In wartime Chicago, with factories desperate for bodies to operate machines, the housing dilemma faced by blacks became a pressing problem for a mayor who was desperately trying to keep money flowing into the city and war goods flowing out. The situation was so critical that a 1943 government study predicted that Chicago would need an additional 375,000 new workers by the end of the year. Unlike Detroit, however, where the first reflexes of white backlash revealed themselves at the point of production in a series of hate strikes by auto workers protesting the insertion of blacks into all-white production departments, similar demonstrations by white workers in Chicago were isolated. In fact, the Federal Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), a watchdog agency created by President Roosevelt after A. Philip Randolph threatened a massive March on Washington to protest discrimination in the war industries, met with fairly strong success in its efforts to integrate Chicago workplaces. The relative calm on Chicago’s factory floors while whites were walking off the job in Detroit is not easy to explain with any certainty. One factor could have been the success of CIO campaigns during the 1930s to bring white and black workers together in a range of interracial recreational activities—bowling competitions, basketball leagues, and picnics, for example—that encouraged workers to form bonds of solidarity off the job.17 However, such programs had been tried in Detroit as well, and from the subsequent pattern of violence that broke out in spaces of leisure in both cities, it seems evident that white participation in these activities was largely forced, artificial, and ephemeral. Rather, what made the difference between Detroit and Chicago were Mayor Kelly’s strong alliances with all of the forces capable of maintaining the status quo: labor unions, organized crime, and the black political machine. While union leaders were certainly on board with Kelly on the need to keep assembly lines moving, it helped that workers who had ideas of disrupting things might have to worry about some wiseguys showing up at their doors.18
Moreover, Kelly’s role as kingmaker for the new Black South Side boss William Dawson, the former Second Ward alderman and Democratic committeeman whom Kelly had handpicked to fill the House seat vacated by Arthur Mitchell in 1942, also helped to keep a lid on things in the Black Metropolis. After defeating Oscar DePriest in 1934 to become the first African American elected to Congress as a Democrat, Mitchell had remained fiercely loyal to President Roosevelt through his four terms in office, never pushing the president’s reluctant hand on civil rights. But he had fallen out of favor with the Kelly-Nash machine when he had sued the Chicago-based Rock Island and Pacific Railroad for forcing him to sit in a segregated Pullman car on a trip to Arkansas in 1937. Dawson, on the other, owed everything he had to Kelly, who had handed him control of the Second Ward by helping to make him congressman and committeeman. Using his control over the police and his leverage with organized crime syndicates, Kelly provided protection to the black South Side policy cartel, which poured cash into Dawson’s war chest. Dawson’s gratitude to Kelly had helped him garner 57 percent of the black vote in the mayoral election of 1939 and 54 percent in 1943.
Blacks in Chicago were no doubt linked to the political machine in ways they were not in many other cities, and Kelly’s protection of the black syndicates meant that black Chicagoans generally had fewer occasions to be angry with the police for bringing down the boot. All this was important to Kelly’s effective stewardship of the war mobilization because, as Detroit’s wartime troubles were revealing, African Americans were hardly passive bystanders in the racial conflicts and work stoppages that were holding up war production. Black workers in Detroit had carried out wildcat strikes to protest the racism of coworkers and the discriminatory practices of employers and had on several occasions aggressively confronted white picketers trying to deny them their rights. In Detroit, in particular, these early forms of civil rights activism in the workplace had a lot to do with gains blacks had made through several racially progressive union locals of the United Auto Workers (UAW). In particular, the Communist-influenced UAW Local 600, which during the war years represented over eighty thousand autoworkers at Ford’s colossal River Rouge Plant, placed blacks in leadership positions, pursued a program of grassroots collective action against racial discrimination, and strongly promoted ideals of racial equality. With tens of thousands of black workers among its members, Local 600 became a driving force for civil rights activism in Detroit. Black workers radicalized by the local had wives, brothers, sisters, daughters, sons, cousins, and friends, and its spirit of militancy quickly fanned out into the black community, inspiring a will to fight back that explains a great deal about why Detroit’s massive riot of 1943 came to pass.
