Chicago on the Make

by Andrew J. Diamond

  This is not to say that the workers had been duped. Kelly was quite frankly the best chance they had. Yet the Kelly-Nash machine had effectively incorporated a movement that held the potential of challenging its agenda and making it more accountable for the economic inequalities that were so starkly exposed by the economic crisis of the 1930s. The CIO’s emergence owed to some of the same shifts in the racial order that had enabled Cermak and Kelly to reconfigure the Cook County Democratic Party into a multiethnic political machine. And yet these two structures were fundamentally at odds. The machine’s drive to carve the city into ethnic blocs ran counter to the CIO’s project of spreading a culture of class unity from the factories and mills into working-class neighborhoods. Moreover, if ethnic differences between whites of European descent were disintegrating, this was in part because a universalizing sense of whiteness was increasingly organizing the world of workers living outside the Black Belt. Of course this was a project in the making during the 1930s, and ethnic animosities still raged within the machine’s “house for all peoples.” Nonetheless, the sensibilities of class unity that were developing during this era were intertwined with notions of white racial unity. The CIO was swimming against the tide. While many white workers were willing to embrace their black coworkers for pragmatic ends in the workplace, interracialism was a much different matter in the context of their communities. CIO locals tried picnics, and pioneer community organizers like Saul Alinsky sought to create councils and committees to negotiate tensions between rival groups in hard-core working-class areas like the Back of the Yards and South Chicago. But the machine had the better response to the new biracial political order in the making, convincing whites in a myriad of ways that blacks would remain subordinate and separate, and assuring blacks that what happened in the Black Belt was their own business.

  TWO

  Black Metropolis

  ADVANCING THE RACE AND GETTING AHEAD

  During the first weekend of April 1938, more than 100,000 black Chicagoans packed into the Eighth Regiment Armory in the heart of the Bronzeville district to behold the fruits of black enterprise displayed at the Negro Business Exposition. Those attending the exposition, as Time magazine reported, were there to “watch fashion shows, finger fancy caskets, see demonstrations of pressing the kink out of Negro hair, listen to church choirs and hot bands, munch free handouts or purchase raffle tickets from the 75 booths.”1 The event attracted the attention of the national news media because it signaled Chicago’s emergence as the capital of black America. “Although Chicago has 100,000 fewer Negroes than New York,” the Time story began, “it is the center of U.S. Negro business; last census figures showed Chicago’s Negro establishments had annual net sales of $4,826,897, New York’s were only $3,322,274.” And of course the article did not miss the opportunity to insert the kind of condescending remark that was so characteristic of the white gaze upon black attempts to “uplift the race”—in this case a jibe about the “admiring pickaninnies” surrounding world heavyweight champion boxer Joe Louis in a ploy to get the dollar bills that his bodyguard apparently gave out “to moppets so they will leave Joe alone.”2

  Organized by a group of local businessmen and religious leaders, the Negro Business Exposition was part of a broader campaign that had picked up momentum in the midst of the Great Depression to promote support for black businesses as a means of “advancing the race.” Speaking on Sunday to an admiring crowd, one of the event’s key organizers, Junius C. Austin, the animated pastor of the famed Pilgrim Baptist Church (whose musical director Thomas A. Dorsey was at that very moment creating Chicago’s blues-inflected gospel sound), issued a declaration that left little doubt about what had motivated the exposition: “Tomorrow I want all of you people to go to these stores, have your shoes repaired at a Negro shoe shop, buy your groceries from a Negro grocer, patronize these Jones Brothers, and for God’s sake buy your meats, pork chops and yes, even your chitterlings from your Negro butcher.”3 Austin’s unabashed huckstering revealed that morale among black businessmen, eight years into the Great Depression, was at a low point. There were reasons to be hopeful—economic conditions had been picking up since the previous year, and the city’s biggest syndicate kingpins, the Jones brothers, had invested some of the countless nickels and dimes they had procured from black Chicagoans chasing winning numbers in their illegal “policy” lotteries to open the country’s largest black-owned retail establishment, the Ben Franklin store, in the heart of the Bronzeville business district. But if Austin’s exhortation to “patronize” the Jones brothers suggested that African Americans could still look to their business leaders—regardless of the nature of their enterprises—as beacons of hope, the idea of the black businessman as a “race man” was desperately in need of reinforcement. Just two months prior to the exposition, former business magnate Jesse Binga, the founder of Chicago’s first black-owned bank and thus a great symbol of racial progress, had been released from prison after serving five years for embezzlement—a broken man who would live out his life working as a janitor and handyman.

