CHAPTER 3

CAN THE MIDDLE CLASS SAVE CHICAGO?

“What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all its children. Any other ideal for our school is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy.”

—John Dewey, The School and Society, 1899

In March of 1955, two African American newcomers to the Chatham neighborhood on the Far South Side of Chicago, Washington Burney and John Sloan, attended a community meeting at the local YMCA. More blacks had recently entered the area, but what Burney and Sloan saw did not surprise them: three hundred whites and no other black faces but themselves. Their presence added to what was already an edgy atmosphere, but the agenda proceeded in an orderly fashion. Finally, however, one impatient resident blurted out what many of the attendees really had on their minds. “Stop horsing around. How are we going to keep these colored people from moving into our neighborhood?” The question sucked the air out of the room. Reverend John Hayes, the chair of the neighborhood association, hastily adjourned.¹

For a second meeting a month later to specifically deal with the influx of African Americans, Burney and Sloan recruited seventy-five other black neighbors to attend. Although whites held varied opinions on integration, many liberals recognized that resistance was doomed to end in failure; it had consistently led to violence and racial turnover in other South Side communities. At the assembly, a majority of the three hundred whites and seventy-five blacks came to a startling consensus: they would attempt to coexist in Chatham.²

However, by 1963, Chatham was a “black” community. “Within two months’ time, the exodus started,” recalled Washington Burney. “Once it started, it was just like a flood. You’d wake up and see a van in front of the house next door, and wonder what happened to the Olsens. They moved out in the middle of the night, and the Joneses moved in.”³ Whites made a steady retreat, leaving African Americans to try to maintain their communities and schools despite the drain of resources and political clout. Chatham exemplified the aspirations and ultimate failures of middle-class racial integration. Unlike most studies of neighborhood change, this chapter focuses on the perspectives of African American newcomers and the whites who tried to make integration work, examines the stumbling blocks, and then details how black residents sought to preserve community advantages, leading to conflict among African Americans over status, behaviors, and respectability.⁴

Many liberals were optimistic about integration along middle-class lines in the postwar era. Newly developing “suburbs in the city” such as Chatham and nearby Avalon Park held out the possibility of planting the seeds of a pluralistic, democratic society. African Americans moved southward in the 1950s, and Chicago newspaper headlines hailed interracial cooperation and implied that these urbanites had the necessary traits to create mixed areas.⁵ After all, these were cosmopolitan places where European ethnics, once bitterly divided by racial and religious differences, had melded along lines of middle-class respectability. “Who are undesirables?” a local priest asked at a community assembly. “Not too many years ago the Irish were classified as undesirables. . . . The Poles have been called undesirables, so have the Italians, the Mexicans and the Jews. If the colored find themselves called undesirables, they can feel themselves in good company.”⁶ Weren’t middle-class Chicagoans willing to recognize that African Americans were just the latest group to be welcomed into the melting pot?

Apparently not. “Integration” in Chatham, as in so many other Chicago communities, was short-lived. Despite liberal efforts, most of the white population left. The turnover in Chatham and nearby communities revealed entrenched racism in the postwar white middle class, as they effectively doomed black urban areas to the perils of hyper-segregation and disinvestment. White flight from desirable locales was not an innocuous act, but rather social violence against cities and their minority residents. The African American newcomers to Chatham were almost always of equal or better class backgrounds than the existing inhabitants, but high status and levels of education could not attenuate the attitudes of fleeing whites.⁷ The reality of fear, suspicion, and loathing of African Americans overwhelmed the efforts of integrationists. Racism was more visible through the deplorable violent actions of working-class whites in Chicago, but middle-class whites held the keys to saving the city. Overwhelmingly, they chose to leave. Black home buyers simultaneously considered community stabilization as a way to solidify their individual gains and advance civil rights. As whites fled, they struggled to make the best of their opportunity in Chatham. Unlike whites, they had no other options.

CONTACT HYPOTHESIS

Middle-class neighborhoods fit the “contact hypothesis” proposed by the influential social scientist Gordon W. Allport. Allport theorized that intergroup contact had dubious value for diminishing prejudice unless it was complemented by an equal status between the accommodating participants and supported by local institutions.⁸ When addressing the problem of racial change in urban areas, many Americans adhered to the notion that the middle classes were more likely to accept integrated living than poor and working-class residents.⁹ They saw the white middle class as more self-assured, and its cultural standards compatible with the emerging black middle class. Surveys indicated that the better educated, especially those with some college education, had higher “general tolerance values” and were more protective of civil rights for all Americans. Polling of Northern whites in the 1950s and 1960s also suggested that education diminished racist attitudes, and whites were increasingly open to having blacks from the same social class as neighbors.¹⁰ Interracial activists placed their trust in this equal-status contact. Groups sought higher-income families to be the first in white neighborhoods, believing they would not “fit the stereotype” and would be accepted.¹¹ As Thomas Sugrue notes, “Over the course of the 1950s, civil rights in the North took on an increasingly therapeutic cast.”¹² Confident integrationists argued that if whites could just jettison personal prejudices and intermingle with like-minded African Americans, racism would fade.

Middle-class blacks also expressed confidence in prospects for integration if society fostered the right kind of contacts. The troubles in working-class areas were intense because, as one black Chicagoan alleged, “many of the homeowners in the area were first- and second-generation Europeans. People who tend to be clannish. They really don’t understand about Negroes.”¹³ Arrivals may not have expected to be fully accepted in higher-status areas, but they thought they would be tolerated, unlike in blue-collar areas where, as one woman remarked, “If you just walked out there, they would get violent, or run you back home.”¹⁴ Drake and Cayton noted that “‘getting to know one another’ as a solvent of racial tensions” was a “mystical faith” in some quarters of the black community, but only if it involved “people of similar tastes and interests.”¹⁵

Drake and Cayton also remarked that the onus for integration was on the white middle class, who “set the tone” for race relations.¹⁶ By the 1950s, they appeared to be coming around to equal-status contact as a solution. Many hoped that whites and blacks of equal status would unite along middle-class lines, an acceptably “American” form of exclusion. “The middle class in America is keenly conscious of the threat of lower-class encroachments,” the civil rights activist and housing expert Robert Weaver noted. “This has long been a national characteristic, perhaps an inevitable consequence of a socially mobile people who are status-conscious.”¹⁷ Nationally, the popular press ran repeated accounts of middle-class whites accepting upwardly mobile blacks as neighbors. The stories in the articles were basically the same: African Americans entered middle-class neighborhoods and the existing residents, after some trepidation, gradually came to the realization that they had much in common with the newcomers.¹⁸ Commentators claimed the issues facing middle-class areas were not “race problems,” but “class problems” that neighbors could solve together.¹⁹

The Chatham and Avalon Park areas appeared to have all the necessary ingredients for successful integration. “The intelligent introduction of Negroes and other minorities into white communities of similar economic and social background,” neighborhood activist Thomas Gaudette declared, “is the only realistic hope of maintaining the basic social, cultural, and religious values of the communities.”²⁰ Integrationists believed that the well-educated, self-assured denizens could coalesce in a leafy area featuring an appealing mix of stately brick bungalows, charming flats, and attractive apartments. They hoped that these people would break the trend of neighborhood change. “The newcomers in this neighborhood have the same aspirations and values as those who have lived here longer,” a resident wrote in the community newsletter. “We can live peacefully together if we work together to maintain our neighborhood.”²¹ A local apartment complex association put this theory into action by declaring an open-occupancy policy in 1959. Proponents reasoned that this plan would “give Chicago and America an example of integrated housing in surroundings which have characteristics to make success possible.”²² Management announced that “applicants for vacancies in the village will be screened and selected with the objective of creating a high-grade racially integrated community. . . . We will not compromise our present high standards including the caliber of tenants as well as the quality and maintenance of service.”²³ Planners directed these words mainly at whites, assuring them that nothing would change in their buildings except for the color of their neighbors. For most whites, though, this was no small adjustment.

