39. Christopher Robert Reed, The Depression Comes to the South Side: Protest and Politics in the Black Metropolis, 1930–1933 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011), 88.
40. James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 233.
41. Chicago Defender, August 8, 1931.
42. Beth Tompkins Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 72.
43. Grossman, Land of Hope, 230.
44. The Messenger 2 (August 1920), 73–74.
45. Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics, 80.
46. The Messenger 2 (October 1919), 5.
47. Cynthia Taylor, A. Philip Randolph: The Religious Journey of an African American Labor Leader (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 116.
48. Pittsburgh Courier, August 16, 1941.
49. Chicago Defender, November 19, 1927.
50. Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics, 81.
51. Jeffrey Helgeson, Crucibles of Black Empowerment: Chicago’s Neighborhood Politics from the New Deal to Harold Washington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
52. Historian Earl Lewis uses the concept of the home sphere to connote a field of political activity that links up the household, the neighborhood, and the wider black community. Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 66–88.
53. Black, Black’s Blue Book, 24.
54. Chicago Defender, September 29, 1923.
55. Quoted in Reed, Rise of Chicago’s Black Metropolis, 96.
56. Chicago Defender, October 13, 1923.
57. N.D.B. Connolly, A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow Florida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 11.
58. Chicago Defender, November 17, 1923.
59. Chicago Defender, May 23, 1925.
60. Helgeson, Crucibles of Black Empowerment, 2.
61. Chicago Defender, February 22, 1936.
62. Erik S. Gellman, Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 25.
63. Chicago Defender, February 22, 1936.
64. Quoted in Michael W. Harris, The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 89.
65. Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (1953; repr., New York: Vintage, 1995), 78–79.
66. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 188.
67. See Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Vintage, 1998); Hazel Carby, “‘It Jus Be’s Dat Way Sometime’: The Sexual Politics of Women’s Blues,” in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, ed. Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz (New York: Routledge, 1990).
68. Chicago Defender, April 21, 1928.
69. Chicago Defender, August 28, 1926; Chicago Defender, July 24, 1926.
70. Chicago Defender, June 18, 1927.
71. While Armstrong’s rendition may have focused attention on white racism, it is important to note that the song was originally written for the 1929 Broadway musical Hot Chocolates, in which it was sung by a dark-skinned black woman who had lost her lover to a lighter-skinned woman.
CHAPTER 3
1. For an excellent critical perspective on the “good war” ideology and its dynamics of ethnic (but not racial) inclusion, see Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
2. Life, August 7, 1942.
3. Chicago’s Report to the People, 1933–1946 (Chicago: City of Chicago, 1947), 40.
4. For a detailed description of the war mobilization as it touched the lives of ordinary Chicagoans, see Perry R. Duis, “No Time for Privacy: World War II and Chicago’s Families,” in The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II, ed. Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 46–70.
5. Quoted in William M. Tuttle Jr., Daddy’s Gone to War: The Second World War in the Lives of American Children (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 70.
6. Chicago Tribune, June 13, 1943.
7. On the symbolic politics of juvenile delinquency panics in the 1940s and 1950s, see James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
8. For further discussion of the circumstances of the Zoot Suit Riots and their meaning in wartime America, see Mauricio Mazon, The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984).
9. Chicago Defender, May 22, 1943.
10. Chicago Tribune, June 22, 1943.
11. “Meeting on Inter-Racial Situation,” Friday, June 25, 1943, Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago Papers, box 145, folder 2, Chicago History Museum. For a study that demonstrates that such tensions escalated into violence in cities across the country during this time, see Harvard Sitkoff, “Racial Militancy and Interracial Violence in the Second World War,” Journal of American History 58 (December 1971), 661–81.
12. “Meeting on Inter-Racial Situation,” Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago Papers.
13. Quoted in Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 311.
14. Chicago Tribune, June 22, 1943.
15. For a detailed account of the 1943 race riot in Detroit, see Domenic J. Capeci Jr. and Martha Wilkerson, Layered Violence: The Detroit Rioters of 1943 (Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1991).
16. Chicago Defender, July 31, 1943.
17. On the efforts of the CIO to create an interracial “culture of unity,” see Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 333–49.
18. On Mayor Kelly, see Roger Biles, Big City Boss in Depression and War: Mayor Edward J. Kelly of Chicago (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1984).
