Eye on the Struggle

by James McGrath Morris

  ETHEL, HER OLDER SISTERS Alice Wilma, Thelma Elizabeth, Alma Josephine, her older brother, Lemuel Austin, and her younger sister, Avis Ruth, were never without something to do. Outside, they played hide-and-seek or raced up and down the block with other neighborhood kids. Inside the house, Bessie maintained a serene atmosphere interrupted only by music emanating either from the Victrola or from the violin that Lemuel, the only boy in the family, reluctantly practiced. There was no shortage of games and amusement. Once, for instance, the children and young adults staged a “Billion-Dollar Wedding” at Hope Presbyterian Church, a block away. They impersonated members of the Astor, Morgan, Gould, Armour, and other millionaire families. Six-year-old Ethel served as the ring bearer.

  Books and stories were a favorite source of entertainment for Ethel and her sisters. Each Saturday the family walked into the surrounding white neighborhood to a city library in Ogden Park, one of several open spaces the city created as a safety valve for the burgeoning tenement districts. Access to the well-stocked library intended for white citizens was one of several advantages the Paynes enjoyed over African Americans cooped up in the Black Belt to the east. Most black citizens were kept at bay from good schools, well-stocked libraries, and green parks by the city’s segregated housing. Rather than using laws, as in the South, housing confined blacks together and preserved the whiteness of public amenities. But in West Englewood, courageous black families such as the Paynes walked to better schools, libraries, and parks that were beyond reach for others of their race elsewhere in the city.

  Ethel’s sister Alma came home with the full limit of books each week. “She would read half the night if Mama didn’t see the light was still on,” said Thelma. Leisure time was devoted to reading the scads of books borrowed from the library or procured at rummage sales. “As I look back now,” Ethel said many years later, “I see this as perhaps the greatest influence on the direction of my life.”

  In particular, Ethel was drawn to Paul Laurence Dunbar, an African American poet who had become famous before his early death at age thirty-three in 1906. While his work was written mostly in conventional English, it was his poems in Negro dialect that gained him fame, much to his dismay and annoyance. His poem “Sympathy” with the line “I know why the caged bird sings” resonated with black audiences. Ethel and her siblings put on plays, acting out Dunbar’s poems, especially those about life on the plantation. They even formed a little theater company that included other children from the neighborhood.

  Ethel and her siblings delighted in hearing family stories. On innumerable nights, Bessie recounted how her mother, Josephine Taylor Austin, and her family escaped from slavery in Kentucky, fleeing before daybreak at the end of a weekend. Drinking water from rain puddles, they found shelter with a courageous family of freed slaves, crossed the Ohio River on a skiff piloted by a white agent for the Underground Railroad, hid in a river cave with old cooking implements left by previous escapees, and finally boarded a boat that took them upriver to freedom.

  Bessie’s father, George Washington Austin, a short, bald man with a twinkling eye, was a master storyteller. On sizzling hot Chicago summer evenings the children were sent out to lie on straw mattresses arrayed under the porch. As the youngsters drifted off to sleep, their grandfather told his tales. Unlike his wife’s family, he and his parents had not been freed from slavery in Tennessee until the end of the Civil War. He recalled vividly how, at age seven, his family was placed on the auction block on a snowy New Year’s Day. After being examined by prospective buyers for the soundness of their limbs and teeth, the family members were sold to separate plantations.

  But tall tales were George Austin’s specialty. On those summer nights on the porch he would trade story after story with a neighbor. One time Ethel’s grandfather and a neighbor named Spencer tried to outdo each other with their storytelling. “Finally at midnight,” said Ethel, “Mr. Spencer rose, shook hands with Grandpa, and said, ‘You win, Brother Austin.’”

  AS WITH THE OGDEN PARK LIBRARY, the family’s good fortune of living in West Englewood gave Ethel and her siblings access to schools better than those that served virtually all African Americans in Chicago. Schools here were not legally segregated. With 90 percent of the city’s African American population confined to the Black Belt, there was no need. The races remained almost entirely separate, confined to their neighborhood schools. But as a result some white schools counted African Americans among their ranks—in small numbers, to be sure.