Despite wishing for equal-status integration and the existence of a “better class” of whites, the African Americans who moved into middle-class neighborhoods in the 1950s and 1960s had few illusions about their reception. Battles over racialized space in Chicago had been constant, and whites had greeted blacks with violence at nearly every turn.²⁴ As one realtor noted, “Any colored person going into an area where there is a crystallized feeling, he is taking his life in his hands.”²⁵ From 1956 to 1958 there were 256 reported incidents of racial violence in Chicago, including five deaths and thirty-eight cases of arson, mostly in areas of racial transition.²⁶ One African American man living in a border area admitted that “when I leave for work in the morning, I leave with the haunting dread that my own home and family may be the victims of violence in my absence.” He had full reason to fret, as incendiaries had bombed two black homes nearby.²⁷ Across the country, home seekers remarked on the emotional toll of finding a “good neighborhood.” As a physician observed, “Any kind of move for a Negro family today is expensive in terms of dollars and ruinous in terms of mental happiness.”²⁸ Yet they continued to brave the barriers, as expansion in the early 1950s was so fast and furious that families moved into a formerly all-white block every ten days.²⁹

Pioneering African Americans had diverse motives and expectations. They were an accomplished group and believed that the American Dream extended to freedom of residence.³⁰ Among those moving to Chatham were Arthur Turnbull, the first African American to graduate from the University of Chicago’s business school; Dr. Welton Taylor, a Tuskegee Airman and famed microbiologist; Reverend Robbin Skyles, the founder of Illinois’ first black Lutheran church; and Ernie Banks, the Chicago Cubs’ first African American player.³¹ Most were less distinguished, but made up a cross-section of the middle class, such as small business owners, professionals, and many government workers.

Some newcomers were optimistic for a new era of race relations, stating that integration was a test case for the survival of American democracy. Welton Taylor, for example, frequently challenged segregation in the military. Afterward, his family integrated veterans’ housing at the University of Illinois and joined with white allies to end discrimination in area restaurants and theaters.³² He argued that Chatham should be a place “where neighborliness is a positive attribute, not just a cornball thing thought up by squares to be ridiculed by beatniks.”³³

Others were more guarded, explaining that they were not seeking integration as such, but safe places with spacious homes, transportation options, and esteemed schools. A study of pioneers showed that they usually had some professional interracial interactions, but their goals were not solely about improved race relations.³⁴ “We didn’t move in to socialize with these people,” a Chatham resident affirmed. “It was just that this was the home we wanted, but if they’re friendly with us, we’re friendly with them.”³⁵ According to journalist Carl Rowan, many blacks were conflicted by the yearning to move wherever they pleased and be “just plain Americans,” yet still felt they should display “racial pride.” They wondered if their move to a new neighborhood represented another step toward equality or signified a desire to “be white.” Most heard whispers that they were deserting the race. Some responded angrily. “I don’t want to be a white man,” a pioneer responded. “I just want to live like one.”³⁶

Not surprisingly, blacks often professed matter-of-fact reasons for integration. With no whites around, one homeowner in a changing area noted, “The police will begin to think of our neighborhood as a Negro district, real estate brokers will think so, the teachers and trash men. And gradually the experienced teachers will ask for transfers. The policemen will appear more rarely. The broken street lamp will go unrepaired. The gutters will be unswept.”³⁷ In Chicago, a mixed neighborhood had benefits that went beyond lofty idealism.

Stabilization was essential to the black middle class because they had few other options. The legal victories against racially restrictive covenants that culminated with the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948 failed to create a culture of open occupancy in the metro area. Ten years later, the Defender observed, “The technique of excluding Negroes from desirable residential dwellings has lingered on, so far unaffected and unopposed. It is a conspiracy entered into by real estate holdings with a view to defeating clandestinely the broad processes of unrestricted occupancy.”³⁸ A journalist estimated that from 1945 to 1962, only nine families moved into white-only suburban areas. That figure rose gradually during the 1960s, but blacks still encountered stubborn impediments. In addition, not until 1966 did a North Side Chicago neighborhood welcome African Americans, when one hundred religious and community groups declared that Rogers Park was open to all.³⁹ While whites could flee to rapidly multiplying suburban developments, blacks faced the “Chicago Wall.” “The suburbs are just as much a closed society as the South,” an American Friends Service Committee official remarked. “Chicago’s system of separation of the races differs from Mississippi’s only in degree.”⁴⁰

Though there were no major riots in middle-class areas, African American newcomers lived in fear of racially motivated assaults. True to form, vigilantes in Chatham perpetrated sporadic acts of violence and harassment and circulated a weekly broadsheet maintaining that “white people must control their communities” and voicing support for Southern segregationists such as Mississippi senator James Eastland.⁴¹ The gospel singer Mahalia Jackson noted that “even though it’s not anywhere near as bad as the South, my second home, Chicago, gave me a bad time, too, when I set out to buy a home.” Jackson owned a “nice apartment,” but “dreamed of having a house all to myself, a little place with trees and grass and a garden.”⁴² In 1955, she drove into outlying districts inquiring about houses for sale, later admitting that the attention she received from white fans “had sort of confused” her, as she supposed that their respect for her talents might translate into a desire to have her as a neighbor. But after repeated rebuffs, she turned to a real estate agent, who found her a home in the heart of Chatham that a surgeon was “proud” to sell to Mahalia Jackson.⁴³

Unfortunately for Jackson, many other whites were not so “proud” to have her as a neighbor. “You’d have thought the atomic bomb was coming instead of me,” she recalled. Neighbors held emergency meetings and tried to block her purchase. Her phone rang at all hours of the night, and one caller warned, “You move into that house and we’ll blow it up with dynamite. You’re going to need more than your gospel songs and prayers to save you.” Jackson claimed she had not set out on an integration crusade; she just wanted “a quiet, pretty home to live in,” and after praying for God’s guidance, she bought the home.⁴⁴

In 1956, the year Jackson moved into Chatham, a wave of racially motivated vandalism swept the neighborhood. Terrorists firebombed one home and damaged another. They shot out Jackson’s windows. In response, police were posted outside her home for nearly a year.⁴⁵ While some neighbors came to welcome her, as Jackson looked out her picture window she could see For Sale signs popping up on lawns “like daisies,” a lucid indication that neighbors were leaving because of her skin color.⁴⁶ Sadistic incidents and threats continued, and in 1959 the Defender lumped the “open violence” in Chatham–Avalon Park with the nightly riots in working-class areas.⁴⁷

Considering the violent incidents in the area, it was telling that so many African American newcomers classified their experience as relatively peaceful.⁴⁸ The integration of middle-class areas took place in a hostile racial climate, but there were no riots or mob actions like those seen in working-class neighborhoods. Black Chathamites experienced enmity as they settled, but they also found hospitable neighbors who wanted to make integration work.

UNITY THROUGH CONFLICT

Though pioneers encountered resistance, some whites indicated they were ready for interracial living. Many had fled one or more times already and were tired of the process. They warily observed the hostile transformations in the line of expansion and wanted to avoid that chaos.⁴⁹ Local institutions tried to foster peaceful integration. The Chatham YMCA already included Jews on the board of directors and welcomed blacks as members and staff when the entered the area. In 1960 the Chatham Lions Club became one of the first integrated chapters in the nation. The Chatham Chamber of Commerce coordinated efforts with the Cosmopolitan Chamber of Commerce, which had changed its name from the Chicago Negro Chamber of Commerce in the 1950s to demonstrate its integrationist orientation.⁵⁰

Many Chicago liberals believed integration was an outward expression of their respective religious faiths. Across the Southeast Side, an impressive effort was made among clergymen as they broadcasted the message of Judeo-Christian welcome from nearly every pulpit.⁵¹ Liberal ministers took on the task of integration rather than disintegration in the mid-1950s despite heavy “pressure” and “ridicule” from dissenting members of congregations.⁵² St. Joachim’s parish in Chatham insisted that parishioners welcome African Americans as equals and enrolled black students in its school by the mid-1950s.⁵³ A group of local Catholic lay activists pledged to “help each other to grow in the love of God and our fellowmen through our jobs and through our interest in good homes and sound urban planning.”⁵⁴ Chatham–Avalon Park Community Council president Thomas Gaudette, who was motivated as much by an uncompromising faith in Catholic universalism as in neighborhood stabilization, often devoted thirty hours a week in his spare time to further harmony among neighbors.⁵⁵ Protestant ministers believed it was a theological duty to stay in the city and that “it is not enough to be against segregation. Both the mandate of the Judeo-Christian tradition and realistic attack on the problems of metropolitan life require movement toward integrated communities.”⁵⁶ Jewish residents quoted from the books of Leviticus and Malachi, reminding their neighbors that there was a single standard for the stranger as well as the native.⁵⁷

