Chicago on the Make

by Andrew J. Diamond

  However, policy’s ideological force was not due only to the fact that it tended to normalize and legitimize the precariousness and risk that could have created, in the words of William Gamson, “the righteous anger that puts fire in the belly and iron in the soul”—the critical preconditions of political mobilization.30 For the more serious players, it is important to remember, policy was more an investment strategy than a game, and even the most leisurely players understood the speculative, calculating nature of the venture. And in this it resembled another form of speculative activity that spread through the Black Metropolis during this same era: the purchase of insurance policies to protect families against a disabling or deadly industrial accident or simply to guarantee a respectable funeral. In fact, many of the same rationalities were at play in the insurance industry as in the world of policy.

  Insurance magnates like Anthony Overton and Robert Cole became race heroes in Bronzeville because they challenged the injustices blacks suffered in paying high premiums for coverage provided by white-owned companies, and in so doing they created decent jobs for the African Americans staffing their expanding workforces. The client base of Cole’s Metropolitan Funeral System Association (MFSA), for example, grew from 33,000 in 1935 to 52,000 by 1939, an increase that made MFSA a source of jobs when most firms in other sectors were scaling back. And, like policy kingpins, the captains of the insurance industry capitalized on their role as race men to maximize their profits, organizing boycotts of white insurers and advertising their contributions to the race on billboards and in the pages of the black press. Yet, after interviewing a number of prominent insurance men and Bronzeville residents, Drake and Cayton painted a grim picture of Bronzeville’s insurance business, including executives speaking cynically and candidly about exploiting their capital of race pride to sell policies, and burial insurers working hand in hand with undertakers to provide minimal funeral services at exorbitant prices—a practice that continued even after state legislation to address the problem was supposed to have required insurers to pay their bereaved clients in cash.

  Insurance, like policy, was of course an upwardly redistributive scheme, even if it did help some to make do under difficult circumstances. There was good reason that funeral parlors often served as policy stations, and that people like Cole and Jackson moved seamlessly between the worlds of policy wheels and insurance policies. But, like policy, the impact of the insurance business on the Black Metropolis went far beyond the economic realm. “Insurance’s general model,” François Ewald has written, “is the game of chance: a risk, an accident comes up like a roulette number, a card pulled out of the pack.”31 In the context of the interwar Black Metropolis, the insurance “game” was thus another activity that tended to cast the effects of structural inequalities as random events devoid of political meaning. Moreover, unlike the labor union or mutual aid society, insurance represented an individualized and privatized response to problems that might have otherwise been perceived as collective and public. The rationale that went with insurance transformed social injustices into “accidents,” deflecting attention away from the reasons why African Americans in Chicago in the 1920s died at twice the rate whites did. Insurance, like policy, imposed a market logic on the affairs of everyday life, and all of the energy that black insurers put into organizing boycotts and emblazoning billboards with the promises of racial uplift suggested that the sense of “linked fate” they were offering with their policies was something of a hard sell.32

  The explosion of policy and insurance in the 1920s thus reflected the ways in which the hegemony of black capitalism was working to “economize” the political culture and everyday life of the Black Metropolis.33 How else to explain Jesse Binga’s astonishing 1922 telegram to the secretary of the Illinois Bankers Association, published approvingly in the pages of the Chicago Defender, which, in urging “stronger ties of cooperation between the two races,” boldly offered up black Americans as a resource to be better exploited:

  The Negro is an industrial people. He furnishes two-fifths of the brawn and muscle of America: our wages return to whomsoever has the proper equivalent for those wages. You may get the Negro’s dollar, but the question is, are you getting all you should from the Negro?

  Should we not utilize to the extent of reaping millions out of him instead of getting merely thousands? Should we not develop the Negro in his desire for economic happiness to the extent of rendering his possessions worth a million instead of a thousand? That means more for your bank and for all the business institutions dependent upon it.

