Black Chicagoans Research Articles

Progress is Painful: Race Relations and Education in Chicago Before the Great Migration

This thesis is the first work focused directly on race relations and education in Chicago before the Great Migration. Proceeding from the dearth of sources covering black Chicago before the First World War era, I argue three main points. First, I disagree with historians who assert that because African-Americans received certain educational opportunities, this period represented a kind of racial golden age. Only when compared to the South and to the post-World War I period in Chicago, I assert, does the era before 1914 seem racially egalitarian. While members of the black community before the Great Migration were able to attend school with whites and thus were not subjected to the targeted and systematic deprivations that legislated segregation mandated, on an individual basis, black Chicagoans faced second-class citizenship each and every day. Second, I argue that despite the lack of extant primary sources recounting the full extent of segregation during this period, there is evidence that national and regional trends formed race relations in Chicago long before the post-Great War migration. In business, housing, and education, strictures were in place by the end of the Gilded Age that would govern social relations to World War II and after. Third, in the absence of official northern court-imposed Jim Crow laws (or de jure segregation), white Chicagoans turned to informal but organized de facto discrimination to usher in a separation of the races before the turn of the century. Running throughout these arguments is the suggestion that black Chicagoans were active in proportions far beyond their numbers in fighting for their rights as United States, Illinois, and Chicago citizens. In this thesis, I chart the increasing incidence of racial violence in the schools as the black community in Chicago expanded, but I also argue that levels of discrimination were not directly tied to the size of the population. Thus, Chicago was a place of opportunity and restriction for black Americans by the early twentieth century, a city where progress did not come without profound struggle.

The Independence, Diversity, and Vitality of Early Black Chicago

The Independence, Diversity, and Vitality of Early Black Chicago Ian Rocksborough-Smith (bio) Christopher Robert Reed. Knock at the Door of Opportunity: Black Migration to Chicago, 1900–1919. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2014. xi + 390 pp. Figures, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $65.00. Margaret Garb. Freedom’s Ballot: African American Political Struggles in Chicago from Abolition to the Great Migration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 306pp. Figures, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $50.00. These recent books by Margaret Garb and Christopher R. Reed explicitly treat the history of Black Chicago’s formative years leading up to and including the first Great Migration years of World War I. In both books, which overlap in the treatment of the twentieth-century’s first two decades, we get rich vignettes of some of Chicago’s earliest African American political elites and prolific community leaders, sites, and institutions. Some of these are already well known, while others less so. We learn of the influential John Jones, who became the city’s first elected black official in the wake of the Great Fire of 1871, and of the city’s first black alderman, Oscar DePriest, elected in 1915. DePriest’s political ascendance demonstrated Black Chicago’s critical support for the famously corrupt yet relatively beneficent administration of Mayor William “Big Bill” Thompson and the GOP machine that dominated civic politics in those years. We also learn about important clubwomen, activists, and reformers such as Fannie B. Williams, Ida B. Wells, and the Reverends Reverdy C. Ransom and Archibald J. Carey with the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church. The latter two competed to influence congregations of black Southerners newly moved to the city within the local community. We learn especially about how long-time black Chicago residents worked in coalition with newcomers (mainly recent Southern migrants) to the City of Big Shoulders to engage with and impact Chicago’s infamously corrupt machine-driven civic politics. As these two studies show, black Chicagoans became vital constituents and political activists for both local Democratic and Republican politicians and party organizations (not just the party of Lincoln affiliates). Such engagements set the stage for important models of independent black civic politics sustained [End Page 665] elsewhere in urban America in later decades. Moreover, each book offers compelling analysis of Black Chicago’s earliest labor, commercial, cultural, and religious institutions and organizations as the city’s African American population grew exponentially through the first two decades of the twentieth century. Black Chicago’s history through the middle of the last century is, of course, now well examined. From the signal contributions of pioneering urban sociologists like Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake (Black Metropolis, 1945), to the prolific and contemporary writings of novelist Richard Wright, to the manifold studies of the University of Chicago’s School of Sociology, Chicago—for better or worse—has long acted as a critical “laboratory” and/or site for the study of black community formation and strivings. There is now a vast scholarly literature on Chicago through the mid-twentieth century, much of it extended well beyond the formative insights of these authors. Indeed, recent scholarship on Black Chicago has taken exciting new directions from examinations of migrant consumer and religious cultures to local studies of housing; neighborhood politics; labor, educational, and cultural activism; and related issues. Many of these newer studies uncover complex histories of community formation mainly rooted in the years from World War I through World War II, when the Great Migrations of African American Southerners occurred, thus shaping many contemporary and scholarly understandings of urban America.1 However, fewer scholars have specifically examined the years prior to these watershed moments of mass migration to the urban North before World War I. Read together, both Garb and Reed show how African Americans from Chicago, many of them long-time residents (descendants of the “old settlers”—or the first resident black families whose roots went back to the antebellum period in the city) worked to form diverse, vital, independent, and influential cultural and political networks, especially on the city’s South Side. These patterns of community engagement occurred many years before the city’s African...

