Our Kind of People

by Lawrence Otis Graham

  Although their fathers both grew up in the late 1800s, graduated from Harvard and Northwestern Medical School, and then became well-to-do businessmen while running the most powerful black-owned business in Chicago between the 1920s and 1950s, Gibson and Evans remember their privileged youth against a backdrop of a midwestern city that remained racially polarized longer than any other. It was a city that was run by a white elite that used restrictive covenants and other bizarre discriminatory laws to keep blacks in their place—on the South Side.

  As adults, Gibson and Evans have seen much of the city’s old bigotry erode. Always accomplished and successful, they and their colleagues have pushed farther north into neighborhoods and institutions their fathers never would have imagined. Gibson, a successful attorney and member of the Boulé, laughs when his all-black chapter meets at the Union League Club downtown. “When I was a student going to the University of Chicago, both the school and the members of this club were part of the conservative leadership that worked to enforce restrictive covenants against blacks and keep us out of good neighborhoods and important networking clubs like this,” explains Gibson, “but now we’ve gotten to see blacks head a lot of major institutions, including the Union League.”

  For Evans, a founding member of the Chicago Girl Friends who holds a master’s degree in biology, the pivotal point was probably the week she and her husband, a retired magazine publisher who was also the nation’s highest-ranking black advertising executive, moved into a duplex apartment on the sixty-fourth floor of the John Hancock Building, a downtown luxury commercial and residential building that remains a centerpiece in the city’s skyline. “Most people who knew Chicago’s history with blacks were surprised that we were able to get that apartment, because for years we had politicians and real estate brokers who were unapologetic about their support of segregation,” says Evans, “but it was 1969, and we had more choices by then. We were no longer required to live on the South Side. My husband, Leonard, wanted to be nearer to the office where he published Tuesday magazine, and I wanted to be closer to the office where I worked with the United Negro College Fund. We hadn’t yet elected a black mayor, but blacks were gaining more clout.”

  Since Chicago’s city neighborhoods were more segregated than the neighborhoods of other cities, many wonder why so many black-owned enterprises succeeded there. In fact, many New Yorkers ask why New York’s black population of the 1940s and 1950s—a larger and less confined community than Chicago’s black South Side—was not producing black-owned businesses at a rate equal to that of Chicago. The explanation that many offer is surprising. Many black businessmen reason that Chicago’s extreme segregation made it possible—or better yet, necessary—for blacks to build businesses that attracted undiluted black support. Black Harlemites in New York, on the other hand, were spending their money in the white-owned establishments that populated most of Harlem and in other nonblack neighborhoods where blacks lived and shopped.

  And—using New York for a further comparison—because its black population of the 1930s and 1940s, for instance, was less ghettoized and was dispersed in many noncontiguous Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Bronx neighborhoods—Harlem, San Juan Hill, Greenwich Village, Brownsville, Ocean Hill, and the South Bronx, for example—black economic power was diluted. Chicago’s blacks were ghettoized into one relatively easily defined area, and because of such boundaries—south of Twenty-sixth Street—black-owned and black-run businesses were able to fuel the community and flourish.

  Dempsey Travis, a real estate developer and major landholder on Chicago’s South Side, agrees. “For the last sixty-five years, it’s been very easy to draw the boundary lines between whites and blacks in this city,” he says. “Almost regardless of black people’s wealth, we have still remained primarily on the South Side. And that’s so ironic because this city was settled by a black man. In fact, going back before the twentieth century—in the 1890s—blacks were actually living in every neighborhood of the city.”

  First founded and settled by the black explorer Jean-Baptiste DuSable of Santo Domingo, Haiti, in 1773, Chicago was begun as a thirty-acre land parcel. DuSable, working as a fur trapper and trading-post operator, eventually owned in excess of four hundred acres. He and his new Native American wife remained in the area until 1800, when he moved to Missouri.

  With an early black population that was much smaller than those of southern cities like Washington, Memphis, Atlanta, and Richmond, Chicago had a small black elite in the mid- and late 1800s—it consisted of only a few families. Most of them lived very integrated lives: They interacted while working together with liberal whites who had been abolitionists when the Underground Railroad moved black southern slaves into the North. The black elite of the period included people like physician Daniel Williams, Pullman Train Company executive Julius Avendorph, caterer Charles Smiley, and attorney Laing Williams. They were all educated people who lived, worked, and socialized among whites. “In fact,” says Travis, who also wrote the book Autobiography of Black Chicago, “at that time, there were blacks living throughout the North Side and elsewhere. Though we were small in numbers, we were represented in every census tract.”

  Travis points out, however, that the total black population was still under fifteen thousand people. It was not until around World War I, the time of a major black migration from the South to the North, that a substantial black population arrived in the city. Most of these black southerners came—about seventy thousand of them between 1900 and 1920—as a result of the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper that was read in the South by educated blacks eager to escape their more rural environment. When these blacks arrived in town, the old-guard black families and their social clubs immediately decided who was “in” and who was not. Truman Gibson’s parents and Maudelle Bousfield Evans’s parents were clearly “in” as far as the black old guard was concerned. Interestingly, as old-guard blacks were busy trying to separate the “society blacks” like themselves from the new working-class arrivals, whites were making plans to ghettoize both groups together on the South Side. And they quickly did so by establishing restrictive covenants that moved blacks out of white areas.