  Ethel began her school at Copernicus Elementary School, where a dozen or so black students were also allowed to enter the handsome four-story building three blocks north of the house. Although he had not gotten far in school, her father, William, shared Bessie’s dedication to obtaining a good education for their children. Once Thelma asked her father for permission to join her friends working summer jobs at an apron factory. “No,” he said, “the money will seem so good to you that you won’t want to go back to school.” It fell to Bessie, who had been trained as a Latin teacher, to keep the children on track when it came to school. “She knew the importance of regular attendance at school and did not cheat any of us by keeping us at home for her convenience,” Thelma said. “Since our father had to be away on his job so much, she ruled the roost, served as business manager, disciplinarian, cook, seamstress, teacher, and manager.”

  Accompanying Ethel to Copernicus each day was her brother, Lemuel. A skinny and frail boy, he was close in age to Ethel, especially in comparison to her sisters. “I was down the ladder quite a bit, so I really didn’t have that close rapport with my older sisters,” Ethel said. “They were almost like one generation, and I constituted another one.”

  Each day’s walk to Copernicus brought Ethel and Lemuel to a setting with advantages unattainable in the overcrowded, understaffed, underfunded schools that served the Black Belt. For most black children, school took place in aging buildings, many of which didn’t even have bathrooms. On the other hand, no Chicago white school could be regarded as hospitable to black students. School officials had no reservations about publicly expressing their fear about the mixing of races. “When it comes to morality, I say colored children are unmoral,” explained an assistant principal of a high school with a few black students. “The colored and white children here don’t get mixed up in immorality; they are too well segregated. Not that we segregate them: the white keeps away from the colored.”

  At school and at home, Ethel came to be regarded as somewhat of a tomboy. “I didn’t bother too much with dolls,” she admitted. Lemuel, on the other hand, was a frail, skinny boy who got picked on and sometimes beat up by other boys his age. “Oh, I just hated it,” Ethel said. Coming out of Copernicus one afternoon, she heard that her brother was in a fight. “I waded into this batch of boys,” she said, “and I was just throwing them right and left.” When she reached Lemuel, he looked up at her and said, “Go on home. Girls aren’t supposed to fight. Go on home!”

  CHAPTER 2

  RED SUMMER

  ON SUNDAY, AUGUST 27, 1919, EIGHT-YEAR-OLD ETHEL Payne chased bugs and grasshoppers and put them into mason jars and tin cans with punched-in paper tops that she kept under the porch. It was a blistering hot summer day. Not far from where she played, five young black teenagers sought relief from the stifling heat by jumping a ride on the back of a produce truck heading toward the cooling waters of Lake Michigan. Chicagoans loved their beaches, especially the thousands of working-class families for whom the lake provided inexpensive Sunday recreation. But they didn’t leave their racial attitudes behind. Just like the city, the beaches were segregated.

  In South Side, some eleven miles of beaches reaching all the way to Indiana were reserved for whites, leaving only a small stretch of waterfront to its north to serve as the “colored beach.” But the boys went instead to an inlet and boarded a small raft they had made on a previous visit. Paying no attention to the southerly direction in which the draft drifted, they entered troubled waters. Unbeknow
nst to them, the sanctity of the white enclave had already been challenged earlier in the day by the entry of several black bathers. Mobs had gathered, both black and white, until the whites outnumbered the blacks and the invaders were chased off.

  As the raft passed an outcropping that demarcated the segregated beaches, a man by the water’s edge began throwing rocks at the boys. The boys dove into the water to seek protection, but a rock struck fourteen-year-old Eugene Williams on his forehead and he disappeared under the surface. The other teenagers reached shore, ran to the black beach, and returned with the lifeguard, who dove into the water looking for Williams. It was too late.

