City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (11 page)

In the workplace, too, blacks were soon causing friction. Since strikebreaking had long been the only route for African Americans into many industries, the words “Negro” and “scab” were often seen as synonymous by many labor groups. At the Union Stockyards, where the number of black workers increased by a factor of twelve in the years from 1915 to 1918, efforts were made to recruit the new workers into existing unions. But many of the migrants, relegated to subordinate, all-black locals and denied access to high-paying jobs, were rightfully suspicious of organized labor and refused to join. (As one black stockyard worker said of the unions, “You pay money and get nothing.”) These workplace conflicts just intensified as many white soldiers returned from the war only to find their old positions filled by black interlopers from the South.
⁷

But it was in the area of housing that racial strains were most keenly felt. New residential construction had all but stopped in Chicago during the war, and so the new arrivals faced an acute housing shortage. The South Side Black Belt, already home to almost 90 percent of the city’s blacks, simply could house no more within its existing boundaries. With Lake Michigan to the east and largely industrial and commercial zones to the north and west, the neighborhood could feasibly grow only to the south and southwest, into
previously all-white sections of Kenwood, Hyde Park, and other nearby areas—setting off an “invasion” that longtime residents regarded with increasing resentment.
⁸

At first, efforts to halt the integration were peaceful. Neighborhood organizations such as the Hyde Park–Kenwood Property Owners’ Association launched initiatives—often under the cover of promoting cleaner, safer streets—to keep their districts “clear of undesirables.” Real estate agents were discouraged from renting or selling to African Americans, and propaganda campaigns urged residents to protect property values by preserving the “lily white” character of the area. When these efforts failed, however, the tactics turned uglier. Mobs armed with brickbats and other weapons gathered around black-occupied dwellings. Intimidating handbills were circulated: “Look out; you’re next for hell,” read one. Another, addressed to black tenants of a building on Vincennes Avenue, was more explicit: “We are going to
BLOW
these
FLATS TO HELL
and if you don’t want to go with them you had better move at once.”

And then the bombs started going off for real. Although the
Defender
, at least, was convinced that these acts of “attempted assault and murder” were committed by members of the Hyde Park–Kenwood Association, no conclusive evidence was ever found to link the organization to the incidents. In any case, the bombing effort was doomed to fail. By the end of the war, Chicago’s black population was still on the rise and still on the move into white neighborhoods, and there was little that anyone in the city could do to stop it.
⁹

*   *   *

One of the major beneficiaries of this mushrooming of Chicago’s black population was William Hale Thompson. Where the
Tribune
and other bastions of the white establishment could see only problems, Big Bill and Fred Lundin saw opportunity. Blacks were still overwhelmingly Republican at this time; they would not begin abandoning the party
of Lincoln until the 1930s, when FDR’s New Deal lured them to the Democratic side. African Americans in Chicago, eager to embrace the franchise they were denied down south, also voted in higher percentages than their white counterparts. And for the first time, blacks made up a significant portion of a northern city’s population. Recognizing these facts, Thompson and Lundin were among the first Chicago politicians to see the voters of the Black Belt for what they had now become—what Carl Sandburg would later call “the strongest effective unit of political power, good or bad, in America.”

Thompson, whose father fought the slave-owning rebels at Mobile Bay, had actually been attentive to black concerns since the beginning of his political career. One of his few accomplishments as an alderman had been sponsoring an ordinance to build a playground in a black section of his ward—allegedly the first municipal playground in the nation. “White people from nearby came over and said they wanted it in their neighborhood,” he would later boast in speeches. “I said to this, ‘I see you have a fine house and yard with fences around it and nice dogs but no children; I’ll build a playground for children and not [for] poodle dogs.’ ” Later, at a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, he threw away his prepared speech and spoke plainly to his audience of fifteen thousand African Americans: “My task is not easy,” he said. “Prejudices do exist against Negroes.… But to deny equal opportunity to the Negro in this land would be out of harmony with American history, untrue to sacred history, untrue to the sacred principles of liberty and equal rights, and would make a mockery of our boasted civilization.”
¹⁰

At a time when alleged progressives were falling pitifully short in their support of equal rights, such words showed significant political courage. And Thompson did not back down from them when he ran for mayor. “I’ll give you people the best opportunities you’ve ever had if you elect me,” he told a black audience during the 1915 campaign. “I’ll give your people jobs … and any of you want to
shoot craps, go ahead and do it.” That he was appealing more to new migrants than to the respectable black middle class is obvious from that last comment, but both ends of the spectrum ended up showing him strong support. The Second Ward’s black voters gave Big Bill the margins he needed in 1915 to win in both the primary and the general election.
¹¹

Whether Thompson’s election was truly a boon for Chicago’s blacks is debatable, but he
did
deliver on many of his promises. Aside from helping to sweep into office the first African American alderman in the city’s history (Oscar De Priest), he also appointed blacks to prominent posts in his administration. Edward Wright and Louis B. Anderson were named assistant corporation counsels (Anderson later became Big Bill’s floor manager in the city council), while the Reverend Archibald Carey was made an investigator in the city’s legal department. By the end of his first term, Thompson had also doubled the number of blacks on the police force. Nor did he neglect the more symbolic expressions of support. He appeared frequently at holiday celebrations and civic functions in the Black Belt, and one of his first official acts as mayor (a decision later reversed by a judge) was to ban the showing of D. W. Griffith’s notoriously racist
The Birth of a Nation
. Thompson denounced the film as an abomination and an insult to millions of American citizens.
¹²

