CHAPTER 1

HUSTLERS AND STRIVERS

Giles Johnson

had four college degrees

knew the whyfore and this

and the wherefore of that

could orate in Latin

or cuss in Greek

and, having learned such things

he died of starvation

because he wouldn’t teach

and he couldn’t porter.

—Frank Marshall Davis, “Giles Johnson, PhD”¹

In 1917, Edward Jones and his family joined the exodus from Mississippi to Chicago. The Jones family was prominent—Ed’s father was Reverend Edward Jones Sr., president of the National Baptist Convention from 1915 to 1923. Ed Jones attended Howard University, but had to stop when his father became ill and died. Back in Chicago, he could only find work as a waiter. Disgusted, he entered the business of taking policy gambling bets. With a substantial investment from his mother, he and his two brothers steadily built an illicit empire, raking in millions of dollars by the late 1930s.² Flush with cash, the Joneses diversified into legitimate businesses. The leases on real estate on the main thoroughfares in Bronzeville precluded blacks, so they bought property and opened the country’s first black-owned department store.³ Ed also purchased a large home, farms in Michigan, substantial real estate on the South Side, a villa in France, and a ranch in Mexico.⁴ Jones was flamboyantly rich, but also a leading employer of black Chicagoans. Most importantly, he was a symbol of success for African Americans in a city where everything seemed to be run by whites.

For years, Jones and other “policy kings” safeguarded their illicit operations by making hefty payoffs to law enforcement and politicians. Jones and his brothers became so intermeshed with the Democratic machine that they served as ward precinct captains and used their sprawling organizations to reliably deliver votes on election day. Though Chicago’s organized crime syndicate, the Outfit, long coveted the abundant policy proceeds, the operators and their well-compensated political patrons rebuffed these efforts.⁵ In addition, the syndicate governed a remarkably honest and peaceable racket, which fostered customer loyalty—black and white—and general community acceptance of what many regarded as a harmless amusement.⁶

Jones was a powerful organized crime figure, but he was not a player in Chicago’s Outfit. Italians were predominant in the syndicate, but it also included Jews, Greeks, Poles, and others with European backgrounds.⁷ Much like the city’s mainstream businesses, Outfit members did not extend full partnerships and equal opportunities to African Americans. Instead, in the late 1930s, the Outfit began an aggressive campaign against black gangsters. White hoodlums murdered Walter Kelly, the numbers boss in nearby Gary, Indiana, in 1939.⁸ The next year, they delivered tiny coffins with black dolls in them to the Jones brothers as a warning. The messages on the dolls stated, “Rest in peace. If you pull even one drawing in northern Indiana you’ll catch up with what Walter Kelly got.”⁹

The situation worsened as policy kings lost their political cover. Chicago mayor Edward Kelly had been a reliable ally, handing out patronage positions, elevating black officeholders, and supporting opening neighborhoods to home-starved African Americans. He received generous contributions from policy kings in return for shielding them from prosecution and competitors. In 1946, Jacob Arvey replaced Kelly as chair of the Democratic Party. Arvey opposed open housing and counted among his associates several Outfit figures. Within days white gangsters kidnapped Ed Jones.¹⁰ After a week in captivity, the Jones family paid a $100,000 ransom, and the kidnappers dropped a haggard Ed on a side street. Frightened but alive, the gambling chief retreated to his ranch in Mexico.¹¹ As the Chicago Defender feared, the snatching was the opening salvo by “other racial groups” with “gun and bomb” to take over the racket and “utilize the South Side for only pillage and plunder.”¹² The Outfit killed off and scared off the remaining policy kings, culminating with the murder of Ed’s lieutenant and successor Ted Roe in 1952.¹³

Ed Jones had a spectacular rise and fall, but his travails reveal the challenges faced by African Americans seeking to get ahead in the Windy City. Though he was educated, discrimination impeded his search for a suitable occupation. Undeterred, he achieved entrepreneurial riches and respect in the underground economy. Even there, Jim Crow in organized crime cut the careers of policy kings short. The Outfit continued to pay Jones $200,000 a year to stay away, but otherwise held a firm grip over what was formerly the largest and most lucrative black-owned business in the city.¹⁴

This chapter examines how segregation and discrimination forced black Chicagoans to generate inventive routes to upward mobility. Though most of the African American migrants were unskilled and lacked formal education, plenty came with the requisite proficiencies, talents, and educational credentials to achieve socioeconomic gains. Most found only frustration, joining the mass of migrants that had their hopes dashed. While European immigrants and their children advanced through unions, corporate capitalism, entrepreneurship, and education, white gatekeepers blocked African Americans from these avenues. Given the execrable conditions endured by most blacks in the segregated city, some historians view the migration as a failed experiment.¹⁵

Yet, confronted with what Richard Wright called the “hopeless limits” of Chicago, black Chicagoans still hoped and, in some cases, succeeded.¹⁶ From the First Great Migration to the Great Depression, the city’s African American population mushroomed. Over this period, one factor remained constant: black men and women in Chicago needed to be creative to get ahead. With most traditional routes of mobility closed to them, they expanded delineations of respectability through unconventional advancements. There were some white-collar careers open to African Americans in government, politics, and black-owned business, but not nearly enough to satisfy demand.¹⁷ In response, innovators created remunerative employment in gambling organizations, storefront preaching, and real estate speculation. These posts conferred dignity, status, and chances for advancement, rare things for African Americans in the first decades of the twentieth century. They also help explain why black Chicagoans, while certainly skeptical about American platitudes on equality of opportunity, did not turn against the democratic-capitalist system en masse.

In their own distinct ways, these pursuits also generated controversy within the community. Critics charged that gambling operators, preachers, and landlords preyed on desperate migrants. Yet most African Americans also understood that economic marginalization limited their options. Men and women in these roles regularly took a keen interest in racial advancement, making them community leaders. Their accomplishments not only signified determined progress but were important examples of upward mobility for the poor and working class. However, these cases also reveal how racism consigned African Americans to separate and unequal paths to advancement. As the Outfit made clear to Ed Jones, Chicago’s version of white supremacy was all-encompassing.

THE MIGRANT PUSH

In the mid-1910s, the migrations of Southern-born African Americans forever changed Chicago’s demographics, culture, and politics. A series of factors spurred this exodus north. Blacks faced the intolerable social, political, and economic conditions of the Jim Crow South following the failure of Reconstruction, as white supremacists targeted African Americans in an onslaught of bigoted lawmaking, lynching, and pogroms.¹⁸ The outbreak of World War I stemmed immigration from Europe and created a labor shortage. Employers responded by opening factories to black workers and sending labor agents to canvass the South. By the end of the 1910s, millions of restive feet were moving north and west. From 1916 to 1919 alone, the African American presence in the Windy City increased 86 percent.¹⁹

Chicago offered higher wages, increased independence, better educational opportunities, and legally enshrined civil rights. More than anything, it was a place of possibility. When Richard Wright came on a train in 1927, he was “full of a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity.”²⁰ Knowledge of these opportunities spread across the South through the newspapers, contacts with kin and friends, and labor agents. “America is not always going to deny the privileges of its Republican government to its dark-hued sons and daughters,” the Chicago Whip confidently stated in 1922. “Chicago is the place to start from; it is the keynote of America.”²¹ Through the 1920s most black Chicagoans were optimistic about the future. Vibrant jazz and blues clubs, black-owned businesses, well-dressed professionals, improved schooling, and the emergence of a political submachine of the Republican Party all contributed to the faith that they were on the way up.²² This hopefulness made Chicago a magnet. Over the thirty years from 1910 to 1940, the black population in Chicago multiplied by a factor of nearly seven, to 277,731 people.²³

