carrying large knives on the streets and “expressing themselves as preparing for fights against Negroes.”11 Seemingly overnight, Chicago had a racial crisis on its hands. Mayor Kelly hastily moved to establish a high-level commission—the Mayor’s Committee on Race Relations—to monitor racial flare-ups and advise ways of keeping the peace. The situation appeared so grave, in fact, that community leaders in several racially mixed areas urged their aldermen to make provisions for first aid stations and safety shelters.12
Such panicked responses stemmed in part from the dramatic, even anarchic way in which the Chicago press had depicted the situation in Detroit. To begin with, as news of the violence spread, Detroit officials could offer no explanation for its origins, other than a vague report of an interracial incident in a crowded recreation area on Belle Isle, a park on a patch of land in the middle of the Detroit River. The absence of a sense of causality contributed to the spread of a perception that what was being witnessed was the outbreak of race war, pure and simple: “a frenzy of homicidal mania, without rhyme or reason,” as one writer for the Detroit Free Press referred to it.13 This was the conclusion many Chicagoans most likely came to when they read in their own city’s leading paper the quotes of riot victims, white and black, expressing shock at having been attacked by mobs for no apparent reason other than the color of their skin. Adding to the unease about the circumstances of the riot was the fact that it was by no means clear from the coverage which race had acted as provocateur. The following description is typical of the reportage Chicagoans received: “Groups of Negroes and of whites milled about on street corners in a wide section bordering the northeastern side of downtown Detroit and hurled bricks and stones at passing automobiles bearing members of the opposite race.”14 Such treatment left intact the perception that the aggression might have been initiated by members of Detroit’s African American community, perhaps even in an organized fashion, an idea that had much deeper implications for racial attitudes in Chicago than if the riot were merely another case of white aggression and black response.15
In the end, however, the bomb planted in the summer of 1943 never blew, even if its ticking continued to be heard in the city for months, if not years. But if Kelly had managed to dodge a bullet in the summer of 1943, his troubles were just beginning. The events of the spring and summer of 1943 were revealing that, after more than a decade of relative calm along the color line, parks, schoolyards, beaches, streets, and neighborhoods were once again becoming battlegrounds in a war of attrition over the city’s limited resources. The immediate cause of this renewal of hostilities was the arrival of some seventy thousand black migrants between 1940 and 1943—a roughly 25 percent increase in the city’s black population. Further aggravating the situation was the halt on construction during the Great Depression, which left the city woefully lacking in proper housing for these new workers and their families. By the end of 1943 an acute housing shortage gripped the city, particularly within the Black Belt, where one study estimated that 375,000 inhabited an area suited for no more than 110,000. Addressing a meeting of realtors in July 1943, Chicago Housing Authority chairman Robert Taylor cited statistics indicating that the Second and Third Wards—the heart of the South Side black ghetto—were more densely populated than the slums of Calcutta.16 And of course it did not take long for slumlords to recognize the opportunity a tight and racially stratified housing market offered them. Ensuing rent gouging practices left black migrants with few alternatives but to pay far too much for poorly maintained apartments within the Black Belt and a number of other pockets of black residence scattered around the West and South Sides. Faced with such conditions, migrants began seeking more affordable housing at the edges of neighborhoods where they were less than welcome, if not openly detested.
In wartime Chicago, with factories desperate for bodies to operate machines, the housing dilemma faced by blacks became a pressing problem for a mayor who was desperately trying to keep money flowing into the city and war goods flowing out. The situation was so critical that a 1943 government study predicted that Chicago would need an additional 375,000 new workers by the end of the year. Unlike Detroit, however, where the first reflexes of white backlash revealed themselves at the point of production in a series of hate strikes by auto workers protesting the insertion of blacks into all-white production departments, similar demonstrations by white workers in Chicago were isolated. In fact, the Federal Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), a watchdog agency created by President Roosevelt after A. Philip Randolph threatened a massive March on Washington to protest discrimination in the war industries, met with fairly strong success in its efforts to integrate Chicago workplaces. The relative calm on Chicago’s factory floors while whites were walking off the job in Detroit is not easy to explain with any certainty. One factor could have been the success of CIO campaigns during the 1930s to bring white and black workers together in a range of interracial recreational activities—bowling competitions, basketball leagues, and picnics, for example—that encouraged workers to form bonds of solidarity off the job.17 However, such programs had been tried in Detroit as well, and from the subsequent pattern of violence that broke out in spaces of leisure in both cities, it seems evident that white participation in these activities was largely forced, artificial, and ephemeral. Rather, what made the difference between Detroit and Chicago were Mayor Kelly’s strong alliances with all of the forces capable of maintaining the status quo: labor unions, organized crime, and the black political machine. While union leaders were certainly on board with Kelly on the need to keep assembly lines moving, it helped that workers who had ideas of disrupting things might have to worry about some wiseguys showing up at their doors.18
Moreover, Kelly’s role as kingmaker for the new Black South Side boss William Dawson, the former Second Ward alderman and Democratic committeeman whom Kelly had handpicked to fill the House seat vacated by Arthur Mitchell in 1942, also helped to keep a lid on things in the Black Metropolis. After defeating Oscar DePriest in 1934 to become the first African American elected to Congress as a Democrat, Mitchell had remained fiercely loyal to President Roosevelt through his four terms in office, never pushing the president’s reluctant hand on civil rights. But he had fallen out of favor with the Kelly-Nash machine when he had sued the Chicago-based Rock Island and Pacific Railroad for forcing him to sit in a segregated Pullman car on a trip to Arkansas in 1937. Dawson, on the other, owed everything he had to Kelly, who had handed him control of the Second Ward by helping to make him congressman and committeeman. Using his control over the police and his leverage with organized crime syndicates, Kelly provided protection to the black South Side policy cartel, which poured cash into Dawson’s war chest. Dawson’s gratitude to Kelly had helped him garner 57 percent of the black vote in the mayoral election of 1939 and 54 percent in 1943.