While Mayor Kelly had nothing like UAW Local 600 to deal with, there were other sources of black rebelliousness that were forcing his hand in ways that would get him into trouble with white voters. A new assertiveness had taken hold of black communities throughout the urban North during World War II as black veterans returned from the war to find they had risked their lives for a country that still treated them like second-class citizens. The Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation’s most widely circulating black newspapers, provided a slogan for this sentiment with its 1942 Double-V campaign: victory over fascism abroad and over racism at home. Chicago’s own black daily, the Defender, added its voice to the Double-V chorus, and it was not long before African Americans in Chicago were wearing Double-V pins and even cutting the letter V into their hair.
In addition to this new spirit of militancy taking shape around the idea of black servicemen’s unrequited sacrifices, the zoot suiter represented another strain of street-smart rebelliousness that was crystallizing within the youth subcultures of black ghettos of the urban North and West. The zoot suit was unequivocally antipatriotic: not only did it brazenly disregard rationing restrictions on clothing materials, but in a moment when everyone was supposed to be making sacrifices, it symbolized an ethos of self-indulgence. Zoot suits belonged to the milieu of big commercial dancehalls, like the famed Savoy in New York or the Pershing or Parkway in Chicago, where jitterbugs swung, flipped, and gyrated to fashionable dances like the lindy hop and partied into the early morning hours. Yet if this was a world where getting one’s kicks was a primary motivation, it would be mistaken to think of its habitués as apolitical. Malcolm X, known as Malcolm Little in his younger days, wore a zoot suit when he went out to the jazz clubs and pool halls at night, and, as historian Robin Kelley has argued, even though he later renounced this as part of the profligate lifestyle he was trying to leave behind after his conversion to Islam, he surely had understood the political meaning of covering his body with such a loaded symbol during the war years.19
FIGURE 6. Zoot suiters at the Savoy Ballroom in 1941. Photo by Russell Lee. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
The zoot suiter, to be sure, represented a very different message than that conveyed by the figure of the black soldier, and proud veterans and insolent hipsters did not always see eye to eye, but the new civil rights consciousness circulating through black communities nonetheless formed powerful bonds of solidarity between these two elements of the community. Such was the case, to be sure, in the Harlem riot, which saw zoot suiters taking to the streets in violent protest after hearing that a black serviceman has been shot by a police officer after attempting to defend a black woman who was being roughed up during an arrest at the Braddock Hotel. After conducting a series of interviews with riot participants, one social psychologist found the zoot suiter so central to the uprising in Harlem that he spoke of a generalized “zoot effect.” Capturing the way many of the young Harlem rioters viewed their uprising against the police were the words of one riot participant, who, after reflecting on a savage beating police administered to one of his peers, warned: “Do not attempt to fuck with me.”20
The zoot suiter was all about a new posture of defiance that was sweeping through northern black ghettos—defiance to the police and to whites trying to stand between African Americans and their civil rights. This form of de
fiance became accentuated in the months following the hot summer of 1943, when everyone in the nation knew that it was open season on zoot suiters. Continuing to wear a zoot suit was, in a sense, an overt provocation—one part machismo, one part racial pride—directed at white toughs out on the streets, a double-down on a dare that was becoming increasingly dangerous in view of the white youth gangs increasingly gathering along the color line. In the face of such dangers, black youths in Chicago remained undaunted, continuing to strut their stuff in these flamboyant outfits in the months following the riots of 1943. Just several weeks after the incident in Harlem, for example, a nearly half-page ad in the Defender told jitterbugs to “wear your zoot suit” to the “Zoot Suit Dance” at the Parkway Ballroom on 45th and South Parkway Avenue, where a prize would be given to the “zootiest.”21
