Spinning the Globe (4 page)

By 1916, the Great Migration was in full swing. Labor agents hired by the railroads and steel mills descended on southern towns, recruiting black workers with promises of guaranteed jobs and free train tickets to Chicago. In May 1917, the
Defender
launched the “Great Northern Drive,” sounding the clarion call with banner headlines, photographs, and rhymed verse: “Some are coming on the passenger,/Some are coming on the freight,/Others will be found walking,/For none have time to wait.” And the stampede was on. Some southern cites were so alarmed by the mass exodus that they banned sales of the
Defender,
fearing that its exhortations would drain the southern labor force. But nothing could slow the tide. Men often made the journey first, found jobs in the slaughterhouses at fifty cents an hour (more than twice the average wage of a southern farm-worker), and sent for their families to join them. In 1910, Chicago had 44,000 black residents; by 1920, the number had swollen to 109, 458 (a 146 percent increase), with an estimated 50,000 arriving between 1916 and 1919 alone. By 1930, the number would more than double again, to nearly 234,000.

Into this crucible of opportunity and hope, thousands of young black men, following the tracks of the Great Migration, would rise to manhood on the mean streets and school-yard courts of Chicago’s South Side.

On March 7, 1907, Inman Jackson was born in Chicago to sixteen-year-old Sarah Jackson, who had left her home in South Carolina and journeyed north, like so many others, seeking a better life. Three years later, in 1910, another teenager, Rosia Pullins, also sixteen, gave birth to her first son, Albert. Unlike Sarah Jackson, Rosia was still in the South, in New Orleans, but soon she, too, would leave her family and make the long pilgrimage to the South Side. She arrived in 1915 with five-year-old Albert, who was already carrying the nickname that would stick with him throughout his life: Runt.

The two boys, Inman Jackson and Runt Pullins, were as different in size and temperament as any youngsters could be. Inman was tall and reserved, deferential, almost laconic, with an aura of dignified silence that surrounded him throughout his life. Runt was, as his nickname implies, small and as thin as a cornstalk, but he had a dynamic personality that seemed to propel him into the limelight wherever he went, just as surely as Inman Jackson sought the shadows.

Other young boys from the South followed the same migratory route. In 1916, nine-year-old William “Kid” Oliver and his younger brother Napoleon rode the Illinois Central from Bolden, Mississippi, to Chicago to join their father, who was already working as a shoeshine boy at the Morrison Hotel, in the Loop. The Oliver boys had been living with their grandmother and grandfather, an ex-slave, on a farm in Mississippi until their father sent for them. “When we got off the train at the Twelfth Street station, I was amazed at all the tall buildings and the horses pulling fire wagons,” recalls Napoleon Oliver, now ninety-three. There were others: Byron “Fat” Long and Roosevelt Hudson came from Alabama; Walter “Toots” Wright from Mississippi; Agis Bray from Louisiana; and Randolph Ramsey and George Easter from Tennessee.

As more African Americans poured into the South Side, the housing situation became critical. During World War I, few new houses were constructed, so the existing structures became over
crowded and dilapidated, and the South Side deteriorated into a “festering slum.” When blacks attempted to move beyond the “Black Belt” into surrounding neighborhoods, restrictive covenants were passed, white neighborhoods were “redlined,” and, if that didn’t stop the influx, roaming gangs of hoodlums attacked black families living on the fringes of white neighborhoods. Between 1917 and 1919, twenty-four firebombs were thrown into the homes of black families or their white landlords.

Resentment toward southern blacks came not just from whites, but from native-born Chicago blacks who feared that the unsophisticated country folk would incite additional prejudice against all African Americans. As one black educator described it: “The southern Negro has pushed the Chicago Negro out of his home, and the Chicago Negro in seeking a new home is opposed by the whites. What is to happen? The whites are prejudiced against the whole Negro group. The Chicago Negro is prejudiced against the southern Negro. Surely it makes a difficult situation for the southern Negro. No wonder he meets a word with a blow.”

