CHAPTER 2
MOVING ON OUT
“Oh my house may have its east or west
Or north or south behind it.
All I know is I shall know it,
And fight for it when I find it.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Ballad of Rudolph Reed”1
On the Sunday morning of April 12, 1914, Frederick Jefferson awoke to the milkman frantically ringing the doorbell. The smell of benzine filled the house, and Jefferson ran downstairs to find his front and back porches on fire. Grabbing his rifle, he recalled the threats made against his family by local whites relayed to him by friendly neighbors. Both exits were ablaze, so he directed his wife and his nine-year-old daughter out through the windows. The Oak Park fire department was newly equipped with an auto hose and chemical wagon, and the innovations proved their value as firefighters made the run in less than five minutes and saved the cottage.2
The Jeffersons had purchased their charming home four years earlier when the nearest neighbor was a block away, but as whites bought lots in the immediate area they resented the presence of a black family. Real estate agents marketed nearby properties with the promise that the “Niggers wouldn’t be there more than a year.” But the Jeffersons resolved to stay in their home, even after the local Jackson Improvement Association ran off a black neighbor and “prominent women” of Oak Park openly declared that “somebody should get rid of the Jeffersons if they had to use matches or dynamite.”3 On that Sunday morning someone—the Oak Park police believed it was a hired incendiary—finally acted.4
Oak Park was a fashionable suburb of Chicago, an ideal dwelling away from the dust and smoke of the big city. Leading residents made their homes there, seeking a garden spot in the expanding metropolis and wanting to surround themselves with neighbors who were mainly Protestant and native-born. The growing area also comprised several strivers, including the Jeffersons. Frederick and his wife had both graduated high school and attended college; now they were homeowners in a well-to-do suburb. Yet due to the color of their skin, locals considered the family interlopers, and regardless of their educational accomplishments, Frederick was only able to find work as a chauffeur while Mrs. Jefferson did domestic service. As the village grew, their mere existence in a “near great” area made them a source of angst, notwithstanding the esteem they had cultivated among some community members.5
The assault dismayed racial liberals. The Daily Jewish Courier compared the incident to Polish pogroms and stated that Jefferson’s house “was burned for no other reason than that the Negro chose to make his home in Oak Park in a neighborhood of white aristocracy.”6 The incident perplexed the Chicago Defender. Oak Park, the newspaper noted, was a “settlement of refinement and culture,” but the attempted murder “would have done credit to Lynchburg, Miss.” The editors labeled the perpetrators the “scum of the village,” “poor whites,” and a “band of Georgia ‘crackers,’” but reminded readers that “as this is Illinois and not South Carolina, justice will be meted out.”7 As the subsequent strikes against black residents mounted, the Defender’s prediction of justice proved to be wishful thinking.
Instead, the episode reflected an emerging precedent. African Americans asserted their right to freedom of residence in the city and its suburbs but were met by enmity and ultimately violence. Despite a collective hope for the North as a place of possibility and the stubborn belief that the “better element” of whites would accept upwardly mobile blacks as neighbors, African Americans encountered fierce resistance in their efforts to move on up and move on out. When African Americans advanced into so-called “white” neighborhoods, they risked their lives, and each move was a forceful declaration of their demands for equal citizenship. Whites consistently resisted black newcomers, and municipal authorities repeatedly declined to uphold their duties to protect them, so pioneers defended themselves, their families, and their investments. When Oak Park whites made a second attempt in 1916 to burn the Jeffersons out, Frederick was prepared with two guns and a huge watchdog. Aiming his revolver, he shot at the assailant five times, wounding him as he fled.8
In the first half of the twentieth century many African Americans placed their hopes in republican conventions such as property ownership and upward mobility to claim individual rights, political liberty, and full citizenship. However, black urban dwellers were caught between an unwelcoming white world and declining conditions in a jam-packed ghetto. While the story is usually told from the vantage point of whites who reacted to “invasions” with hostility and flight, this chapter centers on the experiences of pioneers who were agents of spatial and socioeconomic expansion and initiators of integration.9 Despite the legal and extralegal barriers, pioneers consistently demonstrated that they would not be restrained by these artificial fences. Most often they were Chicagoans with the means and the business connections to purchase homes in white areas. As with the political, social, and economic status of African Americans, rights to freedom of residence included definite changes along with racist continuities. In the late 1910s, black Chicagoans attempted to turn their improved economic status into homeownership out of the ghetto confines. Whites responded with severe violence and legally binding restrictive covenants. This push renewed after World War II, and whites reacted with the same disturbingly familiar patterns.