  After observing the boosterism of black businessmen around the Negro Business Exposition, St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, the illustrious black scholars and authors of the definitive study of black life in interwar Chicago, Black Metropolis, issued a sober rejoinder to those who still sought to measure black progress “in terms of the positions of power and prestige which Negroes attain in the business world”:

  No Negro sits on a board of directors in La Salle Street; none trades in the grain pit or has a seat on the Stock Exchange; none owns a skyscraper. Negro girls are seldom seen in the offices and stores of the Loop except as maids. Colored traveling salesmen, buyers, and jobbers are a rarity. The largest retail stores and half of the smaller business enterprises in Bronzeville are owned and operated by white persons, and until recently many of these did not voluntarily employ Negroes.4

  Drake and Cayton compiled numerous figures to back up this assessment, the most striking of which showed that while black enterprises constituted nearly half of all the businesses in black Chicago, they received less than 10 percent of all the money spent within these areas. They also pointed out that the overwhelming majority of the some 2,600 black businesses in operation were small-scale enterprises—287 beauty parlors, 257 groceries, 207 barber shops, 163 tailors and cleaners, 145 restaurants, 87 coal and wood dealers, 70 bars, 50 undertakers, to name the most numerous—and they were located “on side streets, or in the older, less desirable communities.”5

  This vision of the decrepit state of the black business community contrasted somewhat with the overall picture these scholars painted of the impressive “Black Metropolis” that had developed around the Bronzeville district, with its bustling shopping area around 47th and South Parkway (now called King Drive), where the Ben Franklin store had opened its doors amidst much fanfare. Here, they pointed out, black Chicagoans could look upon an array of powerful and proud black institutions: “the Negro-staffed Provident Hospital; the George Cleveland Hall Library (named for a colored physician); the ‘largest colored Catholic church in the country’; the ‘largest Protestant congregation in America’; the Black Belt’s Hotel Grand; Parkway Community House; and the imposing Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments for middle-income families.”6 Chicago’s Black Metropolis had become a veritable city within a city in the 1910s and 1920s, when nearly 200,000 black migrants took up residence within its borders, raising the total black population to just under 234,000. This influx of migrants transformed black Chicago, creating a “negro market” for goods and services and with it new forms of black market consciousness, which by the 1920s were intermingling with black nationalist currents circulating around Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the New Negro ideology emanating from the Harlem Renaissance. In this context, ordinary African Americans began to see in black purchasing power the promise of racial uplift, if not liberation, and looked towards an emerging generation of busi
ness magnates as the quintessential “race men”—a situation that caused great concern among the political forces of racial progress, from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Urban League to the Communist Party.

  Certainly Drake and Cayton’s gloomy assessment of black business stemmed, in part, from the concern being voiced by some political leaders that the allure of individual success in the business world could dampen support for collective strategies of racial struggle in the political sphere. Garveyism had sought to reconcile the gospel of private enterprise with more cooperative notions of racial progress throughout the 1920s, but the marriage of these ideals had come under considerable strain during the lean years of the Great Depression, even after the Don’t Spend Your Money Where You Can’t Work boycott of 1930 had demonstrated to black Chicagoans that they could use their buying power to force a national chain store like Woolworth’s Five and Ten to change its discriminatory hiring practices. Triumphant as it was, the campaign had failed to blossom into a broader movement, and perhaps more significantly for the black business community, it had failed to alter the daily spending habits of Bronzeville residents. While black businessmen generally ascribed the continuing black predilection for patronizing white-owned businesses to the power of “the white man’s psychology” learned in the South or else to some desire to magically invert the racial order by using their purchasing power to place whites in a subservient position, many working-class blacks referred merely to the lower prices and better services offered by white merchants.7