Most white residents needed no religious justification for staying, as much of the development on the Far South Side was nearly brand-new. Developers drained a swampy area and built homes, apartments, and shopping centers after the war, and locals made large investments in new recreation facilities and churches.⁵⁸ The 1954 unveiling of a $300,000 Young Men’s Jewish Youth Center in nearby South Shore certainly gave no indication of dissatisfaction with the surroundings or a sense that white flight was imminent.⁵⁹ As a letter sent out by Chatham clergy in 1954 asserted, “It is of very doubtful value to try to exchange a community of good homes, schools, churches, stores, and transportation for an area where these things are lacking, simply because a person of a different skin color moves into your block, wanting, the chances are, to be a good citizen in the community.”⁶⁰ Many Chicago whites thought that black newcomers would lower home values, but that was not a foremost concern from local homeowners. Realtors boasted that Chatham would maintain favorable or better housing prices than comparable city communities, as it contained all the amenities residents sought, including high-performing schools. Peter Rossi, a professor at the University of Chicago and resident of the Marynook subdivision in Chatham, called these new areas “semi-suburbs,” which included alluring features such as detached houses and wide, low-traffic streets lined with trees.⁶¹ Many residents had put down roots and took pride in their surroundings.⁶² Unlike other Chicago neighborhoods suffering from decline and overcrowding, residents in Chatham and nearby middle-class communities expressed contentment.

The intolerant sought to strengthen the invisible racial walls around their communities, but liberals also prepared. In the early 1950s, for instance, they established the Chatham–Avalon Park Community Council (CAPCC), an association that broke with tradition by declaring that stable integration was both inevitable and welcomed.⁶³ Reverend John Hayes, the council president, observed that while most neighborhood organizations wanted to build an “iron curtain,” the CAPCC encouraged whites to deal with newcomers calmly and rationally. He linked pioneering to colonial struggles in India, Egypt, and Vietnam, as “people everywhere are demanding to join the human race.”⁶⁴ Other community associations in the area followed suit, although members roiled in tumult regarding the meanings of integration. The West Avalon Community Association, for example, split into a conservative faction that argued for quietly easing in newcomers and an activist bloc that proposed getting involved through demonstrations at local beaches and picketing discriminatory employers.⁶⁵ The breach presaged future cracks in the liberal consensus, but these groups did succeed in marginalizing reactionary segregationists.

The most dynamic white activist in the Chatham area was Thomas Gaudette. Born in Massachusetts and raised in a large, socially progressive Catholic home, Gaudette grew up imagining that church and the community “are the same thing. . . . I don’t understand how you make a distinction.” He flew forty missions as a bomber pilot in World War II and was shot down over Prague. After the war he helped his brother, a priest, with an integrated unionization drive at a can factory in Mississippi and then went back home to attend Boston College. There he married Kay Sullivan, graduated, and became a traffic manager with the Admiral Corporation. Kay and Tom moved to Kay’s childhood neighborhood of Chatham, and Tom appeared to be on his way to becoming an “organization man,” or, as he put it, a “simple man” who “came home every night at 5:30 and had kids.” The gutters were clean, and his grass was cut, but Tom and Kay realized that their lives were “a fucking waste of time.” After a predatory realtor visited his house, Gaudette went to a neighborhood meeting and realized he needed to get involved. Gaudette, spurred on by his wife, became president of the CAPCC and mixed so easily with black neighbors that some dissenters at his parish whispered that he “loved niggers.” The insults only emboldened him, though, because like many activists in the period, he sensed he was on the side of justice. “I was righteous, and I was right,” he recalled. “And I would say give a moral person power and you’ve got yourself a problem, baby, because there is no debate. The moral person is right. I know the feeling, ya feel good.”⁶⁶

Through his activism he became familiar with the rabble-rouser Saul Alinsky. Alinsky’s tactics convinced Gaudette that he could unite neighbors through conflicts that would bring out common interests. Gaudette, a former amateur boxer, reveled in this strategy, confronting friends and foes with subjects that his polite neighbors considered taboo, especially the topic of race. He contended that discussions of “human relations” and “brotherhood” were “Hyde Park liberal crap” as the community did not need “do-gooders,” they needed to fuse around tangible goals.⁶⁷ The CAPCC, led by Gaudette and spurred on by an active membership, found the conflicts they were looking for in unifying campaigns over zoning, the closing of taverns, and a showdown with the Nation of Islam.

Much to the delight of Gaudette and other liberals, integration appeared to be working. Local institutions opened their doors, and blacks and whites interacted in block clubs, bowling leagues, and in the pews.⁶⁸ On the Edward Murrow television show, Mahalia Jackson, who had been pained by her neighbors’ cold greeting, received an integrated delegation from the CAPCC.⁶⁹ Optimistic whites argued that it was beneficial to live in a mixed community and touted the advantages of city life.⁷⁰ Fortune magazine noted that more parents were staying in the city because they wanted their children “brought up in an environment closer to reality,” exposed “to all kinds of people, colored and white, old and young, poor and rich.”⁷¹ One woman moved her family back from Park Forest, calling the suburb an “artificial community.” “You can’t teach your children democracy unless you’re willing to live in an area that is democratic,” she argued.⁷² Whites were reassured when their new neighbors seemed similar to old neighbors.⁷³ Some blacks agreed. After a planned interracial home visit, one black Chathamite noted, “We were all so much alike it was sickening.”⁷⁴ A Chicago Tribune headline proclaimed, “Chatham Integration Is Successful.” Families had not panicked, and the area had made integration a “living experiment.”⁷⁵ The CAPCC won awards for promoting brotherhood, and people flocked to see how the neighborhood had done it, while groups from New Jersey to Ohio invited Gaudette to speak.⁷⁶ “We are finding that Negroes have the same fears we do,” one resident noted. “They don’t want the neighborhood to decline any more than anyone else.”⁷⁷ The rest of the city was looking at Chatham to see what happened when an esteemed community integrated. Would the area maintain its cachet? Or would it become just another run-down extension of the ghetto?⁷⁸

Residents bonded to maintain the prestige of the area by preventing homes from being subdivided into apartments. In middle-class areas, the Chicago Defender noted, black homeowners were determined to “fight harder against possible ‘blight’ than any other group of citizens. . . . Primarily they will be on guard against the kind of ‘kitchenetting’ or overcrowding that has ruined every other neighborhood.”⁷⁹ They invested heavily in improving their homes and had taken special interest in making sure their neighbors did not lower values.⁸⁰ Homeowners hoped that meticulousness would alleviate prejudice and help others move out of the ghetto peacefully. However, this also meant that the middle class felt they needed to keep their less respectable brethren out of their communities. One newcomer made his preference for neighbors clear when he told the Daily News, “As for me, I’d rather have a decent white family next to me than some Negro family fresh from the slums.” Louis A. Fitzgerald, an African American CAPCC member, understood that the dual housing market imposed an artificial “color tax.” “Many Negroes have to take exorbitant mortgages,” Fitzgerald lamented. “Then they carve up their homes to get more income to meet payments.” Nevertheless, Fitzgerald concentrated on stopping illegal conversions of single-family homes into apartments, as protecting property investments was a more immediate and more realistic goal than trying to tackle the gargantuan housing predicament faced by African Americans.⁸¹

Homeowners made joint petitions at city zoning hearings to preserve their community. In 1958, five hundred Chathamites packed city hall to contest multifamily housing. After their victory, one Chathamite after another made clear that they were determined to prevent blight. “As a mother and a teacher I will strive to do whatever I can to make this neighborhood a wholesome place in which to raise a child,” a resident avowed. “Any attempts to change the character of the neighborhood I will fight militantly.” And militant they were, repeatedly thwarting zoning changes throughout the next decade to fight what many called the “evil” of slums.⁸²

In addition to zoning, locals made a “significant interracial effort” to shut down taverns. As shop owners relocated to the suburbs, pubs often filled the empty spaces. According to Chathamites, these establishments attracted the wrong kind of clientele. In response, the CAPCC took advantage of an obscure Chicago law that allowed individual precincts to vote dry.⁸³ Supporters assured voters that this was not a temperance movement (even Gaudette’s Irish-Catholic father argued that this drive went “too far”), but there was a difference between social drinking and public nuisances. “Due to the fact that the social activities of the community are conducted either in the form of back yard barbecues or as basement recreation socials,” a black resident claimed, “the patronage of the taverns operated in the area was transient.”⁸⁴ Locals thought the pubs invited an unwanted, boisterous style of revelry. An African American leader called this the “Cousin Willie” problem. A migrant suddenly flush with cash spent too much time in South Side bars, “and he’s a good bet to get himself in trouble. In fact, he gets us all in trouble.”⁸⁵ On this point, middle-class Chathamites were in agreement. From the outside, observers marveled at the integrated activism on the Southeast Side. These victories, however, masked festering problems.