Blacks in Chicago were no doubt linked to the political machine in ways they were not in many other cities, and Kelly’s protection of the black syndicates meant that black Chicagoans generally had fewer occasions to be angry with the police for bringing down the boot. All this was important to Kelly’s effective stewardship of the war mobilization because, as Detroit’s wartime troubles were revealing, African Americans were hardly passive bystanders in the racial conflicts and work stoppages that were holding up war production. Black workers in Detroit had carried out wildcat strikes to protest the racism of coworkers and the discriminatory practices of employers and had on several occasions aggressively confronted white picketers trying to deny them their rights. In Detroit, in particular, these early forms of civil rights activism in the workplace had a lot to do with gains blacks had made through several racially progressive union locals of the United Auto Workers (UAW). In particular, the Communist-influenced UAW Local 600, which during the war years represented over eighty thousand autoworkers at Ford’s colossal River Rouge Plant, placed blacks in leadership positions, pursued a program of grassroots collective action against racial discrimination, and strongly promoted ideals of racial equality. With tens of thousands of black workers among its members, Local 600 became a driving force for civil rights activism in Detroit. Black workers radicalized by the local had wives, brothers, sisters, daughters, sons, cousins, and friends, and its spirit of militancy quickly fanned out into the black community, inspiring a will to fight back that explains a great deal about why Detroit’s massive riot of 1943 came to pass.
While Mayor Kelly had nothing like UAW Local 600 to deal with, there were other sources of black rebelliousness that were forcing his hand in ways that would get him into trouble with white voters. A new assertiveness had taken hold of black communities throughout the urban North during World War II as black veterans returned from the war to find they had risked their lives for a country that still treated them like second-class citizens. The Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation’s most widely circulating black newspapers, provided a slogan for this sentiment with its 1942 Double-V campaign: victory over fascism abroad and over racism at home. Chicago’s own black daily, the Defender, added its voice to the Double-V chorus, and it was not long before African Americans in Chicago were wearing Double-V pins and even cutting the letter V into their hair.
In addition to this new spirit of militancy taking shape around the idea of black servicemen’s unrequited sacrifices, the zoot suiter represented another strain of street-smart rebelliousness that was crystallizing within the youth subcultures of black ghettos of the urban North and West. The zoot suit was unequivocally antipatriotic: not only did it brazenly disregard rationing restrictions on clothing materials, but in a moment when everyone was supposed to be making sacrifices, it symbolized an ethos of self-indulgence. Zoot suits belonged to the milieu of big commercial dancehalls, like the famed Savoy in New York or the Pershing or Parkway in Chicago, where jitterbugs swung, flipped, and gyrated to fashionable dances like the lindy hop and partied into the early morning hours. Yet if this was a world where getting one’s kicks was a primary motivation, it would be mistaken to think of its habitués as apolitical. Malcolm X, known as Malcolm Little in his younger days, wore a zoot suit when he went out to the jazz clubs and pool halls at night, and, as historian Robin Kelley has argued, even though he later renounced this as part of the profligate lifestyle he was trying to leave behind after his conversion to Islam, he surely had understood the political meaning of covering his body with such a loaded symbol during the war years.19
FIGURE 6. Zoot suiters at the Savoy Ballroom in 1941. Photo by Russell Lee. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
The zoot suiter, to be sure, represented a very different message than that conveyed by the figure of the black soldier, and proud veterans and insolent hipsters did not always see eye to eye, but the new civil rights consciousness circulating through black communities nonetheless formed powerful bonds of solidarity between these two elements of the community. Such was the case, to be sure, in the Harlem riot, which saw zoot suiters taking to the streets in violent protest after hearing that a black serviceman has been shot by a police officer after attempting to defend a black woman who was being roughed up during an arrest at the Braddock Hotel. After conducting a series of interviews with riot participants, one social psychologist found the zoot suiter so central to the uprising in Harlem that he spoke of a generalized “zoot effect.” Capturing the way many of the young Harlem rioters viewed their uprising against the police were the words of one riot participant, who, after reflecting on a savage beating police administered to one of his peers, warned: “Do not attempt to fuck with me.”20
The zoot suiter was all about a new posture of defiance that was sweeping through northern black ghettos—defiance to the police and to whites trying to stand between African Americans and their civil rights. This form of defiance became accentuated in the months following the hot summer of 1943, when everyone in the nation knew that it was open season on zoot suiters. Continuing to wear a zoot suit was, in a sense, an overt provocation—one part machismo, one part racial pride—directed at white toughs out on the streets, a double-down on a dare that was becoming increasingly dangerous in view of the white youth gangs increasingly gathering along the color line. In the face of such dangers, black youths in Chicago remained undaunted, continuing to strut their stuff in these flamboyant outfits in the months following the riots of 1943. Just several weeks after the incident in Harlem, for example, a nearly half-page ad in the Defender told jitterbugs to “wear your zoot suit” to the “Zoot Suit Dance” at the Parkway Ballroom on 45th and South Parkway Avenue, where a prize would be given to the “zootiest.”21
The zoot suiter and the milieu of teenage gangs to which he belonged kept authorities on edge throughout 1944 and 1945. Many officials serving on the newly formed Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations (an updated version of the Mayor’s Committee on Race Relations) were convinced that if a riot were to break out, it would be ignited from friction between black and white teenage gangs. The Chicago Police Department thus made great efforts to monitor hot spots throughout the city where black and white youths regularly crossed paths. In July 1945, for example, a special police patrol was stationed in the Woodlawn district, at the busy intersection of 63rd and Cottage Grove, after reports that black and white jitterbugs were tangling in the streets around the Pershing ballroom.22 What such incidents were revealing was that Chicago had become an unavoidably interracial city during the war. The war years represented the first chapter in a new phase of ghettoization that in two decades would add to the city’s vastly expanded South Side ghetto a massive West Side swath, over a mile wide in parts and stretching all the way to the city’s western limits. But this outcome was far from self-evident for white residents on the ground in the mid-1940s. With the sorry state of housing conditions in the Black Belt, many black migrants began settling at the edges of white neighborhoods and in other racially mixed areas where small numbers of black families already lived. Moreover, even in areas of the city in which the residential color line was absolute, where white hostility was too coordinated and too fierce for blacks to dare taking up residence, blacks and whites inescapably crossed paths at lakefront beaches, in shopping and nightlife districts, in parks, and on buses and streetcars.