Freedom’s Ballot: African American Political Struggles in Chicago from Abolition to the Great Migration by Margaret Garb (review)

Reviewed by: Freedom’s Ballot: African American Political Struggles in Chicago from Abolition to the Great Migration by Margaret Garb Catherine A. Jones (bio) Freedom’s Ballot: African American Political Struggles in Chicago from Abolition to the Great Migration. By Margaret Garb. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Pp. 306. Cloth, $50.00.) Margaret Garb’s meticulously researched new book makes a compelling case that Chicago’s importance to African American history began [End Page 337] long before the Great Migration. Beyond providing a prequel, however, Freedom’s Ballot offers a nuanced portrait of the entwined histories of African American politics and the development of Chicago itself, beginning with antebellum struggles over black citizenship and concluding with the 1915 protests of Birth of a Nation. Garb argues that despite small numbers—less than 2 percent of Chicago’s population before 1910—black Chicagoans influenced the political order of the city as well as national debate on race, rights, and representation. The book joins a growing body of literature, including Stephen Kantrowitz’s work on Boston and Stacey Smith’s recent study of California, in shifting focus away from the South in order to explore the national history of African American politics.1 Garb’s work shares the literature’s concern both with understanding how local context shaped political practices and with illuminating how those practices were connected to national developments. Beginning with an examination of African American activism in Civil War–era Chicago, Garb effectively delineates the connections between the politics of abolition and racial equality. Illinois’s status as a free state did not spare people of color from legal disabilities tied to race. Garb carefully reconstructs the story of how John Jones, born free in North Carolina, navigated this hostile legal environment to achieve remarkable economic success and political influence, ultimately becoming the first African American elected to office in Cook County. She argues that in this period business connections with elite whites were critical to black activists’ efforts to agitate for emancipation and racial equality. Garb’s biographical approach brings the rapidly shifting political terrain of the era into focus but also leaves the complex political dynamics of the war itself only partially explored. For example, the political ferment that postemancipation migrants and Civil War veterans stimulated, richly explored by Kate Masur and Leslie Schwalm, receives modest treatment here.2 The book provides a rich discussion of the role of civic institutions in the development of African American political culture in Chicago. Garb argues that the “interracial elite comity,” which had served men like John Jones well, began to fragment in the 1880s, elevating the need for racial solidarity (51). Freedom’s Ballot carefully reconstructs how the back press, along with fraternal organizations and women’s clubs, fostered a sense of common political concern around racial identity in Chicago while building bridges to national movements for racial equality. Focusing on civil society highlights the canny leadership of women like Ida B. Wells and Fannie Barrier Williams in using the Chicago World’s Fair to challenge racial exclusion and draw national attention to demands for African American representation in culture and politics. [End Page 338] Garb is concerned with Chicago not only as a unit of governance but also as a physical space. Her account is attuned to how the organization of work and the emergence of segregated spaces in the city shaped African Americans’ political engagement, including their participation in unions and reform movements. While much of the book focuses on political leaders who emerged from Chicago’s professional classes, Garb’s exploration of the successful labor actions of the Culinary Alliance, a biracial union, highlights another path of political action. Although black Chicagoans were excluded from much industrial employment, the restaurants that became critical to the functioning of a commercial urban core provided black men steady employment as waiters. Through carefully coordinated walkouts in the early 1890s, the Culinary Alliance gained significant, if temporary, improvements in working conditions. Although Garb acknowledges that racial divisions created fault lines in unions that employers exploited, she argues that the Culinary Alliance’s walkouts in the early 1890s effectively challenged regressive racial stereotypes of black men. The two final chapters...