19. Robin D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), 161–81.
20. Kenneth B. Clark and James Barker, “The Zoot Effect in Personality: A Race Riot Participant,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 40, no. 2 (1945), 143–48.
21. Chicago Defender, October 2, 1943.
22. Chicago Defender, July 7, 1945.
23. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1977).
24. James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 92–94.
25. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935; repr., New York: Atheneum, 1992), 700.
26. Analysis of Chicago School Strikes, American Council on Race Relations, Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago Papers, box 145, folder 3, Chicago History Museum. A number of scholars have examined the role of interracial rape rumors in triggering white mob violence against racial others between 1917 and 1943: see, for example, Marilynn S. Johnson, “Gender, Race, and Rumours: Re-examining the 1943 Race Riots,” Gender and History 10 (August 1998), 252–77.
27. L. Stanton, “Eagles, January 20, 1942,” Chicago Common Papers, box 7, folder: Clubs and Groups, 1940–42, Chicago History Museum.
28. A fascinating account of the racial politics of municipal swimming pools can be found in Jeff Wiltse, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
29. Chicago Defender, May 20, 1944.
30. For a comprehensive acco
unt of the Chicago Housing Authority and its difficulties in pursuing a policy of racial integration, see Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
31. Quoted in Roger Biles, “Edward J. Kelly: New Deal Machine Builder,” in The Mayors: The Chicago Political Tradition, ed. Paul M. Green and Melvin G. Holli (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 124.
32. For more background on the mayor of Bronzeville tradition, see Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott, “Pinkster in Chicago: Bud Billiken and the Mayor of Bronzeville, 1930–1945,” Journal of African American History 89 (Autumn 2004), 316–30.
33. For an article that examines how southern foodways offended black middle-class sensibilities, see Tracey N. Poe, “The Origins of Soul Food in Black Urban Identity: Chicago, 1915–1947,” American Studies International (February 1999), 4–33.
34. Adam Green, Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–1955 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
35. Ibid., 77.
36. For a full account of these controversies, see Nadine Cohadas, Spinning Blues into Gold: The Chess Brothers and the Legendary Chess Records (New York: St. Martin’s / Griffin, 2001).
37. The documentary Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: A Musical Journey was produced by filmmaker Martin Scorsese and aired on PBS as a seven-part series between September 28 and October 4, 2003. The segment dealing with Chess, “Godfathers & Sons,” was directed by Marc Levin.
38. For an account of the sense of racial militancy pervading the zoot suit milieu during the war and a provocative analysis of the link between this militancy and the rise of bebop, see Eric Lott, “Double V, Double-Time: Bebop’s Politics of Style,” Callaloo 11, no. 3 (1988), 587–605.
39. Once again, I am indebted to Adam Green for this idea, which is developed at length in Green, Selling the Race, chap. 2.
40. The seminal book on the “urban crisis” is Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1998; repr., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
41. An instructive analysis of these arguments can be found in Eduard Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Colorblind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).
42. For two examples, see Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: Norton, 1991); and Jim Sleeper, The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York City (New York: Norton, 1990).
43. The first major study to push the debate on the “urban crisis” back to the 1940s and 1950s was Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto.
44. Chicago Commission on Human Relations, Documentary Memorandum: “Interracial Disturbances at 7407–7409 South Parkway and 5643 South Peoria Street,” ACLU Papers, box 7, folder 5, Special Collections–University of Chicago.
45. “Human Relations in Chicago: Report for the Year 1946 of the Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations,” Chicago Urban League Papers, folder 229, Special Collections, University of Illinois–Chicago Circle.
46. Chicago Commission on Human Relations, Documentary Memorandum: “Interracial Disturbances.”
47. For a recent study that argues for the key role played by youths in racist violence in Chicago during these years, see Andrew J. Diamond, Mean Streets: Chicago Youths and the Everyday Struggle for Empowerment in the Multiracial City, 1908–1969 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
48. Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations, memorandum on Fernwood Park Homes, Chicago Urban League Papers, folder 709, Special Collections, University of Illinois–Chicago Circle; Chicago Defender, August 30, 1947.
49. Council Against Racial and Religious Discrimination, Documented Memorandum XI: “1947 School Race Strike at Wells High School in Chicago,” Chicago Commons Papers, box 31, folder 1, Chicago History Museum.