The zoot suiter and the milieu of teenage gangs to which he belonged kept authorities on edge throughout 1944 and 1945. Many officials serving on the newly formed Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations (an updated version of the Mayor’s Committee on Race Relations) were convinced that if a riot were to break out, it would be ignited from friction between black and white teenage gangs. The Chicago Police Department thus made great efforts to monitor hot spots throughout the city where black and white youths regularly crossed paths. In July 1945, for example, a special police patrol was stationed in the Woodlawn district, at the busy intersection of 63rd and Cottage Grove, after reports that black and white jitterbugs were tangling in the streets around the Pershing ballroom.22 What such incidents were revealing was that Chicago had become an unavoidably interracial city during the war. The war years represented the first chapter in a new phase of ghettoization that in two decades would add to the city’s vastly expanded South Side ghetto a massive West Side swath, over a mile wide in parts and stretching all the way to the city’s western limits. But this outcome was far from self-evident for white residents on the ground in the mid-1940s. With the sorry state of housing conditions in the Black Belt, many black migrants began settling at the edges of white neighborhoods and in other racially mixed areas where small numbers of black families already lived. Moreover, even in areas of the city in which the residential color line was absolute, where white hostility was too coordinated and too fierce for blacks to dare taking up residence, blacks and whites inescapably crossed paths at lakefront beaches, in shopping and nightlife districts, in parks, and on buses and streetcars.
Marxist theorist Raymond Williams coined the term structure of feeling to describe a dominant sensibility about lived experience that circulates through the culture of everyday life of a specific generation at a specific time and place.23 For the generation of African Americans who had migrated from the Jim Crow South to the “promised land” of the urban North during the war, the zoot suiter and the black serviceman were the most potent embodiments of a broader structure of feeling of betrayal and injustice that shaped the new spirit of resistance to racial oppression. The collective sense that a limit had been reached—that enough was enough—permeated black Chicago like an acrid smell, the scent of which continuously reminded blacks of what was at stake in the insults they faced in their daily interactions with whites. Recalling his experiences as a young man living in New Jersey and working in defense plants during the war, James Baldwin claimed that was when he “first contracted some dread, chronic disease, the unfailing symptom of which [was] a kind of blind fever, a pounding in the skull and fire in the bowels.” Baldwin explained that he picked up this “disease” while experiencing racial indignities at “bars, bowling alleys, diners, places to live.”24 His affliction eventually caused him to put his life on the line in order to take a forceful stand against a restaurant that refused to serve him—the kind of act that was occurring much more frequently after the riots in the summer of 1943.
While most black Chicagoans were not nearly as daring as Baldwin, never left home in a zoot suit, and did not serve in the American military, they were captivated by the same anger and by the same will to not back down in the face of intimidation—a situation that, in the context of the severe housing shortage in wartime Chicago, translated into a will to live where they chose. However, the zoot suiter, the black serviceman, and the ordinary black resident who had reached the end of his patience had analogues on the other side of the color line. Standing opposite them was the white gang tough ready for a fight, the white veteran angry about heroically risking his life for his nation only to return to find strange black faces in his neighborhood, and all of the ordinary white residents who, like the blacks they so feared, were beginning to feel themselves to be victims. Even though 1945 brought news of an impending victory in the war, Chicagoans were certainly not looking into the future with great optimism. Employers and economists alike were predicting that the loss of war contracts would lead to recession and massive layoffs, and as white workers viewed increasing numbers of blacks joining them on factory floors, the usual fears of blacks undercutting wages and stealing jobs were exchanged in taverns and on street corners. It has often been the tendency of Americans to view racial others as simultaneously lazy and so hardworking that they are willing to labor for pitiful wages, and this was one such time.