Marxist theorist Raymond Williams coined the term structure of feeling to describe a dominant sensibility about lived experience that circulates through the culture of everyday life of a specific generation at a specific time and place.23 For the generation of African Americans who had migrated from the Jim Crow South to the “promised land” of the urban North during the war, the zoot suiter and the black serviceman were the most potent embodiments of a broader structure of feeling of betrayal and injustice that shaped the new spirit of resistance to racial oppression. The collective sense that a limit had been reached—that enough was enough—permeated black Chicago like an acrid smell, the scent of which continuously reminded blacks of what was at stake in the insults they faced in their daily interactions with whites. Recalling his experiences as a young man living in New Jersey and working in defense plants during the war, James Baldwin claimed that was when he “first contracted some dread, chronic disease, the unfailing symptom of which [was] a kind of blind fever, a pounding in the skull and fire in the bowels.” Baldwin explained that he picked up this “disease” while experiencing racial indignities at “bars, bowling alleys, diners, places to live.”24 His affliction eventually caused him to put his life on the line in order to take a forceful stand against a restaurant that refused to serve him—the kind of act that was occurring much more frequently after the riots in the summer of 1943.
While most black Chicagoans were not nearly as daring as Baldwin, never left home in a zoot suit, and did not serve in the American military, they were captivated by the same anger and by the same will to not back down in the face of intimidation—a situation that, in the context of the severe housing shortage in wartime Chicago, translated into a will to live where they chose. However, the zoot suiter, the black serviceman, and the ordinary black resident who had reached the end of his patience had analogues on the other side of the color line. Standing opposite them was the white gang tough ready for a fight, the white veteran angry about heroically risking his life for his nation only to return to find strange black faces in his neighborhood, and all of the ordinary white residents who, like the blacks they so feared, were beginning to feel themselves to be victims. Even though 1945 brought news of an impending victory in the war, Chicagoans were certainly not looking into the future with great optimism. Employers and economists alike were predicting that the loss of war contracts would lead to recession and massive layoffs, and as white workers viewed increasing numbers of blacks joining them on factory floors, the usual fears of blacks undercutting wages and stealing jobs were exchanged in taverns and on street corners. It has often been the tendency of Americans to view racial others as simultaneously lazy and so hardworking that they are willing to labor for pitiful wages, and this was one such time.
Yet to view the racism of white Chicagoans in such economizing terms gives a somewhat distorted impression of what lay at the core of their racial fear and contempt. Many working-class whites did, of course, envision blacks as undermining their class position and their standard of living. This was an idea whose origins stretched back to earlier decades, when bosses employed blacks as scabs to break strikes in the stockyards and steel mills, and real estate agents began using panic-peddling tactics to get whites to sell their homes on the cheap for fear of losing their property values when the neighborhood turned black. Such circumstances give us reason to invest in a notion of white racism as a tool created and exploited by the ruling class in the process of accumulating capital—in the idea articulated by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1935 that white workers enjoyed a “psychological wage” related to their whiteness, which caused them to accept low standards of living and poor working conditions because of their self-proclaimed sense of racial superiority to blacks.25 According to such reasoning, a steelworker might have remained satisfied with wages that were clearly too low for the work he was performing, precisely because both his wages and his job category were superior to those of African American workers. This, we might conclude, is why whites joined together in factory hate strikes and why employers resisted promoting blacks and integrating departments—not for fear of causing racial disturbances among workers but of jeopardizing a tool that helped them exploit their workforce. And yet in wartime Chicago, racial barriers on the factory floor seemed to crumble relatively easily whereas those in the neighborhoods became increasingly fortified. In other words, white racism, as it manifested itself in wartime Chicago, was less about work than it was about family, community, and neighborhood.
Hence, while white workers in Chicago at times invoked fears of black competition for jobs, they seemed much more actively invested in the threat that blacks and their culture posed to their families and, ultimately, to their way of life. Stories that told of blacks moving into white neighborhoods or arriving at white schools were very frequently followed in the next breath by rumors of robberies and rapes, which, at times, spread so quickly that city authorities eventually established hotlines to try to quell them. Telling in this sense was the extent to which interracial rape rumors circulated around a series of 1945 hate strikes carried out by white students protesting small increases in black enrollment. In one school, for example, the visit of two police officers looking for an escaped juvenile delinquent led to wild rumors that two black students had raped a white girl. Some female students interviewed claimed, “We girls are afraid to go anywhere alone.”26
Social workers and other observers of the race relations scene remarked that white residents, adults and youths alike, often described blacks as immoral, smelly, and syphilitic, a situation that was certainly not improved by the black domination of the city’s commercial sex industry. One social worker on the near northwest side, for example, reported that when the boys he supervised were not talking about girls, they were making remarks like “niggers smell,” “ninety percent . . . are syphylletic [sic],” and “Negroes should keep their place which is shining shoes and cleaning toilets.”27 The manifestations of such ill feelings became particularly apparent in the summer heat. An African American boy swimming too close to whites in Lake Michigan had provoked the 1919 race riot, so one can only imagine the anxiety aroused by the idea of blacks plunging their bared bodies into municipal swimming pools, which were preciously scarce resources in the sweltering heat and intense humidity that normally enveloped Chicago in July and August. New Deal public works spending had led to the construction of municipal pools in many U.S. cities in the 1930s, thereby democratizing access to what was previously an elite privilege. Yet, in Chicago, as in many other cities and towns, the power of white racism confounded the hopes of New Deal idealists and planning visionaries, making these new resources into flashpoints for racial incidents in the 1940s and beyond.28
What was thus becoming clear after the summer of 1943 was that white racism was increasingly running up against an immovable force: the black will to fight back. By 1944, Mayor Kelly found himself wedged uncomfortably between these two counterforces. His wartime race relations management strategy had helped Chicago avoid the worst, but it did little to stop the urban guerrilla warfare that was breaking out in the streets. Indicative of where things were heading was an incident that occurred early in 1944, when several youths from an Italian neighborhood around the Armour Square area entered the Little Zion Baptist Church on Wells Street and began stoning black congregants as they prayed. Obviously accustomed to such acts, the assistant pastor at the church had a loaded pistol within easy reach, and he managed to shoot and wound one of the assailants—a situation that had people in the neighborhood talking about a mob of Italians returning that night to burn the church down.29 A police detail prevented more trouble on this occasion, but arson attacks against black homes under the cover of night mounted in this area in the months to follow.