Not all African Americans greeted the newcomers warmly. Detractors depicted migrants as country bumpkins “totally unprepared” for their new urban environs. Higher-status residents, seeking to solidify their positions through negative comparisons, labeled the detached men who ventured north “drifters,” “floaters,” and “ne’er do wells” easily attracted away from Dixie by “the stories of easy work at high wages.”²⁴ The Chicago Defender regularly lectured migrants on proper behavior, admonishing Southerners with harangues such as “Don’t talk so loud, we’re not all deaf” and “Don’t wear handkerchiefs on your head.”²⁵ This portrayal of Southern immigrants became a standard narrative. Playwright August Wilson’s Boy Willie arrives in the North with a truckload of watermelons and is brash, impulsive, and loud, still a “boy” at age thirty. His companion, Lymon, is slow-witted and easily separated from his hard-earned wages by fast men and faster women. Their country ways embarrass their more established and refined cousins, who lament, “You can’t come like normal folks. You got to bring all that noise with you.”²⁶ According to some, migrants not only needed jobs and shelter, but tutorials on proper behavior. According to E. Franklin Frazier, old settlers “scarcely regarded themselves as members of the same race” as migrants.²⁷ In this oft-repeated scenario, Chicago before the mass migration was a place where blacks lived relatively free from prejudice in almost all parts of the city and were invited into white homes as “ordinary neighbors.”²⁸

Subsequent scholars showed that while the mass migration fundamentally rehsaped Chicago’s black community and increased racial tension as ethnic groups fought for resources, jobs, and space, the hegira did not signal the tragic end of a golden age of race relations in Chicago. Segregation and discrimination, often enforced through violence, were evident in Chicago prior to the migration, if on a smaller scale.²⁹ African Americans had already established several significant institutions such as the Provident Hospital, the Wabash Avenue YMCA, and Chicago Defender. They had also elected “race men” to the state legislature and city council. Yet whites established the color line in employment and housing long before the Great Migration.³⁰ While the famed sociologists Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake asserted that population increase and the race riot of 1919 “profoundly altered relationships” between the races, black-white interactions mostly continued the precedents in place before the migration.³¹

Meager attempts at demarcation like the “Old Settler’s Club” were soon overwhelmed by migrants with the talent, ambition, and the means to make a rapid adjustment to city life. While some old settlers had been “the first in establishing class distinctions” and constituting an “upper crust” based on manners, color, and ancestry, the Chicago Whip editorialized in 1923, they were quickly being joined by upstarts who were making wealth and achievement the most important status factors. Light skin, straight hair, and Northern birth were socially advantageous, one Chicagoan noted, but over time “money counts most.”³² Although the old settlers clung tenaciously to a manufactured sense of supremacy, in the 1920s social status in Chicago’s black community shifted from etiquette and duration in the city to wealth, occupational rank, and power. When black Chicagoans envisioned the meanings of making it, they turned their jaundiced eyes to the men and women who achieved these markers.

A MULTIFARIOUS MIGRATION

The migration north was diverse, bringing skilled and unskilled, educated and illiterate. In his contemporary study of the migration, Emmett Scott remarked that a “most striking feature of the northern migration was its individualism.”³³ The bulk of migrants were landless farmworkers arriving with cardboard suitcases, apprehensions, and hope.³⁴ But the exodus also included more than a few who arrived in Northern cities with a myriad of advantages.³⁵ People like William Latham, a migrant from Mississippi, capitalized on this when he founded Underwriters Insurance Company in 1918 and hired other newcomers with experience in Southern-based insurance companies. The talent helped Underwriters prosper throughout the 1920s.³⁶

With circumstances in the South growing “more grewsome [sic] and fiendish with each succeeding day,” more and more higher-status African Americans found the violent terrorism of white supremacists unbearable.³⁷ Artisans faced increased discrimination and white competition and emerged as the vanguard of migration. Skilled and educated workers wrote to the Chicago Defender seeking advice on moving to the North.³⁸ According to NAACP leader Walter White, Southerners frequently targeted the affluent for the “crime” of “being too prosperous for a Negro.”³⁹ As Ida B. Wells argued, lynching in the South was frequently “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property,” a forceful route to “keep the nigger down.”⁴⁰ One Mississippi minister planned his move to Chicago because at the very least black people “had the privilege of dying a natural death there. That is much better than the rope and torch. I will take my chance with the northern winter.” A doctor from the same state closed his practice in 1919 and headed north, declaring the local situation to be “a little short of suicide,” and a place where “no man can still respect himself while the white south hunts us down with as much vigor as one digs rats out of a hole.” Similar testimonials in the late 1910s and 1920s came from barbers, automobile mechanics, and schoolteachers. Professional people reported that whites were making life uneasy for them because they imagined the growing discontent could be traced to the race’s more advanced element. The mass departure also left professionals without customers and clients. A Memphis insurance agent stated that “on account of the race people leaving here so very fast my present job is no longer a profitable one.” A Defender correspondent in Birmingham wrote that while average blacks were way ahead in moving, even the elites were “now considering the advisability of going north to better their condition.”⁴¹

The ambitious, the educated, and the adventurous were often more willing to seek a new beginning.⁴² Some newcomers were not accustomed to big-city life, Carl Sandburg observed, but he recorded that the new arrivals also included a banker, a newspaper editor, a schoolteacher, and several successful businessmen. Tuskegee and Hampton graduates abounded, and they enthusiastically bantered back and forth over the theories of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois.⁴³ Population growth accelerated the development of the city’s professional and commercial classes. Prior to the migration, “frustrated professionals” were without a client base and often ended up in service occupations. Robert Abbott, the publisher of the Chicago Defender, received his law degree in 1898 and made three exasperating attempts to practice before turning to the newspaper business, an undertaking that flourished because of the migration.⁴⁴

The upsurge in the black population produced opportunities for upward mobility, and capable and determined newcomers filled these elevated stations. However, discrimination limited the size and scope of the playing field. Many African Americans were equally or better positioned than rural, native-born whites or European immigrants to achieve their dreams. Yet as these newcomers discovered, employers ensured that their color meant more than their smarts and their credentials. Given that black Americans were citizens, spoke English, and arrived in places like Chicago with high aspirations, the middle class should have grown more racially diverse. This was not the case.