CLASS AND THE SCHOOL PROBLEM

Though blacks and whites were able to come together over neighborhood status concerns, the local public schools proved to be their undoing. For the middle class, schools were usually the decisive factor when choosing where to live. Having achieved their own upward mobility, parents sought to pave the way for their children to maintain their class position, or better yet, to rise to the next level.⁸⁶ Although the postwar years were a boom time for the white middle class, they had persistent anxiety about losing their status or their children moving downward. Since education would determine a great deal of their children’s future, it was no longer a fixed asset, but rather something to be graded and critiqued. If the local school came up short, changes needed to be made.

The Chicago Public Schools (CPS) experienced ups and downs in their effectiveness in the first half of the twentieth century, struggling episodically with overcapacity, corruption, and funding shortfalls. By the 1950s, though, they were in what historian John Rury calls the “golden age” of their existence, “a time of prosperity and growing confidence in the schools.” Under Superintendent Benjamin Willis, class sizes dropped by 20 percent despite enrollment swelling by 10,000 students each year. Augmented teacher salaries, introduction of new curriculum, and enhanced summer and after-school programs signaled innovation. Early in his tenure, many black Chicagoans were impressed by Willis and urged him to do more to close the racial gap.⁸⁷

However, prosperity veiled growing troubles. The changing socioeconomic composition of the city, de facto segregation, middle-class flight, and the deterioration of the inner city contributed to the growing crisis. In the 1950s, the black population in Chicago increased by 321,000, while the white population dropped by 399,000.⁸⁸ In addition, the baby boom and Southern newcomers put tremendous stress on facilities and staffs. Migrants were often handicapped by Southern education and poverty, and they entered overflowing buildings. The number of students in Chicago public schools rose 180,000 from 1953 to 1966, even though the population of the city fell 70,000 in that period.⁸⁹ Few middle-class whites were willing to remain in neighborhoods, no matter how aesthetically pleasing, if they felt that the schools could no longer assure their children’s futures, especially when the suburban alternative beckoned. According to Dr. Robert Havighurst’s 1964 study of the CPS, “Chicago’s chief problem is this: how to keep and attract middle-income people to the central city and how to maintain a substantial white majority in the central city.”⁹⁰

While whites still lived on the South Side, many African Americans contended that integrated classrooms were desirable from the standpoint of race relations and would not be neglected by the power structure.⁹¹ Even though they had experienced the racist limitations of the United States firsthand, parents were deeply invested in their children’s futures. “No matter how bitter or disillusioned people were with their lot and/or the system, when their children were born they dragged out and polished up the old Up-the-Ladder-Dream,” Southsider Melvin Van Peebles recalled. “They were dead positive that life would be kinder to their children.”⁹² They braced their children for harassment, arguing that it was worth it when compared to enduring a second-rate schooling and that “education of association” could eventually lessen race prejudice.⁹³ Classrooms, black activists suggested, should be laboratories of democracy and tolerance.

For most white students and parents, though, integration was not the harbinger of a better future, but a signal of deterioration. Racial, ethnic, and religious animosities simmered among youths across the city, often spilling over into attacks during prep sporting events. The hostility became so heated in 1954 that the police commissioner half jokingly suggested the city should “abolish basketball.”⁹⁴ Many whites firmly opposed integration in the late 1950s as small riots broke out at high schools across the city.⁹⁵ At Hirsch High in Chatham, even the juvenile delinquents said they were leaving. “We may try South Shore [High School],” one explained. “No colored over there. We had fifty of ’em [at Hirsch] last winter. We may have a hundred next year.”⁹⁶ Whites held a near-consensus stance that schools with black students were “bad”; even the “toughs” wanted out of them. Across the country, they left in anticipation of desegregation. “Urban became synonymous with poor public education,” historian Jack Schneider notes, “and that perception, when acted upon, became a reality.”⁹⁷

The school problem inspired an integrated summit in June 1960 sponsored by the Marynook Homeowners Association (MHA) and the CAPCC. Locals sensed that the packed elementary schools on double shift were the prime threat to durable mixed communities, and they alleged that Hirsch High School was undergoing the “typical ghetto pattern” of transformation from better than average into a “disciplinary barracks.” Black and white parents complained that Hirsch was not serving their college-bound progeny, as it had been “flooded with poorly prepared youngsters” from working-class areas north of Chatham.⁹⁸ To remedy this, the MHA and CAPCC collaborated on the “Marynook Plan,” an audacious attempt at interracial cooperation along middle-class lines. The plan proposed a “Regional High School District” and envisioned the five high schools on the Southeast Side of Chicago as “educationally specialized”: two college-prep schools, enhancement of the Chicago Vocational school, a commercial school for business students, and a career-orientation school for “at-risk” students, all with loose transfer rules for students who changed their “life goals.”⁹⁹ The plan garnered local support and inspired a lawsuit to force Superintendent Willis to accept open enrollment.¹⁰⁰ Educational experts touted the strategy to stabilize the racial balance and stem middle-class flight.¹⁰¹

While the authors of the Marynook Plan did express concern over the problem of “at-risk” and “unemployable” pupils, the main thrust of the plan was stabilization along class lines. As the political scientist Norton Long noted, the child-centered middle class felt increased pressure to “keep up with the Joneses in the education of their children” and worried that their children could be dragged down by lower-class peers. “No one who has seen educated Negroes desperately striving to protect their children and their civilized values from the patterns of the plantation South need cringe at the charge of being a segregationist,” Long argued. “What badly needs facing is the kinds of segregation that are justifiable.”¹⁰² According to reform-minded middle-class Americans, racial segregation was wrong because it ignored the individuality of black children. But class segregation could insulate the middle classes from the negative influences of the poor and maladjusted.

The Marynook Plan not only addressed the problem of Chicago’s inability to maintain integrated communities, but also charged that the CPS were not adequately serving the needs of college-bound, “gifted” children.¹⁰³ Parents consistently tabbed Hirsch High as the primary hurdle to maintaining integration, and by 1962 only twenty-six whites remained.¹⁰⁴ Supporters expressed confidence that the Board of Education would listen to their demands, because they were “not that stupid” to ignore middle-class parents in an area in the national spotlight.¹⁰⁵ The Marynook Plan divided children along class lines, ensuring that elite high schools would not be encumbered by vocational-track and problem students. When middle-class parents urged that their children needed a broader curriculum, they meant Latin, not metal shop.