In addition to such events, black leaders began to pressure the city to do something about the severe lack of housing for black war workers. The New Deal’s Public Works Administration had bankrolled the construction of four new housing projects in Chicago in the mid-1930s, but only one—the Ida B. Wells Homes—was intended for black occupancy. Part of the problem stemmed from the federal government’s “neighborhood composition rule,” which prevented federal housing projects from changing the racial composition of the neighborhoods in which they were constructed. Bound by this rule, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), formed in 1937 to oversee the city’s housing projects, steered black projects into black ghetto areas, white projects into white neighborhoods, and avoided the city’s racially mixed areas altogether for fear of provoking racial conflict. When the CHA had attempted to house a substantial number of black workers in the Frances Cabrini Homes in the North Side Sicilian Little Hell District, skirmishes between neighborhood Italians and new black residents culminated in a near-riot after gunshots were fired into a black apartment. The CHA thus bowed to the forces of grassroots resistance, a policy that both reinforced the boundaries around the ghetto and did little to change the housing emergency for African Americans—a problem that was only going to become further exacerbated as increasing numbers of black veterans began returning home to find they had no place to live.30
This was the situation facing Mayor Kelly as the war was winding down in 1945. Hailing from the rugged streets of Bridgeport, where Irish gangs had been ruthlessly patrolling the color line to the east since at least the early 1900s, Kelly was no stranger to the dynamics of grassroots racism that were preventing him from solving the city’s pressing housing problem. However, at the time of the 1919 race riot, when Bridgeport’s Hamburg Athletic Club was leading raids into the Black Belt, Kelly had long graduated from his education on the Bridgeport streets. In fact, he was from a previous generation that had come of age before the city’s black ghetto had taken full form, and, somewhat surprisingly, he seemed to have risen through the ranks of the Cook County Democratic Party machine—an organization full of racist athletic-club types and politicos who had cut their teeth decrying Big Bill Thompson’s “nigger-loving” ways—with certain ideas about racial justice intact. Then, as a loyal New Dealer, who had garnered a huge majority of Chicago’s votes for F.D.R. in the 1936 presidential election, he apparently caught some inspiration from the democratizing winds blowing out of Washington. While most machine cadres harbored an open contempt for self-righteous reformers and the know-it-all university types from Hyde Park that gave them intellectual cover, Kelly had chosen Elizabeth Wood as the first executive director of the CHA, a woman—this in itself, a bold decision—who had been a caseworker for a progressive charitable organization while taking classes at the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration. Wood was clearly coming out of a tradition of social work and sociological research among whose primary objectives was to show that immigrant slums and black ghettos were caused not by the racial defects of their inhabitants but rather by racism and structural poverty.
Thus, when the time came for Kelly to take a stand on the question of open housing, he broke ranks with both the Cook County Democratic Party machine and its base. Initially, it was not so much what he did, but rather what he said. Kelly pledged repeatedly to guarantee the availability of housing to blacks throughout the city, and proclaimed that as long as he was mayor, any person would be allowed to live where he wanted to so long as he could afford it. This was not exactly music to the ears of South Side whites then digging into trenches to resist racial integration. People began referring to swimming pools monopolized by blacks as “Kelly’s inkwells,” and the Democratic Party brass began worrying about the upcoming election in 1947. Into the situation stepped Jacob “Jack” Arvey, who was elevated in 1946 to chairman of the Cook Country Democratic Party—a post Kelly had occupied after Nash’s death in 1943. Arvey was a Jew and, as such, a relative outsider in Chicago politics, but his ability to deliver votes for the party—often at margins of nine to one—propelled him through the ranks of the Nash-Kelly machine. Kelly was in political hot water for a number of scandals, ranging from his failure to deliver adequate garbage collection services despite higher taxes to his tolerance of organized crime, to rampant police corruption. Arvey was thus brought in, fresh from his stint in the World War II Pacific theater, to do damage control, and he started by deploying his people to poll Chicagoans outside movie theaters and by telephone. When the results were tallied, Arvey found that despite all the scandals in play, what Chicagoans were most concerned about was the housing issue. As Arvey recalled later: “Well, we were solid with the Jews, we could see, and better than even with the Negroes, but everywhere else—the Poles, the Irish even, the Germans—we were in trouble. ‘Him?’ they’d say, ‘Are you kidding? We’d sooner vote for a Chinaman.’”31 After over two thousand angry whites battled police and destroyed property—in other words, rioted—to prevent the CHA from moving blacks into temporary housing constructed near the Chicago Municipal Airport on the Far Southwest Side, Kelly’s situation became untenable.
And so Edward J. Kelly, under the strong advice of Arvey and the Democratic machine, did not seek reelection in 1947. Chosen to replace him was businessman-reformer Martin H. Kennelly, another one of Bridgeport’s sons, who had made his fortune in the moving and storage business. Yet the leadership of the Democratic machine was dreaming if it thought that Chicago’s race problem would follow Kelly out of politics. The pitched battles between angry mobs of white residents and police out by the airport would pale in comparison to what was in store for the city in the coming decades. Those increasingly joining the ranks to fight in these battles were largely immigrants and the children of immigrants—Italians, Poles, Slavs, Czechs, Hungarians, Jews, and Greeks, among others—who had themselves been the targets of racially charged aggression by the Irish, Germans, Scandinavians, and Anglos, and sometimes still were. But the nationalist fervor of the war, combined with the demographic sea change that the Second Great Migration had brought about, began the process of gathering all of these groups under one big happy umbrella of whiteness. White Americans of all origins had come together to oppose the Germans and the Japanese on battlefields overseas, and they had joined forces to oppose black invasion at home, in each case helping to make a more universal white identity that would play a key role in American politics in the years to come. This story was far from over—words like “polack,” “wop,” “mick,” “kraut,” “kike,” and “hunky” could still be heard wherever white ethnics mixed, and, on the “white” side of the color line, bonds of ethnic solidarity were still as powerful as bonds of racial solidarity. But as black migrants from the South continued to pour into the city in the postwar years, whiteness was clearly gaining traction on the ground.