  I admit that the Negro is not fully developed in business. He is at the same stage that your ancestors were during the opening of the Victorian era: but he is today the most promising undeveloped commercial material in America.34

  Nor was this vision of the black population as a raw material for economic exploitation merely a rhetorical device for Binga and the business elite he spoke for; it was an idea that was put into practice in the ruthless pursuit of wealth in both the underground and formal economies of the Black Metropolis. In addition to marrying into policy money, Binga also gained some of his wealth in the real estate market. And, although he would build up his résumé as a race leader in the 1920s by using blockbusting tactics to open up formerly all-white areas for African Americans in desperate need of housing, Binga’s business plan ultimately revolved around exploiting the people he was supposed to be uplifting. Instilling panic in white owners fearing the racial “invasion” of their neighborhoods, Binga was able to procure apartments in white-occupied buildings by offering a big advance to the owners on the rents, but, as was common practice among black real estate developers of the time, he then divided them up into kitchenettes and rented to poor black families at a sizable premium over the market price paid by white renters on the other side of the color line. The “boss” of the South Side’s black “submachine,” Oscar DePriest—who became the first African American elected to Chicago’s city council (as Second Ward alderman) in 1915 and then the first black politician elected to the House of Representatives from a northern state in 1928—engaged in similar practices while amassing a personal fortune as a real estate broker. DePriest rose to prominence both locally and nationally as a race leader by defending the rights of African Americans on the floor of the House of Representatives, but his political career was dealt a blow in August 1931, when police responding to his call to stop Communist-led antieviction actions at one of his properties killed three black protestors.35

  Along with Edward H. Wright, whom Mayor Thompson appointed to be the city’s assistant corporation counsel as a reward for getting out the black vote in the 1915 election, DePriest sat atop a black submachine that funneled votes and funds from the South Side’s 2nd and 3rd Wards into the Republican Party machine in return for political appointments for blacks, city jobs for Bronzeville residents, and a range of administrative and legislative favors for black businesses. As Second Ward alderman, DePriest served as intermediary between the Stroll’s gambling clubs and the Republican machine, a role that led to his indictment on corruption charges in 1917. After eventually being acquitted the following year by arguing that the protection bribes he had taken were merely campaign contributions, DePriest lost the aldermanic election of 1919 to Louis B. Anderson, who had filled his seat on the city council after his indictment. By 1920, with DePriest returning to his real estate business, three politicians pulled the strings of the black submachine—Second Ward alderman Anderson, Third Ward alderman Robert Jackson, and Edward H. Wright, who had been named Second Ward committeeman, a position that gave him the power to nominate judges and a range of other political officials. Another black official of considerable influence was African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church bishop Archibald Carey, whom Mayor Thompson named to the Civil Service Commission in 1927, giving him power over the city’s pool of municipal jobs. Under Wright’s leadership, the black submachine sought to use the electoral and financial resources of the Black Metropolis
not only to increase patronage but also to increase the power of black politicians in the legislative process—a challenge that Wright took to heart. His refusal to accede to Mayor Thompson’s pressure on the nomination of a First Ward committeeman in 1926 led to his withdrawal from politics, a void at the apex of the black submachine that was filled in 1928, when DePriest was elected to the House to represent the First Congressional District of Illinois (which included the Loop and the black South Side).36

  Despite the best efforts of Wright and other well-meaning black political officials, the black submachine reproduced the bread-and-butter political style that characterized Chicago politics citywide during the interwar years. This does not mean that black politicians did not spearhead some considerable advances for black Chicagoans. As floor leader in the city council, for example, Anderson led an initiative to raise the wages of all city employees, a measure that helped thousands of black civil servants. Due to the efforts of black aldermen, by 1932 African Americans constituted 6.4 percent of the municipal workforce, which nearly matched their 7 percent proportion of the population.37 Nevertheless, the leaders of the black submachine seldom weighed in publicly on the more systemic dimensions of racial injustice in the city, leaving the racial order intact. Although Thompson was hailed as a friend to blacks, he failed to act on the most pressing issues facing African Americans. For example, he refused to take any action, rhetorical or otherwise, against the campaign of bombings—fifty-eight incidents were recorded between July 1917 through April 1921—conducted by white homeowners’ associations against black residents and the realtors who sought to provide them housing in white neighborhoods. Such terrorism, combined with the rampant use of restrictive covenants, greatly accelerated the advance of segregation, increasing Chicago’s white-black dissimilarity index from 66.8 to 85.2 percent between 1920 and 1930.38 And, in a moment when the education issue was at the heart of progressive politics, Thompson never gave much thought to appointing an African American to the highly politicized board of education.