The Chicago Board of Education repeatedly rejected schemes like the Marynook Plan before finally agreeing to a controversial and short-lived “clustering plan” in 1964. Willis, like many educators in this period, remained committed to the neighborhood school, arguing that it “emphasizes the role of the school in community life.” He reasoned that attempts to change these borders for class or race reasons were political and not among the goals of public education. “I’m an educator, not a social worker,” Willis argued. “I don’t go around counting Negroes, Indians, Hindus or any other group.” Blacks and whites generally viewed neighborhood schools in drastically different ways. As one expert deduced, “Neighborhood schools symbolize, above all else, the effort of America’s vast middle class to transmit shared values and aspirations to its children.” But for urban blacks, these same arrangements meant arrested mobility and “a slow suffocation in the darkness of the ghetto.”¹⁰⁶ An official report from the Board of Education agreed, arguing that the neighborhood school “operates now to retard the acculturation and integration of the in-migrant Negro in Chicago and in the metropolitan United States as a whole.”¹⁰⁷ The integrated team that formulated the Marynook Plan thought they had a solution to please everyone and were disappointed that Willis seemed to ignore community desires because of his devotion to the neighborhood school.¹⁰⁸

Additionally, many Chicagoans suspected that Willis, the Board of Education, and Mayor Richard J. Daley had “political” reasons for confining black students in ghetto schools, judging segregation as the only way to keep whites in the city. As the Daily News noted, city officials were “well aware that many thousands of white families, justifiably or not, already have fled the city rather than send their children to school with Negroes.”¹⁰⁹ These suspicions were confirmed in a school board report demonstrating that 85 percent of Chicago students attended segregated schools. Despite Willis’s massive building efforts, 40 percent of black schools had more than thirty-five students per classroom, while white facilities had space for seventeen thousand pupils.¹¹⁰

Willis became a lightning rod for Chicago’s education tribulations. His stubborn insistence that the system was not segregated made him the focus of near-constant protests. Chathamites blamed him for hastening the departure of the middle class and shattering racially mixed areas yearning for stability. According to one CPS board member, “Ben Willis virtually sank the Chicago public schools.”¹¹¹ If so, Willis had plenty of help. Until 1963, when he temporarily resigned and disappeared for a short period, his policies were consistently supported by city administration, the business community, the press, the board’s only African American member, and most whites.¹¹² The problems were much deeper and systemic than the decisions of the superintendent. One expert concluded that Willis was reluctant to change policies, but he was also pressured to maintain separate schools by “a vociferous minority group which is blatantly anti-Negro and constitutes the local version of the ‘white backlash.’”¹¹³

Black Chathamites, realizing that their hopes for integration were fading, opened a two-front battle by spearheading the civil rights activism against Willis. The school protests grew from a murmur to a shout by the mid-1960s, as tactics grew more confrontational and participation exploded. Integration nudged forward in Southern cities, but progress in Chicago was scant. In 1961, for example, the Sun-Times reported that integration was “peaceful” in Dallas, but pictures showed schools in Chicago denying enrollment to black students.¹¹⁴ CAPCC took an early lead, joining the Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and local civil rights groups in demanding educational equity. In 1961, while the CAPCC collaborated on the Marynook Plan, the group also hired attorney Paul Zuber, fresh off a victory to desegregate the schools in New Rochelle, New York, to launch a suit against the Chicago Board of Education.¹¹⁵

While Chatham parents instigated the legalistic phase, they also began a direct-action component at Burnside Elementary as fed-up mothers initiated a sit-in in January 1962. Burnside had been overloaded for five years; it had approximately 1,600 pupils at a facility built in 1898 to handle 865. Nearby Perry remained all-white and used eleven rooms for the blind and deaf, an allocation of space that parents referred to as a “ruse for filling the school and fending off the transfer of Negroes.”¹¹⁶ Supporters rallied behind the protests, participating in picketing and other demonstrations at the building until police arrested them for trespassing. But the arrests only emboldened the activists, as Judge Joseph J. Butler dismissed the charges and approved of sit-ins as “courageous” and a “good mode of expressing opinions,” while calling for the Board of Education to speak to the dissidents. The problem was deeper than trespassing, Butler added. If the school board is promoting segregation, “the people have a right—almost a duty—to fight.”¹¹⁷

Activists mounted a full-scale campaign. “The battle line must be drawn somewhere in the struggle to democratize the Chicago schools,” the Chicago Defender declared. “Burnside is just as good a place to start the fight.”¹¹⁸ In April, a coalition of neighborhood groups from working- and middle-class areas came together with the Urban League and NAACP to form the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) as a “common front” on civil rights issues.¹¹⁹ The CCCO launched a variety of tactics to integrate classrooms, including litigation, picketing, and independent investigations of empty classrooms in white locales, while pressuring Superintendent Willis and the Board of Education to implement transfer plans. The activities culminated in a one-day boycott on October 23, 1963, when 224,770 children, nearly half of CPS students, stayed home.¹²⁰

Contrary to the criticism launched against the black middle class, their actions in the schooling fray showed that they were willing participants in civil-rights activities, including participating in direct actions and forming broad coalitions. One community newspaper observed that “Negro businessmen, professionals, day laborers, housewives, high school kids, and ADC mothers” were taking part in the “extraordinary measures” to improve education. Though the Burnside actions were started by middle-class parents, they were soon lending their organizational power and expertise to protests across the South Side.¹²¹ Indeed, contrary to the stereotype of the self-satisfied, detached Black Babbitt, a study of Chatham African Americans published in 1971 revealed that 75 percent of white-collar blacks were active in the civil rights movement, and 40 percent had participated in direct action.¹²² The race and class dynamics that played out locally put middle-class African Americans in complex situations that often left them conflicted over balancing neighborhood concerns and wider goals. Instead of withdrawing, they sought a balance that brought contradictions but also progress.

PANIC AND FLIGHT

The headline-grabbing success of integrated activism in Chatham obscured the steady white retreat. On a national level, white flight was a complex phenomenon. As historian Amanda Seligman demonstrates, those exiting often had “multiple sources of discontent with the postwar urban environment” that went beyond racial integration.¹²³ However, whites in middle-class neighborhoods on the South Side rarely expressed dissatisfaction with the city in words and actions. Leave they did, though, sometimes taking a large financial loss on their homes. When “blockbusters” descended on changing middle-class areas in the 1950s, they found fertile ground for business as edgy homeowners fell for the scare tactics of real estate agents.

The nationwide practice of blockbusting almost always accompanied the entry of African Americans into formerly all-white areas, and turnover followed a familiar cycle. Real estate agents—black and white—made vast profits by fomenting panic and buying low from skittish homeowners and then selling at inflated prices to eager African Americans. The agents also solicited black homeowners, seeking to buy their single-family homes and subdivide them.¹²⁴ Some ethically challenged realtors used dirty tricks to spread fear, including late-night phone calls, placing deceptive Sold signs in yards, and staging a phony gang fight to scare neighbors, involving cries of “Don’t shoot!”¹²⁵ Blockbusters in Chatham included the respectable and the shady, the professional and the amateur. There was money to be made, and some had a nose for it. Julian Black, a former comanager of Joe Louis and a policy-wheel baron, handled home sales, as did reputable downtown bankers who waited for the speculators to “break” a block before descending like vultures. While residents commonly likened blockbusters to snakes, some black newcomers admitted that they were necessary. “White home owners’ groups won’t allow sales to Negroes,” a realtor active in the area stated. “There also are mortgage conditions for Negroes. This usually makes it necessary for a speculator to go in first.”¹²⁶ The Chicago Daily News reported that the “panic peddlers” took a vicious toll on attempts at integration. “Any chance to create an interracial neighborhood is undermined and the so-called Negro ‘ghetto’ merely is extended. And more whites make the costly flight to the suburbs.”¹²⁷

The blockbusters’ constant badgering and scare tactics enraged residents, especially integrationists. “Any man who would use misunderstandings between races as a means to make a buck should be horse-whipped,” Gaudette wrote to a Jewish group. “He does more harm than all the Communists in the country today and the trouble is he might be one of our neighbors.”¹²⁸ In 1960 twenty interracial activists in Chatham engaged in civil disobedience, uprooting about a dozen For Sale signs that they claimed had been put up by blockbusters. The crowd started a bonfire in an empty lot and waved placards reading “Realty Goons Get Out,” “Jail Blockbusters,” and “Panic Peddlers Are Un-American” before police dispersed them.¹²⁹ The protests made a brave stand against neighborhood change but could not address the deeper reasons for turnover.

