Such happenings did not figure into Drake and Cayton’s rendering of Bronzeville—somewhat astonishingly given Chicago’s importance as a fountain of Jazz Age black cultural expression. The omission suggests a lingering uneasiness among black middle-class civic leaders about black Chicago’s transformation into a playground of desire, pleasure, and exoticism in the interwar years, when entrepreneurs, a good many of them white, opened up a number of black-and-tan cabarets catering to white “slummers” seeking the thrill of hot jazz, bootlegged liquor, and the black sexuality on display on the dance floor.15 Even by the early 1940s, decades after Chicago’s Black Metropolis had clearly established itself as the nation’s “melting pot” of jazz and blues, its performing and recording scene helping to catapult the likes of Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Bessie Smith, Joe “King” Oliver, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters, and Earl “Fatha” Hines to national prominence, a number of black community leaders were still unable to comfortably embrace this cultural heritage. This ambivalence stemmed from the fact that while many of the music venues of the Stroll were owned and run by blacks, they hardly embodied, in the eyes of many respectable civic leaders, the kinds of enterprises that contributed to “uplifting the race.”16 If the Stroll, according to historian Davarian Baldwin, “was more than simply a stretch of buildings, amusements, sidewalks, and signposts but the public showcase for black ‘expressive behavior,’” the dancing, shouting, shimmying, and frolicking that was being showcased there flew squarely in the face of the codes of respectability promoted by the older, more established middle-class elements of the community.17
As Baldwin has argued, although most in the Black Metropolis invested in some idea of economic nationalism, the interwar years witnessed a struggle between an “old settler” ideology oriented around hard work, thrift, and sobriety and a “new settler” ideology that viewed in the Stroll’s commercialized leisure enterprises the means not only to get ahead but also to create a new sense of racial pride and respectability.18 The clash of these ideals appeared frequently in the black press during this era. On May, 17, 1919, for example, the Chicago Defender justified publishing a list of dos and don’ts directed at recent migrants with the explanation: “It is evident that some of the people coming to this city have seriously erred in their conduct in public places, much to the humiliation of all respectable classes of our citizens, and by so doing, on account of their ignorance of laws and customs necessary for the maintenance of health, sobriety and morality among the people in general, have given our enemies ground for complaint.” Among the list of don’ts provided to the Defender by the Chicago Urban League were several explicitly targeting the Stroll nightlife: “Don’t encourage gamblers, disreputable women or men to ply their business any time or place”; Don’t congregate in crowds on the streets”; “Don’t spend your time hanging around saloon doors or poolrooms.”19
The Defender’s publisher, Robert Sengstacke Abbott, was the mouthpiece of the businessman race heroes of the daytime Stroll, who decried the pleasure-seeking and immorality that raged after nightfall. Abbott’s Stroll by day, referred to at the time as “the black man’s Broadway and Wall Street,” offered a very different vision of black pride and autonomy. Rising amidst its famed nightspots—Motts Pekin Theater, the Apex Club, Elite No. 1, Elite No. 2, the Dreamland Ballroom, the Sunset Café, and the De Luxe Café—were brick-and-mortar monuments to the promise of black capitalism: the hulking Binga State Bank at 3452 South State with its marble, bronze, and walnut interior and imposing steel vaults; the Chicago Defender building at 3435 South Indiana, headquarters of a newspaper that, while occupying a converted synagogue, had the audacity to herald itself as “the world’s greatest weekly”; and the Overton Hygienic Building at 3619–3627 South State, a massive six-story structure also housing Overton’s Douglass National Bank and Victory Life Insurance Company, which Overton himself hailed as “a monument of negro thrift and industry.”20 The owners of these structures unabashedly assumed the role of preachers in the church of black capitalism. Although these reputed self-made captains of industry had established their enterprises in earlier years—Abbott founded the Defender in 1905, Binga opened his first bank in 1908, and Overton established his cosmetics company in Chicago in 1911—their stars began rising in the aftermath of the 1919 race riot, when their words of wisdom about hard work, thrift, and economic nationalism as the antidotes to systemic white racism were spread all over the pages of the black press.
More than anyone else, Jesse Binga incarnated the figure of the businessman race hero of the 1920s, a legend that his associate Robert Abbott—a major stockholder in Binga’s bank—played a big part in creating. The Defender followed Binga’s every move, giving him regular front-page exposure, and Binga used the pulpit offered to him to deliver sermon after sermon about how black businesses, with the proper support from black consumers, would lead the way towards racial progress. Announcing that his private bank would soon be reorganized under the protection of a state charter in April 1920, for example, Binga spoke of “an undercurrent of forces at play . . . gradually forcing the people of the great south side into an insoluble mass, which is to result in inestimable financial strength and resources.”21 More than three years later, addressing the Associated Business Club (ABC), a group that included Abbott, Overton, and Claude A. Barnett, founder of the Associated Negro Press news agency, Binga was still hammering away at the same ideas. “I would say to those aspiring to be of influence in our community,” Binga asserted, “to remember that the banks and the business men are the bulwark of the community.” “A race to achieve its independence,” he proclaimed, “must foster its own interests.”22 Such sentiments were intended not only to position businessmen as race leaders but also to counter the idea, shared by a range of white opinion makers, that African Americans as a race were out of step with the spirit of modern capitalism. Famed University of Chicago sociologist Robert Park went so far as to refer to blacks as “the lady of the races,” attributing their deficiencies in the marketplace to temperament: “a disposition for expression rather than enterprise and action.”23 Although Park and many others of his ilk understood all too well that municipal zoning and law enforcement policies and the concatenations of machine politics—not any traits supposedly inherent in the race—had made the Stroll into a playground for gamblers, boozers, and sporting types in search of sexual adventure, the epic story of Chicago jazz, with all the artistic virtuosity and sensuality that came with it, seemed to confirm Park’s essentialization of blacks as cultural producers.