DEVIL’S MUSIC
Since 1934, when the Chicago Defender began sponsoring the mayor of Bronzeville election, the event had been allowing black Chicagoans to take stock of who they were and who they wanted to be. Bronzeville’s mayor, of course, had no formal political power, but he served as the symbolic embodiment of the larger black community—a cultural icon of sorts, but one you might bump into on the streets.32 During the war years, as black Chicago took on its more militant bent, mayoral candidates used their moment on the stage to speak out on political issues, such as housing problems and police misconduct. Even though the mayoral election could not avoid being somehow political in its implicit assertion of autonomy and representation within a city in which blacks were hardly getting their fair share of either, it was generally understood that the affair was to be, above all, a festive celebration of local black culture and community. Yet to speak of a black culture and a black community in 1940s Chicago is to simplify what was, in fact, a very complicated and often contentious interplay of different cultures and communities defined by class, regional origins, and lifestyle. The very name Bronzeville that these elections popularized was coined by cosmetics magnate Anthony Overton, a man who designed products for middle-class blacks seeking to lighten their skin, and the elections were publicized by a newspaper that spilled a great deal of ink trying to teach lower-class southern migrants how to “act northern.” Southern migrants, in fact, had shouldered the blame for much of what was wrong with “the race” since the 1920s. Their arrival in Chicago, to be sure, had created a profitable market for a whole new generation of black entrepreneurs, but these same uneducated country folk—usually one generation removed from slavery and, in middle-class eyes, displaying unsavory predilections for liquor, the policy wheel, hot music, old-time religion, and jitterbugging—also threatened the self-image of the city’s black middle class, which measured its status, to some extent, in terms of the approbation white society bestowed on it.
And these were only a handful of the numerous ways that made migrants disrespectable in the eyes of middling “old settler” African Americans. Their storefront churches and the jackleg preachers who shouted in them, their way of “jive talking” about “cats” and “kicks,” their zoot-suit-wearing sons, their late-night revelry and loose sexual morals, their brawling and boisterous behavior, their sidewalk barbecues, fried catfish and chicken shacks, and taste for pig’s intestines—all this, in the eyes of many middle-class black Chicagoans, signalled the recrudescence of a backwards-looking southern culture that was giving the race a bad name. Southern foodways, in particular, were at that time much too close to be nostalgic or comforting, as they would be some two decades later, when many African Americans would fetishize collard greens, cornbread, black-eyed peas, smoked spareribs, and fried chicken as “soul food” capable of liberating them from spiritual oppression.33 Moreover, aspersions cast at migrants for setting back racial progress were not the stuff of hushed conversations behind closed doors; they were right out there in the open for everyone to hear, pronounced from sanctified pulpits and in the sanctimonious columns of the black press. Chicago was no Mississippi, but poor migrants understood very well that they occupied the bottom rung on the social ladder of the Black Metropolis.
Which explains why the election of R.H. Harris as mayor of Bronzeville in 1945 signified to the southern migrants who had been pouring into the city since the outbreak of the war that they had finally arrived. Southern-born blacks had of course been crowned mayor in previous elections, but most had been raised in Chicago and were well-established members of the community by the time of their election. By contrast, Harris was a relatively recent migrant from Texas, and although his silky-smooth falsetto singing in one of Chicago’s most beloved gospel quartets, the Soul Stirrers, and his ownership of a successful Bronzeville business, Five Soul Stirrers Cleaners, seemed to distinguish him from the typical wartime migrant, Harris’s election nonetheless signified that southern culture had captured the heart of Bronzeville. And it was no wonder it had. At war’s end, migrants outnumbered “native” African Americans born and/or raised in Chicago before the First Great Migration by almost eight to one. And this numerical majority was translating into economic influence. By 1947, migrants owned thirteen out of every fourteen businesses in black Chicago. This was the same year that the rising number of barbecue joints warranted the creation of their own heading in the city’s business directory for the first time. The smoky smells of southern barbecue, moreover, intermingled with the pounding sounds of southern blues music—country, Memphis, boogie-woogie, jump, big band—coming out of jukeboxes and radios across black Chicago. Respectable middle-class elements called it “devil’s music,” but this was a minority view, as was clearly suggested by the victory of local celebrity disc jockey Al Benson in the 1948 mayor of Bronzeville election. Benson, like Harris, was part entertainer, part entrepreneur—a mix of qualities that appealed to southern migrants—but he was much more country than Harris was. A storefront preacher before becoming the most popular disc jockey at black radio station WGES, Benson’s folksy radio persona was matched by his preference for the blues over the more respectable gospel music. For lower-class migrants, the Mississippi-born Benson was surely one of them, and he had made it by staying true to his roots.
Hence, despite perceptions among some middle-class residents that migrants were lazy and shiftless, they were clearly “getting ahead.” In fact, black median income in the city rose to nearly twice the national average for blacks by 1950, and remained higher than that of every other city except Detroit throughout the 1950s. Historian Adam Green has referred to such circumstances to argue that scholars and other observers of Bronzeville have largely overlooked and, in a sense, underestimated the grand importance of what was really transpiring there in the 1940s and early 1950s. Chicago, which Richard Wright once referred to as “the known city,” has usually been viewed in the context of the local and the everyday—as a place where blacks got on better than elsewhere, where they got decent jobs, established local institutions, and seized a small but not insignificant measure of political power. Migrants have fit into this story as well; these rural folk, we have learned, encountered some difficulties but, in the end, were able to shed their agricultural orientations for the more rigid factory work regime and effectively adjust to life in the modern metropolis. What these angles of vision have obscured, however, is the extent to which Chicago moved to the very center of black life in the United States, becoming the driving force behind new feelings of national fellowship and racial community among African Americans that would provide the foundations for the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Chicago in the first postwar decade, not Harlem in the 1920s, Green argues, hosted the quintessential moment of black modernity. It was the vital site of cultural production for a range of media and cultural forms that allowed blacks throughout the nation to feel they shared a common destiny and belonged to a community that spanned space and time. It was in Chicago that a savvy publishing entrepreneur named John Johnson Jr. saw the need for Ebony magazine, a black version of Life that presented “the happier side of Negro life” alongside perspectives on “the race question.” It was in Chicago that the nation’s only black newswire, the Associated Negro Press, and its most widely circulating black newspaper, the Defender, shaped the news content of blacks throughout the nation. And it was in Chicago that a cohort of virtuoso migrant musicians from the Deep South, with the help of two Polish immigrant club owners, electrified and amplified the bare-bones, roots sounds of the Delta, added a more elaborate rhythm section and a second guitar to the arrangements, and brought to market the internationally renowned Chicago blues sound.34
Encountering the blues scene in Chicago today, it is hard to imagine that the wailing harmonica solos, the bent and sliding guitar notes, the roaring vocals, and the sparse lyrics that were signatures of this music once constituted the dominant soundtrack for life in the Black Metropolis—that jukeboxes in corner bars around the city belted out the gravelly voice of Muddy Waters singing such classics as “I Can’t Be Satisfied” and “Hoochie Coochie Man.” In the 1940s and 1950s, Bronzeville and the rest of black Chicago was teeming with slick blues venues—the Club DeLisa, the Rhumboogie, Joe’s DeLuxe, the 708, and Silvio’s, to name but a few; now, the blues can, with some rare exceptions, only be heard outside of black neighborhoods, in areas where white tourists, suburbanites in for a night out on the town, and college students gather. The blues clubs of today—House of Blues, Chicago B.L.U.E.S. Bar, and Buddy Guy’s Legends—are theme-park-like affairs that seek to offer white folks an “authentic” blues experience; T-shirts and other merchandise are, of course, on sale as you enter, and all of the clubs are, as the reviews on their websites seek to assure potential visitors, “friendly.” Even the storied Checkerboard Lounge, which was one of Bronzeville’s last legitimate blues clubs, moved from 43rd Street to Hyde Park in 2005, opening near the University of Chicago in a space where the fitness club Women’s Workout World used to be. Yet, while white folks today constitute the principal consumers of the blues experience and the blues itself has become what Claude Lévi-Strauss referred to as a “floating signifier,” a cultural form unhinged from its original context and meaning, the blues did not sell out or die, as some purists would argue, but rather passed into other forms that became more commercially viable in black communities beginning in the 1960s—soul, Motown, funk, and eventually hip hop and rap.