Prior to the civil rights movement, black inner-city communities included a mixture of people of different classes, in part due to Northern residential segregation. Blacks all sent children to the same schools, used the same public facilities, and shopped in the same stores. Professionals serviced ghetto areas and were a visible community presence. However, with more housing available to African Americans, those that could moved out, leaving the most disadvantaged groups in inner-city areas where jobs were scarce and opportunities meager. William Julius Wilson stresses that this middle-class flight not only was a drain of capital and talent but removed role models.10
Wilson’s influential assertions have achieved wide cultural currency and affluent African Americans regularly wrestle with the contention that they deserted their communities and abandoned the less fortunate members of the race.11 Instead of celebrating risk takers for knocking down the walls of residential segregation and working toward the goals of integration, nostalgic observers laud the “golden age of the ghetto” when African Americans emphasized community over individualism.12
This chapter historicizes the debate on black middle-class flight, showing that class and race struggles over space were a reality from the earliest days of the formation of a substantial African American community in Chicago. Blacks had considerable motivations to improve their residential situation. Due to white-dominated political structures, vice functioned virtually unchecked in Chicago’s Black Belt. As more African Americans arrived in the city and whites hardened racial lines, overcrowding, substandard living conditions, and health issues became more acute. Residents deemed these circumstances undesirable for their well-being and, importantly, for raising children. Class position was not static, and poor and working-class blacks who enhanced their economic standing also attempted to better their housing.13 Few were willing to stay in deteriorating neighborhoods, and the yearning to improve their residence was an ordinary and generally accepted fact of life. However, stabilization proved difficult when segregation and large-scale migration overwhelmed class boundaries. The fight for suitable housing produced decades of high-profile struggles against discrimination, but also bared concerns over whether these battles were benefiting all black Chicagoans. African Americans rallied to the cause, but while their efforts produced more living space, it also furthered intraracial divides. Pioneers shouldered the burden of breaking down residential barriers and felt the added weight that they could and should lift the entire race with them.14
THE PERILS OF OVERCROWDING
Black Chicagoans had pressing motives for moving, including health hazards. Congestion was not a problem unique to African Americans. One study in 1923 found that Poles, Bohemians, Italians, and Jews were even more packed into dwellings; these ethnic groups, however, had space opening up to them as the city grew.15 Blacks did not. Tenants inhabited domiciles with broken doors and windows, unsteady flooring, leaking roofs, pest infestations, and plumbing troubles. Landlords put meager effort into repairs and maintenance; owners considered their buildings fast-depreciating assets and bled them for every penny before they reached complete dilapidation. Owners could always find desperate home seekers, regardless of the condition of the units. Tenants strained to pay inflated rents; some sought workers on the night shift as lodgers because the “hotbeds” they occupied during the day could also be rented at night. For black Chicagoans, homes were places for working, eating, and sleeping. Life was lived in the outdoors.16
In addition, residents could not help but notice that when their neighborhoods became predominantly black, municipal services declined precipitously and city officials stopped enforcing zoning laws. Muck and filth made alleys in the poorer South Side districts virtually impassable, and ashes and garbage accumulated in yards and overflowed into the streets. Though critics chalked this up to migrant unfamiliarity with cities, it had more to do with neglect by city departments.17 This negligence was a recurrent problem as living space expanded, even in middle-class areas. One block club reported waging “relentless war” with city officials just to get garbage hauled away once a week, while streets were only cleaned right before elections. Though black votes often determined the balance of political power in the city, an African American resident ruefully observed in 1927 that “our power doesn’t do us much good when we want to get an alley cleaned up or a disorderly house closed.”18
Poor sanitation, congestion, and discrimination in access to medical care increased mortality in the Black Belt as residents suffered disproportionately from a myriad of otherwise preventable health problems. While mortality rates for whites were decreasing in the 1920s, statistics published in 1925 indicated that the death rate of Chicago blacks was comparable to that in Bombay, India, and life expectation rates for nonwhites remained strikingly lower in the 1930s and 1940s (see table 1).19 While tuberculosis was generally associated with poverty, in the cloistered confines of the South Side it claimed lives from all social strata, including Chicago Defender publisher Robert Abbott.20 If parents needed yet another reason to locate to more favorable surroundings, a 1927 study showed that tuberculosis death rates for blacks under age twelve were ten to twenty times higher than for whites of the same age range, while in 1926, 41 percent of the total deaths of children under age eleven were among black Chicagoans who made up just 3 percent of the total population of this age group.21 Disease and death sharpened the conviction that the ghetto was “no place for children.”22 Some observers even wondered whether African Americans were really better off in cities. The novelist Thomas Sancton remarked that “a tenement was a hundred delta cabins, plus tuberculosis.”23 These issues convinced those with the requisite resources to move out, as the assurance of white aggression was no match for the slow death of contagions.
CAUGHT IN THE WEB OF VICE
In 1918, the writer Langston Hughes came to Chicago for the first time and walked “the Stroll” along State Street between Twenty-Sixth and Thirty-Ninth Streets. “South State Street,” Hughes recalled, was “a teeming Negro Street with crowded theaters, restaurants, and cabarets. And excitement from noon to noon. Midnight was like day. The street was full of workers and gamblers, prostitutes and pimps, church folks and sinners.”24 Although Hughes’s impression reflected the thrill of the big city, for the African Americans struggling for respectability and a proper place to raise their children, this atmosphere was far from ideal. The desire to make “respectable” spaces on the South Side was not merely a superficial struggle to define class distinctions, it was an imperative driven by notions of proper surroundings.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chicago elected officials, law enforcement, and scores of citizens deemed vice a “necessary evil” that could be controlled and regulated. The authorities allowed brothels and gambling dens to operate in the South Side Levee district bounded by Eighteenth and Twenty-Second Streets, Federal and State. Moral reformers questioned the strategy of abiding vice districts, and in reaction to mounting pressure, officials effectively closed the Levee in 1912.25
Gambling, prostitution, and drug dealing did not end with these actions, but rather seeped into certain districts, including the Black Belt, creating an atmosphere of open vice. Along State Street, men urged pedestrians to “Try your wrist today? Try your wrist?” Craps and poker enterprises flourished, while neighbors put up with day-and-night rowdiness.26 As early as 1913, Sophonisba Breckinridge noted, “It is probably not too much to say that no colored family can long escape the presence of the disreputable or disorderly neighbors.”27 The situation was not exclusive to Chicago. Across the country black communities routinely abutted vice zones, serving as a glaring reminder of municipal racism. “I don’t believe it would be an exaggeration to say that on nearly every other street in Negro neighborhoods there is at least one brothel or house of assignation maintained for the almost-exclusive patronage of white men,” the journalist Roi Ottley found. “In many Negro communities there is no such thing as a strictly residential area, largely because of relaxed supervision and total indifference from absentee landlords.”28 Though the middle class complained the loudest, hardly any families wanted to live amid an adult amusement park.