Chicago, Garveyism, and the history of the diasporic Midwest

This article analyses the dynamic history of Garveyism in Chicago, Illinois (USA). The Jamaican black nationalist Marcus Garvey's message of racial pride, African redemption, and black self-determination electrified black Chicagoans. Thousands of blacks in this Midwestern industrial city joined Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). At its peak in the early 1920s, the UNIA claimed six million members worldwide. Chicago was highly regarded in the transnational UNIA. Black women played a critical role in building this Pan-African movement in the Windy City. The Chicago UNIA spawned black nationalist political and religious movements in this city from the 1920s onward. Tracing the largely unknown story provides insight into the broader history of what I call the ‘diasporic Midwest’. I use the term as a theoretical and analytical framework to extend the geographical scope of the African Diaspora, to internationalize African-American history, to consider the gendered contours and paradoxes of Pan-Africanism and black nationalism, and to chart a genealogy of Black Power.

A Theory of African-American Citizenship: Richard Westbrooks, The Great Migration, and the Chicago Defender's "Legal Helps" Column

This article explores citizenship from the ground up, to focus on migration, settlement, local law, and struggles for racial equality in Progressive Era Chicago. In his weekly “Legal Helps” column, which appeared in the Chicago Defender, attorney Richard Westbrooks answered questions about commercial practices, domestic life, civil rights and residential conditions. Westbrooks' answers advocated a theory of African American citizenship that was rooted in the implied equality of local law, rather than in the decreed equality of constitutional law. In expanding his theory from the individual to the collective—to assert that all Black Chicagoans were equal as citizens—Westbrooks would encounter stiff opposition from law clerks, judges, and jailers, as well as pervasive social discrimination that allowed African Americans to be classified and treated differently in their social and legal relationships. In response, Westbrooks broadened his theory of citizenship, articulating individual and collective equality and partial and comprehensive statuses, to reveal a bottom-up legal consciousness that grew out of everyday encounters and social practices.

Concepts of community in the pursuit of an inclusive archaeology

Community is a key concept that shapes how we approach our relationships with other individuals and groups. In this article, the author reviews how scholars and laypeople alike use the concept of ‘community’ in both theoretical and applied contexts. What do heritage professionals expect from the communities with whom they work? How do these communities define and constitute themselves? The answers to such questions have broad implications for the way that scholars interact and collaborate with stakeholders. Examples are presented from the author’s archaeological projects at sites associated with communities in the African diaspora that illustrate the importance of an explicit and critical approach to the idea of ‘community’. The discussion concludes with preliminary findings from an investigation of the meanings of community among black Chicagoans in the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries.

Archaeology as a Tool to Illuminate and Support Community Struggles in the Black Metropolis of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

The South Side of Chicago — the 'Black Metropolis' — has been the site of many struggles over the years: for human dignity and civil rights; against restrictive real estate covenants; and to control present-day gentrification, to name a few. This legacy is inscribed on the landscape above and below ground. Black Chicagoans are keen to preserve the material manifestations of prior struggles and use preservation to benefit the current inhabitants of 'Bronzeville'. These activists have welcomed the author into collaborative projects that use archaeology and historic preservation to further their goals. Excavation at the Phyllis Wheatley Home for Girls and the Bronzeville Cultural Garden has contributed to our efforts to identify and present stories of the Great Migration and its consequences. At stake are our understandings of how racial and other identities shaped life in this community in the past as well as the neighbourhood's role in the city's future.

Ambiguous reform: technical workforce planning and ideologies of class and race in 1960s Chicago

Throughout the 1960s, educators and planners envisioned new occupational opportunities for Chicagoans in the city's emerging high-tech industries. In many of their forecasts, the least complex, rewarding, and remunerative jobs associated with Chicago's projected industrial renewal were destined primarily for women and non-white populations, especially black and Hispanic Chicagoans living in the racially fraught inner-city. New engineering jobs, by contrast, seemed best suited for white, and typically male citizens. Thus, the modernizing city would perpetuate old social divisions. This essay considers how engineering was naturalized, by engineers and their corporate and civic patrons, as an occupation distinct from those of technicians and shop-floor workers in Chicago of the 1960s. The city in those years faced commercial decline and the social unrest accompanying a growing civil rights movement; that hierarchical organization of technical labor answered both employers' desire for modern managerial techniques and the policy makers' preference that Chicago's workforce remain, enduringly, a racially stratified one.