  In fact, the white community responded quite aggressively to black mobility during the early years of World War I. In the working-class and middle-class white neighborhoods that saw blacks moving in, white residents simply bombed the houses or set them afire. In more upscale neighborhoods like Hyde Park, which surrounds the University of Chicago, white residents organized a full-blown plan to preempt any sales to upwardly mobile blacks who might be able to afford homes in the well-to-do community. My Uncle Telfer, who died before the upscale neighborhood allowed blacks to buy homes there, had saved a copy of Hyde Park’s neighborhood newspaper, published in 1920, which read, “…Every colored man who moves into the Hyde Park neighborhood knows that he is damaging his white neighbor’s property. Consequently…he forfeits his right to be employed by the white man…. Employers should adopt a rule of refusing to employ Negroes who persist in residing in Hyde Park.”

  Soon after that time, restrictive covenants making it illegal to sell homes to blacks, regardless of their wealth, were strictly enforced.

  But regardless of how violently whites reacted to the influx of poor and upwardly mobile blacks, the old-guard blacks of Chicago had their own dismal way of responding to their fellow blacks in this northern city. They were not happy to see them arriving.

  “Not surprisingly, elitism was quite evident. But the rules governing black society in Chicago were always slightly different from the rules that were used in the southern cities,” explains former Chicago Defender society columnist Theresa Fambro Hooks. “In the South, black society was determined by the years your family had lived in a particular city and by their ties to one or more of the nearby black colleges like Howard or Fisk or Spelman. But the rules were different in Chicago because almost everybody was new—almost all of them had migrated from the South. There were very few old families and there w
ere no old local black universities to be tied to.”

  So the standard for black society in Chicago became, instead, financial success and, to a lesser extent, family ties to a few of the northern white universities. In both regards, the Gibson and Bousfield families were at the top. Acceptance by the right schools, the right churches, and the right clubs proved that. In fact, Truman Gibson Sr. and Midian Bousfield were a part of a triumvirate of powerful black men in Chicago.

  A look at their credentials and the business they built reveals why: “My father was a 1909 graduate of Harvard and was responsible for forming Supreme Life Insurance Company of Chicago,” says Gibson, who sat on the Supreme board for several years, “but Dad had actually worked for two other insurance companies before. He’d been friends with Mrs. Alonzo Herndon, whose husband was the millionaire owner of Atlanta Life Insurance, and it was Mrs. Herndon and W. E. B. Du Bois who encouraged my father to go to Harvard after finishing Atlanta University. So after Harvard, he came back and became an executive at Atlanta Life.”

  Having trained under one of the richest black businessmen of the South, Truman senior went north to Columbus, Ohio, where he started Supreme Life of Ohio. “In 1929, my father merged Supreme Life with two other insurance companies and moved my mother, brother, and me to Chicago,” says Gibson, who was starting his first year at the University of Chicago at the time.

  That same year, Chicago became the first congressional district in the nation to elect a black to the U.S. House of Representatives since the late 1800s, when a handful of blacks had been elected during the temporary black political gains of the Reconstruction period. “With us having Oscar DePriest, the only black congressman in the country,” says Gibson, “you would have presumed that this town was some bastion of racially liberal open-mindedness. Believe me, it wasn’t.”

  A member of the Chicago Boulé, Gibson’s father, Truman senior, formed a relationship with Maudelle’s father, Midian, and with attorney Earl B. Dickerson. Dickerson was a 1920 graduate of the University of Chicago and later became Chicago’s assistant corporation counsel and, in 1939, a city councilman. The third member of the team, Dr. Midian O. Bousfield, was a 1909 graduate of Northwestern Medical School.

  “My father started practicing medicine in Chicago in 1914, and he’d become president of a company called Liberty Life Insurance,” recalls Maudelle Bousfield Evans, who spent most of her life in Chicago. “My dad, Truman’s father, and Harry Pace, who headed Northwestern Life of Newark, New Jersey, then merged all three companies in order to create Supreme Life. My father later became medical director of Supreme as well as president of the National Medical Association.”

  With business leaders of the sophistication of Gibson, Bousfield, and Dickerson, black Chicago had done a much better job of creating a coalition of black talent than had cities like New York, whose black community was divided by the Harlem and Brooklyn cliques and was somewhat late in building strong black businesses and electing national black political leaders.

  “The Gibsons, Bousfields, and Dickersons were like Chicago royalty when I was growing up,” says Ronne Rone Hartfield, who remembers reading about Earl Dickerson’s daughter, Diane, in the city’s black society columns. “The black community in Chicago was concentrated enough that everybody knew who those families were. And among my own group of young friends, we all followed Diane’s fairy-tale life in the papers. Because of her dad’s position in business and politics, she had access to places and people that we didn’t know. Even her coming-out party got reported in the papers,” says Hartfield, who attended the all-black Wendell Phillips High School and the University of Chicago for both college and graduate school before becoming executive director of education at the Art Institute of Chicago.