While some residents panicked and fled, others drifted away quietly, even shamefully. Many middle-class whites were eager to maintain the veneer of liberalism and claimed they were not leaving the city for “racial” reasons. Instead, they stressed socially approved motives, with the most frequent response that it was “better for the children.”¹³⁰ Liberals cited education as the major reason, as Daley and Willis may have been correct in their assessment that the only way to keep whites in the city was to keep black students out of their schools. Across the country, whites often assumed that integration would press standards downward.¹³¹ In their minds, this was due either to environmental factors, as black children had “deprived educational backgrounds,” or hereditary causes, as blacks lacked the “potential for achievement.” According to Time magazine, black and Latino migrant children were “different” than the European immigrants of yesteryear. Already having achieved American citizenship, “they are shorn of the drive that spurred their predecessors, weirdly cut off from the middle-class culture that teachers abide by.” Few white parents thought there was anything left to do but move.¹³² As a Marynook resident recalled, “It takes more than attitude” to realize integration, and locals generally agreed that the area high schools were “catastrophic.” His family joined the “migration” to suburban Flossmoor.¹³³ A Chicago school board report admitted that integration was in danger of becoming a “theoretical matter,” because it “cannot be achieved without white students.”¹³⁴ Over time, this prediction was largely borne out.

It wasn’t just the educational standards that bothered whites, as most parents also strongly objected to interracial dating. Once sex differences became apparent in the junior high years, white families either left or sent their children to schools in different neighborhoods. A survey of white women on the South Side in the early 1950s revealed that even those who were completely democratic in terms of housing for African Americans still objected to mixed junior high schools, indicating that integration would be fleeting. One middle-class woman claimed to have “no prejudice against Negroes,” yet still acknowledged “I don’t care for intermarriage. I think the mother has a right to be anxious if her daughter is with Negro boys.”¹³⁵ Interracial sex, for many parents, was beyond the pale. For many white families, the threat inherent in the sexually charged realities of adolescent life trumped any neighborhood attachment. In 1959, the Daily News reported that parents often admitted they would stay in Chatham if they “could send [their] kids to a white school.” Even if the Chicago Board of Education would have accepted the Marynook Plan and divided borders along lines of class and ability, it is doubtful that this would have stemmed the tide of flight.¹³⁶

White boundaries not only provided a rationale for leaving the city, they also reinforced gender norms. Men bolstered their masculinity through the “preservation” of white womanhood and seized an opportune justification for their otherwise “unmanly” exit. “No husband and no family man can long withstand the fears of his womenfolks,” a frustrated white liberal noted. “He simply packs up his family and moves.” One of the first to sell in Chatham reported that he was leaving because the sight of African Americans on his street had his sister “so worked up it was horrible.”¹³⁷ By containing supposed black aggressiveness and saving wives and daughters, white families restructured flight as a safely masculine gesture rather than as a panicked retreat.¹³⁸

In a sense, middle-class whites failed to embody the “contact hypothesis” in part because its tenets were fundamentally true.¹³⁹ Many had rebelled against their own parents’ warnings not to marry outside of their own ethnicity or faith. In some respects, the conscious fixation on miscegenation revealed the collective belief in the inexorable certainty of “race mixing.”¹⁴⁰ If they had any doubts, they were quickly erased by the cross-racial relationships that sprouted in church youth groups and in schools. Middle-class, educated people could express positive feelings on the “rights of Negroes,” but sex across the color line was usually feared and despised. Intermarriage of their offspring would result in a status calamity, negating race privilege.¹⁴¹ A 1958 Gallup poll found that 96 percent of whites disapproved of marriage between blacks and whites. As David Hollinger notes, hard-core segregationists charged that civil rights agitation was just an elaborate plot to encourage miscegenation. Integrationists could not dismiss the allegations because a significant number of Northerners shared these suspicions.¹⁴² A Chicago realtor contended that parents “worry about their children merging with them [blacks] in school. They worry about marriage. In discussing with white people, invariably you find the problem about the children.” Another estimated that 90 percent of whites left the city because of mixing in classrooms. “That’s one of the most basic things in the whole business,” he stated. “They don’t want their children to mingle.”¹⁴³

When the school board rejected redistricting plans, liberal whites in Chatham developed a validation for flight that diminished the importance of race and stressed class and the continuance of generational social mobility. As a writer in the Atlantic Monthly observed, when Negroes moved next door to and into the same classrooms as whites, they were no longer an “abstraction,” but a “concrete reality,” posing a dilemma to liberals who supported equal rights. Middle-class whites alleged that they had not failed Chicago; rather, the city, especially the public schools, had failed them. Some moved out surreptitiously to avoid the awkward conversation with neighbors. Others insisted that they wanted to stay but could not expose their children to substandard education. One resident of Marynook claimed that the community had fought long and hard for integration, “but the schools have been our worst enemy.”¹⁴⁴ Verna Dee Goren, who stayed in the area, was “infuriated” by these excuses, noting that the local schools were excellent and the African Americans moving in were obviously upwardly mobile. “Whites used education as an excuse,” her husband, Mike, recalled. “Everyone thought their kid belonged in Harvard.”¹⁴⁵

The racial advantages of whiteness were also crystal clear in this scenario. When the effort to realign the schools failed, whites had the convenient “escape hatch” of the suburbs, most of which were effectively closed to racial minorities.¹⁴⁶ Government incentives and urban/suburban disparities basically bribed them to leave cities.¹⁴⁷ In the mid- to late-1960s, for instance, Chicago spent $614 per year to educate each high school student, while neighboring Evanston spent $1,096. Whites left, further shrinking the city’s tax base.¹⁴⁸ The cookie-cutter postwar developments guaranteed a baseline level of class stability and self-governance. There white Americans could actively influence their districts without having to deal with the class and race diversity. A major mission of public education in a democracy was to give children from all backgrounds a chance to achieve social mobility. However, with the explosion of suburban fiefdoms in the second half of the twentieth century, the white middle class announced to the country that fulfilling this mission was not their problem. An exhausted Gaudette looked back and realized that his tasks were Sisyphean unless the entire metropolitan area was part of the solution. “We are forced to confront these issues, whether it’s racial, whether it’s education, whether it’s violence . . . as a city.” Unfortunately, the middle-class whites best equipped to deal with these issues turned their backs and moved out. The suburbs, Gaudette wearily admitted, were Chicago’s “obvious problem.”¹⁴⁹

Where whites obfuscated, blacks saw racism. Newcomers, the clear majority of whom were accomplished citizens, regarded this abandonment “as a strongly implied slur on Negroes.” For Mahalia Jackson, the rejection by her Chatham neighbors was “like being put out of a family.”¹⁵⁰ The black journalist Hoyt Fuller maintained that flight revealed the hypocrisy of Northern white liberals. “It was one thing to strike a liberal pose in favor of Negro rights so long as what was involved only amounted to a question of unsegregated seating on a Southern bus, or free use of a public park, or even unrestricted service at a sandwich counter,” Fuller wrote. “But it is quite another matter when this liberality is put to the acid test in terms of jobs, schools, and housing, areas where some adjustment and possible inconvenience on the ‘liberal’s’ part is required to make Negro equality an unqualified reality.”¹⁵¹ The immediate panic of flappable residents and the outwardly racist did not surprise most newcomers as they had seen it all happen before. What really stung, though, is when whites left even after African Americans had proven their worth. “At first I couldn’t understand why people were moving out so suddenly,” a pioneer recalled. “It was like having a tooth pulled for no reason. And then I couldn’t understand why people kept leaving, why the individuals who didn’t leave right way couldn’t see that those of us moving in were at the same economic level—that we had similar values.”¹⁵² The relocation process was already exhausting because of the tension and fear involved, and it became even more wearing as black residents realized that their neighbors chose not to see them as individuals.