Market forces made the blues into a museum piece, but these same market forces were what made the Chicago blues sound innovative and viable in the first place. A great many of the blues legends that came North to Chicago from Mississippi and Louisiana in the 1930s and 1940s—Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Minnie, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, and Sonny Boy Williamson—were, like the vast majority of migrants, trying to improve their lives. If talented blues musicians could scrape together an existence in the South, northern cities like Chicago and Detroit offered scores of clubs to play in, black-appeal radio stations with renowned disc jockeys, record labels that could transform recording sessions into national hits, and bigger paychecks. Yet all these things were contingent on reaching bigger and bigger audiences, which especially after 1949, when Billboard magazine replaced the industry term race music with rhythm & blues, included whites as well. What has been largely overlooked in most accounts of the early blues scene in Chicago is the importance of what Adam Green refers to as an “entrepreneurial ethos” among the performers, producers, and disc jockeys who made Chicago the place to be for blues musicians.35 It all came together in 1948 when Muddy Waters recorded his first single for Chess Records, a label launched by two Jewish immigrants from Poland, Leonard and Phil Chess, who, as owners of the 708 club and the Macomba Lounge, looked to record the performers that were electrifying increasingly larger crowds in their establishments. The Chess brothers were smart enough to bring in polished bluesman Willie Dixon, whose impressive songwriting and production capabilities helped Waters record a long list of hit records for Chess throughout the 1950s, making the label a major force in the industry. With Dixon working behind the scenes, Chess would soon become the bridge between the blues and rock ’n’ roll, recording Chuck Berry’s early crossover hits “Maybellene,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Johnny B. Goode,” and “Rock and Roll Music” between 1955 and 1958.
With Berry’s “Maybellene” climbing to number five on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, 1955 was a momentous year for Chess and for the blues in general, which seemed on the verge of dramatic crossover success. Yet it was also the year that country-and-western singer Bill Haley’s whitened R & B single “Rock Around the Clock” catapulted to number one, that RCA Victor signed Elvis Presley to a record contract, that Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her bus seat sparked the Montgomery Bus boycott, and that the Supreme Court ordered the South to start desegregating its schools “with all deliberate speed.” While a number of bluesmen have sought to disabuse Americans of the idea that the blues is only about anger and sorrow, the undeniable association between the blues and the black southern experience became a bitter pill for whites to swallow as images of virulent southern racism circulated in the mass media, and northern cities like Chicago increasingly began to take stock of their own racial problem. Crossover hits would continue for black R & B performers in the years to come, and a talented second generation of Chicago blues musicians—Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, Koko Taylor—would make its mark, but the rise of white rock and the changing racial landscape would reduce the blues to a niche market by the mid-1960s.
The eclipse of the blues by white rock ’n’ roll in the late 1950s is a story filled with allegations of appropriation and exploitation. Phil and Leonard Chess may have had little to do, at least directly, with the theft of the black blues sound by the Elvis-propelled rock ’n’ roll industry, but their image as patrons of the blues scene was tarnished by a slew of lawsuits filed against them in the 1970s by many of their headliners claiming they were swindled. Willie Dixon had serious problems working with the Chess brothers, and, as legend has it, Muddy Waters was once seen on a ladder painting the ceiling of the Chess studio.36 Interviewed about such controversies in a PBS documentary on the blues in 2003, Leonard Chess’s son Marshall, who worked as an executive producer with the Rolling Stones in the 1970s, described Chess’s talented bluesmen as children interested only in Cadillacs and womanizing, further fanning the flames of rancor surrounding the Chess “success” story.37
Regardless of the racist overtones of such assertions, they touch on a fundamental truth about the Chicago blues scene, which is that the Chess brothers, Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, and most of the label’s other performers were entrepreneurs as well as artists. While blues romantics like to idealize the live blues performances of the 1940s and 1950s as utopic moments when musicians spoke from their souls through the medium of the blues—and, no doubt, they often did—the truth is that most blues artists in Chicago in the late 1940s and early 1950s were moving “with all deliberate speed” away from the stage and into the studio. And who could blame them? On the club stage they could reach hundreds; in the studio they could reach hundreds of thousands, if not millions. For musicians raised in abject rural poverty in the Deep South, the financial payoff that such popularity could bring was hardly beside the point. Though there was more to it than this. Blues musicians also understood that while black writers and artists—those in the more socially accepted fields—could gain some recognition for their accomplishments from white intellectuals and black power elites alike, neither white nor black society would bestow this kind of social and artistic value on black blues musicians, at least not yet. Instructive here is the case of Eric Dolphy, the sublime saxophonist, bass clarinetist, and flautist, who dreamed of being a classical musician but was forced into jazz because that was what black youths did in 1940s Los Angeles. In this situation where black blues musicians could not strive for artistic capital, commercial approval was all that was left, and when it came from white audiences as well, so much the better. This is why Louis Jordan, who spent a great deal of time performing in Chicago in the 1940s and who was one of the earliest blues musicians to achieve crossover success, boasted frequently about all the money he made from white audiences, and why Muddy Waters brought the house down playing in front of East Coast preppies at the prestigious Newport Jazz Festival in 1960.
