American Pharaoh (6 page)

The work of patrolling the South Side’s racial borders was often taken care of by gangs like Daley’s Hamburg Athletic Club.
Because of these gangs’ propensity for violence, blacks who walked through neighborhoods like Bridgeport did so at their peril.
It was a lesson that black children growing up on the South Side absorbed with their ABC’s, but newly arrived blacks who wandered
into the area from outside could be caught unaware, often with dire results. In 1918, the poet Langston Hughes made the mistake
of walking west across Wentworth Avenue into the heart of the white South Side. It was Hughes’s first Sunday in Chicago —
he was a high school student at the time — and he “went out walking alone to see what the city looked like.” Hughes returned
to the black side of Wentworth with black eyes and a swollen jaw, having been beaten up by an unidentified Irish street gang
— it is lost to history whether it was the Hamburg Athletic Club — “who said they didn’t allow niggers in that neighborhood.”
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Blacks have lived in the Chicago area longer than any group but Native Americans. “Chicago’s first white man,” the old Chicago
saying has it, “was a Negro.” The man in question was Jean Baptiste du Sable, a Haitian black who built a trading post at
the mouth of the Chicago River in 1779 to trade with the Potawatomi Indians. The city’s black population grew slowly at first:
black migration into Illinois was limited until the Civil War by laws that barred blacks, both slave and free, from settling
in the state. Despite the legal prohibitions, enough fugitive slaves followed the Underground Railroad to Chicago in the 1840s
and 1850s that it came to be known among pro-slavery polemicists as a “sink hole of abolition.” By the 1870s, Illinois blacks
had the franchise, and in 1876 Chicago sent a black representative to the Illinois legislature. Chicago had 3,700 black residents
— 1.2 percent of the total population — when, as legend had it, Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over the lantern that started the
Great Chicago Fire of 1871. By the turn of the century, blacks still numbered only 30,000. Although they were starting to
concentrate in a small “Black Belt” on the South Side, even as late as 1915 blacks were still living in virtually every part
of Chicago.
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Daley’s childhood coincided with one of the nation’s most far-reaching social transformations: the Great Migration of blacks
from the rural South to the urban North. With the start of World War I, the booming wartime economy in the North faced a severe
labor shortage, as the war cut off the flow of European immigrants. Realizing that there was a ready supply of workers in
the rural South, where agricultural automation was fast reducing the need for black farm laborers, northern recruiters spread
out across the Deep South. Many northern cities were competing for these black workers, but Chicago had a unique advantage.
The
Chicago Defender,
the nation’s leading black newspaper, was widely read throughout the South, and it painted an especially rosy picture of
the high-paying jobs and good life that awaited black migrants in Chicago’s factories and slaughterhouses. “MILLIONS TO LEAVE
SOUTH,” a banner headline in the January 6, 1917,
Chicago Defender
declared. “Northern Invasion Will Start in Spring — Bound for the Promised Land.” To many southern blacks living in conditions
of extreme poverty and chafing under the oppression of Jim Crow, Chicago and the other large northern cities became a “glorious
symbol of hope.” Even blues singers from the era got caught up in the spirit:

