by Studs Terkel
We found him. About thirty people came in, and all thirty identified him at the show-up. We put that fellow in the penitentiary for five years. That gives you an idea how desperate fellows were to secure work. They’d go for almost anything.
Did you have any encounters with strikers at that time or labor organizers … ?
There was nothing wrong with those fellows organizing the CIO. Left wing is a term that was used, where you don’t go around with the rank-and-file. They organized the fellows that worked hard for a living up at the stockyards. The American Federation of Labor did nothing for the laborer, nothing.
I can remember when my father worked at the stockyards when I was a little boy. That’s fifty years ago. His salary was ten cents an hour. My brother worked up there for the same. He worked ten hours for a dollar a day. If they mentioned unions up there, they’d get fired. American Federation of Labor did nothing for these men. It was during the Depression, the CIO came along.
That’s when they started calling ’em left wings and bolsheviks and so forth and so on. Personally I don’t think they were any more bolshevik or Communist than I was. They just wanted an honest living, that’s all.
If all this happened today, I think the people would take it in their own hands, the way things are going. They’re a different breed now. More educated today, more educated.
There was no basic race trouble at that time. The colored stayed by themselves, they never marched into any neighborhoods. People were more or less indifferent to them.
Earl B. Dickerson
President of the Supreme Life Insurance Company. “It is written largely on the lives of Negro people. Now we are seeking to move into the mainstream, due to the fact that competition is coming in from white companies. All this has happened since the 1954 Supreme Court decision.”
He has been president of the Chicago Urban League, as well as of the National Bar Association, the Cook County Bar Association168 and the National Lawyers Guild.
From 1939 to 1941, he was a member of the Chicago City Council as alderman from the Second Ward.
“The Depression was like a hurricane. Fortunately these ‘Acts of God’ are not prejudiced. They kill whites as well as Negroes.”
THE SOUTH SIDE was very much as it is now in the ghettos. People standing around on corners. The streets were crowded whether it was Saturday or Monday. People who didn’t have carfare to even seek jobs. Hopelessness on their faces, as they sat on stoops…. Almost all the Negro companies went out of business. The banks in the community were closed. Though they catered to black depositors, they were operated by whites.
At almost every meeting of the City Council, delegations came down from the South Side, asking for better relief treatment. Many times on the floor of the Council, I argued for more consideration of their needs. The Council was grudging and niggardly in its response. An alderman from a West Side ward 169 accused them of being lazy: “That’s why so many of them are on relief,” he said.
I replied, “It’s like tying a man’s hands behind his back, beating him on the head and accusing him of being a coward because he doesn’t fight back.” During my investigations, I found very few Negroes employed by the city and none by most of the large State Street stores.
The Council was run by Mayor Kelly just as it’s now run by Daley. He was a ruthless, domineering figure. It was a one-man show. There were only three aldermen who really challenged him. Paul Douglas was one. John Boyle was another. I was the third.
At first, Kelly was friendly. But when I introduced resolutions challenging the way things were, he changed. I challenged the winking at restrictive covenants that had so much to do with the development of today’s ghettos. The School Committee hadn’t had a meeting in six years, I discovered. I asked why it was that white students could transfer to other areas at will, but Negro children couldn’t. None of my resolutions passed. Kelly didn’t approve.
Oh yes, once I succeeded. I urged that the traction ordinance include a non-discriminatory provision. At the time, there were no Negro motormen or conductors working the Surface Lines. The pressure was so strong—manpower shortage because of the war—Kelly acceded. Not that he was personally in favor of it. He was never a friend of the Negro people. He rode on Roosevelt’s coat tails.
He recounts Mayor Kelly’s choosing a relative newcomer to the ranks of the Democratic Party, William A. Dawson, who had been a Republican, as Congressional candidate, over himself in 1942, “because I couldn’t take orders.”
I have never been to the Council chambers since the day I left. Sometimes I regret those four years. I was denied my full development as a political person. Every door I sought to open for the Negro people was closed. In matters of housing, no success. In employment, no success. In education, no success. All I was able to do was raise the questions and bring them out in the open….