  Using a grappling hook, the police retrieved his body and brought it to the white beach. The surviving boys singled out a white man in the crowd as the rock thrower. But the white police made no effort to arrest the man and thwarted a black officer’s attempts to do so. Word spread quickly across the city. Soon as many as a thousand angry black Chicagoans gathered at the entrance of the white beach, demanding the police turn over the rock thrower and the white officers. A black man discharged his gun and was immediately killed by a jittery policeman.

  By nightfall a race war had begun. Armed whites, members of so-called athletic clubs with such names as Ragen’s Colts, Hamburgs, Dirty Dozen, and Our Flag, combed the streets attacking blacks. They took to automobiles and sped through black neighborhoods in the dark, unloading their guns at men, women, and children on the street. Unrestrained by the police, the gangs believed they had license to kill. Unprotected by the police, blacks took their own measures to resist. They stationed themselves behind windows or in the cover of darkened porches and fired back.

  The South Side became a battle zone. Confined economically in poor neighborhoods, families were now also trapped by violence. At day, the white gangs expanded their attack to go after blacks returning from work in the stockyards. Black men were dragged from streetcars and assaulted. Few dared to venture out from their homes. At night, entire blocks were enshrouded in darkness as rioters shot out the streetlights and in a silence broken only by the sound of pistol and rifle shots.

  The Payne family huddled in their Englewood house. The police designated their neighborhood a “danger zone” when rioting broke out at four different spots within blocks of the family’s house and a police platoon was dispatched to quell the outbreaks. Making matters more terrifying, their father was not home.

  All but a few of the Chicago Pullman car porters, cooks, and railroad employees had reported for work when the riot first began. They found themselves imprisoned on their trains, unable to get home. The railroads stopped black workers from debarking in Chicago. “We drew up new running schedules,” said one railroad official, “making the porters and other employees double back out of town instead of resting here.”

  Finally, on the third night of violence, Payne got off a New York train. Hiding from marauding mobs, probably using his knowledge of the maze of railroad yards that honeycombed the city, he reached his house just before midnight. Awakened by the sound of his return, Ethel went into the front bedroom, where she found her father loading a rifle. In her innocence, she clasped her hands in excitement. “Shut up,” yelled her father, “get down on the floor.” The street below was enshrouded in darkness broken only by the light of an occasional flashlight or gasoline lamp. Bessie began to sob and pray. “My mother was praying,” said Ethel, “and he was cursing!”

  “Hello, Bill,” came a voice from below. “Can you come down?” It was a white police officer and, more important, one of the few trusted white neighbors. Payne consented to come out of the house but he brought his rifle. The policeman promised that more officers were on their way to protect the neighborhood. But just then a small white mob appeared out of the darkness. Telling Payne to put down his rifle, the policeman drew his revolver. “I got some pretty good target practice at Belleau Wood,” he told the mob, referring to an epic World War I battle. A clap of thunder and a sudden downpour of rain rendered his threat unnecessary, and the men dispersed. Under the drenching rain, Payne gripped the police officer by both shoulders and thanked him.

  Several days later the police gained the upper hand and the violence abated. Chicago had not been alone in experiencing racial violence in the summer of 1919. The season was soon nicknamed “Red Summer” after rioting broke out in more than three dozen cities, mostly whites attacking blacks.

  WHEN CALM DID COME, life did not go back to what it had been. The Paynes’ few white neighbors decamped. Before the riots, a white couple from Eastern Europe lived next door, as did another white couple, with French and German ancestry, down the block. By 1930, the block was entirely black except for one lone white couple who had recently arrived from the Netherlands. The same was true throughout Chicago. Whites moved away and landlords further tightened the real estate cordon around blacks, leaving them no choice but to remain in the overcrowded neighborhoods of South Side. The wall of segregation became firmer than ever. As Payne entered her teenage years, her neighborhood was solidly black. “It was sort of an island in the midst of a white sea,” she said.