  But Drake and Cayton’s skepticism was also due to the fact that from the vantage point of the late 1930s and early 1940s, when they were collecting their data, black businesses were hardly thriving. If, as historian Christopher Robert Reed has claimed, the 1920s was the “golden decade of black business,” many of the grand achievements of this era had been erased during the Depression years.8 Black Chicago’s banks had gone belly up, and its mighty business leaders had been brought down to size. In fact, by the time Black Metropolis was released in 1945, each figure in Chicago’s triumvirate of black business heroes had been leveled in one way or another. Binga was working as a janitor; Robert Sengstacke Abbott, the founder of the Chicago Defender, the most widely circulated black newspaper in the country, was dead; and Anthony Overton, who in the 1920s had parlayed the revenues from his Overton Hygienic Company into a conglomerate that included the Douglass National Bank, the Victory Life Insurance Company, and a black weekly newspaper called the Chicago Bee, had reverted to his role as a seller of brown face powders.

  And yet, even though the Great Depression had certainly humbled black businessmen and many of those who entrusted them with the future of the race, the crowds that packed into the Negro Business Exposition demonstrated that the gospel of black capitalism was relatively unshakable among ordinary residents of Bronzeville. This was due in part to the fact that the exclusion of blacks from trade unions and their relegation to low-wage, often dangerous jobs unleashed the spirit of entrepreneurialism in the Black Metropolis. Utilizing occupational data gleaned from a New Deal–funded study on the black labor market in Chicago, Drake and Cayton painted a grim picture of a black population constrained by an impossibly low “job ceiling.” Out of some 123,000 blacks in the workforce in 1930, 75,000 (61 percent) worked unskilled and service jobs, while only 12,000 (less than 10 percent) performed professional, proprietary, managerial, and clerical jobs—what Drake and Cayton referred to as “clean work.” In fact, African Americans filled just 2 percent of all clean-work positions citywide, compared to 78 percent for whites and 20 percent for foreign-born immigrants. For black men, mail carriers (630) constituted by far the most common job in this category, followed by musicians (525), clergymen (390), and messengers and office boys (385); for women, restauranteurs (235) topped the list, followed by musicians (205) and actresses (145). As for the lower rungs of the occupational ladder, some 25 percent of all black male workers and 56 percent of all female ones were employed in some kind of servant work. For women, this mostly meant domestic service; for men, it involved a range of low-paying service jobs (janitors, elevator men, waiters, domestic service) as well as the relatively high-paying but somewhat demeaning job of Pullman porter (held by almost 14 percent of black male service workers). Black male manual laborers, for their part, were concentrated in the lowest paying and dirtiest unskilled jobs in factories, steel mills, and packinghouses, and black female manual laborers in poorly paid positions in laundry service and the needle trades.9

  Starting one’s own business thus seemed well worth a shot when faced with the prospect of working in the foundry of a steel mill or on the killing floor of a packinghouse. Black’s Blue Book, black Chicago’s first business directory catered to this burgeoning entrepreneurial spirit, urging black Chicagoans to “find your vocation and follow it” and warning them to “expect nothing on sympathy, but everything on merit.”10 Between 1916 and 1938 the number of black-owned businesses in Chicago jumped from 727 to over 2,600, outpacing the robust growth of the black population. Moreover, these figures did not even take into account black Chicago’s most prevalent “business”: the storefront church, which, with well over three hundred lining the streets of Bronzeville, topped beauty parlors as the most numerous type of black enterprise in the city.11 During the Great Depression, according to Drake and Cayton, several hundred “jack-leg preachers” competed for pulpits in order “to escape from the WPA or the relief rolls”—a situation that resulted in a veritable “revolt against Heaven” by working-class churchgoers who accused their religious leaders of corrupting their spiritual lives or, more bluntly, of bilking them out of their money. As one congregant complained, “The average pastor is not studying the needs of his race. He’s studying the ways to get more money out of the people.”12