POSTSCRIPT: “I was appointed by Roosevelt to the first Fair Employment Practices Commission. I served from 1941 to 1943. I remember the hearings in Los Angeles. A big aircraft company, employing twenty thousand, had hired no Negroes. Not until the morning of the hearings did they employ fifteen. I asked the personnel manager in what departments they worked. He replied, ‘Custodial.’ That means they were sweeping floors.
“At another company, there were no black bricklayers. The reason given: one or two couldn’t work alongside whites. They’d have to get enough to work one side of the building. Since they couldn’t find that many, they’d employ none.”
Dr. Martin Bickham
THERE WERE MORE than forty thousand unemployed men in town back in 1925. Lumbermen, railroad men, miners … they followed the railroads into Chicago.
He was making a study for United Charities, a private welfare agency. His interest was primarily in the unemployed handicapped worker. “There were one-legged men, who had worked the trains. Sawyers, who had lost an arm in training camps. A colony of deaf mutes.” They, along with the blacks, were the first displaced.
I saw the Depression coming, as more of these handicapped came into my office. By early 1930, businessmen and social leaders in Chicago had developed the Cook County Relief Administration. They had no thought other than handing out a dole. I knew more was needed for preserving manhood. I developed a plan of work and talked it over with Ed Ryerson, who was chairman of the committee. I was called before them.
I told them about Paris in 1848, how the revolution was forestalled by men being put to work. I told them a revolution was in prospect right here if they didn’t give the men a chance to participate in our economy. They accepted my plan.
It was simple. The man was not to earn more than would be required for his family to live. No more than he would be getting on relief, though the pay was union scale. He’d work so many days until the equivalent sum was reached.
Weren’t you often asked: “Why would a man work when he’d get the same money on relief?”
The men wanted to work. This was the dominant theme through all the years of the Depression. I very seldom found a man who was willing to accept relief as a process of life. He knew it was debilitating. I’ll never forget the morning we opened the office. It was a cold November day, 1930. Thousands of men were lined up for blocks. Many were skilled men and carried their tools with them. In the course of that winter, we put almost ten thousand men to work.
Soon after I opened that office, among the first to see me were the ward committeemen and aldermen. Hinky Dink came and old Bauler, too.170 I talked to them courteously and asked them what they wanted. They drew out a list. I told them: if these people are on my list—or that of any accredited relief agency—they will go to work. Otherwise, they would not. These politicians went out with their tongues in their cheeks. They thought they could get around me. But when they found out, everybody else got the same medicine, they stood up in the City Council and defended my program.
In 1935, when some forces were strenuously attacking the WPA, I developed a reply adopted by Roosevelt and Hopkins:
the conservation of human resources. Here is democracy at work, conserving the capacity of breadwinners, conserving family life and the children of the nation. This is a fundamental responsibility of government.
The Tribune and some of those birds rode me unmercifully, made fun of me, tried to cry it down. But it captured the imagination of people everywhere….
As I traveled through the state, I’d find crowds of men in the county seats, standing around the hall, idle, gambling or something of the kind. Hungry looking, some of them drinking a little. As the WPA developed, these men disappeared. They would be out on a work project. They began to get wages. We were now away from the relief limit. WPA gave men full wages for full work. If a man worked as a carpenter, he got a carpenter’s wage.
There was very little shirking on these jobs. I surveyed them month after month, all over the state. Some of the projects, thought up by committees, may not have been too wise. These were the ones newsmen took digs at—leafraking, as they called it.
In my own neighborhood—I live in a suburb—some of my neighbors would be waiting for me on the porch. Men who had been in business and industry. I found them a number of WPA jobs.
By ’31, thousands of Negroes had been laid off. They were the first to go. Scores of them were evicted from their homes in the winter of that year. Their property was sitting out on the walk. That’s when the Commies came in, sharp operators from New York. They had parades and organized a riot. The police shot down six or eight Negroes on the street. This flared up the whole community. I spent the next forty-eight hours in the streets down there, trying to quiet things down.