The significant role of vice in the political economy of the ghetto translated into mixed reactions to and definitions of “crime” among residents. Since working in the rackets was often one of the few ways of making steady money, it attracted even the “respectable” and college educated. Ada “Bricktop” Smith, the famous jazz singer, recalled that her mother boarded only “nice working people” who were married, but was often disappointed to find that “even nice working people engaged in ‘funny business.’”29 Entrepreneurs profited from vice, for others it was steady labor, and some were thrilled by the scene. For a young Bricktop, buffet flats (converted apartments offering a full assortment of illegal services) were not a perilous nuisance, but rather exhilarating after-hours party spots rife with liquor, harmonization, and easy laughter.30 While a black journalist viewed all-night “black and tan” saloons as evidence of the “white plague” of “white men in search of Negro women,” Ben Hecht argued that interracial dancing “wiped out the color line with liquor, music and sex.”31 When it came to leisure, one man’s menace was another’s sign of progress.32
Yet, most black Chicagoans rejected an “anything goes” attitude toward vice. They railed against the ubiquity of municipally sanctioned amusements, and neighborhood clubs made sincere efforts to rid areas of unsavory nightspots, contending that vice should be “removed from the residential districts.”33 The Chicago Whip accepted that prostitution and gambling were unlikely to disappear anytime soon, but “we can only hope that it will be segregated and removed from residential sections where people make the pretense of decency.”34 Residents did not necessarily begrudge the men and women who made their money from organized crime, but did object when they operated in their neighborhoods.35
Prostitution garnered the most objections. It was already a problem in black areas by the early 1910s, as operators shielded their operations through deals with organized crime, politicians, and the police.36 As migrants arrived, they discovered that men and women who sought the “gay life” visited the Black Belt.37 In 1917, the Chicago Tribune observed that a dozen “disreputable” houses operated openly within a few hundred yards of the Twenty-Second Street police station.38 By 1928 the Chicago Defender reported that there were 2,750 buffet flats and brothels in the majority-black Second, Third, and Fourth Wards that operated without interference, with some of them visited regularly by policemen.39
Black Chicagoans were aware that white power structures allowed vice to proliferate, forming what historian Kevin Mumford calls “another spectacle of sexual racism.”40 Organized crime figures drew the color line in the upper echelons of vice management, while raids by the Chicago police’s “wrecking crew” focused on black-owned establishments and “black and tan” saloons. Some brothels in the Black Belt even enforced Jim Crow, infuriating African Americans by flaunting open vice and topping it off with discrimination.41 The Whip complained that “white hoodlums and vile women” infested neighborhoods, while the Defender reported that 60 percent of brothels were controlled by whites who lived outside the district, and begrudged the cultural and economic imperialism of white pimps and customers. “They have come to the South Side with their vice and filth, and have taken the cash to other sections of the city to beautify them. When money leaves the district in this fashion it never returns.”42
Despite organized efforts against “disreputable women” and their pimps, the battle often seemed unwinnable as protests made to landlords and law enforcement fell on deaf ears. Even when police buckled and made arrests, judges passed out small fines and prostitutes were back in a day or two, “plying their trade with brazen audacity,” sometimes even in the same buildings with “respectable people.”43 Much to the chagrin of residents, the sex trade overwhelmed their communities. “Window tappers” solicited day and night, sounding “like hail beating on the pavement of a city street,” while pimps in faux cigar stores asked, “Don’t you want to meet some nice girls, white girls?” Ropers and runners implored potential clients to check out what they had to offer, while fixers guided groups of white men. Vice dens sprouted like mushrooms next to churches and schools. In the early 1930s practically every house between Forty-Sixth and Forth-Seventh Streets across Michigan Boulevard from the fashionable Rosenwald apartments harbored “working girls.” To area residents these conditions were a menace, even as there was a general understanding that prostitution was a last resort for most women.44
These notions of propriety cut across class lines, as working-class and poor families often had stringent versions of proper behavior. Migrants regularly adjusted the city through a church-based understanding of respectability based in the often mislabeled “middle-class” traits of economy, restraint, and moderation. They did not passively accept middle-class uplift ideologies; rather, they arrived with their own ideals of conduct. Fretful parents realized that the “wide-open” ghetto introduced children to far more dangers and enticements than rural areas. A survey of poor and working-class blacks in 1937 indicated that one-half attended no public amusements, cabarets, or taverns. “I don’t go to theaters, dance halls, ball games, and things like that,” a domestic worker explained. “It just don’t [sic] go with the rules of the church.”45 Sermons in mainline and storefront churches explicitly denounced prostitution and urged congregants to resist the temptations of the city. Pastor S. E. J. Watson of Pilgrim Baptist Church railed against “the old woman whose house is the way to hell.” “There was nothing that was going on in Sodom that is not going on in Chicago,” a spiritualist preacher sermonized. “If God don’t know what’s going on, let him put on clothes like anybody else, and walk down Calumet Street.”46 These protestations to prostitution and dissipation came from a variety of voices in the Black Belt. Churchgoers were dismayed that whites tarred them as criminals because they lived and worshiped in vice-ridden areas, and they responded by stressing their abstemious personal lives. If they caught a break, they usually sought to distance themselves from vice by moving.
Families trying to live the “upright life” made a major priority of leaving sordid settings. According to Drake and Cayton, “We can’t raise children right around here” or “We’re stuck here” was a constant complaint, and even stable families confronted daunting obstacles in their struggle to keep their children “straight.”47 A young Dempsey Travis witnessed women stopping men on streets near his family’s apartment. At first he thought they were lost and asking for directions, but the men would repeatedly follow the “lost” women into alleys or hallways. After more incidents like this, Travis’s father finally decided that his family deserved a “better environment” and moved.48 Most families, though, lacked the means to get out, and even as the territory open to them gradually and violently expanded, prostitution and seedy nightspots followed with the approval of politicians and police who padded their incomes and funded their campaigns through graft. “Everywhere the self-respecting colored citizens, singly or in groups, have fled to new neighborhoods free of vice as a haven for their children and families,” the Chicago Bee noted. “Fast on their heels vice has followed in their wake, a menace to society at large and colored groups in particular.”49 The well-to-do learned they could not defeat the forces that encouraged organized crime in their communities. In response, they tried to establish and maintain homogeneous, exclusive enclaves, even if it meant taking unpopular stands.