HIGH HOPES IN THE BLACK METROPOLIS

The move north was more than just flight from violent oppression or an answer to the industrial want ads. Black Americans invested in the American republican ideals of equality before the law, and migrants had substantial expectations for the “Promised Land.” They came north already immersed in the cultural virtues of thrift, self-discipline, and temperance, and the increased educational and employment opportunities fostered high hopes for migrants and their children. In addition, some arrivals, especially the young, came with a swaggering self-assurance. The poet Frank Marshall Davis remembered that he and other newcomers were ready to take on the world. “You got the world in a jug, Lawd, stopper in your hand,” he recalled. “You got the River Jordan flowing through your veins, and the gals oughta stand in line waiting to be baptized. You’ve got confidence oozing through your pores.”⁴⁵

The migration’s peasant-to-proletarian character often led to an underestimation of newcomers’ bolder objectives. In his study of the First Great Migration, James Grossman argues that migrants had “modest goals—a job in a Chicago packinghouse or steel mill” and looked to Northern factories and cities to “obtain what other Americans supposedly had—the opportunity to better their condition by hard work.”⁴⁶ Although migrants sought security and a higher standard of living through industrial occupations, they also had rapidly expanding aspirations. Many industrial and domestic workers, not merely satisfied with their paychecks, had even greater long-term expectations than their Eastern and Southern European counterparts, who often had an “antimobility work ethos” that valued family, community, and the return to their homelands over individual goals.⁴⁷ Numerous black migrants came to Chicago looking for “eny [sic] kind of work,” but often did not settle for this once they arrived.⁴⁸

Long deprived of decent schooling, migrants regarded educational opportunities as the “key to freedom.” One Mississippian vowed to give “my children an advantage that I never had.” A Louisiana packinghouse worker migrated because he wanted “to go somewhere I could educate my children so they could be of service to themselves when they gets [sic] older, and I can’t do it here.” John Johnson, the future publishing magnate, left his Arkansas hometown because there was no black high school and his mother insisted he get his diploma. A female migrant from the Deep South came in the 1930s to attend a “big university to make a name for myself” like other “great Negro women.” In Chicago, she reasoned, she could “make a contribution to the Negro race” and “be socially prominent and economically independent.”⁴⁹ Once in the city, men and women flocked to night schools, even after putting in full days of labor. Migrants “positively swarmed” to Wendell Phillips public night school, the largest in Chicago, where four thousand black men and women enrolled in 1921 and 15 percent of the teaching force was African American.⁵⁰

Young blacks also held lofty aspirations. A study of eighth graders in Chicago found that 90 percent of black students were headed to high school, equaling Jews as the ethnic group with the highest matriculation rates. The researcher noted that these schoolchildren realized they must be better educationally equipped than whites to compete for careers, and their future plans “showed more thought and originality than did those of any other children”⁵¹ Nationally, black pupils had high expectations for their futures.⁵² African Americans were not naïve about the racism their children were sure to encounter. As Langston Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son” related, life would be “no crystal stair.” However, the mother tells her son that she has been “a-climbin’ on” and “turnin’ corners,” and her son must do the same.⁵³ Parents needed to brace their young for prejudicial hardships to come, but at the same time could point to their own advances as evidence of headway. For black Americans, the North was enigmatic, simultaneously a place of unbounded possibilities and unmistakable boundaries.

African Americans knew that they would have to seize opportunities to fight for equality. Many believed that fairness could be had, and oftentimes the initial impressions of the city contributed to migrants’ ascendant orientation. Migrants marveled at the impressive Overton Building on State Street, housing numerous businesses owned by entrepreneur Anthony Overton, and the five-story Binga Arcade commissioned by banker Jesse Binga.⁵⁴ Though rare, the “physical presence” of black teachers and administrators “was more important than the lessons they taught,” John Johnson remembered. “I’d never seen so many well-dressed and well-educated blacks in one place.” Johnson was also inspired by insurance men, who were “moving paper and talking big money talk just like White folk.”⁵⁵ The Chicago Defender, which circulated widely in the South via railroad employees, commonly featured the rise of wealthy African Americans, but also detailed success stories of average migrants like Robert Wilson, who came to Chicago from Atlanta with “one nickel and a Lincoln penny” but obtained work in a foundry and now had a car, a house, a bank account, and had been able to bring his family from the South.⁵⁶

Although segregation forced migrants into squalid living conditions, this assured that the poor and working class interacted daily with thriving men and women. As scholars argue, the achievements of the well-heeled in the ghetto made “bourgeois symbolism” and “middle-class ideals” take a solid hold in the imagination of black Chicagoans.⁵⁷ Journalist Warner Saunders remembered that “people of almost every ilk lived in the same community. . . . You saw the ‘best’ and the ‘worst’ all in one neighborhood.” While many middle-class Africans Americans resented living next to the “worst” of the race, others believed it helped the poor visualize a better future. “For me, life was interesting in the neighborhood and there were always people who were making it and were successful,” historian and real estate magnate Dempsey Travis recalled. “Famous people lived close by, and that meant there was hope.”⁵⁸ African Americans, despite encountering discrimination, were not immune from a national culture that stressed personal attainment. Even Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, whose ideological battles shaped much of black thought in the first half of the twentieth century, had a vision of uplift, self-help, and support of black businesses.⁵⁹

Optimists hoped that African Americans were just the latest racial group to come to Chicago and that they would be given opportunities for upward mobility and assimilation. “The Irish had their day, then the Greek, the Pole and the Jew each in their turn. Each has passed on to the better tasks in industry but not without an encounter with race prejudice,” one commentator wrote in the Urban League journal Opportunity. “Anti-race sentiment has not been directed at the Negro alone.”⁶⁰ In this formulation, black city dwellers would soon move up socioeconomically as they gained a foothold in the economy. “Money is a wonderful thing,” an editorial in Half-Century Magazine declared in 1922. “If you have enough of it, the world voluntarily places a coat of white wash over your blackest crimes. Money opened the doors for some of the most exclusive places to the Jews. Enough money would blind the eyes of the white race to our own color.”⁶¹ Another writer noticed that as African Americans became more fortunate, “white” firms increasingly solicited their business. He believed this was an encouraging sign, as “money is the one thing in the world that doesn’t lose one iota of its value because a Colored man possesses it.”⁶² Idealists stubbornly held onto these sentiments long after it became clear that whites would not afford blacks the same chances.⁶³

“VACANCIES FOR NEGROES IN INDUSTRY WERE MADE AT THE BOTTOM”⁶⁴

Instead of following the immigrant pattern, black Chicagoans encountered stark discriminatory patterns in employment and promotions. Employers segmented the labor market and relegated black workers to lower-wage and less-secure jobs regardless of their qualifications, hampering factory hands, skilled trade workers, and the college educated alike.⁶⁵ Not only did whites deny blacks promotions, many migrants experienced downward mobility. The Department of Labor reported in 1917 the phenomenon of carpenters and cabinetmakers returning South, as they resented being shut out of unions and unable to find suitable work. Migrant professionals also discovered that the change of address came with increased competition and more stringent accreditation requirements. Schools were slow to hire qualified black instructors and administrators—there were no black principals until 1928—even when they became overwhelmingly African American. Skilled and educated Southerners had to be content with factory and service work in the North because of discrimination, and youths saw no point in training for trades that unions barred them from practicing.⁶⁶

Black women’s prospects were even more limited. An investigation of graduates of Wendell Phillips High School in the late 1920s found that young women qualified as clerical and office workers were only offered employment as “ordinary workers in factories.”⁶⁷ After the manager of a hotel queried why a high school graduate was looking for work as a maid, the woman’s frustrations poured forth. “Yes, I can type. I can write 50 words a minute in shorthand. I can keep books, but my face is black. Do you hear me, my face is black! So I must do the drudge work!”⁶⁸ A 1927 study confirmed that there were plenty of African Americans qualified for white-collar work, but few positions open to them. “The problem of the educated Negro seeking employment is a serious one,” the author concluded. “Many well-educated Negroes must work at vocations where their training cannot be utilized.”⁶⁹ The nation extolled education and training as the keys to the good life, but for blacks this was a false promise.

