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Crucibles of Black Empowerment
Chicago's Neighborhood Politics from the New Deal to Harold Washington
By Jeffrey Helgeson The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-13072-9
CHAPTER 1
The Politics of Home in Hard Times
The Great Depression hit black Chicago at a particularly important moment. During the 1920s, black Chicagoans had been able to achieve the dream of the Black Metropolis more fully than at any other moment in the city's history. They had built a black-led Republican political machine that brought patronage power and political influence at the citywide level unheard of in other black communities. They had created formidable blackled business sectors—in banking, insurance, newspapers, and beauty products—which together created an economic elite and made the South Side a magnet for entrepreneurs, artists, intellectuals, and activists. And they had constructed a variety of "parallel" black social and community institutions, ranging from women's clubs and male fraternities to churches, "Race progress" institutions, sports teams, and the beginnings of a black labor movement.
The development and growth of black Chicago by the outset of the 1930s could also be seen in its diversity. Divided by class and newcomer–old settler tensions, black Chicago was riven with contests over everything from the best means of political organization to the most appropriate modes of expression that reflected divergent respectable and popular interests in religious practice, music, sports, and the arts. The Depression and the political and social tensions of the 1930s together shook the Black Metropolis to its core, revealing the fragility of previous gains and intensifying political and cultural tensions within black communities.
In this context of changing economic fortunes and political upheaval, black Chicago's neighborhoods became important sites of struggle for those seeking to maintain their relatively privileged positions as well as for those who had been excluded from previous political networks. During the 1930s, as many historians have shown, black Chicagoans broke from the past to create insurgencies in labor, civil rights, and community-based organizing. They worked with militant and left-leaning organizers in Unemployed Councils, led a fight to establish the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters as the nation's first independent black union, and played key roles in the building of an interracial union movement in the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Yet there were important continuities in black Chicago's political culture. Many locals adapted existing institutions to the new context, using churches, social clubs, neighborhood organizations, and electoral politics either to resist the changes in their quality of life, or, also likely, to bring new forms of power to their efforts to improve their immediate situations. In these ways, as the 1930s economic crisis reached into local communities, the era's political transformations provided new outlets for local people's efforts to sustain the quality of life in their neighborhoods.
Black women in particular played essential, if largely overlooked, roles in this Depression-era "politics of home"—pragmatic struggles against everyday manifestations of race, class, and gender inequalities. These were struggles against external forces impinging upon ordinary people's lives, as well as contests over who would lead black community-based politics, and for whose interests. Some black women carried relative economic privilege and political influence into the new era, and they generally fought to sustain their status. Others tried to win new influence in local politics by adapting existing neighborhood institutions to the new government, labor, and civil rights allies of the late 1930s. To some observers, they may appear to have acted conservatively in that they were focusing on quality-of-life issues in local contexts. But for these women, the 1930s was a period of political innovation, a time of opening new paths to community welfare.
The history of black women's struggles to ameliorate the effects of the Depression on their families and communities highlights the broad vision of struggles to sustain the "home sphere." This term, introduced by historian Earl Lewis, has provided a way to see that for people acting in their own interests, local struggles to sustain households and neighborhoods could never be disentangled from the wider world of political and economic power. The politics of the home sphere grew directly out of everyday frustrations with, and responses to, the challenges of migration and urban life, frustrations that the Depression only intensified. Just as importantly, people acting on their fears and hopes for the vitality of their families and neighborhoods drew links to political and economic developments in the black community as a whole, and at the citywide and national levels.