MAP 3. Bronzeville and the Stroll in 1920.
FIGURE 3. The Overton Hygienic Building at 3619–3627 South State Street. From The New York Public Library.
Binga and the ABC crowd were thus somewhat adamant about drawing a sharp distinction between the earnest enterprise of the daytime Stroll and the frivolous jouissance of its nighttime alter ego, but the connection between these two worlds was, in reality, hard to deny. For one thing, there was no getting around the fact that the action of the nighttime Stroll produced revenues for some of the most important black businesses. Abbott’s Defender may have stridently criticized the immoral ways of migrants cavorting on the Stroll, but it also profited enormously from showcasing these same activities. Amidst the Defender’s ads for the Stroll’s hottest clubs, moreover, could be found others for a range of beauty services and products—Overton’s face powders prominent among them—for revelers heading out for a night on the Stroll, and the burgeoning black-owned Your Cab Company at 3635 South State Street earned a good many of its fares from these same revelers. The activities of the daytime and nighttime Strolls were intertwined in other ways as well. As Davarian Baldwin has argued, “Better paying industrial jobs surely provided the disposable income for leisure activities, but it was the nickels and dimes used to buy drinks in local dance halls and put on lucky numbers at policy wheels that recirculated within the community to support the black metropolis.”24 It
was, to be sure, hard to find a nickel or a dime in Bronzeville that had not touched the hands of a numbers runner. Brought to Chicago from New Orleans in the late 1880s by the legendary “Policy” Sam Young, policy wheels (illicit lotteries) multiplied rapidly in the high-paced atmosphere of the Black Metropolis, where, as Drake and Cayton claimed, a spirit of “getting ahead” joined that of “advancing the race” as one of the organizing axes of black life.
BY THE NUMBERS
By the late 1930s, the more reliable estimates had over 100,000 black Chicagoans placing some $18 million in bets at over 4,000 South Side policy stations, and while the policy syndicate was of course a pyramidal structure with limited redistributive possibilities (at least in a downward direction), policy wheels nonetheless provided thousands of jobs, and the profits they generated found their way into a range of legitimate ventures that created thousands more. Policy was thus the common denominator between the daytime and nighttime Strolls. Gambling and jazz (not to mention vice) were of course hard to disentangle on the nighttime Stroll, where policy kings underwrote the establishment of many of black Chicago’s most revered jazz venues—the Pekin, the Dreamland, the Apex Club, Elite No. 1, and Elite No. 2—and where smoky gaming rooms were often appendages of the halls where Chicago’s greatest musicians strutted their stuff. But policy proceeds lubricated the cogs of the daytime Stroll’s economy as well. Binga’s financial ventures, for example, were bankrolled in part by the gambling proceeds that passed into his hands through his marriage to Eudora Johnson, who had inherited more than half the substantial wealth of her brother, legendary policy kingpin John “Mushmouth” Johnson, upon his death in 1907.
The impact of policy could be felt in nearly every corner and alley of the Black Metropolis. Policy wheels offered supplemental revenue to beauty parlors, grocery stores, bars, and even funeral parlors, and many such legitimate businesses were built upon the nickels and dimes of its players. For example, in 1925 undertaker Dan Jackson, the “general manager” of the South Side’s most powerful vice and gambling syndicate, used the profits from his illicit operations to launch the Metropolitan Funeral System Association—a thriving business that offered burial insurance to working-class black families for a fifteen-cent weekly premium. Two years later he sold it to another gambling kingpin, Robert Cole, who used his own profits to develop a sister company, Metropolitan Funeral Parlors, and move it into a modern office building he built at 4455 South Parkway in 1940. While Cole was no doubt looking to make a buck, this particular business venture aligned financial motives with more noble ideals. Denied proper funeral services by white undertakers, bereaved African Americans faced the humiliation of not being able to procure a respectable funeral, a situation that transformed Cole, whose companies offered insurance and burial services, into another of Bronzeville’s self-made businessman race heroes. Yet Cole’s contributions to the cause of black respectability did not stop at the funeral parlor. Beginning in the 1930s, he invested his financial resources in a number of visionary cultural ventures, providing office space for the pioneering All-Negro Hour radio show, the first to feature black performers exclusively, founding a popular black magazine called the Bronzeman, and purchasing the Chicago American Giants Negro League baseball team in 1932. Jackson served as Second Ward committeeman after helping Big Bill Thompson procure more than 91 percent of the black vote in his victorious 1927 mayoral election bid. As committeeman, he steered hundreds of thousands of graft dollars each year into Thompson’s machine, assuring that South Side gambling operations would continue to irrigate the economy of the Black Metropolis.