  Excluded from Chicago, African Americans began building their own city within a city. Turning, as one observer put it, “segregation into congregation,” they set about strengthening their own institutions. Several miles to the northeast of the Paynes’ home, Grand Boulevard became the hub of all things black. Here African Americans could purchase anything they needed. One could cash a check at the Binga State Bank, Chicago’s first black-owned bank; pick up a new supply of High-Brown Face Powder from the Overton-Hygienic Company; make a payment on a life insurance policy at Supreme Life; pay respects to a deceased relative at the Jackson Funeral System; consider a new house at the Julian A. Black real estate office; take in a show at the Regal Theater; or hail a cab from the Supreme Taxicab Company. “Because cabs wouldn’t come in,” said one longtime South Side resident, “we created our own.”

  An African American newspaper, the Chicago Bee, christened the emerging community Bronzeville. And, as it did with all its other needs, the city within a city created its own vibrant Fleet Street. Two blocks from the Bee, which occupied a magnificent Art Deco building on State Street, the Chicago Defender moved into an equally imposing edifice. Although it was the Bee that gave Bronzeville its name, the older Defender was its newspaper. “The Chicago Defender was the paper,” said Payne. “You couldn’t grow up in Chicago and be black if you didn’t know the Chicago Defender.”

  The Defender was the brainchild of Robert Sengstacke Abbott. Born in Georgia in 1868 to former slaves, Abbott had lost his father while still an infant. John H. H. Sengstacke, a German immigrant who had been raised in Georgia, became Robert’s stepfather, and the child was raised in small towns in Georgia. Abbott briefly attended two colleges before pursuing training as a printer at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Virginia, which counted Booker T. Washington among its alumni. After graduating in 1896, Abbott came to Chicago, Illinois, where he earned a law degree from Kent College of Law.

  Finding the practice of law in Chicago mostly closed to African Americans, Abbott hit upon the idea of creating a newspaper for black readers. He already had printing skills and experience as a reporter with the Savannah Tribune; his stepfather had once established a newspaper. Converting his landlady’s apartment kitchen into an editorial office, Abbott ordered up a 300-copy press run of the Chicago Defender on May 5, 1905. The four-page, six-column broadsheet weekly was a hit.

  TAKING A PAGE FROM Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, Abbott gave his copy a sensational sheen and packed his headlines with a melodramatic vocabulary. Living up to its name, the Defender chronicled every racist injustice, from atrocities such as lynchings in the South to discrimination in the North, under its thunderous motto “American Race Prejudice Must Be Destroyed.”

  Within a decade of its founding, the weekly’s circulation exceeded 50,000. But the actual number of readers was far greater. “Copies
,” said one reader, “were passed around until worn out.” African Americans in the South dared not receive the Defender through the U.S. mail. To do so would tip off watchful whites that they were reading the incendiary sheet, banned by law in some communities. Instead, the paper devised another system to get its issues into the hands of its Southern subscribers. It formed an alliance with Pullman porters, rewarding them financially with payments and editorially with coverage. Each week the men would get bundles of the Defender, store them in their personal lockers on the trains, and drop them off at barbershops and churches along their Southern routes. By 1920, two-thirds of the newspaper’s 130,000 circulation was outside of Chicago. The Defender’s national readership was considered so threatening to racial order that the U.S. government military intelligence created a 64-page report on its circulation growth, complete with maps, as if charting the progress of an invading force.

  The Defender was no more solely a Chicago newspaper than the New York Times was merely a New York newspaper. It was America’s black newspaper. Southern readers were fed an endless diet of stories about the prosperous life that awaited blacks in Chicago, accompanied by graphic reminders of the horrors at home. It sparked a migration fever. In turn, the Defender fueled it by providing hard-to-find transportation and resettlement information and each week covered the migrants’ arrivals in Chicago. “I bought a Chicago Defender, and after reading it and seeing the golden opportunity, I have decided to leave this place at once,” wrote a Tennessee man. As a poem the Defender made popular exclaimed: