Chicago on the Make

by Andrew J. Diamond

  Such trends had touched down in Chicago in July 1955 in the form of a media-induced panic about the subculture of deadly gang violence in the city’s working-class districts. The defining event was a gang of toughs from Bridgeport gunning down a teen in front of a snack joint, an incident that prompted the Tribune to run an investigative series on “youth gangs and the juvenile delinquency problem.”2 Several months later, after a fatal stabbing and vicious gang attack hit the papers in the span of three days, the Daily News reported that Chicago youths were increasingly falling under the influence of a “wolf-pack complex.”3 In response, the YMCA announced plans to infiltrate gangs with “secret agents,” and Mayor Daley, who had expanded the ranks of the police department’s juvenile bureau by nearly 50 percent since his recent election, urged stricter enforcement of the city curfew law while reassuring Chicagoans that “our young people are good.”4

  These events coincided with an epidemic of racial violence along Chicago’s color line, and, while evidence of the leading role played by youths in the defense of neighborhood boundaries had been mounting since the war years, the local press marshaled the jargon of social psychology and popular beliefs about lower-class gangster pathology to explain the problem at hand. Juvenile delinquency, in this view, was merely the stuff of “grudge killings” and “gang feuds” perpetrated by young men afflicted by “gang complexes,” “feelings of inadequacy,” and “misguided bravado.” Although James Dean’s gripping portrayal of a troubled suburban teen in Rebel had demonstrated that delinquency could just as easily strike middle-class America, the delinquency issue in Chicago came across as it had in the past—as a manifestation of working-class life. The black press, on the other hand, had a very different perspective. When the Chicago Defender printed a front-page editorial entitled “Juvenile Terrorism Must Be Stopped” in the spring of 1957, its editors were referring not to gangland grudge killings but rather to a “wave of crimes and violence” that was, they claimed, “paralyzing social relations and hampering normal race relations.”5 The main incident prompting their call to Mayor Daley for a “citywide emergency committee” came in March 1957, when twelve teens belonging to a predominantly Polish Englewood-area gang known as the Rebels surrounded a seventeen-year-old African American named Alvin Palmer and one of their members landed a fatal blow to his head with a ball-peen hammer.

  Palmer’s slaying awakened the city to the gravity of its racial problem, and to the deep implication of its young within it. Startling to many was the utter banality of the whole affair. The Rebels were not killers—they were not even high school dropouts—but rather ordinary teens from the Back of the Yards area who had never been in any real trouble with the law before. And yet, despite the chilling senselessness of the Palmer murder, Chicago—its political leadership, its news media, and its citizens—was still far from any public reckoning of the simmering racial tensions in its streets or of any policy response to the conditions producing them. With most of the city turning its back on the interrelated problems of neighborhood transition and racial conflict, young men on both sides of the color line began taking things into their own hands and acting in ways that, in their collective and concerted nature, began to have some political implications. The summer after the Palmer murder, for example, several thousand white youths rioted in Calumet Park, not far from the Trumbull Park Homes on the city’s Far South Side, in a demonstration against the use of the park by African Americans. Eyewitnesses reported rioters waving white flags or tying them to the radio antennas of their cars and singing racist chants. Police officials monitoring such events spoke of large street gangs rallying youths to the scene, and of white gangs from different parts of the city coordinating their actions.

  While few at the time may have viewed such events as constituting anything resembling a social movement in the making, the task of explaining how a crowd of some seven thousand mostly young white men could have materialized so quickly moves us towards the kinds of theoretical perspectives offered by sociologists seeking to understand the structures and networks that mobilize large groups of people to action, and the cultures and identities that make individuals feel themselves to belong to the groups acting.6 Here, in Chicago, youth gang subcultures had exploded throughout the city’s working-class districts, replete with the black leather jackets, white T-shirts, slicked-back hairstyles, and spirit of nihilism that had become the signifiers of youth rebellion throughout the nation. But in the context of the city’s shifting racial geography, the youthful angst and anger that circulated through these subcultures was directed as much at rival ethnoracial groups as it was at sources of adult authority. The gangs that had brought thousands of youths into Calumet Park had been organized to protect neighborhood boundaries, and they shared a common identity of whiteness that they ritualized with flags, banners, and racist songs. While no doubt unaware of it, these youths were the foot soldiers of a broader grassroots movement to defend white identity and privilege that was just starting to rise up as black demands for integration and equality were growing more vocal.

  With every rock thrown and every insult shouted, the black will to resist grew stronger. The white youth movement that was crystallizing stood dialectically opposed to a black one feeding off the anger produced by the everyday indignities its members faced at the hands of white gangs and the police. Until somewhat recently, historians of the civil rights struggle in the urban North have tended to overlook such dynamics because of a tendency to employ top-down perspectives that placed the actions of mass-based organizations and the pronouncements of great leaders at the center of the story. Even if some fine studies have contributed to changing that view over the past decade or so, most still view the history of the civil rights movement as beginning in the South in the mid-1950s under the aegis of Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and then moving north in the mid-1960s, where it was derailed by the allegedly destructive influences of the Black Panther Party and divisive Black Power leaders like Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and H. Rap Brown.7 Despite the best efforts of scholars, the collective memory of the civil rights struggle still thinks in tidy dualities—Martin and Malcolm, rights and power, nonviolence and violence, integration and separatism—that tend to oversimplify what was actually a very messy interplay of ideologies and organizations.

  To be sure, Martin Luther King did move his people to Chicago in 1966 to take on the problem of northern de facto segregation—that much is true. But black youths in the city were hardly waiting around to be led; they were already organizing to defend their civil rights many years before their city became a key battleground in the nationwide mobilization for rights. Throughout the 1950s, groups of blacks youths—sometimes affiliated with gangs, sometimes just cliques of kids from the same block or school—frequently took on white aggressors attempting to prevent them from using parks, beaches, swimming pools, and streets. By the beginning of the next decade, such actions began to take more organized form. In July 1961, for example, some two thousand black youths participated in “wade-ins” organized by the local branch of the NAACP Youth Council at Rainbow Beach around 76th Street. Perhaps even more impressive than such demonstrations, however, were the much more frequent informal protest actions that characterized these years. A stunning example occurred in June 1962, when in the midst of a series of racist attacks against black students on the city’s Near West Side, over one thousand African American students from Crane High School staged a remarkable march through the heart of Little Italy—a street normally off limits to blacks. While youth workers and scores of policemen were alerted to help prevent a riot from erupting, the youths walked in an orderly procession, school books in hands, without any sign of provocation towards the mainly white onlookers—a nonviolent demonstration that surely drew its inspiration from the courageous southern sit-ins that had recently been carried out by the young members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). This event would not make it into the newspap
ers—the only reason we know it happened is because Frank Carney recorded it in his daily report log—but its assertion of black solidarity and resolve would certainly be remembered in the area for months to come.8

  And yet as most of the city’s youth workers knew all too well, things were not always so orderly out on Chicago’s streets—far from it. Although young black Chicagoans were beginning to exhibit a growing awareness of their role in the broader struggle for civil rights, many youths nonetheless continued to live by codes of the street that were shaped by powerful structural conditions: periodic recessions that ravaged the labor market, massive urban renewal projects that tore up communities and displaced their inhabitants, and demographic forces of flight and migration that transformed the composition of neighborhoods with breathtaking rapidity. By the early 1960s, these circumstances had produced two broader interrelated trends that defined the street cultures of many working-class areas, especially those on the city’s ethnoracially diverse West Side. The first was an escalation in the intensity and stakes of racial aggression that reflected both the increasing use of firearms and a dogged fixation on the presence of racial others. The second was the widespread emergence of fairly large (between fifty and one hundred members) ethnoracially defined street gangs—commonly referred to by youth workers as “fighting gangs”—whose principal function was to engage in potentially deadly combat against rival groups.

  Chicago was not alone in this second development. Historians have documented similar trends in New York around the same period, showing how fighting-gang subcultures there developed within the context of deindustrialization, urban renewal, and racial marginalization. But according to one study of postwar New York, violence between opposing gangs was more about controlling territory than it was about ethnoracial conflict.9 Certainly the protection of “turf” was also a driving force in Chicago, but here turf was usually a euphemism for community, and community was often defined in ethnoracial terms.10 Geographers building upon the theoretical frameworks introduced by geographer Henri Lefebvre have drawn attention to the ways in which groups “produce” or define space through their everyday activities.11 Youth gangs in Chicago had been principal actors in this process since at least the late nineteenth century, playing a key role in creating a patchwork of ethnoracial neighborhoods. And ethnoracial identities played a defining role in the politics of everyday life—in telling people who they were and where they stood—because, at least in part, these very identities were physically inscribed within the city’s geography. Characterizing urban social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, sociologist Manuel Castells has observed that “when people find themselves unable to control the world, they simply shrink the world to the size of their community”—an idea that seems particularly well suited to understanding what fighting gangs were, on an instinctive level, trying to accomplish as they defended neighborhood boundaries amidst the racial and spatial turbulence of Chicago of this same era.12

  FIGURE 10. White gang members standing watch on a Near Northwest Side corner as a youth worker looks nervously over his shoulder, ca. 1961. Courtesy of Lorine Hughes and James Short.

  But the forces that propelled young men impetuously into rumbles against enemies armed with lethal weapons like guns, knives, and bats went beyond ethnoracial pride and prejudice. The violent confrontations they provoked and joined also involved a search for respect and honor when such values were becoming harder to find in the workplace. Between 1955 and 1963, the Chicago metropolitan area lost some 131,000 jobs (or 22 percent) as the number of potential job seekers increased by some 300,000.13 While this period is often considered to be one of national prosperity, Chicago employment figures indicate a slump-and-boom pattern of economic growth that tended to make the labor market precarious for young workers. Recessions struck the city especially hard in 1958 and 1961, causing sharp spikes in unemployment. Moreover, by the early 1960s Chicago was feeling the effects of the larger process of deindustrialization that was beginning to transform labor markets across the old steel belt of the urban Midwest.

