In addition to such events, black leaders began to pressure the city to do something about the severe lack of housing for black war workers. The New Deal’s Public Works Administration had bankrolled the construction of four new housing projects in Chicago in the mid-1930s, but only one—the Ida B. Wells Homes—was intended for black occupancy. Part of the problem stemmed from the federal government’s “neighborhood composition rule,” which prevented federal housing projects from changing the racial composition of the neighborhoods in which they were constructed. Bound by this rule, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), formed in 1937 to oversee the city’s housing projects, steered black projects into black ghetto areas, white projects into white neighborhoods, and avoided the city’s racially mixed areas altogether for fear of provoking racial conflict. When the CHA had attempted to house a substantial number of black workers in the Frances Cabrini Homes in the North Side Sicilian Little Hell District, skirmishes between neighborhood Italians and new black residents culminated in a near-riot after gunshots were fired into a black apartment. The CHA thus bowed to the forces of grassroots resistance, a policy that both reinforced the boundaries around the ghetto and did little to change the housing emergency for African Americans—a problem that was only going to become further exacerbated as increasing numbers of black veterans began returning home to find they had no place to live.30
This was the situation facing Mayor Kelly as the war was winding down in 1945. Hailing from the rugged streets of Bridgeport, where Irish gangs had been ruthlessly patrolling the color line to the east since at least the early 1900s, Kelly was no stranger to the dynamics of grassroots racism that were preventing him from solving the city’s pressing housing problem. However, at the time of the 1919 race riot, when Bridgeport’s Hamburg Athletic Club was leading raids into the Black Belt, Kelly had long graduated from his education on the Bridgeport streets. In fact, he was from a previous generation that had come of age before the city’s black ghetto had taken full form, and, somewhat surprisingly, he seemed to have risen through the ranks of the Cook County Democratic Party machine—an organization full of racist athletic-club types and politicos who had cut their teeth decrying Big Bill Thompson’s “nigger-loving” ways—with certain ideas about racial justice intact. Then, as a loyal New Dealer, who had garnered a huge majority of Chicago’s votes for F.D.R. in the 1936 presidential election, he apparently caught some inspiration from the democratizing winds blowing out of Washington. While most machine cadres harbored an open contempt for self-righteous reformers and the know-it-all university types from Hyde Park that gave them intellectual cover, Kelly had chosen Elizabeth Wood as the first executive director of the CHA, a woman—this in itself, a bold decision—who had been a caseworker for a progressive charitable organization while taking classes at the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration. Wood was clearly coming out of a tradition of social work and sociological research among whose primary objectives was to show that immigrant slums and black ghettos were caused not by the racial defects of their inhabitants but rather by racism and structural poverty.
Thus, when the time came for Kelly to take a stand on the question of open housing, he broke ranks with both the Cook County Democratic Party machine and its base. Initially, it was not so much what he did, but rather what he said. Kelly pledged repeatedly to guarantee the availability of housing to blacks throughout the city, and proclaimed that as long as he was mayor, any person would be allowed to live where he wanted to so long as he could afford it. This was not exactly music to the ears of South Side whites then digging into trenches to resist racial integration. People began referring to swimming pools monopolized by blacks as “Kelly’s inkwells,” and the Democratic Party brass began worrying about the upcoming election in 1947. Into the situation stepped Jacob “Jack” Arvey, who was elevated in 1946 to chairman of the Cook Country Democratic Party—a post Kelly had occupied after Nash’s death in 1943. Arvey was a Jew and, as such, a relative outsider in Chicago politics, but his ability to deliver votes for the party—often at margins of nine to one—propelled him through the ranks of the Nash-Kelly machine. Kelly was in political hot water for a number of scandals, ranging from his failure to deliver adequate garbage collection services despite higher taxes to his tolerance of organized crime, to rampant police corruption. Arvey was thus brought in, fresh from his stint in the World War II Pacific theater, to do damage control, and he started by deploying his people to poll Chicagoans outside movie theaters and by telephone. When the results were tallied, Arvey found that despite all the scandals in play, what Chicagoans were most concerned about was the housing issue. As Arvey recalled later: “Well, we were solid with the Jews, we could see, and better than even with the Negroes, but everywhere else—the Poles, the Irish even, the Germans—we were in trouble. ‘Him?’ they’d say, ‘Are you kidding? We’d sooner vote for a Chinaman.’”31 After over two thousand angry whites battled police and destroyed property—in other words, rioted—to prevent the CHA from moving blacks into temporary housing constructed near the Chicago Municipal Airport on the Far Southwest Side, Kelly’s situation became untenable.
And so Edward J. Kelly, under the strong advice of Arvey and the Democratic machine, did not seek reelection in 1947. Chosen to replace him was businessman-reformer Martin H. Kennelly, another one of Bridgeport’s sons, who had made his fortune in the moving and storage business. Yet the leadership of the Democratic machine was dreaming if it thought that Chicago’s race problem would follow Kelly out of politics. The pitched battles between angry mobs of white residents and police out by the airport would pale in comparison to what was in store for the city in the coming decades. Those increasingly joining the ranks to fight in these battles were largely immigrants and the children of immigrants—Italians, Poles, Slavs, Czechs, Hungarians, Jews, and Greeks, among others—who had themselves been the targets of racially charged aggression by the Irish, Germans, Scandinavians, and Anglos, and sometimes still were. But the nationalist fervor of the war, combined with the demographic sea change that the Second Great Migration had brought about, began the process of gathering all of these groups under one big happy umbrella of whiteness. White Americans of all origins had come together to oppose the Germans and the Japanese on battlefields overseas, and they had joined forces to oppose black invasion at home, in each case helping to make a more universal white identity that would play a key role in American politics in the years to come. This story was far from over—words like “polack,” “wop,” “mick,” “kraut,” “kike,” and “hunky” could still be heard wherever white ethnics mixed, and, on the “white” side of the color line, bonds of ethnic solidarity were still as powerful as bonds of racial solidarity. But as black migrants from the South continued to pour into the city in the postwar years, whiteness was clearly gaining traction on the ground.
DEVIL’S MUSIC
Since 1934, when the Chicago Defender began sponsoring the mayor of Bronzeville election, the event had been allowing black Chicagoans to take stock of who they were and who they wanted to be. Bronzeville’s mayor, of course, had no formal political power, but he served as the symbolic embodiment of the larger black community—a cultural icon of sorts, but one you might bump into on the streets.32 During the war years, as black Chicago took on its more militant bent, mayoral candidates used their moment on the stage to speak out on political issues, such as housing problems and police misconduct. Even though the mayoral election could not avoid being somehow political in its implicit assertion of autonomy and representation within a city in which blacks were hardly getting their fair share of either, it was generally understood that the affair was to be, above all, a festive celebration of local black culture and community. Yet to speak of a black culture and a black community in 1940s Chicago is to simplify what was, in fact, a very complicated and often contentious interplay of different cultures and communities defined by class, regional origins, and lifestyle. The very name Bronzeville that thes
e elections popularized was coined by cosmetics magnate Anthony Overton, a man who designed products for middle-class blacks seeking to lighten their skin, and the elections were publicized by a newspaper that spilled a great deal of ink trying to teach lower-class southern migrants how to “act northern.” Southern migrants, in fact, had shouldered the blame for much of what was wrong with “the race” since the 1920s. Their arrival in Chicago, to be sure, had created a profitable market for a whole new generation of black entrepreneurs, but these same uneducated country folk—usually one generation removed from slavery and, in middle-class eyes, displaying unsavory predilections for liquor, the policy wheel, hot music, old-time religion, and jitterbugging—also threatened the self-image of the city’s black middle class, which measured its status, to some extent, in terms of the approbation white society bestowed on it.