Workers came to Chicago and usually started at the bottom, but discrimination doomed blacks to stay there. For African Americans in factories, the elation of obtaining work was short-lived as employers relegated them to inhumane conditions. Laborers experienced deafening machines, overpowering smells, insufficient ventilation, intense heat or bitter cold, the reckless rate of the assembly and disassembly lines, and industrial ailments such as “brown lung” and “hog itch.”⁷⁰ Black laborers were regularly dissatisfied with their treatment by petty bosses, the distance to plants from their homes, unequal pay, and promotions reserved for whites. They realized that employers had consigned them to the flu holes, hide cellars, gut shanties, bone houses, and fertilizer rooms for life. “We go right in the furnace where it is so hot no man can stand it for more than twenty minutes at a time,” a steelworker testified. “When we come out the buttons on our coats are so hot they will burn you if you touch them. My eyes are ruined from the work.”⁷¹ African Americans were caught in the triple whirlwind of employer discrimination, union coldness, and hostility from white coworkers.⁷² Migrants were not unwary of the limits of the North, but still perplexed at how their expectations met bitter reality. As the Chicago bluesman Big Bill Broonzy remarked, “All over the USA it’s the same soup, just served in a different way.”⁷³

Due to these conditions, many African Americans sought more dignified occupations. “Clean work” often brought greater freedoms, more perquisites, higher chances for promotion, and healthier bodies.⁷⁴ Few workers remained satisfied with menial stations and ventured out to try to better their lot and their lives. All over Chicago there were porters trying to hustle up the money for college, tradesmen on their way to a law degree, peddlers with visions of expansion, and domestics singing gospel with dreams of stardom. For optimistic new arrivals, the first thing on their minds after securing a job was to find something better.

Yet virtually every occupation utilized by European immigrants and native whites for upward mobility excluded black Chicagoans. White-collar jobs in almost all private corporations were unattainable, and during economic recessions or slack business, the few African Americans who had found employment were the first to be let go.⁷⁵ Despite organized struggles like “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work,” black job seekers were continually denied employment at businesses they patronized. In 1929 two Chicago banks reported that blacks were more than 90 percent of their savings depositors and about 25 percent of commercial deposits, but the Industrial Bank engaged one black woman in the savings department and the Bankers Bank only employed one black chauffeur and one janitor. Three other banks had black customers but no African Americans above the rank of janitor. Employers reasoned that they were not interested in “sociological experiments” or that they feared negative reactions from white coworkers and patrons.⁷⁶ In 1939 the Chicago Whip indignantly reported that blacks paid over $40 million to white insurance companies and “received the sum total of no jobs in return.”⁷⁷

Discrimination at all levels of employment meant that educational achievements magnified frustrations. In comparison to those in the laboring classes, black college graduates usually had an economic advantage that translated into a higher quality of life. However, when compared to whites, the labor market differentials were gaping at the top of the economic ladder in terms of wages and occupations, mainly because corporations excluded blacks from munificent white-collar careers.⁷⁸ As the sociologist Clifford Shaw documented, Chicagoans breathed “in a cultural atmosphere filled with the heady ozone of individualism,” but the black man was “forced, literally, to act out the drama of his life career upon a stage shrunken to the proportions of the racial ghettos of our cities.”⁷⁹ Many learned African Americans ended up in service; a union official in the early 1940s stated that in his Chicago station seventy-two of ninety porters had college degrees. After a Dartmouth-educated Pullman porter died in a wreck with his Phi Beta Kappa key on his chest, the Chicago Whip called him “another martyr to American hatred.” If he “had been given a man’s chance he would have been in a position to help the world, but being nipped in the bud while blacking boots is an end that leaves us bitter and sick at heart.”⁸⁰ Although employers supposedly sought aptitude and initiative in their salaried employees, they obstinately refused to see blacks as individuals.

The hypocrisy of the so-called “Promised Land” bred cynicism among African Americans. One researcher, noting the ambition of black children, urged Chicagoans to give them a chance “on basis of their education and personal ability to enter their chosen fields and to stand or fall on their merits as individuals.”⁸¹ The chance did not come. For some African Americans, the barriers took an extreme psychological toll. “Think of the feelings in the hearts of boys and girls of my race who are clean, intelligent and industrious,” a self-described “new negro” wrote, “who apply for positions only to meet with the polite reply that, ‘We don’t hire niggers.’”⁸² For these youths, the American Dream revealed itself as a cruel joke.

With all these obstructions in place, blacks had to look outside the mainstream for opportunity. Efforts to “move on up” included involvement in pursuits such as gambling rackets, real estate speculation, and storefront preaching. These occupations created controversy because these entrepreneurs often exploited fellow African Americans, but most also acknowledged that the combination of free-market capitalism and racist limits warped economic prospects. African Americans often afforded a degree of understanding to shady practices because they had common experience with racism and discrimination and an admiration for the hustler ethic.

TAKING A CHANCE ON “POLICY”

In 1921 an African American woman came to Chicago from Oklahoma with her two children. After two days searching for employment, she obtained a dishwashing job, but four years with her hands submerged in soapy water took its toll, and her doctor instructed her to quit. Left with few other employment options, she turned to numbers running. In this job she “wrote” twenty dollars daily, keeping five dollars for her share. “I’m forty-five years old and have lived in five states,” she said, “but that’s the best job I ever had.”⁸³

The Chicago variant of numbers, called “policy,” provided thousands of jobs for black Chicagoans. Multiple wheels existed in the city, competing for bettors in the “poor man’s stock market.” A daily lottery that involved picking three numbers, at its height in the late 1930s it included an estimated 4,200 gambling stations employing ten thousand people who handled one hundred thousand players per day. Policy operators paid protection fees to law enforcement to turn a blind eye or actively shield their wheels.⁸⁴ The safest place in the city, some said, was the policy drawing, as police, often in uniform, served as “tellers” and escorted the daily receipts. Few efforts were made to conceal policy depots; signs in windows such as “We Write All Books” hung visibly. One researcher claimed, “children born in Chicago within the past fifteen years are unaware of the fact that the operation of policy is illegal.”⁸⁵ There were occasional crackdowns on numbers’ businesses, but they were usually politically motivated rather than in the name of law and order.⁸⁶ The game did engender occasional criticism and soul-searching in the community. Social reformers charged that policy preyed on the “poor and superstitious” and discouraged work. Others held a more tolerant view. As the historian Humbert Nelli explains, most Chicagoans abhorred poverty more than crime, and the shadow economy was a ready method for overcoming a lack of money.⁸⁷ For those squeezed by unemployment, underemployment, and discrimination, it offered dignity and remuneration.⁸⁸

Numbers operations were highly structured organizations, with “policy kings” earning their way to the top of the hierarchy. They were a varied bunch, with some members of the “overdressed underworld” clad in flashy suits and diamonds. These “sports” engaged in conspicuous consumption and lived lavishly—a journalist recalled that a policy king’s wife paved the vestibule of her mansion with silver dollars.⁸⁹ Others tried to fit into middle-class society, eschewing glamour for decorum. Regardless of their bearing, policy kings elicited thrills, envy, and admiration from black residents. “There was nothing I wanted more than to run policy,” Warner Saunders recalled, “like any other boy in that community.” The future reporter knew that gambling was technically illegal, but policy kings were his “greatest heroes,” and as he grew up, he realized that discrimination made it hard for his neighbors to concretely define “illegitimate” activity.⁹⁰