When they enrolled in school, southern blacks were conspicuous by their shabby clothing and halting grammar, and were often two years below grade in schoolwork. That was not surprising given the deplorable funding of public education for blacks in the South, where African American teachers were paid less than half their white counterparts, and black schools were horribly neglected and often in session only five months of the year. Even the
Defender,
the staunchest champion of the migration, published a cautionary list of “do’s and don’ts” for new arrivals, including: “Don’t appear on the street with old dust caps, dirty aprons and ragged clothes” and “Go clean up north…. In the south a premium was put on filth and uncleanliness. In the north a badge of honor is put on the man or woman who is clean.”

Following the pattern established during the earlier Jewish migration, black churches, community organizations, and settlement houses sponsored recreation leagues and athletic events for black youth, hoping that sports would speed up the assimilation process. A men’s basketball league was operating on the South Side as early as 1909, a church league followed in 1912, and two years later the
South Side Boy’s Club and Wabash Avenue YMCA were sponsoring basketball teams that played white teams all over Chicago.

As the Great Migration continued, however, the racial lines in the city hardened, and the segregation of neighborhoods, schools, playgrounds, and beaches became fixed and irrevocable. The racial divide was less noticeable in elementary schools, as younger children seemed almost oblivious to racial differences. When Kid and Napoleon Oliver arrived from Mississippi, they enrolled in Colman Grammar School, which was about 50 percent black, with most of the white students Italians and Swedes. “I didn’t know anything about prejudice,” Napoleon Oliver recalls. “We all played together, ate together—all the same. We were all buddies.” By high school, however, the racial lines were starkly drawn. In 1922, Wendell Phillips High School was 56 percent black, yet had only one black teacher (the lone black teacher in all of Chicago’s high schools) and all school clubs were exclusively white. Sometimes, segregation turned to confrontation, even on the basketball court. In 1913, all-white Evanston High refused to play Lane Tech, whose top player, Virgil Blueitt, was black. And when another school with three black players showed up for a game at the all-white Tilden High, the white team not only refused to play but attacked the black players. “[They] got just about laid out,” one of the white players said. “The white fellows weren’t hurt any, but the coons got some bricks.”

Already one of the most ethnically segregated cities in America, Chicago was becoming a cauldron of racial hatred and distrust, with a fault line running across the South Side. In July 1919, the fault split wide open. A stone-throwing clash between black and white youths at a Lake Michigan beach, during which a black boy drowned, escalated into a full-blown riot that swept over the city. Innocent bystanders of both races were pulled off trolley cars and beaten to death; white gangs rampaged through South Side neighborhoods, beating and shooting blacks indiscriminately; armed blacks retaliated against whites in kind; and houses in black and white neighborhoods were burned to the ground.

“My mother wouldn’t let us go outside for four days,” recalls Napoleon Oliver, who was nine years old at the time. “We could hear ’em shooting downtown. We’d look out the windows and see guys
walking up the street with shotguns—there wasn’t no law anywhere. The whites was killing everything black, and the blacks was killing everything white.”

After four days of chaos, the riot was finally subdued by the state militia, but not before 38 people were killed (23 blacks and 15 whites) and 537 injured. The rioting ended, but the underlying causes of it—and the resentments toward blacks—did not.

In the wake of the riot, the African American community turned inward, creating a protective wall, almost a parallel universe, that was separate and, if not equal, at least independent of the hostile white community. The South Side created its own identity, and even its own name: they called it Bronzeville. Sports became one of the primary mechanisms for rallying together all segments of the black community—southern and northern, immigrant and native-born—into one cheering throng. On the playing fields and basketball courts, the differences between country boys from Mississippi and city slickers from Prairie Avenue quickly faded. They were all players, were all of “our group,” as the
Defender
phrased it, and they were all on the same team.

In the black community, as in the white, baseball and boxing were, by far, the most popular sports. The most acclaimed black athletes in Chicago were Rube Foster, the father of Negro League baseball, and Jack Johnson, former heavyweight boxing champion, who infuriated whites with his flashy lifestyle and consorting with white women. It was on the basketball court, however, that South Side athletes would achieve their greatest triumphs in Chicago sports,

In 1922, the Robert L. Giles American Legion Post sponsored a basketball team, made up of World War I veterans from the “Fighting Eighth,” an all-black unit, which compiled a 71–5 record in the Chicago city league. The Wabash YMCA and the South Side Boys’ Club also fielded successful teams. But the torch for the South Side was carried most proudly by Wendell Phillips High School, which by the mid-1920s was nearly all black. Named for the famed abolitionist, Wendell Phillips became the magnet for athletic and educational achievement in black Chicago.