I went down to see Ryerson and the committee of leading businessmen. They were much disturbed. They expected a riot there on Sunday. I said the only way to stop this business is to put these evicted men to work at once. This was on a Saturday. They said, “We don’t have the money.” I said, “You better get some.” By Monday morning, they had the money, and we put three hundred of those men to work in the parks that day. This quieted them. We met the issue….
Evictions, Arrests and Other Running Sores
Mrs. Willye Jeffries
A wisp of a woman: the black of her skin is highlighted by the startling white of her hair. She is seated in her kitchen. From the portable radio, the announcer, in machine-gun tempo, offers the news of the day.
In the adjoining room, on a neatly made bed, a very small boy is curled in sound sleep. He is a neighbor’s child.
Now WE had what was known as the Workers Alliance. Local 45, for which I was secretary and treasurer. And we were going into relief stations, sometimes gettin’ arrested two, three times a day.
We were fighting for an old lady that had died. And the relief wouldn’t give ’em that hundred dollars towards the burial. They didn’t want to give you nothing anyway. We got a crowd of about fifty people and went to the station. We gonna stay until we get this hundred dollars for this old lady. We finally succeeded in getting it. But we were two, three days before we could catch up with this man. This man was the head of everything. You see, the police would arrest us then. But when they learned we were fighting for a good cause, then they would let us alone.
There were policemen who felt this way, who would let you alone?
Oh, that guy they used to call Two-Gun Pete.
(Startled) Two-Gun Pete Washington?171
That’s right. He was one of them. But here at this relief station that day, they had those big patrol vans. You turned that thing bottoms up. Didn’t nobody go in. We turned it over. There were a lot of Polish women in this organization, too. They had cayenne pepper, and they threw it in those policemen’s eyes, and nobody knew who done it, but they went blind. That cayenne pepper, that red pepper. A lot of the time, the men were knocked down, but they get right up and fight again. The women, they played the biggest roles.
We had, oh a gentleman to die. We went over to the headquarters, and the workers were all working on the first floor then. We had a white lady, weighed about two, three hundred. We called her Ma Kuntz. She looked out. We were marching up and down, you know, picketing the place, because they wouldn’t bury this old man. So we just took the corpse over there—not the man, but something resembling the corpse—and just set it in there. Where the workers was. And they all went upstairs. We run them out, just marching around there. We shall not, we shall not be moved. Singing—meaning we shall not be disturbed. When it was lunch time, those workers made up $5 and sent it downstairs and told us to get something to eat.
The police patrol came. Ma Kuntz, she spied them out there well nigh before they got there. She had that old stick, and she’s just marching, keeping time with that stick, see? Well, she say, if the patrol should come, now don’t nobody get panicky. Just keep on doing what they’re doing. So they just come in and they just stood in the door, crossed their legs, kinda stood in the door like that and looked at us. Got back in that patrol and went about their businesses.
But we did get that old man put away. We stayed over two weeks on that first floor. We had blankets, we moved a piano in and we had a big time. We had plenty to eat, ’cause those that weren’t picketing saw that we had food every day.
An old time sit-in …
Sure, that’s what it was. It was a fight, too. But I enjoyed it, I really enjoyed it. I didn’t let them think I was powerless, either.
When my husband fell dead, my daughter wasn’t two years old. He died on the third of September on the job out at the packing … and she was two years old on the eighth of November. Well, I had this little girl and I just thought everybody was pushing me around because my husband was gone. And I was very mean. Very mean.
So I moved in a place—the old building is torn down now. The bathrooms and toilets were all on the halls. You could meet the water coming downstairs. It wasn’t fit for anybody to live in. I heard about it, and I moved in there to get into a fight. And I got a good fight.