The forms of activism in the home sphere changed over time and varied according to each woman's individual social position and ideology. In the particular mix of crisis and opportunity of the 1930s, black women kept the home sphere connected to labor and civil rights struggles. In histories of the 1930s, there has been a tendency to see the rise of male-dominated labor and civil rights struggles as having displaced black urban neighborhoods—the "women's domain"—as the "central terrain" of politics. But local women responded to the challenges and new resources of the 1930s in a variety of often unpredictable ways. Rooted in efforts of black migrant women to remake their lives in the city during the early twentieth century, community-based activism both reinforced longstanding forms of social service and took on new directions beginning with the Depression. In the 1920s, according to Victoria Wolcott, women led struggles for social mobility in black urban neighborhoods where "black leaders embraced the opportunity to shape new urban communities by reforming migrants' dress, demeanor, and deportment." As Wolcott has demonstrated, the limits of such racial uplift became especially apparent during the Depression, and black city dwellers turned to new strategies. "Although bourgeois respectability as a reform strategy never entirely disappeared, economic nationalism and civil rights took precedence during the Great Depression." This may have been true in the sense that black Americans entered labor unions and political battles focused on the economic realm to an unprecedented degree. But the "home sphere" remained central to the political vision of a wide range of black women. Struggles for respectability as a reform strategy not only remained, but they were also reshaped by the new context of the 1930s.
Even in the worst days of the Depression, some women managed to hold onto a measure of economic stability in their personal lives and enjoyed deep connections to social clubs, churches, and political institutions that dated to the beginning of the twentieth century. For these relatively privileged residents of black Chicago, the Depression in some ways reinforced their commitment to protecting their positions while giving back through traditional networks of charity. Their responses to the Depression—turning inward to protect themselves and outward to provide charity services to the race—represented key aspects of black political culture throughout the twentieth century, which would become even more apparent as social status differences within black urban communities grew after World War II.
Other black women often found new ways to seek to improve their quality of life and to promote collective action. Like the women who supported the growth of black trade unions—as members of the auxiliaries of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters or as members of the new industrial union in meatpacking—many black women extended efforts to help their neighbors through churches and social clubs by connecting those organizations with the rapidly growing and changing government institutions of New Deal Chicago. Building upon older forms of community politics, they responded to new challenges of unemployment and neighborhood decline in ways that connected institutions based in churches to new government institutions.
Women in late-1930s black Chicago created diverse forms of self-help and political action that mixed what historian Darlene Clark Hine calls "domestic feminism" with economic nationalism and, in some cases, labor and civil rights organizing and electoral politics. Their previously unnoted stories reveal the complexities of women's "work as makers of community." The real benefit of following the stories of such women is not just that they reveal individual agency and creativity but also that they hold lessons for understanding the everyday development of black Chicago's political culture. Black women seeking to protect the privileges they had won in the early decades of the twentieth century, along with other women who had lost virtually everything during the Depression and turned to new forms of political action, all shared in the creation of a variety of expressions of community-based politics. What they all shared was a generally pragmatic interest in the quality of life in local communities, as well as a fundamentally liberal belief in the importance of government institutions in ensuring individual opportunity.
The Old Elite in Hard Times
When newcomers arrived in Chicago in 1930 they would have found a major black urban community of nearly 234,000 people with well-developed social status differences (map 1). At the time, many members of the World War I–era black elite who had established their homes in the 1900s and 1910s struggled to hold onto their neighborhoods in the Douglas Community Area on the Near South Side. Embodying the political and social networks that had transformed black Chicago between 1900 and 1930, they used their positions to protect their own quality of life and to give back to the larger community. As they passed out of the vanguard of political leadership, they held onto an older style of community activity.
In the late 1930s, Eliza Chilton Johnson, an old settler par excellence, lived alone in a two-story frame house at 3650 South Prairie Avenue that she had bought with her husband. The Johnsons were the first African Americans to move into the blocks between 35th and 37th on Prairie. Eliza was born in Oxford, Mississippi, and finished the eighth grade at a boarding school in Holly Springs, Mississippi. After moving to Chicago in 1907, she married Colonel James Henry Johnson, a master brick mason who had served in the celebrated Eighth Regiment in the Spanish–American War. She became a leading light in Chicago's social club scene. "I have been a great lodge lady," she declared, "I am an Eastern Star, a member of the Louise D. Marshall Auxiliary Illinois National Guard, Day Nursery Club for Children, Phillis Wheatley Home Club, John R. Tanner Camp Auxiliary, Prairie Avenue Neighborhood Club, and a few others." Women like Johnson set the standard for black Chicago's rich tradition of activity in voluntary organizations.