In 1922, when the Wendell Phillips heavyweight basketball team made it to the city semifinals, the
Defender
urged the entire South
Side to turn out to support the “red and black machine.” Dr. Albert Johnson, the Phillips coach, was building a basketball powerhouse with a cadre of talented players—all of them from the South—who would eventually carry the legacy of Wendell Phillips basketball far beyond Chicago: Tommy Brookins, Randolph Ramsey, Toots Wright, Kid Oliver, Fat Long, Lester Johnson, Runt Pullins, George Easter, Agis Bray, Roosie Hudson, and many more.

In 1924, led by the “hot combination” of Brookins, Wright, and Lester Johnson, the Wendell Phillips heavyweights defeated Englewood High, an all-white team, to claim the South Central Division championship and advance to the finals of the city championship against Lane Tech. By the end of the game, Phillips’ rooters were hysterical and the school battle cry—“Fight, Phillips, fight!”—rang out across the gym. On March 8, the night of the championship—which the
Defender
called “the night of all nights”—the Chicago Elevated ran a special train from the South Side to Loyola University, the site of the game. Unhappily, the Phillips heavyweights suffered an ignominious defeat, losing 18–4. Lane Tech was led by Bill Watson, its lone black player, and despite Phillips’ defeat, the
Defender
nevertheless took solace in the fact that out of two million people in Chicago, the city championship game was decided by six black boys: “Since we had to battle, we bow out gracefully to Bill Watson.”

By then, basketball had become more than a mere sporting event on the South Side; it was a major social affair. For years, the Giles Post American Legion team had been hosting dances after their games at the Eighth Regiment Armory. And in 1925, the
Defender
inaugurated its “Annual Winter Classic,” which matched Wendell Phillips against one of the top black teams in the county for the unofficial “national cage title.” Described as the “greatest spectacle in the history of our Race in Chicago,” 4,500 people showed up for the gala, and another 2,000 were turned away. The Winter Classic drew as much coverage on the
Defender
’s society page as on the sports page, as women arrived in silk gowns and men in tuxedos, and fifty-five box seats were reserved for Bronzeville’s elite (“businessmen, doctors, lawyers, society matrons, Debs and near debs”). The Wendell Phillips band entertained before the game, the Booster Orchestra played during half
time, and Joe Jordan’s Orchestra played afterward until the wee hours, turning the dance floor into a “surging mass of humanity.”

By 1926, basketball on the South Side was at its peak. Tommy Brookins, Randolph Ramsey, and Lester Johnson had already left Wendell Phillips but were still playing for the Wabash Y Squirrels, St. Monica’s Catholic Church, and the Giles Post American Legion. The Phillips heavyweights had reloaded with Toots Wright, Fat Long, and Kid Oliver, and sixteen-year-old Runt Pullins was coming up through the ranks, already making his mark for the lightweights.

These young men were battle-tested veterans who had played together for years, had won tough games in hostile arenas, facing the taunts and jeers of white crowds, the blind eye of the referee, even the bricks thrown at the “coons.” Once they left the sheltering hallways of Wendell Phillips, they would be entering a world that was foreboding and openly hostile to black men. It didn’t take a guidance counselor at Phillips to explain to them what their job opportunities were. All they had to do was look around. On every street corner, on every tenement stoop, they saw in the haunted eyes of their fathers, their older brothers, and their friends the limitations of the American dream. Their chances of entering the skilled trades were almost nil, as the craft unions blatantly discriminated against blacks. A civil service job at the post office, which was the top of the career ladder, was almost impossible to come by without political connections. If they were lucky, they might catch on as an unskilled laborer in the packinghouses, sweeping the steaming guts off the killing-room floor, or as a porter or cook in one of the fancy hotels in the Loop, or as a janitor, dishwasher, messenger boy, or shoeshine boy. In any case, that’s all they’d ever be—somebody’s “boy,” bowing and scraping for the white man’s dime. A worse fate, shared by many black men, was to have no job at all.