Randolph extended such reproaches to Chicago’s clergy as well—especially to the eminent Archibald Carey, who not only banned the BSCP from AME churches but also demanded that all AME ministers warn their congregants against the evils of labor unions. However, Randolph’s opposition to the black religious establishment lay not only in its ties to big business and the political machine; it grew out of a broader critique of how black churches had fallen victim to the economizing logic of the Black Metropolis. As early as October 1919, he had argued in an editorial entitled “The Failure of the Negro Church” that the black church had been “converted into a business . . . run primarily for profits” with an “interest . . . focused upon debits and credits, deficits and surpluses.”46 In the face of such tendencies, Randolph set out to devise an alternative theology that would align religion with a powerful language of social justice. Invited to the Yale Divinity School in 1931, he delivered a lecture entitled “Whither the Negro Church?” in which he urged black churches to develop “a working class viewpoint and program.”47
While most religious leaders were unreceptive to such messages, Randolph’s vision of working-class solidarity caught the attention of a handful of influential ministers. One of these was William Decatur Cook, the former pastor of Chicago’s Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, who had become a rebel pastor after having been ousted from his pulpit by Archibald Carey upon his nomination as AME bishop for the Chicago area. In fact, Cook’s removal indicated that he was already at odds with the more conservative church leadership. After holding services for a number of years in Unity Hall, the headquarters of DePriest’s People’s Movement Club, in 1927, the undaunted Cook took his some five hundred followers with him to the handsome sandstone Romanesque Revival church at 41st and Grand Boulevard, which had previously housed the First Presbyterian Church. Aligned with the Community Church movement, the Metropolitan Community Church defined its mission with the credo “non-sectarian, broadly humanitarian, serving all the people.” Cook’s church was thus a loyal friend to the BSCP.
In addition to Cook, Randolph had the unqualified support of Pilgrim Baptist Church pastor Junius Austin, a fervent Garveyite, who, having arrived in Chicago in 1926 from Pittsburgh, was relatively free of patronage entanglements and, presiding by 1930 over a congregation of some nine thousand faithful members, possessed the kind of power base that would allow him to remain free. Austin represented quite another version of black capitalism, one that shunned the competitive, profit-driven spirit articulated by Binga and his cohort. Back in Pittsburgh, he had developed a real estate cooperative that had enabled the purchase of some one thousand properties for black families. Once in Chicago, he quickly formed the Cooperative Business League, a venture that, according to the Pittsburgh Courier, “paved the way for the militant program that [gave] Chicago the largest number of Negro owned and operated enterprises of any city in the world.”48 And yet neither Austin nor his Cooperative Business League appeared in the pages of the Defender in 1926 and 1927, as Randolph and the BSCP were seeking to spread their vision of racial solidarity founded in a collective commitment to social equality.
By November 1927, however, the Defender had published a mea culpa regarding its stance on the BSCP:
It is felt and asserted by some that the Defender is opposed to the porters’ efforts at organization. . . . Whatever may be the merits of these charges, be it known by all whom it may concern that the Defender is a red-blooded four-square Race paper, which is unequivocally committed to the policy of supporting all bona fide Race movements. Therefore, we wish definitely to register that fact that we back and favor the right of Pullman porters and maids to organize into a bona fide union of their own choosing, untrammeled by the Pullman Company.49
Abbott’s reversal represented a critical turning point in the BSCP’s campaign. In 1935, the union would defeat the company union and win its charter from the AFL, paving the way for the Pullman Company’s decision to grant it official recognition in 1937. Four years later, in 1941, when Randolph spearheaded the March on Washington movement to protest racial discrimination in the war industries, which were flourishing as a result of the United States entering the hostilities overseas, the BSCP rose to national prominence as a major player in the struggle for civil rights.
The BSCP’s triumph had not come easily. By 1933, its total membership had dwindled to under seven hundred—a small fraction of the overall workforce—and were it not for the Roosevelt administration backing the Wagner Act of 1935, which outlawed company unions, it is doubtful the BSCP would have weathered the Pullman Company’s offensive. Red-baiting tactics also played a role in the BSCP’s struggles, especially after Randolph’s election as president of the Communist-driven National Negro Congress (NNC). This alliance between the BSCP and the NNC caused rifts between the Communist-influenced CIO and the more conservative leadership of the AFL while subjecting Randolph to pressure from the Dies Committee. In 1940, Randolph resigned as NNC president, claiming: “Negroes cannot afford to add the handicap of being ‘black’ to the handicap of being ‘red.’” And yet, what perhaps hampered the union most in Chicago was the continuing resistance from the city’s black establishment.
Somewhat ironically, what support the BSCP was able to muster in order to overcome this resistance enough to win recognition came from a group of militant middle-class women who were no strangers to the black establishment crowd. Ida B. Wells-Barnett rallied the women of her Wells Club to canvas their neighborhoods in support of the BCSP. In fact, as a member of Cook’s congregation at the Metropolitan Community Church, Wells-Barnett sat in the same pews as Robert Abbott and under the same roof as DePriest’s political headquarters—a building, as the story goes, that was provided to DePriest by telephone magnate and Commercial Club player Samuel Insull. Joining Wells-Barnett in her fight was another insider, Irene Goins, president of the Illinois Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs (IFCWC) and founder of the Douglass League of Women Voters. Goins had the kind of pull that enabled her to bring Second Ward Republican committeeman Edward Wright and national Republican committeewoman Ruth Hanna McCormick to address the IFCWC. Like the old settler business crowd they were opposing, the influence these African American clubwomen wielded stretched across the color line, where it was entangled with the very patronage structure that Randolph had in his crosshairs. The involvement of such figures as Wells-Barnett and Goins on behalf of the BSCP was also critical to attracting prominent labor organizer and settlement worker Mary McDowell to the cause—the only white Chicagoan who took an active stand against the Pullman Company. McDowell made her support clear when on October 3, 1927, she addressed an audience of two thousand packed into Austin’s Pilgrim Baptist Church for a BSCP meeting organized by Wells-Barnett, Goins, and BSCP organizer Milton Webster. This show of force for the BSCP, with its interracial cast of notables, was enough to push the hand of Abbott, who at the time was noting a drop in circulation due to talk of a boycott protesting his paper’s stance. The BSCP had clearly hit Abbott where it hurt most by revealing, as Beth Tompkins Bates has argued, “the contradiction inherent in advocating black freedom through paternalistic relations.”50
Certainly, something of a popular groundswell had been set in motion as clubwomen activists brought the BSCP’s message of economic rights and racial dignity into the homes of working-class neighbors who, understandably, would have been receptive to such appeals. Historian Jeffrey Helgeson has recently argued that these circumstances represented a broader trend of community-based activism around quality-of-life issues led by women who were acting pragmatically to sustain the conditions of their households and neighborhoods in the interwar Black Metropolis.51 Although Wells-Barnett and Goins were somewhat extraordinary race women, many of the more ordinary middle-class clubwomen who answered their call had entered the milieu of political activism as a means of addressing the ills of the city that were arriving at their doorsteps: crime, prostitution, and creeping slum conditions created by the spre
ad of the nefarious kitchenettes. Whereas some scholars have viewed such bread-and-butter struggles to sustain the “home sphere” in a conservative light—as the individualistic reflexes of strivers and climbers seeking respectability and stature—the mobilization of clubwomen for the BSCP suggests that women engaging in the politics of home and neighborhood could also embrace more ambitious forms of collective activism.52 Yet it would be misleading to overstate the power of such forms of activism to dilute the potent ideological brew produced by the intermingling notions of entrepreneurial initiative, personal responsibility, and racial uplift that were so central to the spirit of black capitalism in the interwar Black Metropolis. In the final analysis, the moral of the BSCP story is not its triumph but rather the dogged resistance it faced in achieving it. Regardless of the Urban League’s position on race-based unions, the BSCP’s approach was in line with the spirit of racial unity of the times, yet its collectivist appeal and its unabashed challenge to the ethos of black capitalism was hard to digest for the black power elite and enough members of the black middle class—professionals, small businessmen, and civil servants—who saw their interests as aligned with the Appomattox Club crowd.