MAKING MIDDLE-CLASS RACE SPACE
Higher-status African Americans attempted to put some room between themselves and the lower classes even before the tumult of the Great Migration. Undoubtedly aspirations to make exclusive race spaces were due to a degree of social snobbery. As early as 1907 one aristocrat claimed that “an excess of democracy exists among Negroes.”50 Another resident stated that his family was “not satisfied with the neighborhood where the masses of Negroes lived” because they were “low and degraded.”51 Middle-class blacks commonly chose their mates, church affiliation, social activities, and peer groups based on the class of people they chose to mix with. An attorney who had worked his way up from the plantation asserted that class separation was natural, as “there must be some discrimination in order to get along in life.” Socialites mingled at the Appomattox Club, the Civic Century, and the Tuskegee Club and formed fraternities and sororities that brought together the more “advanced” element of the “the Race.”52
The middle class thought they should encircle themselves with neighbors of comparable morals, dispositions, and standards. “The real problem of the social life of the colored people in Chicago, as in all northern cities, lies in the fact of their segregation,” prominent writer and activist Fannie Barrier Williams remarked in 1905. “The huddling together of good and bad, compelling the decent element of colored people to witness brazen displays of vice of all kinds in front of their homes and in the faces of their children, are trying conditions under which to remain socially clean and respectable.”53 In 1910, the forerunners of the National Urban League grumbled that segregation, high rents, and boarders meant that “respectable Negro neighborhoods find themselves unable so far to keep out persons of doubtful or immoral character.”54 A Southern-born doctor lamented that blacks were “constantly being exploited by real estate dealers,” but his main gripe was not really racial exploitation but rather that this discrimination forced them “into a limited area where the upper classes must mingle with the lower” so that “the bad pollutes that which otherwise might be good.”55 The Black Belt in Chicago was surrounded by neighborhoods where different European ethnic and religious backgrounds coalesced around the principles of cosmopolitan, middle-class life. But because violence and restrictive covenants constrained living space, in black areas of the urban North all classes were crowded together.56 As Frank Marshall Davis wrote,
Across the street from the Ebenezer Baptist Church,
women with cast-iron faces peddle love
In the flat above William’s Funeral Home
six couples sway to the St. Louis Blues
Two doors away from the South Side Bank
three penny-brown men scorch their guts with four bit whiskey
Dr. Jackson buys a Lincoln
His neighbor buys second hand shoes
—the artist who paints this town must
use a checkered canvas.57
Though critics expressing nostalgia for the class blend of Jim Crow Chicago could point to the successful role models in this “checkered canvas,” the role models themselves usually detested living in a seedy, overcrowded, and unhealthy area.
The upwardly mobile often charged that if they could separate themselves from the poor, interracial connections could improve the racial climate, as long as they were between the sophisticated ranks. The Broad Ax argued that the “ardent hope” of white Chicagoans was that the lower classes would always be confined to the ghetto, while African Americans with “culture and refinement” moved into white neighborhoods.58 A black Chicagoan lambasted white improvement associations for their unfair, un-American actions against aspiring homeowners, but volunteered that the “better class” of blacks “stand ready and willing to assist any individuals or association to rid our community of ‘undesirable citizens’ based not on color, but upon moral fitness.”59 As pioneers routinely discovered, though, these visions of class-based racial harmony underestimated the depths of white middle-class intolerance.
Given the extent of the housing crisis, black efforts to maintain exclusive spaces entangled them in controversy. A black enclave in the Far South Side neighborhood of Morgan Park formed in the 1910s when a group of domestic and railroad workers built homes on cheap, low land badly in need of drainage. The district had a “boom-town” feel, as substantial brick and stucco homes sat next to those built in stages as finances permitted. By 1920, 73 percent of blacks in the area were homeowners. African Americans would occasionally venture out to the suburb on Sundays to look at the large residences interspersed with vacant prairie land and envision the day when they could erect their own dream house. One homeowner noted that while local dwellings seemed ragged, “they are comfortable, full of hope, and not loaded with debts. There are home-loving families in all of them.” The Morgan Park Improvement Association, with a membership that included several black municipal employees, lobbied successfully to secure drainage enhancements, street paving, street lights, and sewers.60 African Americans were 12 percent of the population of Morgan Park by 1920, and they channeled their economic and organizational strength into creating a vibrant community.61
Residents carved out a fragile racial truce in the area by agreeing that African Americans would not live east of Vincennes Avenue. Many of the district’s native-born affluent whites relied on black domestic laborers, and the races maintained generally friendly relations. Children of all races, including a smattering of local “foreigners,” attended integrated public schools, and there was no color line in area public accommodations.62
These “friendly attitudes” were put to the test in 1917, however, when John Resakes, a Greek real estate agent, and black landlord Eugene Mann solicited black renters for their twenty-flat building in Morgan Park after claiming that they had failed to secure white tenants. The audacious Mann was unshaven, fast-talking, and unafraid to boldly challenge Jim Crow norms. He and his partner encountered immediate antagonism from local whites, and Resakes asked for police protection for himself and the building to stave off “bombs, insults, and conspiracy.” Many black locals, perhaps in an effort to maintain class standards and preserve the tenuous racial peace, agreed with the protest, and their improvement association and Baptist church went on record to support the efforts to defeat what the Chicago Tribune dubbed a “Negro invasion.” A superior court injunction ultimately blocked the move-in, preventing Resakes from renting until he made certain improvements.63
In seeking the stabilization of their district, the black residents of Morgan Park walked a fine line between class and race interests. The Chicago Defender lambasted Morgan Park for preventing desperate members of the race the “opportunity to move into half-way decent quarters.” The paper labeled Bessie Ray, chair of the black improvement association, as a “traitor” and contended that “scalawags who are willing to bow to the bidding” of whites should “be tarred and feathered, whether members of the church or not.” According to the Defender account, some African American residents of Morgan Park were also disturbed at the accommodation to segregation and stymied opportunities for housing, calling Ray a “white folk’s nigger.”64 Critics scrutinized black middle-class exclusivity, a treatment that whites rarely encountered.
The delicate but amicable racial armistice in Morgan Park was rather unique in Chicago; the desire for an incipient middle class to spatially separate itself from the humbler elements of the race was not. The incessant search for “a better neighborhood” created spatial patterns within the Black Belt along class lines like those of the city as a whole. Higher-income residents generally migrated to the south end of the district. The north end became a low-income area and the point of disembarkation for Southern migrants.65 In the 1910s and 1920s black homeowners formed improvement associations, a trend urged by the National Committee on Negro Housing, a group appointed by President Herbert Hoover as part of a larger conference on home building and ownership. The committee recommended an “aggressive campaign” to form improvement associations “among the more intelligent Negro” to work against “the intrusion of immoral persons” and the “intrusion of immoral conditions.”66 Against all odds, the well-to-do tried desperately to carve out high-status spaces, fighting both against white intransigence and the poor and working-class black Chicagoans who were also in a frantic search for improved housing.67 A professional man, who with a physician, lawyer, and musician had been the first to enter a select area near Thirty-Seventh Street in the 1920s, felt he was forced to move after his neighborhood “rapidly degenerated” with the sound of gunfire and “the worst kind of cursing.” He moved farther south, where it was “beautiful” with “well kept” lawns, but soon after the “same class of Negroes who ran us away from 37th Street” came creeping along “slowly like a disease.”68 The middle class continued their incursions into forbidden areas, but less well-off African Americans usually followed. Homeowners considered this situation detrimental to property values, community morals, and harmonious race relations, and they often directed their ire at the lower classes.