I started organizing those people in there and every time I’d get one leaflet, they’d take ‘em down stairs and pile ’em on the landlord’s desk. He lived out in Beverly’s Hill.172 He’d come the next morning, with all those leaflets piled up there. Naturally he looked at me. “Miz Jeffries …” He was offering me $500 to stop organizing the building. I’d say, “Look, these people I’m organizing are my people and I do not sell them out. Your money is counterfeit.”
And, honey, Wilkins 173 had him a paid-off bunch of police officers. They were detectives, plainclothesmen, from Forty-eighth Street.174 He had a list of every widow woman living in the building, and was on relief. He gave those names to the police officers, and around eleven thirty or twelve o’clock, they’d come in and knock on your door to see if you had a man in there. See? Everywhere they found a man, they had those people on relief cut off.
So on this particular night, when the law knocked on my door, I say, “Who is that?” Me and a fella named Edward Gray was playing a game of cards. We had a drink. We had a pint of liquor settin’ on the table, but it wasn’t open. He knocked again. He say, “Police officer, open the door.” Well, I had a broom handle. I said, “Come on in. You got your goddam key.” And that time, he kicked on the door. I threw it open. He run it ag’in. I hit him. I said to my daughter, she was nine years old, “Jean, get out of bed and get down to the next block.” The president of the Workers Alliance was on the next block. She went down there and got Tony, and Tony couldn’t get here fast enough.
I was having a fight with Malone. Tony said, “O.K., hit him again, Sis.” And he stood and held his watch, forty-five seconds, he say, “Hit him again, Sis.” I got an old pen knife that I still got in my place that I pick my corns with sometimes. It was lying on the table. When he got tired of taking those hits over the head, he run under the stick and caught this arm and twisted it. That made me fall against the table. It knocked the knife off. My daughter saw it and run off the bed and run and picked it up. About that time, he just shoved his gun right into her side like that.
<
br /> So he finally called the patrol. He said, “There’s a fighting woman here and can’t do nothing with her.” I was a big lady. I wasn’t skinny like I am now. So here come the police, the patrol, the old black maria. They say, “Gray, you better get out of here. We don’t want you.” He said to them, “Look, I would be less than gentlemanly to walk out on this woman now. I visited with she and her husband when her husband was livin’ and I would be less than a man.” He said, “If she gets ninety-nine, I can certainly stand a hundred.” O.K., they took us both.
During the time we were waiting to go for trial, we got out a leaflet. Everybody from the South Side that belonged to the Workers Alliance was over at the courtroom that morning. So they messed around that trial all day, talk a little and call us up there.
In the meantime, Malone saw that everything was against him, ’cause he was the intruder. He had no business at my door. He called Gray to come in the hall. So Gray come back and he told me what Malone wanted. He wanted Gray and myself to pay a dollar fine and plead guilty. I said, “Look, I was a free woman when I come in here. And when I walk out I’m gonna be free.” I’m not gonna have no record when I got out of here.
Well, the case was called. Wilkins had about fifty people there to appear against us. They were sitting in the back of the courtroom. We went up and the judge say, “Case dismissed.” Wilkins and his wife got halfway up there and we were already halfway back. They didn’t know what happened. So they all went home.
Wilkins say, “Miz Jeffries, could I take you back to the South Side.” I say, “No, thank you. The streetcar runs out there. That’s how I got here, that’s how I’m going back.”
I was doing tenants’ work then and, you know, I didn’t mind going to court with all those other people. They thought I was a lawyer. (Laughs.)
You see, I had a big, brown briefcase. And after, they commence to holler in court every time I go in court, two and three times a day: “This old lawyer woman!” I got a whole lot of newspapers and tore ‘em up and put ’em in that briefcase. (Laughs.) Them were my law books. I had people laughin’ about that all the time: “Here comes that old lawyer woman!” Goin’ up front, case called … and I got my rosary laying there on that thing. The judge had on some, too. And I had a little pocket, here, stick the crucifix down. He thought I was a Catholic like him. (Laughs.) I didn’t lose a case.