The fact that policy wheels undergirded the financial, cultural, and political infrastructure of the Black Metropolis made many of the champions of middle-class respectability somewhat reluctant to include policy among the litany of vices allegedly setting back the race. One study of the numbers game in interwar Harlem revealed that business leaders there claimed that the viability of the community’s policy banks had been critical in building business confidence among African Americans, and it is more than likely that such views were prevalent among business leaders in Chicago’s Black Metropolis as well.25 Moreover, the argument that policy provided thousands of jobs to black folks who were being denied employment in white businesses held plenty of water, transforming gambling kingpins into veritable race leaders. Bronzeville residents thus reacted with heated anger at the judgmental gaze of whites upon their alleged propensity to throw nickels and dimes at elusive numbers. The Chicago Defender was clearly seeking to channel such feelings of resentment, for example, during Mayor Cermak’s 1931 campaign to close down South Side policy wheels, when it published a series of editorials decrying the mayor’s characterization of a lawless “black belt,” where, Cermak reportedly claimed, “95 percent of colored people over 14 years old” played the numbers.26
To be sure, policy was a sensitive issue in the Black Metropolis. A range of black ministers and civic leaders railed against it, pointing at all the people reduced to destitution because of their addiction and sardonically mocking those who sought to profit from this addiction—the so-called spiritual advisors and peddlers of “dream books” promising to extract winning combinations from the shadowy depths of a gambler’s subconscious. However, such reproaches coming from the other side of the color line sparked the kind of outrage and proud defiance that made average residents of the Black Metropolis see heroism in the businessmen and syndicate kingpins who were exploiting them. For if policy was many things to many people, it was also a means of redistributing the increasing wealth of the Black Metropolis upward towards the point of the social pyramid, and, regardless of the numerous stories of winning “gigs” (three winning numbers out of twelve) pulling families out of tough circumstances, policy did, in fact, keep a good number of people down, though how many we will never know with any certainty.
But policy’s impact went far beyond the economic realm. The penetration of policy into the fabric of everyday life in the Black Metropolis also had undeniable consequences for the political culture, especially in terms of how average residents made meaning of the dramatic inequalities prevailing there and of the possibilities for addressing them. Although historians have grappled with the role of policy gambling within the economies and labor markets of black ghettos in the first half of the twentieth century, they have largely overlooked its ideological power.27 Policy was symptomatic of the conditions of life in the lower-class world of Bronzeville, and a good many of those who laid down their nickels and dimes for long-shot slips of paper lived in the impossibly cramped “kitchenette” apartments that proliferated on the South Side during the interwar years (figure 4). These one-room living spaces, which real estate developers hastily carved out of basements and larger apartments, with little concern for proper ventilation and plumbing, often housed as many people as could find a space on the floor to stretch their legs for a night’s sleep. “A building that formerly held sixty families,” Drake and Cayton claimed, “might now have three hundred.”28 Richard Wright referred to the kitchenette as “our prison, our death sentence without a trial, the new form of mob violence that assaults not only the lone individual, but all of us, in ceaseless attacks.”29 Yet, if Wright’s evocation of “mob violence” pointed to the white hand behind such conditions in northern ghettos like Harlem and Bronzeville, the ethos surrounding policy represented a countervailing force to such notions.
FIGURE 4. South Side kitchenette apartment. Photo by Russell Lee. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
To be sure, discerning the psychology of habitual gamblers is slippery ground, and few scholars dealing with such issues have sought to do so in the tight-knit cultural context of a place like the Black Metropolis of interwar Chicago. Nonetheless, it is hard to argue with the idea that the fatalism inherent in the ritual could only have worked to deflect attention from the structural circumstances behind the rampant poverty of the Black Metropolis, even if the ethos of black capitalism offered constant reminde
rs that the misery and toil there were due to the exclusion of blacks from white society. Besides, when players lost enough to make them stop to think about who was profiting from all the nickels and dimes they threw down, their reflection led them not to the other side of the color line but to their own policy-king race heroes, whom they simultaneously begrudged and admired. This is not to say that policy did not offer something valuable. It was a ritual of sociability that provided daily amusement, and the sense of camaraderie around the game sometimes saw players pooling their winnings and more often commiserating over their losses. Moreover, in addition to their role as an employer, policy banks served as a vital source of loans at a time when credit was scarce. Nonetheless, playing the numbers on a daily basis infused the common sense of working-class blacks with powerful notions of chance and risk that individualized or otherwise explained away the difficult conditions they faced as matters of fate and hard luck. And there were enough self-made success stories around the Black Metropolis and in the pages of the black press to confirm such notions.
Chicago on the Make Page 10