Black Chicagoans demarcated their class position through aesthetics and argued that the poor did not share these values. The middle class considered the Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments, built by philanthropist Julius Rosenwald in 1928, as a paradise because of their modern interiors as well as their inner gardens, “landscaped with grass, trees, flowers, and shrubbery, which is visible from practically every apartment.”69 Homeowners argued that their lawns and gardens signified “pride and attention,” while areas with “unkempt” yards “full of rubbish” indicated that the neighborhood was a slum. One letter writer to Half-Century Magazine identified herself as a resident of “one of the better residence sections” of Chicago because her “neighbors are the kind who keep their lawns trim and tidy, their windows clean and send their children to school looking neat and clean.” But other families in the area were “trouble makers” because they presented themselves and their premises in an untidy manner.70 Instead of middle-class districts, Black Chicago tended to contain middle-class islands, a building or block interspersed among overcrowding and deterioration. Referred to as “oases in the slums” by the press, block groups sometimes bought communal tools for garden and lawn work or hired a gardener to landscape vacant lots.71 The Defender and Chicago Urban League also encouraged stabilization by running contests rewarding the “neatest lawn” and sponsoring “block beautiful” programs.72 The Defender urged readers to counter white improvement associations’ “dirty propaganda” by keeping homes clean on the inside and out to “disprove such rot.”73 According to the middle class, well-kept lawns, ornate landscaping, and home improvements signified success, demonstrated urban adjustment and sophistication, and distinguished them from the masses.
The goal of class separation was continually tested by waves of migrants and the color line that boxed black Chicagoans into cloistered areas. The segregated market created a grave housing shortage, a problem that city authorities and private builders showed no interest in rectifying. Financial institutions “red-lined” black zones, making new construction difficult, so families packed into subdivided “kitchenette” buildings while weed-filled lots sat empty across the street.74 In the eyes of the successful, the housing shortage was criminal, but there was something particularly odious about denying homes to those who could afford them in places befitting their stature.
MAKING RACE SPACE: BLACK PIONEERS
For upwardly mobile families, homeownership was an “obsession.” The Defender remarked, “We were denied in years gone by the privilege of owning the roof over our heads. . . . Now we grasp the first opportunity to invest our earnings in property.”75 Property ownership signified status and thriftiness and brought security, stability, and community approval. As residential districts became increasingly crowded, African Americans battled ferocious resistance and pushed out into middle-class areas. There, according to observers, they were able to sustain “a higher standard of living and a more vital community feeling.” The spacious homes also provided privacy, “one of the rarest of the good things of life” in a congested district.76
Considering the time, expense, and extreme measures taken by whites toward the goal of complete containment of the black population, the methods employed to keep them hemmed in were not very effective in the long run. Chicago’s African Americans were sometimes accused of submitting to “voluntary segregation” and of lacking “the pioneering spirit,” yet they put persistent pressure on the walls of segregation.77 The strikingly repetitive barrage of violence, harassment, and restrictions hurled at pioneers reads as a litany of misery, but it also reveals the dogged expansion of living space. Their stiff-necked response to this aggravation was a stark contrast to the skittish reactions of whites when blacks entered “their” neighborhoods.
Even before the fevered violence of the late 1910s and early 1920s, African Americans knew that moves into new areas would be contested.78 As J. Saunders Redding recalled, the process was so draining and convoluted by subterfuge and conspiracy that “moving was almost like stealing.”79 Lending institutions usually refused to finance home purchases, shutting African Americans out of the mortgage market. The Chicago Defender reported that one downtown bank even sent out postcards stating “No Nigger Loans” in large type.80 Real estate agents typically rebuffed them, and those that broke this code were frequently the targets of violence, intimidation, and boycotts.81 Blacks often paid a premium for the privilege of owning a home, yet the racism prospective buyers encountered was just the beginning of their troubles.
The entrance of black newcomers into white neighborhoods followed a familiar pattern throughout the first half of the twentieth century. An affluent family utilized a white intermediary to purchase a home. Neighbors almost immediately panicked, with some putting their homes up for sale and others organizing to drive the newcomers out. Pioneers were virtually assured of threats and repeated episodes of violence against their property. In some instances, the assailants unmistakably intended to kill, and it is a wonder that more deaths did not occur.82 The black banker R. W. Woodfolk owned a flat with one white and four black families as tenants. On February 1, 1920, a man with keys locked the tenants in their apartments to prevent escape and planted an explosive in the hallway. The blast was so large it shattered the windows of adjacent buildings, but miraculously no residents were killed.83
No arrests were made, as the authorities were usually uninterested in apprehending the perpetrators of racial violence. The indifference from law enforcement was tantamount to condoning violent acts, and in most cases the police were in accord with white assailants.84 “For what good is a home,” the activist Irene McCoy Gaines lamented, “if a mob, without fear of punishment, may come in the darkness of the night and bomb, burn or otherwise terrorize the owners of that home?”85 Pioneers were usually surrounded by unfriendly neighbors and had to rely on their own methods of defense.
Despite these obstacles, pioneers sneered at restrictive efforts, moving steadily into formerly white areas and making a physical declaration of their social ascension and rights. From July 1917 to July 1919 there were twenty-four bombings aimed at black homeowners and black and white real estate men, yet the Chicago Tribune reported that “colored families refuse to retreat northward.” Two years later real estate records showed that bombings had “little effect on property buyers” as the well-off continued to purchase homes. Politician and realtor Oscar DePriest, whose own property had been bombed, stated, “Negroes are going to move anywhere they can pay rent and if the white people don’t like it, we’ll run them into the damn lake.”86 Alderman L. B. Anderson reminded Chicagoans that Africans Americans were among the first residents of the city and were there to stay. “The Negro, if he is financially able to live in a modern apartment building,” Anderson stated, “has just the same right under the Constitution to enjoy the comforts of such an abode as the white man.”87 In the face of the rallying cry of “They Shall Not Pass,” the social worker Mary McDowell noted that black men and women persistently moved southward, with territorial gains standing “as a monument to the courage and diplomacy of the race that will not allow anything to stand in the way of their ‘climbing higher—higher.’”88 When whites in suburban Evanston expressed fears that blacks would “overrun” the city, a letter writer to the Tribune declared that “black people have as much right to overrun Evanston as Poles, Slavs, Jews, Greeks, Irish, New Englanders, westerners, southerners, white people, and any other people who live in this nation and who have their homes wherever they desire.”89 African Americans asserted the freedom to live where they pleased as a fundamental civil right, and studies established that the bombing campaigns were “futile,” for they “will neither intimidate any considerable number of them nor stop their moving into a given district.” Violence only succeeded in exacerbating racial antagonisms.90
Though most pioneers relocated for socioeconomic and family-based reasons, they also knew that each move into a new neighborhood struck a blow for the race. For African Americans, a minister noted, racially restrictive covenants were like “red rags.” They were eager to break them, because “such things are un-American and un-Christian.”91 Upwardly mobile African Americans spearheaded the battle to defeat them in Chicago and across the nation, viewing their advancement as not only a matter of improving living conditions, but as fundamental to racial progress.92 The motto of Chicago’s Protective Circle, a group organized to protest bombings and the indifference of city officials, was “No backward step. Anywhere, providing it be forward.”93 Jane Jones’s fictional pioneer McKenzie Wilson received threatening letters and offers to sell his home, even at a profit. Despite sleepless nights, Wilson did not give in, “lest the white people triumphantly declare they had scared him out and then they would treat the colored people even worse than they ever had.”94 Leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Oscar DePriest sang the praises of those who refused to be intimidated and scolded those who folded.95 For pioneers, a housing upgrade was not only deserved but helped break the ghetto logjam.
Pioneers were fully aware that whites would challenge every move into disputed territory. This was more than a “gut feeling,” as African Americans heard about hostilities through peer networks and media accounts. Move-ins brought out the worst in the existing population, and the threat of carnage hung dauntingly. One family that bought in a white area recalled driving home every night expecting to see a heap of smoldering ashes where their house stood.96 Extremely stressful moves evoked military connotations, as whites used terms like “invasion” to describe the process of integration, and blacks adopted terminology such as “pincer movement” and “advanced landings of paratroopers.”97 In Rudolph Fisher’s fictionalized account of a move-in, an observer calls home buying “war—conquest of territory.” The protagonist, a lawyer, who is “downright rabid” on racial matters, wants to enjoy his house “purely as an individual,” but “just the same I’m entering it as a Negro.” Embittered, he admits that his “chief joy in life is making [whites] uncomfortable.”98 Regardless of the amount of prestige or education achieved by members of the black middle class, they realized that their status would not protect them from violence or ensure any assistance from city officials.
In response, African Americans expressed a strong conviction in the necessity of aggressive self-defense. When whites threatened the life or property of African American families, the community consistently demonstrated that it would rise to protect them. The Washington, DC, East St. Louis, and Chicago race riots in the late 1910s were to a large degree triggered by antagonism over space, and African Americans viscerally proved that they would meet violence with violence. Their resolve demonstrated the collective fortitude of a people who had revolted against Jim Crow by moving north and now felt an increasing racial consciousness.99 Veterans from World War I returned with confidence, knowledge of the gun, and a willingness to use it.100 “It is the duty of every man here to provide himself with guns and ammunition,” a Chicagoan declared after the 1919 race riot. “I, myself, have at least one gun and at least enough ammunition to make it useful.”101 These men positioned themselves as the antithesis of the “black pussyfoot” who had succumbed to white terror. Blacks recognized events like the Chicago race riot as tragedies, but also celebrated the exhibition of racial resilience.102
Armed self-defense was not the only method African Americans used to secure living space in Chicago, but it was probably the most effective. Peaceful attempts to appeal to city officials were rebuffed, whites ignored published broadsides counseling them not to join protective organizations or to participate in violence, and negotiations with the Chicago Real Estate Board and improvement associations went nowhere or were seen as accommodationist by other black Chicagoans.103 For those willing to push boundaries, weapons became a necessity. As one Great War veteran stated, “I can shoot as good as the next one, and nobody better start anything. I ain’t looking for trouble, but if it comes my way I ain’t dodging.”104 This philosophy regularly guided pioneers. The Ossian Sweet case in Detroit was the most famous instance of armed self-defense, mainly because Sweet and his comrades hit their targets, but countless African Americans were armed and willing to use force to protect their families and property.105 On the eve of the Great War, the Albert Dunham family built a home in suburban Glen Ellyn. Neighbors soon realized that Albert was not a dark-skinned servant of his light-skinned wife and attempted to expel the Dunhams through zoning laws. When this failed, a homemade explosive shattered newly installed downstairs windows. A determined Albert exited the early morning train from Chicago with a double-barreled shotgun. As locals watched warily, he performed an extended vigil with his gun every night until the last coat of paint was applied.106 Similarly, after whites bombed his home in 1920, Crede Hubbard stated that he was arming himself with “anything I want from a Mauser to a machine gun,” and if a suspicious intruder came his way, he would “crack down on him and ask him what he was there for afterwards.”107 While her husband, Carl, was fighting restrictive covenants in the courtroom in the late 1930s, Nannie Hansberry patrolled their house in Washington Park with a loaded German Luger, steadfastly safeguarding her four children.108 For African Americans, firearms were often the logical response to aggression.
Frequent antagonistic experiences with working-class, white ethnics led many African Americans to peg them as violence-prone and pathological; sometimes it seemed their only joys came from keeping blacks one rung beneath them on the ladder.109 Drake and Cayton noted that a common lament was that “foreigners learn how to cuss, count and say ‘nigger’ as soon as they get here,” and blacks were particularly galled that poor immigrants speaking broken English could boast “no niggers live in this section.”110 Despite their own problems in America, or perhaps because of them, white ethnics proved to be poor allies in the fight against racial subjugation.
What disappointed pioneers more was the reception they received from the so-called “better class” of whites. Blacks typically viewed racism as a product of ignorance and hoped that higher-class people could see past race and concentrate on traits like character and achievement. “There’s less friction in communities where the people are educated,” a letter writer to Half-Century Magazine opined in 1920, “and most of the trouble occurs between the uneducated element of both races.”111 This conventional insistence that a more open-minded element existed was reinforced by occasional positive interactions with middle-class whites. Black men and women experienced plenty of racism, but some also had encouraging exchanges with whites: a friendly face at work, a business mentor, and a helpful teacher were not uncommon. They hoped that more of these interactions between high-status people would be “ennobling” and a chance for the white man “to test his vaunted democracy.”112
As Frederick Jefferson and his family discovered in Oak Park, however, when it came to living alongside the white middle class as neighbors, receptions were often just as harsh as those in white-ethnic neighborhoods, with the only difference being that the affluent were able to hire out their dirty work. The Hyde Park–Kenwood Property Owners’ Association notoriously held the eastern line of the Black Belt at Cottage Grove Avenue by employing gangsters. When the Crede Hubbard family bought a home in Kenwood in 1920, the association repeatedly asked him to sell. When the association could not meet Hubbard’s inflated price, the members used their professional connections and attempted to enlist Hubbard’s boss, the chief clerk of the Northwestern Railroad, to convince Hubbard to reconsider. The chief clerk refused to cooperate, and having exhausted these “businesslike” attempts, the association hired bombers to hit the house while Hubbard’s sons slept.113 Indeed, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, some of the most vicious racist propaganda emanated from middle-class residents.114 Black newspapers lashed out at the segregationists, charging that they showed a “lack of civilization” and were not “bona fide Americans,” but “low bred, shanty Irish” and “kikes.”115 Yet the truth was that educated, high-status whites regularly perpetrated hard-core racism. Though racial housing riots in working-class areas dominated the headlines, the Defender remarked that “respectable property owners, middle-class businessmen and great numbers of white ‘liberals’” were solidly behind restrictive covenants, and these “phoney [sic] liberals and apologetic ‘friends of the Negro’” were doing much to exacerbate the housing crisis.116
Where newcomers did not face violent resistance, they regularly discovered that whites were still averse to residing alongside them. The African Americans who moved into Lawndale on the city’s West Side in the late 1940s, for instance, were the typical middle-class newcomers: doctors, lawyers, schoolteachers, government workers, and businesspeople. Many became property owners for the first time and were relieved at the cordial greetings they received from their mainly Jewish neighbors. There were no threats, no bombings or brick-tossing, and no menacing racial episodes. There was even a short-lived interracial attempt to maintain standards and create an amicable community. However, within months For Sale signs materialized. The exodus moved at such a hurried tempo that vacant apartments existed despite the postwar housing shortage. As Enoch Waters recalled, the Jews “fled as if pursued by Nazis.” Newcomers were “plainly disgusted with the Jews, whom they felt had clearly demonstrated racial prejudice in fleeing.”117 The lack of aggression was small consolation when replaced by their rejection via wholesale flight. Pioneers achieved expanded living space for themselves and for the race, but white obstinacy denied the concurrent goal of racial integration.
OAK PARK REDUX
In 1950 the eminent chemist Percy Julian and his wife, Anna, also a PhD, bought an expansive home in Frederick Jefferson’s old hometown of Oak Park. Percy Julian had attained degrees from Harvard and the University of Vienna, was the chief of soybean research for Chicago’s Glidden Corporation, and had made world-renowned chemical innovations. The Chicago Sun-Times named Dr. Julian its “Chicagoan of the Year” in 1949, and the exclusive suburb, which advertised itself as the “middle-class capital of the world,” seemed to be the perfect fit for Julian and his family.118
Nationally, black economic and social conditions changed for the better in the 1940s. The March on Washington Movement and the Congress of Racial Equality awakened the civil rights movement in Chicago and across the country, as moderates became actively engaged in securing jobs and then full equality and democracy for African Americans nationally and “dependent peoples” globally.119 Blacks in the Chicagoland area made substantial strides especially after pressure resulted in President Franklin Roosevelt signing the Fair Employment Act prohibiting racial discrimination in the defense industry. Unemployment plummeted, while earnings rose significantly, giving more home seekers the ability to search for improved housing.120
After the war a series of actions suggested momentum in civil rights. In the spring of 1947 Jack Roosevelt Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier. Liberals, radicals, and civil rights activists compelled the federal government to rethink its traditionally lax enforcement of equal protection under the law and to assert its prerogative on the rights of African Americans. A year later in the landmark Shelley v. Kraemer case, the Supreme Court ruled that under the Fourteenth Amendment the government could not legally enforce racially restrictive covenants. Two months after that President Harry Truman abolished racial discrimination in federal employment and integrated the armed services.
Though blacks made advancements in their socioeconomic position and in securing civil rights in the 1940s, the housing situation got even worse in urban America, leading to pitched racial conflicts across the country.121 In Chicago, 60,000 new migrants arrived, and the Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations calculated that the Black Belt was overcrowded by 75,000 to 100,000 people. In response, African Americans renewed their push out of their cramped confines.122 Violence resulted, and the Chicago Council Against Racial and Religious Discrimination noted that while a mass lynching in Georgia was in the headlines in August 1946, there was a “lynch spirit in our own midst” with 59 separate attacks on homes in the previous twenty-seven months, including 29 arson bombings, 22 stonings, 3 shootings, 3 house wreckings, and 2 stink bombs.123 Major mob disturbances occurred at temporary housing set up for veterans and their families near Midway Airport in 1946, at public housing in Fernwood Park the following year, and in residential areas of Park Manor and Englewood in 1949.124 Arnold Hirsch astutely labels this an era of “hidden violence” because of the mainstream media’s intentional disregard for covering the events, but the intimidating incidents were not hidden from African Americans, who were well aware of what was likely to greet them when they crossed the invisible color line.