50. Chicago Defender, July 30, 1949; Chicago Defender, September 17, 1949.
51. For a full account of Mayor Martin Kennelly’s years in office, see Arnold R. Hirsch, “Martin H. Kennelly: The Mugwump and the Machine,” in The Mayors, ed. Green and Holli, 126–43.
52. Loïc Wacquant uses the term hyperghetto to distinguish the more recent black ghettos stricken by the disintegration of their middle-class strata, the disappearance of their economic bases, and the withdrawal of the welfare state from the “communal ghettos” of the first half of the twentieth century, which grouped together blacks of all classes around a range of vibrant institutions. Loïc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008), 2–4.
53. On the dynamics of white resistance and flight on Chicago’s West Side in the postwar decades, see Amanda I. Seligman, Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago’s West Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
CHAPTER 4
1. Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
2. Chicago Tribune, July 17, 1951. For a recent analysis of the events in Cicero that highlights the involvement of teenagers in the affair, see Andrew J. Diamond, Mean Streets: Chicago Youths and the Everyday Struggle for Empowerment in the Multiracial City, 1908–1969 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 166.
3. The addresses of those arrested were published in Chicago Tribune, July 14, 1951.
4. Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations, “Progress Report, Month of July, 1946,” Chicago Area Project Papers, box 32, folder 1, Chicago History Museum.
5. Mike Royko, Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (New York: Dutton, 1971), 56–57.
6. James Q. Wilson, Negro Politics: The Search for Leadership (New York: New Press, 1960).
7. Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor, American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago and the Nation (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000), 95.
8. The definitive study of the role of the black submachine in mayoral elections in Chicago is William J. Grimshaw, Bitter Fruit: Black Politics and the Chicago Machine, 1931–1991 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
9. Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
10. Confidential Report, Case # E-77, Operative L.G., April 23, 1954, ACLU Papers, box 11, folder 9, Special Collections–University of Chicago.
11. Chicago Defender, April 2, 1955.
12. Cohen and Taylor, American Pharaoh, 134–36.
13. Royko, Boss, 88–89.
14. Ibid., 89.
15. Cohen and Taylor, American Pharaoh, 141.
16. Adam Green, Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–1955 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 179–212.
17. Richard M. Daley, interview by Paul M. Green, Illinois Issues 22 (August–September 1991), 22.
18. Cohen and Taylor, American Pharaoh, chap. 5.
19. Milton Rakove, Don’t Make No Waves . . . Don’t Back No Losers: An Insider’s Analysis of the Daley Machine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 5.
20. Cohen and Taylor, American Pharaoh, 164.
21. Jon C. Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940–1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 19.
22. Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make: 50th Anniversary Edition, introduction by Studs Terkel, annotated by Bill Savage and David Schmittgens (1950; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 23.
23. Royko, Boss, 93.
24. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 131.
25. Quoted in Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 112.
26. Joel Rast, “Regime Building, Instituti
on Building: Urban Renewal Policy in Chicago, 1946–1952,” Journal of Urban Affairs 31, no. 2 (May 2009), 177–78.
27. Joel Rast, “Creating a Unified Business Elite: The Origins of the Chicago Area Committee,” Journal of Urban History 37, no. 4, 593–96.
28. Quoted in Rast, “Creating a Unified Business Elite,” 596.
29. Ibid.
30. Rast, “Regime Building, Institution Building,” 180.
31. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 47.
32. For a history of how the definition of blight shifted from a condition of substandard housing to a condition of “suboptimal” local economic development in the postwar decades, see Colin Gordon, “Blighting the Way: Urban Renewal, Economic Development, and the Elusive Definition of Blight,” Fordham Urban Law Journal 31, no. 2 (January 2004), 305–37.
33. Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essay on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 44.
34. Quoted in Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 122.
35. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 257; and Amanda I. Seligman, Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago’s West Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 8.
36. Cohen and Taylor, American Pharaoh, 189.
37. William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage, 1997), 35.
38. Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool,” in The Bean Eaters (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960).
39. Chicago Tribune, March 21, 1961.
40. For similar stories in other cities, see, for example, Herbert Gans, The Urban Villagers (New York: Free Press, 1962); Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
Chicago on the Make Page 47