Moreover, the politics of the home sphere that brought middle-class folks and their well-heeled neighbors together in church-based and neighborhood-based clubs seeking to lift up their impoverished neighbors and the race played out in the context of frantic real estate speculation—yet another force working to economize the fabric of neighborhood life in the Black Metropolis. By the late 1910s, seventeen South Side realtors were running listings in Black’s Blue Book, with several of the more ambitious, such as DePriest and DePriest, taking out eye-catching ads. Sensing the trend in the making, one realtor, Dr. R.A. Williams, implored potential home buyers to “Make Your Dream Come True,” warning them that “every rent day sees a little more money gone and you a little further behind.”53 By the mid-1920s, the black press was hailing what the Defender referred to as the black “obsession” with homeownership and the “friendly spirit of rivalry” motivating black homeowners to join “neighborhood improvement associations.” In an editorial entitled “Neighborhood Pride,” the paper’s editors opined that the increasing number of blacks seizing “the opportunity to invest [their] earnings in property” was “the best thing that ever happened to [the race].”54 At the start of the following year, Anthony Overton’s Half-Century Magazine proudly announced that “$10,000,000.00 of Chicago real estate had gone over to Colored people in the past year.”55
Indeed, like many other commercial activities in the Black Metropolis, the real estate industry held out great promises for advancing the race. Exemplifying this alignment of collective racial progress with individual property acquisition was a 1923 ad placed by the Sphinx Real Estate Improvement Corporation in the Defender reminding potential black homeowners that of the “fifty million dollars per year . . . paid out by the Colored renters of Chicago . . . less than 5 percent . . . is retained by the Colored race or controlled by them for the improvement of their own living conditions.”56 Such sentiments, according to the work of historian N.D.B. Connolly, reflected the critical importance of property and real estate to black politics in the first half of the twentieth century. Connolly argues, “Owning rental real estate and owning one’s own home promised black people a measure of individual freedom from the coercive power of wage labor, landlords, and the state.”57 But Connolly also describes another side to this story—the contradictions that arose as black leaders seeking to uplift the race pursued economic activities that extracted resources from those they were seeking to uplift. And such contradictions also extended into the political sphere, as black landlords cooperated with white elites invested in maintaining a racially unjust status quo. While these circumstances certainly characterized the real estate dealings of Overton, Binga, and DePriest, perhaps even more significant for the Black Metropolis was the way in which its transformation into a real estate frontier in the 1920s reshaped its political culture. With residents increasingly bombarded with advertisements warning them not to miss the golden opportunity, an economizing ethos of “getting ahead” began to eclipse that of “advancing the race.” “Have you invested in Chicago real estate?” asked another Sphinx Real Estate ad. “Those who have bought Chicago property in the last ten years have made money and values are increasing every year.”58 And yet another ad in the Defender from a Gary, Indiana, real estate agency implored potential buyers to get into the market there: “Putting things off has kept many men poor—perhaps this is your case. Action has made all rich men.”59
The transformation of the family home into a financial investment—a critical development in the neoliberalization of the political cultures of metropolitan spaces, black and white alike, over the course of the twentieth century—was a phenomenon that was hardly specific to the Black Metropolis, Harlem, or any other of the country’s larger black ghettos. Nor was the tendency of developers to take advantage of the situation. And African Americans were hardly alone in their tendency to imbue their property with a sense of racial and civic duty. Working- and middle-class whites buying into the hopes and promises of homeownership on the other side of the color line were also increasingly viewing their properties in such terms, as fears of black invasion increased and grassroots struggles to hold the line against blockbusting real estate agents proliferated. And yet the blockbusters cynically betraying white homeowners for quick and substantial monetary gain were clearly regarded as villains, whereas