A tacit approval of policy developed because, unlike other forms of vice and gambling, organizers ran an orderly game and put themselves forth as responsible citizens by contributing to churches and civil rights groups, financing politicians, and making loans. Although there were some crooked writers and policy operators, the drawings were usually held in a large room with from two hundred to five hundred employees present, keeping the game honest and orderly, and the syndicate strictly disciplined operators who failed to pay winners. Neighbors protested dice, craps, and card games that created disorder, but rarely raised a ruckus about policy.⁹¹ One finicky citizen who resided in the Lilydale community, an area of “people of higher ideas and people of self-respect,” bragged that his neighbors had facilitated the closing of a local nightclub casino, yet tolerated the two policy stations that operated nearby. “Almost everybody plays policy,” he reasoned, “but our organizations don’t bother the policy station because that is the only form of gambling that most people think is all right.”⁹² Some vociferous critics spoke out against the game, yet most blacks understood that rampant discrimination forced go-getters to fall back on vice as an occupation, and policy was a relatively clean racket. As one informant contended, the Jones brothers “appear to be businessmen first. It is not their fault that the law considers policy to be a racquet [sic]. They are not racketeers. Only colored boys who cannot enter legitimate business because of the color barrier, & must turn to illegitimate policy.” The Jones brothers’ middle-class background was not unique inside gambling organizations as outlaw capitalism offered more prospects than mainstream businesses.⁹³

Black Chicagoans were fully aware that the game was in the house’s favor, but at least the beneficiaries were local men made good, a source of pride when nearly everything appeared to be white-owned and -operated. “Policy barons peeled and ate the South Side like a ripe banana,” Frank Marshall Davis conceded. “But they were black; Al Capone, Bugs Moran and the others did not muscle in on this rich racket.”⁹⁴ Even the upper crust of society regularly interacted with policy kings, though they preferred not to admit it. Reverend Harold Kingsley of the prestigious Good Shepherd Church outspokenly disparaged the numbers game but eased his opposition after gambling entrepreneur Julian Black donated $50,000 to Kingsley’s community house.⁹⁵

Similarly, the South Side Community Committee, a distinguished civic organization, sought to impress upon youths that the “swaggering racketeer” was not the local “big shot” in comparison to the hard-working, legitimate businessman “who had the confidence and respect of his neighbors.” Yet the chair of the women’s committee was Mrs. James Knight, whose husband rose up from being a Pullman porter to a policy king, owner of the famous Palm Tavern jazz club and first mayor of Bronzeville, a ceremonial post sponsored by the Chicago Defender. “Some of the women on my committee obtain their money from businesses which cannot be called exactly uplifting,” a member admitted. “But that’s all right. We don’t mind. As long as they are willing to contribute money we are glad to receive it.” An observer of the group perceived that many black Chicagoans made few distinctions between the criminal and the conventional, but because elites were embarrassed by the intermixing, they made a big show of attacking the illicit pursuits. “This, however, is strictly a type of play acting which has little reality so far as the residents themselves are concerned.” The bosses of illicit enterprises were “well integrated in the total pattern of dominance in the community.” However, the observer recommended that the South Side Community Committee should “refrain from mentioning the fact” in public, because the “outside world” would not understand.⁹⁶

Policy kings took on leadership roles on the South Side. Among the six candidates for the first mayor of Bronzeville in 1934, four made their money in the informal economy.⁹⁷ They also reinvested in their communities. By the 1930s nineteen Chicago policy-wheel operators had at least twenty-nine different legitimate businesses. Racketeers like Dan Gaines, owner of the only black Ford Motors dealership, and Robert Cole, president of Chicago Metropolitan Insurance Company and owner of the Negro League’s Chicago American Giants baseball team, secured personal fortunes through gambling operations but used their capital to branch out into legal businesses that provided employment.⁹⁸ A Chicago Urban League official stated that while he was “not in favor of the policy game,” he was glad to see blacks managing it and reinvesting in local businesses such as taverns, funeral homes, and shoe stores.⁹⁹ Without the investment capital generated by gambling, black enterprise in the first half of the twentieth century would have been extremely bleak. The profits from policy were built on the dreams of men and women who wagered their nickels and dimes looking for a big break, but the game also generated jobs, venture capital, and a class of wealthy, civic-minded entrepreneurs.

For African Americans seeking decent employment, the industry required thousands of functionaries. Men and women worked as door-to-door solicitors (called “writers”), fielders, doormen, checkers, stampers, bookkeepers, and supervisors. The exertions of “writers” at the bottom of the pyramid were akin to insurance salespeople working on commission, and the slots higher up in organizations were increasingly lucrative, with managers drawing weekly salaries of up to $320.¹⁰⁰ Salaries during the Depression for checkers, pickup men, and guards ranged from $25 to $45 a week, and unlike white-owned firms, gambling operations had a merit system where talented, diligent employees secured choice positions. By comparison, stockyards workers earned from $20 to $30 a week during times of regular employment in the 1920s, while the lucky few who kept their jobs during the Depression took home around $11 weekly. In the 1930s, most employers cut domestic worker pay from $4 a day to $4 a week. Though policy included the perils of organized crime and occasional harassment from the police, it was significantly less dangerous than the killing floor or the foundry, and unlike the laundry or kitchen it allowed workers to use their initiative. Additionally, blacks enjoyed the thrill of defying white strictures on their ambitions and earnings.¹⁰¹

Policy workers were a mixed lot. In the late 1920s a researcher estimated that six to seven thousand black men and women on the South Side earned their living from the game, and while some writers could only sign their names with difficulty, others were well educated. One policy king employed eight hundred writers in 1928, half of whom were women. “Their chief assets were nerve and integrity,” an investigator argued. “The former being necessary to ‘take the rap’ if caught by the police, and the latter, in enabling them to build up a large clientele.”¹⁰² Another contemporary researcher believed that policy writers in the Depression “would probably make good salesmen, but what are they going to sell? . . . Most of them never received any training and less opportunity.”¹⁰³ As the economic slump deepened and black banks and insurance businesses failed, college-trained African Americans entered gambling operations, applying rationalized principles of business organization including advertising to promote betting. Policy kings added lawyers, bookkeepers, and experienced accountants to the payrolls, easing any remaining stigmas attached to the industry.¹⁰⁴ “Many men have given up the legitimate pursuits of insurance collecting, Pullman portering and waiting to engage in number writing,” policy critic J. Saunders Redding remarked. “They are not all stupid men. They feel that the income from the racket is permanent.”¹⁰⁵ For these workers, policy was dignified and rewarding labor.