And these were only a handful of the numerous ways that made migrants disrespectable in the eyes of middling “old settler” African Americans. Their storefront churches and the jackleg preachers who shouted in them, their way of “jive talking” about “cats” and “kicks,” their zoot-suit-wearing sons, their late-night revelry and loose sexual morals, their brawling and boisterous behavior, their sidewalk barbecues, fried catfish and chicken shacks, and taste for pig’s intestines—all this, in the eyes of many middle-class black Chicagoans, signalled the recrudescence of a backwards-looking southern culture that was giving the race a bad name. Southern foodways, in particular, were at that time much too close to be nostalgic or comforting, as they would be some two decades later, when many African Americans would fetishize collard greens, cornbread, black-eyed peas, smoked spareribs, and fried chicken as “soul food” capable of liberating them from spiritual oppression.33 Moreover, aspersions cast at migrants for setting back racial progress were not the stuff of hushed conversations behind closed doors; they were right out there in the open for everyone to hear, pronounced from sanctified pulpits and in the sanctimonious columns of the black press. Chicago was no Mississippi, but poor migrants understood very well that they occupied the bottom rung on the social ladder of the Black Metropolis.
Which explains why the election of R.H. Harris as mayor of Bronzeville in 1945 signified to the southern migrants who had been pouring into the city since the outbreak of the war that they had finally arrived. Southern-born blacks had of course been crowned mayor in previous elections, but most had been raised in Chicago and were well-established members of the community by the time of their election. By contrast, Harris was a relatively recent migrant from Texas, and although his silky-smooth falsetto singing in one of Chicago’s most beloved gospel quartets, the Soul Stirrers, and his ownership of a successful Bronzeville business, Five Soul Stirrers Cleaners, seemed to distinguish him from the typical wartime migrant, Harris’s election nonetheless signified that southern culture had captured the heart of Bronzeville. And it was no wonder it had. At war’s end, migrants outnumbered “native” African Americans born and/or raised in Chicago before the First Great Migration by almost eight to one. And this numerical majority was translating into economic influence. By 1947, migrants owned thirteen out of every fourteen businesses in black Chicago. This was the same year that the rising number of barbecue joints warranted the creation of their own heading in the city’s business directory for the first time. The smoky smells of southern barbecue, moreover, intermingled with the pounding sounds of southern blues music—country, Memphis, boogie-woogie, jump, big band—coming out of jukeboxes and radios across black Chicago. Respectable middle-class elements called it “devil’s music,” but this was a minority view, as was clearly suggested by the victory of local celebrity disc jockey Al Benson in the 1948 mayor of Bronzeville election. Benson, like Harris, was part entertainer, part entrepreneur—a mix of qualities that appealed to southern migrants—but he was much more country than Harris was. A storefront preacher before becoming the most popular disc jockey at black radio station WGES, Benson’s folksy radio persona was matched by his preference for the blues over the more respectable gospel music. For lower-class migrants, the Mississippi-born Benson was surely one of them, and he had made it by staying true to his roots.
Hence, despite perceptions among some middle-class residents that migrants were lazy and shiftless, they were clearly “getting ahead.” In fact, black median income in the city rose to nearly twice the national average for blacks by 1950, and remained higher than that of every other city except Detroit throughout the 1950s. Historian Adam Green has referred to such circumstances to argue that scholars and other observers of Bronzeville have largely overlooked and, in a sense, underestimated the grand importance of what was really transpiring there in the 1940s and early 1950s. Chicago, which Richard Wright once referred to as “the known city,” has usually been viewed in the context of the local and the everyday—as a place where blacks got on better than elsewhere, where they got decent jobs, established local institutions, and seized a small but not insignificant measure of political power. Migrants have fit into this story as well; these rural folk, we have learned, encountered some difficulties but, in the end, were able to shed their agricultural orientations for the more rigid factory work regime and effectively adjust to life in the modern metropolis. What these angles of vision have obscured, however, is the extent to which Chicago moved to the very center of black life in the United States, becoming the driving force behind new feelings of national fellowship and racial community among African Americans that would provide the foundations for the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Chicago in the first postwar decade, not