  In the final analysis, however, it is difficult to take Chicago’s black political and economic establishment too rigorously to task for not advancing black aspirations in the political arena, in view of the enormous constraints they faced from the white political establishment, Republican and Democrat alike. Much more dubious was their influence in actively shaping a political culture and organizing a public sphere that proved highly resistant to grassroots political projects challenging the circumstances of social inequality within the Black Metropolis. The race men whose voices rang out loudest on the reigning issues of the day invested doggedly in the ideals of thrift, hard work, and entrepreneurial spirit, the lack of which, in their eyes, explained many of the problems working-class blacks faced in their daily lives. Oscar DePriest was perhaps behaving as a loyal member of the Republican Party—the party of Lincoln, one must not forget—when he declared on the floor of the House in 1930, “[I am not] asking for public funds to make mendicants of the American people, and I represent more poor people than any other man in America represents.” But such sensibilities also reflected the ethos of black capitalism embraced by middle-class residents of his Chicago district, where a lack of public assistance was causing the forcible eviction of unemployed tenants in his properties. Addressing a crowd of protestors in Washington Park in the tense atmosphere following the deadly antieviction riot of August 3, 1931, Robert Abbott echoed these same ideas when he argued that their troubles had come about because they had not “saved for the lean years.”39

  Abbott’s views were not only pronounced on soapboxes. Along with churches, the black press played a critical role in shaping the perceptions of ordinary residents about the political, economic, and social circumstances prevailing in the Black Metropolis, and Abbott’s paper was certainly the most powerful of them all. While some scholars have described the Defender’s stance as “fluctuating” on certain issues (for example, in regard to labor unions), its coverage of grassroots movements for social and economic justice was normally colored by Abbott’s pro-business, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps vision of the world. If the Defender supported unionization in cases when it seemed like the best means for advancing the race in the face of discriminatory actions by management, Abbott’s weekly, notes historian James Grossman, “opposed anything that smelled of economic radicalism.”40 Hence, while Abbott praised the Communist Party for expelling one of its white members for segregating guests at a social function in 1933, his position on Communist efforts to defend evicted black residents two years earlier had been unequivocal: in a Defender editorial several days after the antieviction riots, he had opined, “Communism is not in the blood of the Negro.”41

  “POOR MAN’S BLUES”

  Hence, while Abbott could embrace the racial egalitarianism of Communists, their efforts to uplift the poor were another matter altogether, which explains a great deal about his reluctance to throw the support of the “world’s greatest weekly” behind black Chicago’s most ambitious challenge to the political and economic arrangements of the Black Metropolis and the economizing logic of black capitalism: the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP). Following its successful unionization drive in New York in 1925, the BSCP, under the leadership of A. Philip Randolph, turned to the difficult task of organizing the many maids and porters living in Chicago. The BSCP was not a typical union in that porters were among Bronzeville’s labor aristocracy. But their middle-class wages depended on gratuities, which placed them in a degrading and precarious position in relation to white customers, who could decide to withhold tips to those not displaying the requisite subservient demeanor. Moreover, the BSCP was an all-black union, and the Chicago Urban League, under the direction of T. Arnold Hill, had taken a position against separate unions since the 1919 race riot. An influential member of the Urban League was Associated Negro Press founder Claude Barnett, whose newswire was unwavering in its criticism of the BSCP. But the most significant impediment to the BSCP’s success was the enormous power Pullman wielded on the South Side, where the company provided thousands of jobs and where it had bought considerable influence, in one way or another, with a good many of the race men of the Black Metropolis. Major black community institutions like the Provident Hospital and the Wabash YMCA, which provided a range of social services for Bronzeville’s working-class residents, depended on Pullman’s contributions for survival; the Pullman Porters’ Benefit Association of America, the company union, had considerable funds deposited in Binga’s bank; and Pullman money padded the revenues of both the Chicago Defender and the Chicago Whip. For these reasons, Chicago’s leading race heroes—Binga, Abbott, Overton, DePriest, and Wright—withheld their support from the BSCP as it struggled for survival in the early years of its unionization drive.