Participation in the informal economy was often a strategy to meet fundamental needs. In their economically disadvantaged communities, blacks viewed policy not as a legal transgression, but as an appealing alternative to protracted deprivation. This did not mean they had a higher tolerance for crime, but rather saw shades of gray in capitalism. African Americans spoke out about the crime problem, but also pointed out racial double standards in the justice system, decried the poor and often predatory police performance, and offered solutions that attacked root causes.¹⁰⁶ Meanwhile, city authorities actively quarantined vice activities in black areas, and the media ignored the reasons for crime and sensationalized the results. As Richard Wright worried, the “violently reactionary and vicious nature of the Chicago Tribune,” with its “lurid stories of so-called Negro crime, written in a wildly sensational manner,” was “provocative enough to spur a race riot in Chicago every twenty-four hours.”¹⁰⁷

Gallingly, blacks faced overt discrimination in organized crime as well, as Chicagoland’s syndicates excluded them from full partnerships. Through their political connections and payoffs, policy kings were able to keep white mobsters at bay. But from the late 1930s to the 1950s, whites murderously took over policy wheels and established a profitable dominance over the rackets, signaled most clearly through Ed Jones’s kidnapping and exile.¹⁰⁸ For black Chicagoans, the reign of the policy kings had demonstrated how cunning operators had subverted racist structures, but their downfall indicated the potency of racism in nearly every aspect of political and economic life.

STOREFRONTS TO SUCCESS

Black Chicagoans also took sacred paths to white-collar work. The tremendous influx of African Americans to the city inundated existing churches and created the mushroom growth of “storefront” churches. Storefront churches often attracted poor and working-class Southerners who felt out of place in the more restrained, decorous houses of God. Many Southern migrants clung tenaciously to their religious rituals that accentuated human struggle, African values, and an ecstatic style of worship. For congregants, soul met body through religious expression, and euphoric worship regained control over one’s essence while seeking God’s blessings. Ministers spoke of the God of justice who had delivered them from slavery and would be there for them in their current struggles, fortifying feelings of a joint destiny. One woman testified she made twice-weekly pilgrimages to Olivet Baptist to thank God for providing a “place where colored folks worship and ain’t pestered with white folks.” Chicago’s grind spawned the blues, but the city’s plebeian churches also produced gospel music. “Blues are songs of despair,” gospel innovator Mahalia Jackson contended. “Gospel songs are songs of hope. When you sing gospel, you have a feeling that there is a cure for what is wrong.”¹⁰⁹

Ministers long occupied an esteemed and vital role in black culture. “The Preacher,” W. E. B. Du Bois observed, “is the most unique personality developed by the Negro on American soil. A leader, a politician, an orator, a ‘boss,’ an intriguer, an idealist,—all these he is, and ever, too, the centre of a group of men, now twenty, now a thousand in number.”¹¹⁰ As Chicago’s black population swelled, ambitious men and women sought to fill these roles, and youths aspired to ordination. For a young Melvin Van Peebles, being a preacher had a “firemanlike, tarzanlike romantic appeal.”¹¹¹ Churches with imaginative names like the Willing Workers Spiritualist, Spiritual Love Circle, Crossroads to Happiness, and Church of Lost Souls appeared in abandoned buildings furnished with only rudimentary benches and crate altars. Tiny but determined congregations painted their windows in imitation of the stained-glass panes of more ostentatious houses of worship.¹¹² Not all migrants headed for the storefronts—the congregants swelled established Baptist and African Methodist Episcopalian churches as well—but some men and women sought professional occupations through fulfilling spiritual needs.

The mainstream clergy and middle-class Chicagoans typically considered the presence of so-called “jackleg” storefront preachers as an alarming development. A poll of 341 black professionals in 1937 found that 94 percent vehemently objected to storefront churches, believing that they were “rackets” maintained for the support of fraudulent ministers who preyed on the religiosity of the ignorant and damaged the sacredness of the church. A social worker stated that storefront churches were simply facades for “ministers who go out to get money for the church which never gets to the church.”¹¹³ A writer in Opportunity referred to storefront clerics as “cast-offs,” “religious criminals,” and members of the “piker class” who engaged in the “prostitution of the church.”¹¹⁴ Critics maintained that storefront clerics violated the biblical warning against serving two masters, charging that their quest for money equaled and occasionally surpassed their mission to save souls.

Detractors deemed upstart preachers as charlatans who had not earned their station. Conventional ministers resented uneducated evangelists elbowing into stations that professional clergy secured through painstaking study. University-educated African Methodist Episcopal minister J. Langston Poole stated that storefront preachers were “almost illiterate and so ignorant and appeal only to those people’s emotions and make no appeal to their intelligence.”¹¹⁵ A scribe for the Illinois Writers Project argued that most of them were “false prophets, imposters, and exploiters” and complained that “the ministry among Negroes is the only profession which is overmanned while the other professions are undermanned.” In 1930, blacks made up only 7 percent of the Second City’s population, but were 15 percent of all clergymen, and by the 1940s, there were an estimated 700 preachers for 500 pulpits in the Black Metropolis, with 75 percent of all churches the storefront variety.¹¹⁶

The preaching profession was “overmanned” for good reason. The church was one of the primary paths for social mobility, especially since no formal training was required for the job, only “the call” from God. A national study of 591 urban black ministers in the North and South in the 1930s found that 427, just over 72 percent, had no degree of any kind, college or seminary.¹¹⁷ The minister role offered clean, dignified labor and was one of the few white-collar careers readily available to African Americans.

Despite accusations that storefront preachers sought to avoid labor, becoming an evangelist took a high degree of hard work. With so much competition among churches and denominational mobility by parishioners, preachers had to refine their oratorical talents and recruit congregants, often while holding second jobs. Crafting sermons, forming choirs, and delivering inspiration at prayer meetings and church services required flair and consistency, and storefront churches commonly failed to attract patrons or raise adequate funds to pay the rent.¹¹⁸ Maintaining a congregation involved the entrepreneurial knack, and the faithful within the “Spiritualist” and “Holiness” milieu thought that ministers’ and gospel artists’ use of the commercial market was an acceptable way to spread the word. Preachers recorded music-laden sermons such as “Jonah and the Whale,” “Lord’s Army Marches On,” and “Where Will You Be Next Christmas Day?” and sold them in stores. Ministers used weekly radio shows to spread the word and promote their churches.¹¹⁹ Inspired congregants felt that their spiritual guides should be rewarded for their talents and that their affluence was a sign of God’s bounty.

Though critics accused storefront preachers of entering the vocation for “selfish purpose[s],” aspirants knew that religious callings could lead them to distinction.¹²⁰ In Chicago, certain “Holiness” or “Spiritualist” churches grew to large and popular houses of worship. Clarence H. Cobbs, the stylish preacher of the First Church of Deliverance, built his flock from a storefront to a massive congregation housed in a grand, art moderne–style structure.¹²¹ Elder Lucy Smith started a prayer meeting in her own house in 1916; by 1926 her All Nations Pentecostal congregation built a $65,000 church.¹²² In addition, a large number of mainline churches in Chicago had humble beginnings in storefronts or homes before purchasing or building respectable edifices.¹²³ The Good Shepherd Church, which attracted the “elite of the Negro race,” began with intimate meetings in the front of a home in 1925. Although Reverend Kingsley of Good Shepherd stated that storefront preachers were a “case of the blind leading the blind,” incipient ministers could look to his church as an example of what was possible.¹²⁴