AFTER WHITE FLIGHT

African Americans were chagrined, but they had no time for vexations as they set out to make the best of their new surroundings. They had the sense that they were a part of a rising middle class and wanted to ensure that Chatham remained “quiet and dignified.” As soon as whites moved out, black residents began to wonder: Who is going to move next door?¹⁵³ Flight had not “left” communities open to blacks; rather pioneers had claimed these spaces through initiative and ambition and were not about to let their neighborhoods slide.¹⁵⁴ One study of Chicago in the 1960s demonstrated that Africans Americans were not entering new areas at random, but rather were actively seeking “family-oriented, middle-class communities,” demonstrating the “power and predominance of a new black middle class.”¹⁵⁵ Where whites and demographers saw an “expanding ghetto,” African Americans spotted opportunity. In 1962–1963, black Chathamites invested nearly $9 million in new home construction, one of the largest amounts in any city area.¹⁵⁶ These “gilded ghettos,” as St. Clair Drake called them, were “indistinguishable from any other middle-class neighborhoods except by the color of the residents’ skin.”¹⁵⁷

Black areas in cities across the North continued to be segmented by class, but compared to middle-class whites, middle-class blacks still lived near the poor and working class. This fostered more interactions, but the black middle class also witnessed bleak cases of decay in adjacent areas. Single-family homes rarely retained their integrity, as owners maximized revenue by converting them to kitchenettes. Districts such as Woodlawn and Kenwood, beset by congestion and absentee landlords, declined as buildings began to take on the appearance of “old war ruins.”¹⁵⁸ These nearby examples of decline made the black middle class even more attentive to stabilization. Home upkeep became a second religion, and nonconformists faced the ire of neighbors.¹⁵⁹ Welton Taylor, who succeeded Gaudette as the president of the CAPCC, differentiated between “neighborhood” concerns and the black middle class’s leadership role. He argued they needed a “willingness to accept responsibility for problems that affect the community.” However, “a neighborhood is primarily for the people who live in it. We can’t run it for transients who have no stake in the community beyond the bottles they leave on the lawns on Sunday morning. If that’s snobbery, then I’m a snob.”¹⁶⁰ Lewis Caldwell, a former social worker and future state representative, also blamed bad behaviors for disorder. He argued that whites in Chatham and Marynook had good reasons for leaving, because too many African Americans tolerated street crime, failed to engage in civic activities, and valued Cadillacs over fixing broken windowpanes. The civil rights movement was making headway, but Caldwell wondered, “Will Negroes be ready for first-class citizenship which carries with it first-class responsibility?”¹⁶¹ Many well-to-do blacks felt they needed to set a good example for other members of the race but were impatient with those who refused to follow along.

Unlike the white middle class, prosperous blacks acknowledged their racial uplift duties. However, they also felt the squeeze of the expanding ghetto and unresponsive white elites. In their minds, the “neighborhood” consisted of fellow homeowners and tenants, exposing the limits of a larger “black community.” Some felt torn over this divide. An accountant living in Chatham likened joining the middle class to “getting into your backyard, landscaping it, and putting a fence around it.” He was glad to be out of the slums but acknowledged that blighted areas were only two miles away, tying black fortunes together. “We are not going to move appreciably now until the whole group moves.”¹⁶² Many middle-class blacks struggled with balancing demanding personal advances with the immense work of broad-based civil rights gains.

Despite concerns for racial solidarity, middle-class African Americans often channeled their energies into stabilization. In Chatham, fast becoming “the only ghetto with a two-year waiting list to get in,” black residents sustained the regulation of taverns, acts that were first undertaken by integrationists. The Bulletin, a local newspaper, noted that despite the racial turnover in Chatham, the agenda of the CAPCC was unchanged, as the organization sponsored another local-option referendum to close more saloons. “The stage and setting are the same; the actors are different; the outcome cannot yet be predicted.”¹⁶³ Although white-owned businesses ran ads in the local papers proclaiming, “We are here to stay,” the main business arteries soon became “ghost towns” as businesses joined in the suburban exodus. In black minds, shady real estate operators, seedy taverns, and disreputable churches took an excessive amount of this empty retail space.¹⁶⁴ According to one African American, too many were getting into the “barbecue shops, the beauty shops and the chicken shacks, and the people in the middle-class community just don’t want this type of business.”¹⁶⁵

Class-based concerns drove the tavern-closing movement, but it was also a reaction to segregated vice that had long beleaguered black Chicagoans. Activists had engaged in long-running battles to regulate unruly taverns.¹⁶⁶ Chathamites claimed they were not opposed to social drinking, but that bars had consistently been a “menace” by staying open at all hours, serving minors, tolerating gambling, and most exasperatingly, serving as fronts for prostitution.¹⁶⁷ Bars in Chicago often fell under the outright or shadow direction of gangsters and served as vice depots, with the police taking regular payoffs. The Chicago Crime Commission reported that even “mom and pop” pubs were being muscled by “the hoodlum element.” Chathamites need only look a dozen blocks north, where “Sin Corner” operated unmolested at Sixty-Third and Cottage Grove, for evidence of the dangers of organized crime under police protection.¹⁶⁸ “Ours is a good and stable neighborhood,” a minister reported after the West Avalon Community Association closed a nightclub. “One way we intend to keep it that way is to keep riff-raff bars away from here.”¹⁶⁹ Black civic leader A. L. Foster, who opposed closing the bars, admitted that the “direct action” of “irate citizens” was not unexpected when owners allowed “prostitutes, sex diviates [sic] and plain hoodlums to make their places their headquarters.”¹⁷⁰ Though the local option seemed drastic, experience taught residents that they needed to take aggressive action.

Taverns provided the wrong kind of secular entertainment, but the black middle class also wanted proper sacred institutions. They often associated storefront churches with encroaching blight. Many critics considered them “eyesores” and “undignified” and maintained they precluded the “high type” of businesses while attracting “undesirables.”¹⁷¹ Self-made revivalist preachers seemed to outnumber congregations, and critics linked them to sexual shenanigans and immorality.¹⁷² Driving out “ghetto churches” became a customary part of preserving community standards. An African American president of a South Side neighborhood council listed the closing of three storefront churches alongside such ordinary actions as mosquito abatement, lobbying for traffic signals, and the creation of a community playground as the group’s achievements in 1963.¹⁷³ Gaudette said he was unaware of the level of animosity from the black middle class toward the poor until the storefront church campaign. They told him, “This is what we ran away from: the storefronts, the loud music, the taverns, the prostitutes.” They had no intention of letting Chatham fall into the same pattern.¹⁷⁴

Storefront churches were not the only religious institution targeted by Chathamites. In 1960, they made clear that they wanted no part of the Nation of Islam. The Nation’s plan to build a religious and commercial center in the heart of Chatham not only frightened the remaining whites, but also aroused the fury of blacks who deemed the sect a serious threat to maintaining a stable, middle-class community. The Nation of Islam acquired a parcel of land in 1960, between Eighty-Fifth and Eighty-Sixth Streets, through the plotting of Alderman Thomas Keane, Mayor Daley’s number two man.¹⁷⁵ Keane and his associates profited handsomely from city property that ended up in the hands of the Nation of Islam, which planned to build a temple, school, hospital, and shopping center (in 1974, a jury convicted Keane of using his position to buy tax-delinquent property and sell it at inflated prices).¹⁷⁶

As word of the planned $20 million complex spread, residents organized vigorous opposition. Gaudette had never heard of the Nation of Islam, but area blacks called him to a gathering and told him, “We can’t let them in!” They demanded that the CAPCC take action, and the group’s leaders decided that the land was earmarked for a long-desired park. In truth, locals had previously rejected park plans because of fears of encouraging juvenile delinquency. Now, with the Nation of Islam devising a major development, Chathamites suddenly deemed a park a necessity.¹⁷⁷ The dispute flared into what the Chicago Tribune called “one of the bitterest neighborhood fights ever brought before the park board.”¹⁷⁸ Gaudette fanned the flames. In testimony to park commissioners, Gaudette lost his “Irish temper” and referred to the Nation as an “extremist religious sect” and “zombies facing east.” Other residents also associated the “verbal militancy” of the movement with violence. When bow-tied members came to park district meetings, the CAPCC recruited police living in the area to stare them down.¹⁷⁹

Chathamites shunned the sect’s goal of racial separation and its appeal among the poor and ex-convicts, and residents bombarded City Hall and the park district with complaints. After receiving an unsatisfactory response, every area neighborhood group coordinated to keep the Nation out.¹⁸⁰ The Nation of Islam and its high-profile lawyers accused residents of racism. Attorney George Leighton, who had served as vice president of CAPCC, resigned from the group, stating, “This project is now being used to deprive people of the land because of their race and religion.” He compared the CAPCC’s tactics to those of the White Citizens’ Councils in the Deep South. A Nation of Islam spokesman asserted that the reason the CAPCC “is siding with influential whites against us is that they hate Muhammad for teaching Negroes to wake up and start doing constructive things for themselves and their race.”¹⁸¹ Curiously, neither side mentioned the class conflict at the heart of the matter. Racial discord gripped the nation during this period, and Chicagoans were unable to make sense of the situation without using racial language. For instance, the New Crusader, a radical black newspaper, alleged that Chatham quashed the Nation’s plan because Gaudette was a segregationist and that Taylor advocated “a program of racial self–Jim Crow.”¹⁸² Proponents of the park plan shot back, claiming this was simply a case of objecting to what they considered unsuitable land use. Chatham was now 90 percent black, they pointed out; race could not be the main concern.¹⁸³

For middle-class Chathamites, the Nation of Islam was an unwelcome neighbor. The notoriety of the group and their expansive plans for the parcel probably heightened opposition, but locals had firm ideas about the class makeup of their community, and the Nation’s working-class membership and radical ideology were not part of their vision. At a park district hearing, Taylor reminded commissioners that the community was changing, but 99 percent of residents supported a park rather than the Nation of Islam. The protest succeeded, as the park district annulled the sale and built a park on the plot, naming it after Nat King Cole.¹⁸⁴ Chathamites won, but they opened themselves up to bitter condemnations, which only continued as they stymied the construction of multifamily projects.