  But even with a legacy of such well-heeled black businessmen and even with its history of serving as the hometown for the first three blacks—Oscar DePriest, Arthur Mitchell, and William Dawson—to serve in a post-Reconstruction U.S. Congress, Chicago and its black elite remain a conundrum when students from other cities with large black populations analyze Chicago’s inability to elect local black leaders with any consistency. Unlike Atlanta, Washington, Detroit, New Orleans, and other cities with a long history of a black elite, Chicago has managed to elect only one black mayor. It has done no better than communities like Minneapolis, Seattle, or Denver—cities that have elected black mayors with newer and smaller black populations.

  “The problem that always plagued upscale blacks in Chicago,” says a retired city employee, “is that they were always jealous of each other. Everybody thinks there can only be one HNIC—one Head Nigger In Charge—to represent the black community. And the white people here have been cynical enough to play us off against each other and keep us divided. The old mayor Daley perfected the game of dividing the black elite by utilizing tokenism as a means to keep blacks angry at each other. Elevate one black and demote the other. Keep each one of us looking over our shoulder.”

  “Just look at the history of the most talented blacks in this city,” says a retired black Cook County employee. “We’re always selling each other out or talking down the rising black stars. People did it to John Johnson after he became a millionaire by publishing Ebony. They tore him down because he grew up poor. They did it to George Johnson when he turned Afro Sheen and his Johnson Products company into household names. They said he and his wife, Joan, were too “nouveau.” When Jesse Jackson was running Operation PUSH here, we said he was too young and anti-establishment. We said Jewel Lafontant was too pro-establishment. When we got Harold Washington elected as mayor, we joined in with whites when they questioned his sex life. Early on, even the Chicago Defender, our own black newspaper, went after some of the liberal black leaders. Washington and Atlanta have their skin color fixation. New York has its American-born and West Indian-born conflict. New Orleans has its obsession with French family lineage. And we’ve got the HNIC problem that came out of Daley’s machine politics of rewarding and anointing Uncle Toms.”

  Some of the older black Chicagoans agree that their community would have been better off if some of the elements among the black elite had worked together sooner. For one, the very first black congressman from Chicago, Oscar DePriest, was a staunch Republican who was elected by a mostly black, working-class community. A major supporter of President Herbert Hoover, he disappointed many of his black constituents when he spoke out against the liberal New Deal programs that Franklin D. Roosevelt had put in place. The very people that stood to gain from these programs had elected a representative who chose the party line over his community’s needs. Similarly, the Chicago Defender, the nation’s most influential black newspaper, was published by the wealthy Abbott family, also supporters of the Republican establishment. Although the paper later came to support liberal programs that aided blacks, the patrician publisher Robert Abbott, who lived in a brick South Parkway mansion, infuriated many black Chicagoans by his occasional tendency to turn a blind eye to the needs of his readers and neighbors who had so much less than he.

  Another person who became a divisive element in the black community was the well-to-do black attorney Arthur Mitchell, who got himself elected to Congress in 1934 after having moved from Washington only six years earlier. Even though he was elected by the mostly black First Congressional District, he very quickly distanced himself from other Chicago blacks by giving a famous speech in which he declared that he did “not represent Negro people in any way.” Educated at Tuskegee Institute, Columbia, and Harvard Universities, Mitchell was later credited with filing a Supreme Court case that led to the desegregation of passenger trains. “But he only filed that suit because he, himself, got pulled out of a first-class seat on his way to Arkansas while he was in Congress,” says an unconvinced Chicagoan who had lived in Mitchell’s congressional district in the early 1940s.

  “And interestingly,” says Dempsey Travis, former president of the Chicago NAACP, “we’ve always had a visible group of black Republicans.” A further
division between elite blacks in Chicago has, indeed, been the presence of many of them in the Republican Party. My own Uncle Telfer had been one of those individuals until he was won over by the results of Roosevelt’s problack programs. But there were many who remained Republican.

  “Like that Jewel Stradford Lafontant,” says a retired Chicago Defender reporter as he recalls Lafontant, a lifelong well-to-do black Republican and one of the city’s most accomplished professional women. “There she was, sitting on the boards of all these Fortune 500 companies—like Mobil and TWA—and supporting all these white Republicans. I was aghast when I saw her standing up on the podium at the Republican Convention in 1960—seconding the nomination of Richard Nixon. Of all the people she could have tied herself to. That one picture captured all the problems with the black elite in Chicago. We were in the middle of the civil rights movement, with black people getting our butts kicked in every part of Chicago, on every city’s six o’clock news report, and this brilliant black woman—from the University of Chicago Law School—stands up there in pearls, in front of an all-white convention, and nominates someone like Nixon. We’ve always been a small percentage of this city, but as time goes on we keep trying so hard to be accepted by the white majority that we just sell our souls. I don’t think her father or grandfather would have done what she did.”