Yet to view the racism of white Chicagoans in such economizing terms gives a somewhat distorted impression of what lay at the core of their racial fear and contempt. Many working-class whites did, of course, envision blacks as undermining their class position and their standard of living. This was an idea whose origins stretched back to earlier decades, when bosses employed blacks as scabs to break strikes in the stockyards and steel mills, and real estate agents began using panic-peddling tactics to get whites to sell their homes on the cheap for fear of losing their property values when the neighborhood turned black. Such circumstances give us reason to invest in a notion of white racism as a tool created and exploited by the ruling class in the process of accumulating capital—in the idea articulated by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1935 that white workers enjoyed a “psychological wage” related to their whiteness, which caused them to accept low standards of living and poor working conditions because of their self-proclaimed sense of racial superiority to blacks.25 According to such reasoning, a steelworker might have remained satisfied with wages that were clearly too low for the work he was performing, precisely because both his wages and his job category were superior to those of African American workers. This, we might conclude, is why whites joined together in factory hate strikes and why employers resisted promoting blacks and integrating departments—not for fear of causing racial disturbances among workers but of jeopardizing a tool that helped them exploit their workforce. And yet in wartime Chicago, racial barriers on the factory floor seemed to crumble relatively easily whereas those in the neighborhoods became increasingly fortified. In other words, white racism, as it manifested itself in wartime Chicago, was less about work than it was about family, community, and neighborhood.
Hence, while white workers in Chicago at times invoked fears of black competition for jobs, they seemed much more actively invested in the threat that blacks and their culture posed to their families and, ultimately, to their way of life. Stories that told of blacks moving into white neighborhoods or arriving at white schools were very frequently followed in the next breath by rumors of robberies and rapes, which, at times, spread so quickly that city authorities eventually established hotlines to try to quell them. Telling in this sense was the extent to which interracial rape rumors circulated around a series of 1945 hate strikes carried out by white students protesting small increases in black enrollment. In one school, for example, the visit of two police officers looking for an escaped juvenile delinquent led to wild rumors that two black students had raped a white girl. Some female students interviewed claimed, “We girls are afraid to go anywhere alone.”26
Social workers and other observers of the race relations scene remarked that white residents, adults and youths alike, often described blacks as immoral, smelly, and syphilitic, a situation
that was certainly not improved by the black domination of the city’s commercial sex industry. One social worker on the near northwest side, for example, reported that when the boys he supervised were not talking about girls, they were making remarks like “niggers smell,” “ninety percent . . . are syphylletic [sic],” and “Negroes should keep their place which is shining shoes and cleaning toilets.”27 The manifestations of such ill feelings became particularly apparent in the summer heat. An African American boy swimming too close to whites in Lake Michigan had provoked the 1919 race riot, so one can only imagine the anxiety aroused by the idea of blacks plunging their bared bodies into municipal swimming pools, which were preciously scarce resources in the sweltering heat and intense humidity that normally enveloped Chicago in July and August. New Deal public works spending had led to the construction of municipal pools in many U.S. cities in the 1930s, thereby democratizing access to what was previously an elite privilege. Yet, in Chicago, as in many other cities and towns, the power of white racism confounded the hopes of New Deal idealists and planning visionaries, making these new resources into flashpoints for racial incidents in the 1940s and beyond.28
What was thus becoming clear after the summer of 1943 was that white racism was increasingly running up against an immovable force: the black will to fight back. By 1944, Mayor Kelly found himself wedged uncomfortably between these two counterforces. His wartime race relations management strategy had helped Chicago avoid the worst, but it did little to stop the urban guerrilla warfare that was breaking out in the streets. Indicative of where things were heading was an incident that occurred early in 1944, when several youths from an Italian neighborhood around the Armour Square area entered the Little Zion Baptist Church on Wells Street and began stoning black congregants as they prayed. Obviously accustomed to such acts, the assistant pastor at the church had a loaded pistol within easy reach, and he managed to shoot and wound one of the assailants—a situation that had people in the neighborhood talking about a mob of Italians returning that night to burn the church down.29 A police detail prevented more trouble on this occasion, but arson attacks against black homes under the cover of night mounted in this area in the months to follow.
Chicago on the Make Page 15