FLEXING POWER

The black population in the city grew by nearly one million people from 1940 to 1970, and African Americans continued to face a shortage of passable housing. Government authorities frequently dealt with this problem by constructing high-rises, and the black middle class made clear that they objected to subsidized developments in their vicinity.¹⁸⁵ Across the nation, urban politicians walked the tightrope of balancing needs for shelter against the objections of black homeowners, exposing racial fissures in the civil rights era.¹⁸⁶ Blacks were at a severe disadvantage in the placement of public housing. City council resolutions and Illinois state laws passed in the 1940s gave aldermen veto power over sites proposed by the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), and white aldermen in outlying areas nixed sites in their wards because they believed public housing would bring in “negroes” and other “undesirable people.” Thus, despite most of these wards having the only vacant land readily available, most projects were constructed in “blighted” districts requiring massive “urban renewal” that displaced African Americans, including many homeowners.¹⁸⁷ This resulted in highly visible, racialized, concentrated poverty, as the CHA warehoused the poor in austere projects. From 1955 to 1968, the CHA built or was in the process of constructing 10,256 family apartments. Of these, 10,193, or more than 99 percent, were located in black districts.¹⁸⁸

Though battles over public housing existed within a discriminatory market, African American resistance to it should not be discounted as merely a side effect of racism. From the proposal of the first public housing project in the late 1930s through the 1960s, a segment of African American homeowners protested the government constructing them adjacent to their properties. These residents frequently maintained that they were responsible citizens, property investors, and taxpayers, thus distinguishing themselves from public housing recipients. The dual market squeezed middle-income blacks, and slum clearance did not serve their interests. They were also aware that segregationists safeguarded acres of vacant land in the city’s outskirts and suburbs.¹⁸⁹ The poor bore the brunt of the shortage, but urban renewal and public housing also imperiled middle-class gains.

Black homeowners resisted public housing projects repeatedly after 1940, stirring controversy. In the 1950s and again in 1967, for example, the CHA proposed units for the Far South Side neighborhood of Morgan Park. In these instances, black residents joined white neighbors in opposition.¹⁹⁰ Civic leaders claimed that local schools were already jammed to capacity, and public housing would upset the fragile “racial balance” at Morgan Park High School. Wilson Frost, the black alderman of the Twenty-First Ward in 1967 and former CAPCC attorney, had lived in public housing himself in the early 1950s. Yet he also opposed the development, stating that while he was not against public housing per se, he did think it unsuitable for his ward.¹⁹¹

Black neighborhood groups attracted heavy criticism for their exclusionary contrivances, sometimes from within their own ranks. One community leader stated he could not justify his fight for the underprivileged throughout the city while endorsing a policy that “says that housing for the poor is off limits in my own community,” while a letter writer to the Defender challenged anti–public housing forces to “see how some people [in the slums] are living. Before I would live like that I would go back South.”¹⁹² E. Franklin Frazier argued that some members of the black bourgeoisie were opposing low-cost public housing so that they could continue to exploit the scarcity as slumlords. “While their wives, who wear mink coats, ‘drip with diamonds’ and are written up in the ‘society’ columns of Negro newspapers, ride in Cadillacs,” Frazier snapped, “their Negro tenants sleep on the dirt floors of hovels unfit for human habitation.”¹⁹³ Among the city’s worst slumlord offenders, according to investigations, were policy king Dan Gaines, who owned the “worst kept apartment building in Chicago,” and the prominent Hansberry family, who reportedly preferred to pay small fines rather than fix their units.¹⁹⁴

In Chatham, the CAPCC made its opposition to multifamily housing an organizational tactic and a point of pride.¹⁹⁵ In 1968, Milton Lamb of the CAPCC went on the black affairs television show Our People and boasted that his group, which had ten thousand members, had defeated the proposed construction of two seventeen-story high-rises in the area. “That’s black power,” host Jim Tilmon commented. “It’s certainly a real pleasure to see someone is really making this black power work successfully.” The host also asked Lamb, a loan officer for the black-owned Independence Bank, to respond to allegations by radicals that the middle class cared little for the black masses. “We don’t mind being middle class so long as we don’t lose our identity with those who are less fortunate,” Lamb replied. “We do everything we can to try to instill in the minds and the attitudes of people who do not fit into this middle-class category the notion that they too can accomplish and they can have the same things we have for the most part.”¹⁹⁶ The exchange reflected the diversity of thought in the late 1960s on how to strengthen political muscle. While prominent groups such as the Black Panthers offered a social democratic vision of community uplift, the CAPCC argued that their increasing clout constituted progress as role models, even if it kept the less affluent out. Racial pride and class exclusion mixed uneasily on the episode, as Lamb appeared along with state senator Richard Newhouse, who bashed the police department’s “stop and frisk” policies, and the author James Baldwin, who proposed black police for black communities. Though class conflict simmered in Chatham, the show presented Lamb as another example of African American political and economic potency. While many blacks in Northern cities needed living space, the middle class simultaneously resented authorities unfairly steering projects to their communities.¹⁹⁷

Racial subordination created distinct complications for the African American middle class, and they felt they had to defy forces threatening their neighborhoods. Community stabilization sent a clear signal to whites that solutions to the racial problem were not going to be purchased on the cheap by leaning on the black middle class. These conflicts accelerated class tensions, though, even as all involved understood that the dual market and site selection were key instigators.

A SUCCESSFUL FAILURE

The racial turnover on Chicago’s South Side revealed a great deal about the limits of racial liberalism in the second half of the twentieth century. Attitudes on race were clearly changing, but many behaviors were not. Integrationist liberals hoped that city neighborhoods would foster civic spirit and multiracial democracy. Yet no matter if they fled immediately to the suburbs, smashed windows, or worked to steady the neighborhood, nearly all whites eventually left, and they did so mostly for racial reasons. The racial turnover not only damaged cities such as Chicago, but the chances for American pluralism.

Though scholars have added context to the trend of “white flight,” the transformation of middle-class areas on the South Side of Chicago reasserts the primacy of race.¹⁹⁸ The white middle class said many of the “right” things on race, but “equity” vanquished “principles.” The stakes were more than just home values; it was all the privileges that came with living in a solidly white community. While the black middle class was constantly on trial, the white middle class rarely had to answer for anything. When they left, observers called it an understandable reaction to changing conditions, absolving them of any larger societal responsibilities.¹⁹⁹ The integration of places such as Chatham would not have solved all the discriminatory structural problems facing black Chicagoans. However, it would have gone a long way toward reversing the tide of departures and setting an example of integrated living.

The dramas of neighborhood life did not end as whites exited. Enforced segregation and continued migration made decent accommodations a prized commodity. The black middle class, wary of putting too much emphasis on elusive goals for integration, strategically shifted to maintaining a long-sought prestigious enclave. Borders were porous, though, and it took tremendous attention to maintain a neighborhood’s character. Opposition to large-scale developments opened the middle class to amplified charges that they were “Black Babbitts.” The reality was much more complicated, as high-status African Americans acted locally while also serving as the leadership cadre of citywide civil rights activities. When faced with complex issues, middle-class blacks usually chose engagement, a decision that made them divisive on some issues and a unifying force in others. American society expected a lot of the black middle class. As African Americans would soon learn, the same would be true in the corporate workplace. The era of the “super negro” had dawned.