And in some sense, this spirit of entrepreneurialism is what distinguished Chicago from the other major center of black cultural expression, Harlem. As blues musicians in Chicago were trying to bring their music to wider audiences, jazz musicians in Harlem were moving in a somewhat different direction. At after-hours clubs like Minton’s Playhouse and Monroe’s Uptown, black jazzmen like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Coleman Hawkins invented a new jazz form, bebop, which, in its technical sophistication, fast tempo, and instrumental virtuosity, represented a turning away from the marketplace and from the white audience that had so eagerly consumed the swing music of the 1930s. Jam sessions were small, unstructured, and often consisted mostly of musicians themselves, many of whom took turns on the stage. This was not music one could dance to, and white audiences found it discordant, edgy, and nervous, which, on some level, was the point. Bebop connected on an aesthetic level to the new spirit of racial militancy that was sweeping through much of the urban North during the 1940s, but it also represented an attempt by black musicians to create a cultural form so opaque that it resisted both commercialization and critical denigration by white society.38 In the process, they created an art form that lacked popular appeal among average blacks as well. By the late 1940s, bebop’s practitioners were venturing into more commercial projects in order to make a living, but the avant-gardist spirit remained in the Harlem music scene for decades to come. Such circumstances meant that from the 1940s through the mid-1960s, the years of the blues, soul, and Motown, New York would take a back seat to Chicago and Detroit, where southern culture cross-fertilized a northern spirit of “getting ahead” to produce the music that touched African Americans across the nation.39
THE ROAD TO SEGREGATION
Viewing the Englewood neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side today, it is difficult to imagine that it once sat at the crossroads of progress. In the 1920s and 1930s, its respectable turn-of-the-century brick two-flats and single-family bungalows housed middle-class workers of Irish and German descent, many of whom held jobs in the stockyards to the north. Its shopping district at Halsted and 63rd was one of the city’s busiest, and thousands of elevated trains, streetcars, and suburban commuter trains serviced the neighborhood every day. Many of those who could afford to live in this neighborhood had the unions to thank for raising their wages, and loyalty to a union was surpassed only by loyalty to one of the area’s ten Catholic parishes, whose pastors were frequently heard urging their parishioners to support union campaigns. A good many of the Irish Catholics in the area were also, no doubt, beneficiaries of the Irish control over the city’s political machine and the wealth of patronage resources it had to spread around.
Cut to turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Englewood: a neighborhood chopped up by vacant lots strewn with rubbish and debris, where cryptic gang graffiti was splattered on countless boarded-up homes and businesses, where the only white faces were those of policemen and other civil servants, where the unemployment rate was triple the national average, and where a never-ending turf war between some of Chicago’s most notorious street gangs—the Gangster Disciples, the Black Disciples, and the Black P-Stones—bestowed upon the neighborhood the ignominious claim of having the highest crime rate in the city, which ranked it near the top of the list of highest in the country. In 1991, eighty-one murders were committed in this one corner of the city in just four months. Most people in the United States live their entire lives without hearing a live gunshot pierce the night; in the Englewood of recent years, they have been almost nightly occurrences.
Englewood is a poster child for what historians refer to as the “urban crisis” that overwhelmed many northern industrial cities in the postwar decades.40 In Detroit, the crisis spread like a cancer throughout the entire city, creating an impoverished black core ringed by more prosperous white middle-class suburbs; in Chicago the crisis was quarantined, contained within broad swaths of the black South and West Sides. One of the great intellectual challenges of the past few decades has been explaining how this transpired, how the roughly twenty-year period between the end of World War II and the turbulent race riots of the mid-1960s came to produce, in the famous words of the Kerner Commission studying the riots, “two societies, one black, one white—separate but unequal.” The position Americans take on this question inevitably determines, in part, whether they fall on the conservative or liberal side of the ideological fence. Conservatives tend to privilege explanations that reflect cultural racism (such as “blacks live in poor ghettos because their culture is dysfunctional and therefore they underachieve”), free market rationalities (such as “blacks and whites have simply chosen to live in their own separate neighborhoods, as is their right to do so”), or some combination of the two (such as “blacks and whites have chosen to live apart because of irreconcilable cultural differences”).41 Liberals, on the other hand, have historically referred to the power of racial discrimination in housing, education, and employment, and, to a lesser extent, to economic circumstances and policies that have eroded inner-city employment bases while promoting suburban growth. Although most reputable historians of the postwar American city are more likely to be liberal than conservative in their outlook, they have offered different interpretations of the causes and origins of the urban crisis. Until somewhat recently, the dominant view was that the struggle for racial integration was lost as a result of the ghetto riots and black power consciousness of the 1960s. Such circumstances, the story goes, allowed the Republican Party to stoke white middle-class fears to provoke a broad-based backlash against racial liberalism that enabled it to capture the White House in 1968.42 To be sure, many of those middle-class whites who imagined themselves within the ranks of the “silent majority” Nixon claimed to represent were scratching their heads and wondering: “Why should my hard-earned money be used to support people who burn their own neighborhoods and who hate white people?”