Certain storefront clerics rose from modest origins to earn esteemed positions. The Protestant tradition accepted schisms, and congregants believed that storefronts were temporary locations.¹²⁵ Cobbs began by holding spiritualist meetings in a small room and attained notoriety by charging admission to view the body of an executed murderer; by the late 1930s he had a congregation of nine thousand.¹²⁶ His influence forced open doors to the establishment as organizations looked to him as someone who truly represented the poor, including serving on the executive committee of the NAACP.¹²⁷ As Horace Cayton observed, the prevalence of churches and funeral homes in Chicago were no accident, because “these two activities afforded Negroes their limited possibilities of making big money.”¹²⁸

Class differences in religious rituals exposed community fissures. Many middle-class blacks looked down on the emotionalism practiced by the poor and working class and believed that spiritualist preachers were leading their flocks astray while reinforcing stereotypes. As historian Wallace Best finds, though, African American religious establishment “had to gradually yield preeminence to a dynamic and class-diverse religious culture, as these churches found in their midst growing numbers of southern migrants, who were overwhelmingly poor and working class.”¹²⁹ Storefront preachers also subverted these critiques by attracting congregants, pushing into the mainstream, and democratizing religious authority. Some particularly gifted ministers rose from humble beginnings to become key political forces with large, loyal followings. The blending of sacred messages and secular fortunes reflected both the personal desires to get ahead and the communal acceptance of strivers.

HUSTLING SPACE: THE REAL ESTATE GAME

While storefront preachers sold eternal salvation, other determined blacks peddled space on earth. The Black Belt’s housing shortage, exacerbated by segregation, left anyone who owned a house or large apartment with the potential for profit. Most landlords in the ghetto were white, but African Americans recognized that they could also turn property into considerable income. By 1907 at least ten black real estate operators were active on the South Side.¹³⁰ Prominent African Americans such as Oscar DePriest and Jesse Binga made substantial fortunes by approaching the owners of rental buildings and guaranteeing a year’s return. They evicted all the white tenants, raised rents by 25 to 50 percent, and subdivided the building.¹³¹ The large returns spurred investments in the segregated residential market. “All over the south side,” an observer noted, “one will find postmen and stockyards laborers with annual incomes of less than $2,000 feverishly struggling to keep up the payments on a four- or six-flat building.”¹³² The excessive rents and shoddy accommodations became a crisis, but collective action against this predicament was blunted by the African Americans, including a host of community stalwarts, who earned their living as landlords.

Segregation fostered deplorable living conditions, and renters especially begrudged the practice of subdividing dwellings into smaller and smaller “kitchenette” apartments. Migrant tenants were often forced to “double up” to make rent, and kitchenettes proliferated across the Black Belt. Reformers roundly denounced the “evils” of kitchenettes as a “moral and physical hazard of first importance” that contributed to high mortality rates, delinquency, sexual deviance, illegitimate children, and community deterioration.¹³³ For Gwendolyn Brooks, kitchenettes were where dreams clashed with the smell of “yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall.” Richard Wright described them as “our prison, our death sentence without a trial, the new form of mob violence that assaults not only the lone individual, but all of us, in ceaseless attacks.”¹³⁴ Gallingly, African Americans paid a much higher price than whites for their shoddy domiciles, a practice that came to be known as the “color tax.”¹³⁵ As the Chicago Whip seethed, “We live like dogs and pay like princes.”¹³⁶ Most Africans Americans understood that discrimination was the root cause of this misery, but their landlord was often a rich black man like Carl Hansberry, the “King of the Kitchenettes.”¹³⁷

Despite strong resentments toward subdividing and outrageous rents, black elites saw opportunity. The Negro Chamber of Commerce advocated bringing more apartments and houses under the control of black agencies but made no calls to lower rent levels. “Cases were found of colored landlords whose exploitation was fully as extreme as that of white landlords,” one investigator reported in 1928. “With the increase in the purchase of apartments by Negroes as an investment it seems probable that neither lower rents nor improved conditions in Negro neighborhoods will result from Negro ownership of rental properties.”¹³⁸ Landlords claimed that tenants, especially uncultured migrants, caused the problems. “Kitchenettes are not bad,” a proprietor stated. “It’s the people who are bad.”¹³⁹ During the Depression the mass evictions of tenants included black renters put out by black property owners, demonstrating the limits of racial solidarity. When city officials cracked down on policy gambling in 1931 at the behest of Mayor Anton Cermak, the Chicago NAACP protested the raids vigorously, objecting to the “Cossack”-style abuses of business owners. Yet the NAACP remained almost silent on the rash of home evictions, some of which were carried out by African American proprietors and management companies.¹⁴⁰

Though black landlords generally escaped scrutiny in the 1910s and 1920s, the Depression brought class conflict into the open. Black laborers suffered disproportionately as the first fired and last hired.¹⁴¹ In 1929, the Chicago Urban League reported, “Every week we receive information regarding the discharge of additional Race workers who are being replaced by workers of other races.”¹⁴² By 1932, almost half of Chicago’s black workforce was unemployed, causing a wave of evictions.¹⁴³ The only thing worse than a kitchenette, it seemed, was losing it, and anger boiled over in 1931. The Negro Tenants’ Protective League especially targeted Congressman DePriest for turning out the unemployed and “fleecing his own race.” On August 1, 1931, DePriest, dubbed the “millionaire Negro landlord” by his critics, met with other property owners and demanded that Chicago’s chief of police halt anti-eviction actions by the Communist-led Unemployed Councils. On August 3, during a melee over an eviction, police killed three African American men. The following November DePriest lost his reelection bid, in part because he was unable to escape his reputation as a rapacious slumlord.¹⁴⁴

Likewise, indignant black Chicagoans turned on Jesse Binga, who had been the largest black real estate owner in Chicago in the 1920s. Schooled in the real estate business by his mother, Adelphia, young Jesse made his first sizable real estate deal when the government opened an Indian reservation near Pocatello, Idaho, to the public. Binga bought twenty lots and then sold them at a considerable profit.¹⁴⁵ He moved to Chicago in the early 1890s, and after dabbling in a series of ventures, he returned to real estate, buying slum property at rock-bottom prices, renovating and subdividing units, and then renting to home-starved migrants. Binga also became a “blockbuster”—breaking the segregationist residential patterns through real estate deals—a hazardous but lucrative practice.

White assailants frequently attacked Binga—in one six-month stretch they bombed his property five times.¹⁴⁶ Binga was undeterred. When terrorists hit his $30,000 home in an exclusive neighborhood for the fifth time, a newspaper quoted Binga saying, “This is the limit; I’m going.” He quickly denied the account, announcing, “Statements relative to my moving are all false. . . . I will not run.” The banker fought attempts to foreclose on black homeowners who moved into white areas by taking over their mortgages. In resisting such efforts, he also situated himself as a “race man.” “The race is at stake and not myself,” he proclaimed. “If they can make the leaders move, what show will the smaller buyers have?”¹⁴⁷ Binga’s courage and savvy elevated him from back alley huckster to the foremost black capitalist on the main line. In the 1920s, he could boast that he owned more footage on State Street, Chicago’s major thoroughfare, than any other man. His “Binga Block” between Forty-Seventh and Forty-Eighth Streets was the longest tenement row in Chicago.¹⁴⁸

Boosters portrayed Binga as interested in racial advancement through capitalism and uplift. Housed in a magnificent granite edifice and flanked by the Gothic-style Binga Arcade, the Binga State Bank was the “pride of the racial group of Chicago,” a manifestation of race progress in the 1920s. Robert Abbott, the editor and publisher of the Chicago Defender, owned stock in the bank and burnished the businessman’s image.¹⁴⁹ Binga positioned himself as a role model and believed his bank was a step toward relieving “conditions that are said to be making our people the undesirable citizens of Chicago.” Through instruction and community institutions, he stated, the influential could “develop a thrifty and desirable person out of an indolent, reckless spendthrift.”¹⁵⁰ He argued that his blockbusting had freed up more living space and that blacks should follow his example of using ingenuity and hard work to overcome hurdles.