  Even the active backing of famed journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett, whose antilynching campaign in the 1890s had won her national recognition as a “race woman” and who had emerged as a force to be reckoned with in South Side politics after her Alpha Suffrage Club had effectively mobilized thousands of women behind the triumphant aldermanic candidacy of Oscar DePriest in 1915, proved to be of little help in winning over the top brass of the Black Metropolis to the BSCP cause. When Wells-Barnett asked the exclusive Appomattox Club, black Chicago’s version of the Commercial Club founded by Edward Wright in 1900, to give Randolph a hearing, she was told that the club could “not afford to have Mr. Randolph speak” because so many of the “men who are opposing him are members here and it would embarrass them with the Pullman Company.”42 A portrait of Pullman, it should be noted, hung in the club’s stately three-story building at 3632 Grand Boulevard.

  Opposition to Randolph was also strong among many of black Chicago’s most influential religious leaders. Reverend Lacy Kirk Williams, who had allowed packinghouse and steel workers to use his Olivet Baptist Church for organizing efforts in 1919, voiced strong opposition to the BSCP, and Bishop Archibald Carey forbid Randolph access to any AME churches. C
arey had a number of personal reasons to be loyal to Pullman. George Pullman had once helped stave off the foreclosure of his Quinn Chapel, and Carey’s amicable relations with the company made him the man to see in the Black Metropolis about procuring one of the enviable positions in the Pullman workforce. Nonetheless, Carey articulated his aversion to challenges to the white business establishment in broader terms: “The interest of my people,” he once proclaimed, “lies with the wealth of the nation and with the class of white people who control it.”43

  This was the very notion that Randolph had been publicly squaring off against since 1917, the year he cofounded the magazine The Messenger with fellow Socialist Party member Chandler Owen to serve as the mouthpiece of the black labor movement. It was within the pages of The Messenger that Randolph confronted the ethos of black capitalism, presenting his own vision of the New Negro spirit that replaced the values of thrift and self-reliance emanating from the black business heroes of the day with those of economic rights, brotherhood, and “collective organized action.” “The social aims of the New Negro are decidedly different from the Old Negro,” he wrote in his 1920 editorial “The New Negro—What is He?” “He insists that a society which is based upon justice can only be a society composed of social equals.” Dismissing out of hand the emancipatory promises of black capitalism being celebrated by the Defender around the time of the opening of Binga’s state bank, Randolph further argued that “there [were] no big capitalists” in black communities, only “a few petit bourgeoisie” whose position was untenable anyway because “the process of money concentration [was] destined to weed them out and drop them down into the ranks of the working class.” As for the new political order of the Black Metropolis emerging at the time, Randolph proclaimed in the same editorial that “the New Negro, unlike the Old Negro, cannot be lulled into a false sense of security with political spoils and patronage.”44 This was a message he carried into the Chicago organizing campaign seven years later, when he unabashedly took on the pantheon of race men in the Black Metropolis—especially Robert Abbott, whose newspaper’s support, tacit or otherwise, was critical to BSCP success. In October 1927, Randolph told a large Bronzeville crowd assembled at the People’s Church and Metropolitan Community Center that Abbott had surrendered to “gold and power.”45