Many whites disapproved of these efforts. Writers in the daily press began referring to city hall as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and questioned the wisdom of some of Thompson’s appointments. Big Bill did back down on at least one choice (of a black physician to the Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium), but on the rest he stood firm. “The persons appointed were qualified for their positions,” he argued. “In the name of humanity it is my duty to do what I can to elevate rather than degrade any class of American citizens.” This from a man derided by his allegedly more enlightened enemies as “a blubbering jungle hippopotamus.”
¹³

The black community responded with understandable enthusiasm to Thompson’s various expressions of support. The
Chicago Defender
in particular was lavish in its praise of the mayor, comparing him frequently to Abraham Lincoln and calling him “the best friend politically our people have had in the past half-century.” According to the
Defender
, the members of the race owed him their votes. “He has treated us fairly and squarely,” an editorial claimed in late 1918, during Thompson’s unsuccessful Senate campaign. “We have waited too many long, weary years for such a friend, and we should be loyal to him.”
¹⁴

But there were some in Chicago’s Black Belt who were not quite so entranced with Big Bill Thompson. For those working to mitigate the squalor of black neighborhoods, the mayor’s bruited support often seemed all talk and grand gestures, with very little real conviction behind it. Wasn’t it Thompson’s police department that was pushing vice and gambling establishments into the Black Belt, degrading the neighborhood and providing black youths with an easy road to crime and vice but no route to respectable success? And wasn’t it that same police force that was now just standing by as black homes were being bombed? Clearly someone needed to point out that fine words and a few token jobs were not enough to earn the mayor comparisons to the Great Emancipator. And there was at least one black leader in Chicago determined to do just that.

*   *   *

On the night of March 19, a little girl playing on a South Side pavement watched as two men in a roadster drove past and tossed a package from the passenger side. It landed on the steps of 4724 State Street, the offices of black banker and real estate agent Jesse Binga. Curious, the girl turned to a woman standing next to her. “Let’s see what it is,” she said. But the woman held her back, warning, “No, it might be a bomb.”

A few seconds later, the package exploded, rocking the neighborhood and showering the sidewalks on both sides of the street with broken glass.

Only one person—a frightened man who jumped out of a third-floor window at the sound of the blast—was hurt. Another bomb a few minutes later on Calumet Avenue, apparently thrown from the same roadster, hurt no one at all. But for Chicago’s black population, the implications of this new attack were ominous: The pace of bombings was accelerating, and it seemed clear that the Chicago Police Department was unwilling to do anything to stop them.
¹⁵

Admittedly, the police weren’t doing much to fight crime elsewhere in Chicago, either. As the spring of 1919 progressed, crime suddenly seemed to be out of control everywhere in the city. Holdups, shootings, stolen automobiles—all were now on the rise, making a mockery of the hopeful New Year’s sentiments about “Chicago’s greatest year.” In the first twenty days of March alone, the city had seen eighteen murders, two major bank robberies, three payroll holdups, and scores of assaults, muggings, and other offenses. John Garrity, Mayor Thompson’s chief of police, was on the defensive. Crime was rampant nationwide, he explained. There were simply too many soldiers returning from war and failing to find jobs. In Chicago, he added, the problem was compounded by the presence of five thousand unemployed African Americans newly arrived from the South. With so many idle, rootless black men in the city, it was no wonder that crime was so high.
¹⁶

To Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the well-known South Side journalist and anti-lynching activist, this was simply too much to take. Not only were blacks being disproportionately victimized by the rising tide of crime in Chicago; now, apparently, they were also going to be blamed for it. And this by the administration of a man who claimed to be the best friend of the Black Belt!

Born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862, Wells-Barnett had been a controversial figure for most of her adult life. Called everything from “the mother protector” of her race (by the
Illinois State Journal
) to “a slanderous and nasty mulatress” (by the
New York Times
), she had been on a one-woman “crusade for justice” since her early twenties, when she filed suit against the C&O Railroad for ejecting her from a first-class coach on a train out of Memphis. (When the conductor tried to pull her from her seat, the diminutive young teacher “hooked her feet under the seat in front of her, began scratching the conductor with her nails, and then bit his hands deeply enough to draw blood.”) Several years later, in response to the lynching of three black men in Memphis, she wrote a newspaper editorial so scathing that a mob of the city’s “leading citizens” ransacked the paper’s offices and warned the editorial’s author (who was in Philadelphia at the time) that if she ever returned to Memphis she would be hanged in front of the courthouse. This, of course, only cemented her resolve to keep writing. “They had destroyed my paper …, made me an exile, and threatened my life for hinting at the truth,” she later wrote, “[so] I felt that I owed it to myself and my race to tell the
whole
truth.”
¹⁷

Since moving north to Chicago in its world’s fair year of 1893 (when she caused a stir with her controversial pamphlet “The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World Columbian Exposition”), she had married and raised six children. But family life had done little to curtail her activities. When called upon to make speaking tours, she would simply pack up whatever child was still young enough to require her attentions and bring him or her along. She also organized several women’s political and suffrage clubs, served as Chicago’s first black female probation officer, worked with Jane Addams to prevent school segregation, and once even represented “the colored people of Illinois” in a court case against a sheriff who had failed
to prevent a lynching in Cairo. (“Mother,” her thirteen-year-old son had said to her when at first she seemed reluctant to take on the task, “if you don’t go, no one else will.”) Anticipating that Chicago’s burgeoning black population would soon need a reliable source of social services, she and her husband had founded the Negro Fellowship League in 1910. Conceived as a kind of black version of Hull House, the league was to serve as a “lighthouse” for black migrants, finding them jobs and housing and providing them with alternatives to the saloon and the brothel as places to spend their idle hours.