Black brick masons generally did not have access to steady work, yet somehow Eliza and her husband made a comfortable life. She was proud of her status, acted the part of the socialite, and held attitudes about class and color to match. When an interviewer asked her about an attractive plant stand in her living room, Johnson said that it belonged to a white friend of hers who had lived in the neighborhood when she arrived. "I have quite a few good white friends," she continued. "I am not against people on account of the color of their skin, but I am against people when they are not in my class. I have certain standards and I stick to them." Johnson's color-blindness, however, did not necessarily extend to other members of the race. Johnson felt badly for her friend Essie Arnold because Arnold had never married. Reflecting the longstanding history of "color prejudice" within African American communities, Johnson said, "Every time the child started to get married something was wrong. If she liked the fellow and he liked her, he was either too dark, or if he was light enough, he didn't have any money, or he was not a thoroughbred." Unlike her bold statement about her class affinities, however, Johnson was embarrassed talking about color distinctions. When she noticed the interviewer taking notes on her anecdote about Arnold, Johnson said, "Don't write this down."
The 1930s had been tough on Eliza Johnson and her neighborhood. Colonel Johnson had passed away, and even before his death, the Johnsons had lost almost all of their savings. They suffered from one of the defining scandals of Depression-era black Chicago, the collapse of the black-owned Binga Bank. "I wouldn't be broke now," she told an interviewer, "but my husband was a stockholder for the Binga Bank." Jesse Binga was one of the most prominent of the post-1900 generation of black Chicago business leaders. Born in Detroit in 1865, Binga came to Chicago in 1893 as a railroad porter and invested his money in real estate, infamously gouging his renters for ten to fifteen dollars more per month than white renters had been paying for the same kinds of apartments. Binga was a celebrated race leader as he pushed for middle-class blacks' access to white neighborhoods and became a famous target of the violence aimed at black "pioneers" in all-white neighborhoods between 1917 and 1921. At the end of the 1920s, Binga's star looked bright, but his real estate and banking empire came crashing down in 1930 during an early Depression-era run on the bank he had founded in 1908. Binga lost his five-story Arcade building on the 3600 block of State Street that included office space, a dance hall, and his bank. In 1931, Binga was convicted of embezzling $300,000 from the bank and sentenced to one-to-ten years in prison. The Black Metropolis took Binga's fall hard, for he had come to represent the fragile foundation on which much of it was built. The Johnsons had difficulty recovering from the loss of their savings. "Of course," Johnson said, "you know that we [black investors] get nothing until everybody else is taken care of."
Alone and broke, Johnson regretted the concessions she had to make to remain in her house. She began taking in a boarder, and, although she needed the money, she "never reconciled herself to the fact that she is not able to have her own home to herself." The surrounding neighborhood also began to change. While neighboring blocks continued to have higher rates of owner occupancy, better housing conditions, and fewer subdivided apartments than most blocks in the Douglas Community Area, the 3600 South block of Prairie experienced a major influx of newcomers and numerous housing conversions. This nineteenth-century settler lived on the same block as tenants who generally moved every one to two years. Blocks with ten or more converted residential structures sat alongside blocks with zero or one converted building. On Johnson's block 218 of 328 dwelling units needed major repairs, or were unfit for use. In contrast, on the block across the street from Johnson, only fourteen of 270 units were in major disrepair, and two nearby blocks contained no significantly deteriorated units. Moreover, only twenty-seven of 328 units on Johnson's block were owner occupied (maps 2 and 3).
Johnson feared the decline of her general area but still strongly identified with the two or three blocks immediately surrounding her house. "You hear people say this is a bad neighborhood. It isn't at all," Johnson reflected. "You see, the neighborhood club has done a good job in helping to keep the neighborhood clean and to keep prostitutes off the street here in these two blocks between 35th and 37th Streets on Prairie." The neighborhood, as she defined it, remained a bulwark against further decline and an inspiration to stay involved in the neighborhood club and the local club world.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Crucibles of Black Empowerment by Jeffrey Helgeson. Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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