Yet such accounts are of little use in trying to make sense of a place like Englewood, which had already been transformed from a thriving white middle-class neighborhood to a distressed black ghetto by the time of the Watts rebellion of 1965—the first major uprising of the black power era. Englewood’s story suggests that the origins of the urban crisis can be found way back in the 1940s and 1950s, when, faced with the prospect of racial integration, whites formed neighborhood associations and unruly mobs to oppose it with all the means at their disposal, including sometimes lethal terrorist tactics.43 Any assessment of what went so horribly wrong in Englewood, for example, cannot avoid considering such events as the Peoria Street riot of 1949, when crowds as large as seven thousand or more gathered to vent their anger at what they wrongly believed was a black family moving into a home at 56th and Peoria. African Americans, had, in fact, been spotted entering the premises at this address, but their presence had nothing to do with real estate transactions. Rather, they had come to the home of Aaron Bindman that night for an informal labor union meeting and celebration. In a moment filled with tragic irony that speaks volumes about the decline of the U.S. labor movement in the postwar years, Bindman, an officer of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, attempted to no avail to use his union credentials to win over the angry crowd at his doorstep. His appeals to working-class solidarity only poured fuel on the fire, eliciting shouts of “Kike!” “Lynch the niggers!” and “Communists!”44 Here, in the streets of Englewood, the sanctity of whiteness trumped any appeals to the class struggle, especially when issued from the lips of someone like Bindman—a Jew and thus an outsider in a part of Englewood that was home to the nearly four thousand Irish Catholic members of Visitation Parish. Although pastors of this and other Englewood parishes had once used their authority to promote the unions, they now rallied their flocks to protect the parish against racial invasion and white flight. Fear fermented into anger as residents heard rumors of friends and neighbors planning to move away. Homeowners worried about falling property values, longtime renters worried about having to cut ties with the parish, and those unable to move so easily worried about being left behind as the area morphed into a black ghetto. All this angst was focused on the two-story flat at 56th and Peoria that November night. If blacks could move here, most of those in the crowd reasoned, the neighborhood was lost. These were the circumstances that turned otherwise law-abiding citizens into rioters along Chicago’s color line in the postwar years.
What was happening in Englewood was hardly unique to Chicago. The Peoria Street riot was one of the more serious events in what historians now consider to have been a broad-based wave of grassroots activism against racial integration throughout the industrial Midwest in the postwar years. Between 1944 and 1946, some fifty homes in Chicago were firebombed, stoned, or otherwise vandalized, usually in hit-and-run fashion under the cover of night, resulting in the deaths of three of their occupants.45 These acts were most often perpetrated by teenagers running with street gangs. The movement of white resistance taking shape was a family affair, with mothers and children not infrequently seen on the front lines. But young men in their teens and twenties—a generation that had come of age after the great labor struggles of the 1930s—most commonly constituted the core of the racist mobs. Out of twenty-nine local residents arrested during the Peoria Street riot, for example, all were male and only one did not fall between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five.46 It was this element of the mob that began pursuing bolder tactics of resistance in the late 1940s.47 Hence, in August 1947, as crowds of between 1,500 and 5,000 whites battled police around the Fernwood Park Homes housing project at 103rd and Halsted over the city’s plan to move in black veterans, groups of marauding whites pulled blacks out of passing automobiles and streetcars to beat them up.48 The following month teenage gangs attacked numerous black youths and incited hundreds of students at Wells High School on the Near Northwest Side to strike over the transfer of 60 blacks to their school, despite the fact that these additional students brought the total number of African Americans at Wells to a mere 130 out of a student body of 2,200.49 In late July 1949, some two thousand incensed residents besieged a two-story building that had recently been purchased by a black teacher and his social worker wife at 7153 South St. Lawrence, around the southern edge of the Black Belt, burning mattresses and throwing stones at the house until daybreak.50 And these were but a handful of the seemingly countless actions taken by whites to terrorize African Americans who dared to cross the color line.
MAP 4. Major incidents of racial violence and the black population, 1946–1952.
Through such terrorist tactics white Chicagoans were able to stave off the advancing color line—if, in many cases, only temporarily—during a period when the Chicago Housing Authority possessed a leadership committed to promoting racial integration in the housing market. The Housing Act of 1949 made substantial federal funding available to municipalities for the purpose of building public housing, and the CHA, still under the direction of tireless liberal Elizabeth Wood, was ready with a list of proposed sites in white neighborhoods. Yet site after site met with dogged resistance from aldermen who understood all too well that allowing black housing into their wards would be committing political suicide. Since the city council had the power to veto any CHA project, Wood did not stand a chance without the support of the mayor. And, watching nervously as his base hurled insults at police fending off attacks against African Americans, Mayor Kennelly chose the path of least resistance, which was to refrain from taking on the city council’s segregationist ways. Like most of the aldermen on the city council, the mayor had his ear to the ground, and the rumblings of white discontent began to sound like a freight train on a collision course with the mayor’s office. Moreover, Kennelly’s lack of resolve in backing the CHA against the city council was matched by his reluctance to deploy adequate police protection for the black residents targeted by racist mobs. Time and time again, human relations officials and other eyewitnesses criticized the police for insufficient manpower, incompetence, unwillingness to make arrests, and, perhaps most importantly, complicity with the mob. Kennelly scrambled to institute reforms, but complaints about the police continued. In the summer of 1953, for example, when yet another attempt by the CHA to integrate a housing project—the Trumbull Park Homes on Chicago’s Far South Side—met with fierce neighborhood resistance, black tenants and outside observers once again criticized the police for failing to protect black tenants and sympathizing with their aggressors.51
Looking back upon this early chapter in the urban crisis, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that mob rule was allowed to shape a segregated future for Chicago while the city’s leadership stood idly by. Not only would the CHA not pry open the housing market for African Americans, as Elizabeth Wood dreamed, but it would, in the years ahead, even become a lever of hyperghettoization.52 With Wood resigning out of utter frustration in 1954 and the memories of the white housing riots of the 1940s and 1950s etched in the minds of the political establishment, the monstrous housing complexes built for black families in the 1950s and early 1960s would end up only in black ghetto areas or adjacent to preexisting projects on the city’s South and West Sides. But the whites taking the streets in the Peoria Street riot and many of the other racial disturbances of these years won only a Pyrrhic victory. The dynamics of segregation in Chicago were as much about resistance as they were about flight.53 The black population in Englewood increased from 11 percent in 1950 to 70 percent in 1960, as over 50,000 whites left the area. Those whites left behind, moreover, were hardly mixing with blacks; rather, they were preparing for their own departure. Ten years later Englewood was solidly black, along with many of the surrounding areas. Whites in Chicago, with astonishingly few exceptions, were unwilling to share their neighborhoods with African Americans, and with the federal government guaranteeing long-term, low-interest loans for veterans and other potential homeowners, they began heading for more leafy environs far from the color line. And Chicago was well on its way to becoming one of the most segregated cities in the nation.