I used to have a woman that lived up on a hill

I used to have a woman that lived up on a hill

She was crazy ’bout me, ooh well, well, cause

I worked at the Chicago Mill.
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The trip itself was not difficult. The Illinois Central Railroad, dubbed the “Fried Chicken Special” for the homemade lunches
carried by the migrants, provided easy passage from New Orleans through the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta and on
up to Chicago. A half-million southern blacks made the journey north between 1916 and 1919 alone, and another million followed
in the 1920s. Large numbers of blacks headed to New York, Detroit, and Cleveland, but as one Mississippi migrant recalled,
“the mecca was Chicago.”
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As the city’s black population soared, blacks were increasingly concentrated in a distinct ghetto — the South Side’s Black
Belt. Many of the southern migrants pouring into the Illinois Central Railroad Station clutched the addresses of friends and
family who lived in the Black Belt, and those who arrived with no plans were generally steered in that direction. By 1920,
the Black Belt — an area roughly bounded by 26th Street to the north, 55th Street to the south, State Street to the west,
and Lake Michigan to the east — was home to about 85 percent of the city’s blacks. “[S]egregation has been increasing,” Swedish
sociologist Gunnar Myrdal wrote of Chicago in
An American Dilemma,
his classic survey of American race relations. “[E]ven the upper class Negroes whose ancestors lived in Chicago on terms
of almost complete social equality with their white neighbors are now forced into Negro ghettos and are hardly differentiated
from the impoverished Negro just arrived from the South.” The upside of this racial segregation was that a remarkable African-American
world began to take shape on the South Side. The stone-front houses and apartment buildings along once-white avenues like
South Parkway and Michigan Boulevard now housed black teachers, lawyers, and other pillars of the black middle class. And
the Black Belt’s business districts were filled with black-owned stores and black doctors’ and lawyers’ offices. “Why should
Negro doctors and dentists give a damn that most white folks would rather die than let skilled black fingers repair their
vital organs?” St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton wrote in
Black Metropolis,
their 1945 study of Chicago’s “Bronzeville.” “The Negro masses were gradually learning to trust their own professional men
and would some day scorn to enrich white physicians at the expense of their own. Why beg white stores and offices to rescue
educated colored girls from service in the white folks’ kitchens and factories? Negroes were learning to support their own
businesses, and some day colored entrepreneurs would own all the stores and offices in the Black Belt; cash registers and
comptometers and typewriters would click merrily under lithe brown fingers.” The Black Belt provided Chicago’s blacks with
a measure of control over their own lives, and some refuge against the unfriendly white city outside its borders. But the
sad reality was that it remained badly overcrowded and desperately poor, with high illness and mortality rates; a high percentage
of residents on relief; a high crime rate; inadequate recreational facilities; lack of building repairs; accumulated garbage
and dirty streets; overcrowded schools; and high rates of police brutality.
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In white Chicago, the Great Migration produced a response that ranged from wariness to undisguised panic. The Chicago newspapers
ran inflammatory headlines such as “Half a Million Darkies from Dixie Swarm to the North to Better Themselves” and “Negroes
Arrive by Thousands — Peril to Health.” Articles in the city’s three leading papers — the
Tribune,
the
Daily News,
and the
Herald Examiner
— generally overstated the size of the migration, and focused on the new arrivals’ purported sickness, criminality, and vice.
White Chicagoans worked to prevent the migrants from moving into white neighborhoods. One South Side neighborhood association
captured the exclusionary spirit sweeping white Chicago when it declared that “there is nothing in the make-up of a Negro,
physically or mentally, which should induce anyone to welcome him as a neighbor.” In April 1917, the Chicago Real Estate Board
met and — concerned about what officials described as the “invasion of white residence districts by the Negroes” — appointed
a Special Committee on Negro Housing to make recommendations. On this committee’s recommendation, the board adopted a policy
of block-by-block racial segregation, carefully controlled so that “each block shall be filled solidly and . . . further expansion
shall be confined to contiguous blocks.” Three years later, the board took the further step of voting unanimously to punish
by “immediate expulsion” any member who sold property to a black on a block where there were only white owners.
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If white Chicago as a whole turned a cold shoulder to the new black arrivals, Daley’s Irish kinsmen were particularly unwelcoming.
The Irish and blacks had much in common. Ireland’s many years of domination at the hands of the British resembled, if not