Selling the race: culture, community, and black Chicago, 1940-1955

In Selling the Race, Adam Green tells the story of how black Chicagoans were at the center of a national movement in the 1940s and '50s, a time when African Americans across the country first started to see themselves as part of a single culture. Along the way, he offers fascinating reinterpretations of such events as the 1940 American Negro Exposition, the rise of black music and the culture industry that emerged around it, the development of the Associated Negro Press and the founding of Johnson Publishing, and the outcry over the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till. By presenting African Americans as agents, rather than casualties, of modernity, Green ultimately re envisions urban existence in a way that will resonate with anyone interested in race, culture, or the life of cities.

Down from Equality: Black Chicagoans and the Public Schools, 1920-41. Michael W. Homel

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsDown from Equality: Black Chicagoans and the Public Schools, 1920-41. Michael W. Homel Carl A. CohnCarl A. Cohn Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Education Volume 94, Number 3May, 1986 Sponsored by the Penn State College of Education Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/443858 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1986 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Down from Equality: Black Chicagoans and the Public Schools, 1920-41

Down from Equality: Black Chicagoans and the Public Schools, 1920-41

Down from Equality: Black Chicagoans and the Public Schools, 1920-41

Down from Equality: Black Chicagoans and the Public Schools, 1920-41

Down from Equality: Black Chicagoans and the Public Schools, 1920-41.

Down from Equality: Black Chicagoans and the Public Schools, 1920-41.

The Politics of Public Education in Black Chicago, 1910-1941

Southern Blacks moved North during and after World War I primarily for promise of better economic opportunity. Improved schooling, however, was a major by-product of migration. In rural South, formal education was often brief, uncertain, and inadequate. Many black children encountered dilapidated buildings and insufficient supplies. State appropriations for black pupils were but a fraction of those for whites. By contrast, urban North offered longer school terms, compulsory attendance, and higher standards of facilities and instruction. The black press enticed newcomers by comparing the splendid unrestricted system of learning in northern cities with southern classrooms, where Jim-Crowism is to be first lesson taught.'1 Once settled in North, Blacks altered their perspective. No longer judging their lot by standards previously known in Dixie, southern migrants now compared schooling they received with that of white neighborhoods in same city. With this shift in focus, commentary on public education gradually changed from celebration to complaint. The schools had become a civic issue in which Blacks tested their strength in urban political arena. The politics of public education in black Chicago from before mass migration of World War I to eve of World War II explores values and dynamics of ghetto civic life during these years. What goals concerned black Chicagoans active in school matters? What methods did community employ in pursuit of its goals? Which interest groups in ghetto were involved in educational affairs? Answers to these questions not only analyze community activity but also illuminate previously neglected history of black education in North. Blacks in Chicago contended for three main goals from

Family Planning in the Negro Ghettos of Chicago

1010 women aged 18-44 and living in Chicago census tracts in which the median family income was below $5500 per year in 1960 were interviewed in 1967-1968 to determine attitudes toward family planning. Absolutely no evidence was found of a fertility culture. Fertility aspirations were substantially lower than the 1959 ideals of both white and black Chicagoans. More than 1/2 regarded age 23 or older as the ideal age to get married. About 60% suggested an interval of 2 or more years as the ideal interval between marriage and the first birth. 80.5% approved moderately or strongly of family planning while 8.9% were neutral. All but a small fraction knew at least one reliable contraceptive method and knew of its reliability. A tendency existed however to underestimate the most reliable methods and overestimate the least reliable methods. Pregnancy histories reveal a high prevalence of teenage pregnancy resulting from uncontracepted premarital sex relations. Planning of the first child not the last should become a major goal among family planners. Several researchers discuss Bogues paper in a concluding section. Non-compatible ideals in individuals and/or lack of purposive rational planning may dictate a lack of contraception.