Harlem in the 1920s, Green argues, hosted the quintessential moment of black modernity. It was the vital site of cultural production for a range of media and cultural forms that allowed blacks throughout the nation to feel they shared a common destiny and belonged to a community that spanned space and time. It was in Chicago that a savvy publishing entrepreneur named John Johnson Jr. saw the need for Ebony magazine, a black version of Life that presented “the happier side of Negro life” alongside perspectives on “the race question.” It was in Chicago that the nation’s only black newswire, the Associated Negro Press, and its most widely circulating black newspaper, the Defender, shaped the news content of blacks throughout the nation. And it was in Chicago that a cohort of virtuoso migrant musicians from the Deep South, with the help of two Polish immigrant club owners, electrified and amplified the bare-bones, roots sounds of the Delta, added a more elaborate rhythm section and a second guitar to the arrangements, and brought to market the internationally renowned Chicago blues sound.34
Encountering the blues scene in Chicago today, it is hard to imagine that the wailing harmonica solos, the bent and sliding guitar notes, the roaring vocals, and the sparse lyrics that were signatures of this music once constituted the dominant soundtrack for life in the Black Metropolis—that jukeboxes in corner bars around the city belted out the gravelly voice of Muddy Waters singing such classics as “I Can’t Be Satisfied” and “Hoochie Coochie Man.” In the 1940s and 1950s, Bronzeville and the rest of black Chicago was teeming with slick blues venues—the Club DeLisa, the Rhumboogie, Joe’s DeLuxe, the 708, and Silvio’s, to name but a few; now, the blues can, with some rare exceptions, only be heard outside of black neighborhoods, in areas where white tourists, suburbanites in for a night out on the town, and college students gather. The blues clubs of today—House of Blues, Chicago B.L.U.E.S. Bar, and Buddy Guy’s Legends—are theme-park-like affairs that seek to offer white folks an “authentic” blues experience; T-shirts and other merchandise are, of course, on sale as you enter, and all of the clubs are, as the reviews on their websites seek to assure potential visitors, “friendly.” Even the storied Checkerboard Lounge, which was one of Bronzeville’s last legitimate blues clubs, moved from 43rd Street to Hyde Park in 2005, opening near the University of Chicago in a space where the fitness club Women’s Workout World used to be. Yet, while white folks today constitute the principal consumers of the blues experience an
d the blues itself has become what Claude Lévi-Strauss referred to as a “floating signifier,” a cultural form unhinged from its original context and meaning, the blues did not sell out or die, as some purists would argue, but rather passed into other forms that became more commercially viable in black communities beginning in the 1960s—soul, Motown, funk, and eventually hip hop and rap.
Market forces made the blues into a museum piece, but these same market forces were what made the Chicago blues sound innovative and viable in the first place. A great many of the blues legends that came North to Chicago from Mississippi and Louisiana in the 1930s and 1940s—Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Minnie, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, and Sonny Boy Williamson—were, like the vast majority of migrants, trying to improve their lives. If talented blues musicians could scrape together an existence in the South, northern cities like Chicago and Detroit offered scores of clubs to play in, black-appeal radio stations with renowned disc jockeys, record labels that could transform recording sessions into national hits, and bigger paychecks. Yet all these things were contingent on reaching bigger and bigger audiences, which especially after 1949, when Billboard magazine replaced the industry term race music with rhythm & blues, included whites as well. What has been largely overlooked in most accounts of the early blues scene in Chicago is the importance of what Adam Green refers to as an “entrepreneurial ethos” among the performers, producers, and disc jockeys who made Chicago the place to be for blues musicians.35 It all came together in 1948 when Muddy Waters recorded his first single for Chess Records, a label launched by two Jewish immigrants from Poland, Leonard and Phil Chess, who, as owners of the 708 club and the Macomba Lounge, looked to record the performers that were electrifying increasingly larger crowds in their establishments. The Chess brothers were smart enough to bring in polished bluesman Willie Dixon, whose impressive songwriting and production capabilities helped Waters record a long list of hit records for Chess throughout the 1950s, making the label a major force in the industry. With Dixon working behind the scenes, Chess would soon become the bridge between the blues and rock ’n’ roll, recording Chuck Berry’s early crossover hits “Maybellene,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Johnny B. Goode,” and “Rock and Roll Music” between 1955 and 1958.
Chicago on the Make Page 16