It was in this context that the Julian family bought their home in Oak Park. Though working-class whites fueled the postwar housing riots, the Julians’ purchase in the fashionable town also caused a furor, and the family received anonymous threatening phone calls and other obstacles thrown in their way, including a city commissioner’s refusal to turn on their water. On Thanksgiving eve, after the landscapers and renovators had gone for the day, a dark sedan pulled up to the Julians’ fifteen-room house. Two men got out, broke into the home, and soaked the walls with kerosene. After failing to light the fuse, they tossed a flaming kerosene torch through a window and drove away. The crashing window alarmed the neighbors, and the fire department arrived before the gasoline ignited.125 Nine months later assailants hurled a bomb at the Julians’ home, which fortunately landed short and exploded in the yard. Though the assaults abated, the family continued to be the object of ominous threats for years.126 Thirty-six years after white neighbors targeted Frederick Jefferson and his family for a forced eviction, Oak Park residents again made clear that they would not stand for black neighbors.
The assaults only strengthened the Julians’ resolve. “We refuse to be intimidated,” Dr. Anna Julian said defiantly. The move would be delayed due to the vandalism, “but we are going through with it. We are not going to be intimidated by hoodlums.”127 The Julian family hired private, round-the-clock armed security to patrol the property, an expense that ultimately cost upward of $10,000, and Percy himself brandished a shotgun and served as lookout with his son. For the Julians and for other pioneers who had battled racism at every step of their climb, the sting of rejection was nothing new. “We’ve lived through these things all our lives,” Percy stated. “As far as the hurt to the spirit goes, we’ve become accustomed to that.”128 The Julians’ search for housing in Chicago had already been distressing, as angry crowds gathered when he first tried to rent an apartment on the North Side, and the Glidden Corporation had to surreptitiously buy the family a home in Maywood to prevent the Julians from being turned down because of their race.129 As the threats persisted in Oak Park, Julian articulated the republican mantra that emboldened pioneers. “We’re American citizens and we’re entitled to this. I’m on the lookout and will not stand for anyone taking my property. We’ll die before they do it.”130
Although a great deal had changed for African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century, in the field of housing the struggles largely remained the same. The upwardly mobile continued their quest to find whites who would see past race, yet the similarities between the violence directed at the Jeffersons and the Julians showed that their options were tightly limited and undeniably risky. Oak Park was supposed to be a suburb with “solid and respectable” residents; the so-called “better class” who would welcome the Julians. Though a vocal minority was infuriated by the attacks on the Julians’ home and took steps to demonstrate their commitment to peaceful integration, the majority maintained a deafening silence or voiced their disapproval of the Julians’ presence.131 No one was ever charged in connection with the crimes, prompting even the conservative Chicago Tribune to question if the police force really wanted to make any arrests.132
The violence against the Julian family was overshadowed by the race riots in the neighboring working-class suburb of Cicero, where a family’s move-in to an apartment building precipitated three nights of mayhem that required the Illinois National Guard to quell the disturbances. This attack was easier for the media—black and white—to comprehend. They expected white working-class ethnics to resort to violence to maintain their communities.133 They found it more difficult to square the violence in Oak Park and the exclusion of Dr. Julian from the upper-crust Union League Club just a month after his home was bombed. Percy could not conceal his own disappointment at this latest snub from the “better element.” “It appears to me that organizations like the Union League Club are as directly responsible as any other agency for such un-American incidents as the bombing of my home in Oak Park and the Cicero riots,” Julian stated. “When individuals in high places behave as the Union League Club behaves ordinary citizens follow suit.”134 For black Chicagoans, the search for enlightened whites continued.
THE PRICE OF PIONEERING
Class distinctions within the black community created tensions, though usually not conflict in the classical Marxist sense. Most black employees worked for white-dominated firms, not the small black business class. As Langston Hughes pointed out, most of the “big Negroes” were not high enough to keep anybody down, much less the “little Negroes.”135 Blacks often faced similar limits on opportunities for economic and physical mobility, but not in the same degrees. Friction also frequently occurred between those who judged themselves “respectable” and those deemed unable or unwilling to live up to these ideals. There was a degree of class separation within the Black Belt, and this phenomenon became more apparent as the middle class expanded its domain. When African Americans in Northern cities advanced, they usually upgraded their settings and separated themselves from the substandard ghetto conditions.
Although critics occasionally chastised the middle class for leaving the ghetto and thereby abdicating leadership positions, the situation was much more complex. Pioneers never really were too far away spatially or psychically from the masses, and they often shared schools, parks, commercial areas, public spaces, and kin networks with African Americans from a variety of backgrounds. The Julians were censured in some corners for moving out and scrutinized by friends who questioned why they would endure such treatment “just for the right to live among whites.” Yet they stayed connected to black civic institutions and assumed leadership roles.136 Pioneers often argued that they were fulfilling their respective racial roles by making more space for all and that there was no variance between private ambition and racial benefits. Every gain in territory meant more breathing room for everybody.
The steady expansion of Chicago’s ghetto was tangible evidence that African Americans never acceded to segregation. As James Gregory notes, these urban pioneers are often ignored by scholars, or their brave actions are explained away as the natural outcomes of rising economic fortunes, population growth, and pressures on the existing housing stock.137 Yet for the men and women who took the step of moving out, the process was filled with hope, anxiety, and dread. Housing in urban areas passed from white to black as the ghetto expanded, but usually only after emboldened African Americans broke through the lines of segregation. In Chicago, blacks went from being a significant presence in just 8 percent of the city’s census tracts in 1920 to 22 percent by 1950, and given the impediments, this space was hard-earned.138
Most immediately, though, the upwardly mobile acted in the best interests of their families, something nearly all African Americans sought to do. If they moved up socioeconomically, a physical relocation usually followed. Blacks continued to strive for their piece of the American Dream, and with the onset of liberalism in the postwar United States, optimists trusted that the time had come for the white and black middle classes to integrate. However, as the next chapter shows, the persistence of racism and discrimination largely dashed those hopes.