Yet Binga’s version of uplift included some harsh assessments of fellow African Americans. “I’m an Irishman,” he stated in 1916. “You won’t find any other colored people like me.”¹⁵¹ A black journalist charged that the laconic capitalist was “not worried about the Race problem,” but in “solving an individual problem.”¹⁵² Any racial benefits his largesse produced—jobs in his bank or more residential space in Chicago—were merely residuals to his pursuit of wealth. He was simultaneously admired for his accomplishments and resented as a landlord with an inexorable drive for profit who talked down to his employees and other blacks, boasting, “Jesse Binga knows how to deal with Negroes.”¹⁵³ The Chicago Whip doggedly disparaged Binga, calling him an “arrogant individual” and a “Black Capitalist . . . very much disliked by the black constituency.”¹⁵⁴ Even as whites targeted him with racially motivated violence, critics scolded him for distancing himself from the masses.¹⁵⁵

Suspicions over Binga’s ethics were confirmed in 1930, when his bank and fortune collapsed, and investigators revealed that the autocrat ran the bank as his “personal wallet.” Tens of thousands of black Chicagoans lost their small but hard-earned savings.¹⁵⁶ Few elite African Americans lost their investments, though, as reports revealed that the bank had only two accounts over $10,000, and the average deposit was only $66.12. “We are being urged to support our own institutions in preference to those of the other race,” wrote one Chicagoan, “yet it has become public knowledge that many of our race leaders, who do this exhorting, have been, and are depositing the bulk of their savings in [downtown] Loop banks.”¹⁵⁷ The formerly adulatory Chicago Defender turned censorious, noting that Binga exploited his “own people” by raising rents $10 and $15 per month above the rates whites paid, a method replicated by other dealers. In 1938, a black politician tabbed him as “one of the most vicious Negroes when he was in power” and related that “his present circumstances make him an outcast and menace.”¹⁵⁸ The Depression intensified the criticism directed toward wealthy men such as Binga, as those who had listened to the maxims of the elite to work hard, save, and be thrifty recognized that, though they had played by the rules, the economic downturn and bank failures left them penniless and without prospects.

Like policy men and storefront preachers, landlords met criticism for exploiting black Chicagoans’ precarious social and economic situation. These real estate investors and managers, though operating legally, were often more divisive among black residents than other hustlers. African Americans appreciated that they were functioning in a segregated marketplace distorted by racism, but they begrudged real estate managers for inflating the price of a basic need. Unlike gambling, which was a luxury, housing was a necessity, and residents bitterly resented their unhealthy, cramped, and overpriced quarters. Even as pioneers made more space for themselves by braving mobs and winning court cases to overturn racially restrictive covenants, poor and working-class African Americans worried that these gains would mainly benefit elites, while the price gouging and poor conditions for ghetto dwellers continued.¹⁵⁹

HUSTLER’S TOWN

Due to discrimination, black Chicagoans had difficulty demarcating the lines between legitimate and illegitimate occupations. Folklorists referred to it as being “put in a trickbag,” as whites tasked African Americans with making the best of bad options. As the Depression deepened, civic leader Irene McCoy Gaines lamented that young women in Chicago “have come to consider all vocations (whether legal or illegal) as rackets” and “we have observed promising boys from respectable families leave school to find ‘a profitable racket’ and in a few short years become heroes of the underworld, heralded for their prominence as ‘big shots.’”¹⁶⁰ From the vantage point of some African Americans, however, the “big shots” were resisting the stifling forces of racism through attainment, regardless of how they earned their cash. “You get sick and tired of depending on the other fellow for bread and butter, wearing the same old thing,” a black male in boy’s court stated. “My idea of a ‘big shot’ is this. You don’t have to depend on nobody for nothing.”¹⁶¹ The lauding of the hustle, even when it was illegal, reflected rising cynicism. Although elites continued to moralize, their authority was severely damaged by the Depression and the realization that many had made their money through real estate speculation and gambling. A college-educated policy racketeer related the skepticism of operating in fundamentally inequitable racist/capitalist terrain:

Dishonesty is the key to all wealth. Many of the great fortunes of the present day were accumulated by methods which might be open to question. People forget very easily. Should I die, leaving my children a million dollars, no one will question the source of their wealth, and they—the second generation—will be the financial, social, and cultural leaders of their day. Only by attaining economic security however gained, will the Negro in Chicago, or anywhere in America, ever get ahead.¹⁶²

This policy king grasped the unique position of African Americans as marginal actors in the national economy and made clear that “white wealth” was not and had never been “pure wealth,” something the ancestors of former slaves knew well.

Chicago, as the writer Leon Forrest observed, was a “hustler’s town.” “The word was if you couldn’t make it in Chicago,” he wrote, “you couldn’t make it anywhere.”¹⁶³ The imposition of racism and discrimination combined with corruption fostered a situation where the realities of survival overwhelmed standard notions of propriety. Policy, storefront preaching, and the real estate game were all routes of upward mobility that skirted the lines of respectability, yet they were also part of adaptation to city life. When Our World, a black glossy, boasted that Chicago was the “money capital of Negro America” in 1951, the magazine featured impresarios such as Judge Parker, the “Sausage King,” and the insurance magnate Truman Gibson, as well as Reverend Clarence Cobbs, the former storefront preacher who picked up two $400 vases for his $50,000 house in two Cadillacs, and Ted Roe, the “millionaire policy boss of the South Side.” The article suggested that there was no line between the respectable business owner and the outlaw capitalist; only money mattered.¹⁶⁴ Many African Americans admired the hustler ethic when they all felt the sting of prejudice, segregation, and discrimination.

Blacks came to Chicago seeking the land of hope, but instead ran into widespread and nearly pervasive discrimination in employment, education, and residence. Their narrowed opportunities made intraracial class relations more intimate, as the poor and working class lived close to the more well-off members of the race. For some, these moneyed men and women served as examples of making it against the odds, but others saw them as exploitative. The myriad of interests also diminished collective action, as some strivers either ignored calls for “race solidarity” or refashioned them to suit their needs. In Chicago, upward mobility often involved complex interactions with members of one’s own racial or ethnic group. For black capitalists, this negotiation was particularly difficult because segregation made fellow blacks their only clients. Hustlers understood the harshness of city life and turned it to their advantage. Despite recurrent calls for racial unity, the jaded commonly expressed variations of author James D. Corrothers’s “Chicago Golden Rule”: “Do de other feller, befo’ he do you.”¹⁶⁵ One Chicagoan excused Oscar DePriest’s overcharging rents, saying if he “hadn’t gotten it, someone else would have.”¹⁶⁶ African Americans knew that they lacked the same opportunities as whites, and to thrive they would have to make hard choices. Blacks, regardless of their backgrounds, simply were not on a level playing field. As the next chapter details, this was not only true in what they could do, but where they could do it.