the black developers who were ripping up buildings and charging exorbitant rents for substandard apartments were cast as race men and community leaders. This explains a great deal about how the clubwomen activists of the Black Metropolis could mobilize to help their poorer neighbors while embracing a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps view. If, as Helgeson has argued, these women did help to create “resilient local bases of power and a long and rich tradition of black liberal politics” that led blacks to make demands on the black submachine as well as New Deal relief agencies in the years to come, they also participated in shaping a political culture that proved hostile to many of the most assertive struggles for social justice in the early 1930s: the Communist-led actions against housing evictions, unemployment, and the lack of adequate welfare relief.60 The political sympathies of a good many clubwomen activists lay not with such campaigns but with the more respectable Chicago NAACP, which, during the very moment antieviction protestors and Unemployment Councils were hitting the streets, was fighting for its survival. Indeed, if the local NAACP took on a more active role beginning in 1933 under the leadership of former Chicago Whip editor and Yale graduate A.C. MacNeal, one of the key forces behind the Don’t Spend Your Money Where You Can’t Work campaign, it had no real economic program in the midst of an economic catastrophe, and its reliance on the Appomattox Club crowd meant it would do little to become relevant to working-class blacks.
Hence, as on the other side of the color line, the political culture of the Black Metropolis could muster little opposition to the reigning political and economic order, even as that order lay in shambles. After 1929, most of what had been invested in black banks and businesses—in hope and money—had vanished, and even the likes of Edward Wright had kitchenettes on his block. Courageous were those agitating for jobs, housing, and relief in the 1930s, but their ranks were almost impossibly thin. By the mid-1930s, committed Communists in the city numbered about four hundred (although there were enough fellow travelers to swell the crowd to over a thousand when they demonstrated for relief). After dropping to 658 in 1933 from a 1928 peak of 1,150, membership in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters rebounded to over 1,000 by 1935, but there was no getting around the fact that seven years had passed with no gain.
It was within this context that the Black Metropolis played host in February 1936 to the first convention of the National Negro Congress (NNC), which brought over seven hundred delegates, including such notables as Harlem’s famed Baptist pastor Adam C
layton Powell Jr.; James W. Ford, black vice presidential candidate for the Communist Party in 1932 and 1936; the National Urban League’s Lester Granger; and the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, as well as a number of leading writers, artists, and intellectuals, including Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Arna Bontemps. The event was held at the Eighth Regiment Armory, whose interior hall was draped with banners, one of which read “Jobs and Adequate Relief for a Million Negro Destitute Families.” Randolph could not attend the event but he sent another BSCP official to deliver a spirited speech proclaiming that “the problems of the Negro people [are] the problems of the workers, for practically 99 per cent of Negro people win their bread by selling their labor power.”61 “The NNC convention in Chicago proved unique,” historian Erik Gellman has argued, “because its participants not only talked about working-class blacks but also looked to them for leadership.”62 Nevertheless, while receiving praise in the Defender, the convention also stirred up a great deal of controversy. Several religious leaders stormed out, and reporters covering the event noted undercurrents of discontent among the delegates concerning the radical tone of the proceedings, the large presence of whites and Communists, and the notable absence of old guard black leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Charles S. Johnson.63 In the end the NNC convention hardly left a footprint within the political culture of the Black Metropolis. Two years later, the scathing critiques of capitalism that had filled the Eighth Regiment Armory seemed like distant memories as Junius Austin urged the crowd gathered for the Negro Business Exposition in the very same building to take on racial oppression by buying black and supporting the retail business of the South Side’s biggest policy kingpins.
Chicago on the Make Page 12