slavery, then certainly southern sharecropping — with Irish farmers working the land and sending rent to absentee landlords
in England. The Irish were dominated, like southern blacks, through violence, and lost many of the same civil rights: to vote,
to serve on juries, and to marry outside their group. Indeed, after Cromwell’s bloody invasion in the mid-1600s, not only
were Irish-Catholics massacred in large numbers, but several thousand were sent in chains to the West Indies, where they were
sold into slavery. But these similar histories of oppression did not bring Chicago’s Irish and blacks together. Much of the
early difficulty stemmed from rivalry between two groups relegated to the lowest levels of the social order. As early as 1864,
a mob of four hundred Irish dockworkers went on a bloody rampage against a dozen blacks they regarded as taking jobs from
unemployed Irishmen. The
Chicago Tribune
— whose WASP management had little affection for Irish-Catholics — argued that this kind of anti-black violence was particularly
the province of Irish-Americans. “The Germans never mob colored men from working for whoever may employ them,” the
Tribune
declared. “The English, the Scotch, the French, the Scandinavians, never molest peaceable black people. Americans never think
of doing such a thing. No other nationality consider themselves ‘degraded’ by seeing blacks earning their own living by labor.”
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Nor was the Catholic Church a force for racial tolerance during these tense times. The Church had more reason to fear the
black influx than other white institutions. Unlike some faiths, Catholicism is firmly rooted in geography: Catholics’ relationship
to their Church is determined by the parish in which they reside. Catholics “ascribe sacramental qualities to the neighborhood,”
one historian has explained, “with the cross on top of the church and the bells ringing each day before Mass as visual and
aural reminders of the sacred.” Protestants and Jews who saw blacks moving into their neighborhoods could move to the suburbs,
taking their houses of worship with them or joining new ones when they settled in. But for Catholics, the ties to the land
were greater, and the threat of losing their parish more deeply felt. “[E]verything they have been taught to value, as Catholics
and Americans, is perceived as at risk,” wrote a reporter in Cicero, describing the racial siege felt by a parish there. “The
churches and schools they built would become empty, the neighborhood priests, if any were left, would become missionaries.
. . .” In 1917, the same year the Chicago Real Estate Board endorsed new steps to preserve racial segregation, Chicago’s Archbishop
George Mundelein declared that Saint Monica’s Parish would henceforth be reserved for the city’s black Catholics. Since Mundelein
had in the past opposed “national” parishes on principle, it seemed clear that his intention was to keep the races separate
within the Church.
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The demographic pressures kept mounting as trainload after train-load of blacks arrived from the South — and it was not clear
how much longer these new migrants could be squeezed into the borders of the overcrowded Black Belt. The end of World War
I had brought the return of black soldiers, many of whom were less willing to accept racial discrimination back home after
they had risked their lives for their country. And Chicago had just reelected William Thompson, a mayor many whites felt they
could not trust to keep blacks from moving into their neighborhoods. Republican Thompson’s close ties to the black community,
and his record number of black appointees, had led resentful whites to dub his City Hall “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The racial backlash
growing in white neighborhoods was palpable, and word began to spread in the black community that whites were plotting some
kind of bloody attack to re-assert their control of the city — perhaps even an invasion of the Black Belt designed to drive
blacks out of Chicago.
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On July 27, 1919, these tensions exploded when six black teenagers went swimming in the wrong part of Lake Michigan. Young
Eugene Williams drifted too close to a “white” beach on the South Side, and drowned after being hit by a rock thrown by a
white man standing on the shore. False rumors spread rapidly through both the white and black communities. Blacks reported
that a policeman had held a gun on a black crowd while whites threw stones; whites spread word that it was a white swimmer
who had drowned after being hit by a rock thrown by a black. Five days of bloody riots ensued, from July 27 to July 31, followed
by another week of intermittent violence. White gangs roamed the South Side, attacking blacks indiscriminately, and whites
drove through the Black Belt shooting at blacks out of car windows. Black gangs wandered through black neighborhoods, beating
up white merchants. In the end, it took the state militia and a driving rainstorm to bring about a tense peace. But before
the hostilities had died down, 23 blacks and 15 whites had been killed, and another 537 injured, two-thirds of them black.
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