  The stories concerning the iniquitous practices of some of the more entrepreneurially minded storefront preachers no doubt contributed disproportionately to the perception shared by many black Chicagoans that their churches were akin to rackets or businesses, but the larger, more established mainline Baptist and Methodist churches also engaged in practices that blurred the line between spiritual and monetary pursuits. By the early 1920s, with pews in Bronzeville packed with recently arrived southern migrants, many of the more prominent churches began building alliances with black businesses. “It was not uncommon for black churches to support black-owned businesses by carrying advertisements in their church bulletins and newspapers,” historian Wallace Best has argued, “or by encouraging members to patronize certain retail stores, grocers, doctors, barbers, and undertakers.”13 While such exhortations were justified by broader appeals to “advancing the race” through the promotion of black enterprise, pastors also understood that businessmen would reciprocate with donations. In the fall of 1923 a group of black businessmen led by Robert Abbott and Jesse Binga organized the Associated Business Club (ABC) of Chicago for the purpose of adding a secular voice to the chorus of preachers singing the praises of black capitalism. With its membership expanding from fourteen to nearly one thousand in its first year of existence, the ABC sought to harness the efforts of pastors throughout Bronzeville by offering a free trip abroad for the pastor who brought the most customers to ABC-affiliated businesses.14 Some fifteen years later, as Junius Austin’s spirited involvement in the Negro Business Exposition suggests, pastors and businessmen were still rallying around the hopes and dreams of the black economy, and many ordinary black folks still seemed to want to believe.

  This alliance of pastors and businessmen explains a great deal about the staying power of a business ethos oriented around the ideas of thrift, self-help, and racial uplift popularized by Booker T. Washington and his Negro Business League in the early years of the twentieth century. Certainly churches had their detractors, but they nonetheless continued to touch the hearts and minds of black Chicagoans as much as any other institution in the community. Yet African Americans also continued to be
lieve in racial salvation through business success because a great many of them had lived through the not-so-distant heyday of the Black Metropolis, and there was plenty of reason to think that what had befallen their community was not due to any failings of the race or of the system of black capitalism itself but rather to broader forces that had struck U.S. society at large. The aura of the Black Metropolis as a place of excitement, innovation, and pride—immortalized in the canvasses of Archibald Motley, the writings of Langston Hughes, and the sounds of Louis Armstrong’s trumpet—still lingered in the air.

  For many, the promise of the Black Metropolis lay not in the rise of its vaunted black-owned banks, insurance companies, newspapers, and manufacturers but rather in the development in the 1910s and 1920s of the black entertainment district known as “the Stroll,” a segment of State Street stretching from 26th Street on down to 39th Street, where, as Langston Hughes famously remarked, “midnight was like day.” Here on the Stroll the bright glow emanating from countless cabarets, theaters, bars, and restaurants served as stage lighting for the swirling mass of black and white humanity jamming the sidewalks and spilling into the streets. The soundtrack was provided by the intermingling sounds of blues shouters, boogie-woogie piano romps, and hot jazz horn solos pulsating out of the numerous storefront jazz joints and cabarets. “If you held up a trumpet in the night air of the Stroll,” bandleader Eddie Condon once claimed, “it would play itself!” In the 1910s and 1920s, as Chicago was assuming its place as the nation’s leading center of heavy industry, the economy of its black city within was developing around the myriad commercial leisure ventures offered by the Stroll—its cabarets, nightclubs, dance halls, ballrooms, theaters, speakeasies, gambling halls, vaudeville houses, buffet flats, and brothels. By the late 1920s the Stroll began to decline rapidly, but its spirit migrated southward with the opening of the enormously successful Savoy Ballroom at 47th and South Parkway in 1927. In the early 1930s this area became the new bright-lights district of the Black Metropolis, and its happenings were, thanks to the publicity offered by the Chicago Defender, known to African Americans across the nation.