  One now needed a connection to land the kind of good union job on a factory floor that had provided the previous generation with a decent living and the sense of manliness that comes with working around heavy machines in the company of men; much more available to the generation coming of age in the 1960s were the low-wage, unskilled jobs being offered by hotels, restaurants, and retail stores. Making matters even worse, these labor market conditions coincided with massive clearance and renewal projects on the Near West and South Sides of the city to make way for the construction of giant public housing complexes, new medical facilities around the Cook County Hospital, and the new Chicago campus of the University of Illinois. Describing the Near West Side area in February 1961, Frank Carney offered a stark vision of the situation faced by area residents remaining there: “Many men are in evidence on the streets and street corners when it is warm enough. The emptiness of certain sections resulting from land clearance increases the generally depressing atmosphere.” “It is impossible,” he concluded, “to escape the feeling that the area is on its way out.”14

  In addition to industrial decline, labor market volatility, and the social dislocations caused by urban renewal, the forces of postwar racial migration heightened the uncertainties working-class youths felt and shaped their responses to the predicaments they faced. The ethnoracial demographics of the metropolitan United States would be transformed in the 1970s after the passage of the landmark Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, when new family reunification entitlements would open the floodgates to immigration from Asia and Latin America. But Chicago stood apart from many other major cities in that migration flows from both the American South and Latin America had already been altering its racial geography back in the 1950s and 1960s. Constituting just over 14 percent of the city’s population in 1950, the steady flow of African American migrants from the South increased their share of the population to over one quarter by 1962. Paralleling this steady black migration were the waves of Mexican and Puerto Rican immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s. After increasing some 43 percent between 1940 and 1950, the number of Mexicans in Chicago grew almost fivefold between 1950 and 1970 (from 24,000 to 108,000). In this same period, the city’s overall Spanish-speaking population increased from 35,000 to 247,000, while the total population of the city dropped from 3,600,000 to 3,300,000.15 These large migratory flows of Latin Americans complicate the idea, evoked most notably in Arnold Hirsch’s classic study Making the Second Ghetto, that the 1950s was a moment of racial consolidation, the end of a long process of black ghettoization that reinforced the idea of a black-white binary racial order. While one could speak of a universally recognized “color line” separating black from white in previous decades, the situation had become much more complex by the early 1960s, especially on Chicago’s West Side, which had become a mosaic of black, Puerto Rican, Mexican, and white neighborhoods. In this context whiteness and blackness seemed stable enough. African Americans knew they had few friends outside the boundaries of their neighborhoods, and although the Irish still muttered words like guineas and greasers when they crossed paths with Italians at late-night Polish sausage stands, by the end of the 1950s European Americans of all origins could feel secure in their identification with whiteness. The situation was quite different for Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, who were forced to navigate an unpredictable course between blackness and whiteness.

  As recent newcomers to the city, Puerto Ricans, in particular, faced some of the most formidable challenges in their efforts to integrate into the city’s housing and labor markets. While New York City was the primary destination for Puerto Ricans leaving the island for city life on the mainland in the 1930s and 1940s, by the early 1950s several small Puerto Rican communities were becoming visible to the north and west of the Loop, especially in Lincoln Park, Lakeview, the Near West Side, Woodlawn, and East and West Garfield Park.16 By the early 1960s, however, the Puerto Rican population was consolid
ating into two main sectors of the city: the lower Lincoln Park neighborhood on the North Side and a large area to the Loop’s northwest that stretched westward from the community area of West Town into the neighborhood of Humboldt Park, with its main drag along Division Street. Scholars seeking to explain the factors behind such swift internal migrations often refer to “push” and “pull” dynamics—the forces of racial discrimination that pushed migrants into certain areas and the cultural forces that pulled them towards people with whom they felt strong affinities. In reality, these two sides of the story are difficult to separate. While it is hardly surprising that Puerto Ricans arriving in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s would gravitate towards areas where Spanish was spoken, where plantains could be easily procured to mash into the garlicky comfort food mofongo, and where friends and neighbors could share stories and reminiscences about the island, the flight to the familiar is often, in some sense, a flight from the unfamiliar. The development of a concentrated Puerto Rican barrio along Division Street in the mid-1960s said something about the new spirit of “Boricua” pride and solidarity circulating within the community, but it said just as much about the climate of racial hostility—the insults, the hard stares, and the acts of physical aggression—that Puerto Ricans dealt with on a daily basis. The decision of so many Puerto Ricans to opt for a home in the West Town/Humboldt Park area during the 1960s suggested that, even after almost two decades in the city, few expected this climate to change.