With Berry’s “Maybellene” climbing to number five on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, 1955 was a momentous year for Chess and for the blues in general, which seemed on the verge of dramatic crossover success. Yet it was also the year that country-and-western singer Bill Haley’s whitened R & B single “Rock Around the Clock” catapulted to number one, that RCA Victor signed Elvis Presley to a record contract, that Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her bus seat sparked the Montgomery Bus boycott, and that the Supreme Court ordered the South to start desegregating its schools “with all deliberate speed.” While a number of bluesmen have sought to disabuse Americans of the idea that the blues is only about anger and sorrow, the undeniable association between the blues and the black southern experience became a bitter pill for whites to swallow as images of virulent southern racism circulated in the mass media, and northern cities like Chicago increasingly began to take stock of their own racial problem. Crossover hits would continue for black R & B performers in the years to come, and a talented second generation of Chicago blues musicians—Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, Koko Taylor—would make its mark, but the rise of white rock and the changing racial landscape would reduce the blues to a niche market by the mid-1960s.
The eclipse of the blues by white rock ’n’ roll in the late 1950s is a story filled with allegations of appropriation and exploitation. Phil and Leonard Chess may have had little to do, at least directly, with the theft of the black blues sound by the Elvis-propelled rock ’n’ roll industry, but their image as patrons of the blues scene was tarnished by a slew of lawsuits filed against them in the 1970s by many of their headliners claiming they were swindled. Willie Dixon had serious problems working with the Chess brothers, and, as legend has it, Muddy Waters was once seen on a ladder painting the ceiling of the Chess studio.36 Interviewed about such controversies in a PBS documentary on the blues in 2003, Leonard Chess’s son Marshall, who worked as an executive producer with the Rolling Stones in the 1970s, described Chess’s talented bluesmen as children interested only in Cadillacs and womanizing, further fanning the flames of rancor surrounding the Chess “success” story.37
Regardless of the racist overtones of such assertions, they touch on a fundamental truth about the Chicago blues scene, which is that the Chess brothers, Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, and most of the label’s other performers were entrepreneurs as well as artists. While blues romantics like to idealize the live blues performances of the 1940s and 1950s as utopic moments when musicians spoke from their souls through the medium of the blues—and, no doubt, they often did—the truth is that most blues artists in Chicago in the late 1940s and early 1950s were moving “with all deliberate speed” away from the stage and into the studio. And who could blame them? On the club stage they could reach hundreds; in the studio they could reach hundreds of thousands, if not millions. For musicians raised in abject rural poverty in the Deep South, the financial payoff that such popularity could bring was hardly beside the point. Though there was more to it than this. Blues musicians also understood that while black writers and artists—those in the more socially accepted fields—could gain some recognition for their accomplishments from white intellectuals and black power elites alike, neither white nor black society would bestow this kind of social and artistic value on black blues musicians, at least not yet. Instructive here is the case of Eric Dolphy, the sublime saxophonist, bass clarinetist, and flautist, who dreamed of being a classical musician but was forced into jazz because that was what black youths did in 1940s Los Angeles. In this situation where black blues musicians could not strive for artistic capital, commercial approval was all that was left, and when it came from white audiences as well, so much the better. This is why Louis Jordan, who spent a great deal of time performing in Chicago in the 1940s and who was one of the earliest blues musicians to achieve crossover success, boasted frequently about all the money he made from white audiences, and why Muddy Waters brought the house down playing in front of East Coast preppies at the prestigious Newport Jazz Festival in 1960.
And in some sense, this spirit of entrepreneurialism is what distinguished Chicago from the other major center of black cultural expression, Harlem. As blues musicians in Chicago were trying to bring their music to wider audiences, jazz musicians in Harlem were moving in a somewhat different direction. At after-hours clubs like Minton’s Playhouse and Monroe’s Uptown, black jazzmen like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Coleman Hawkins invented a new jazz form, bebop, which, in its technical sophistication, fast tempo, and instrumental virtuosity, represented a turning away from the marketplace and from the white audience that had so eagerly consumed the swing music of the 1930s. Jam sessions were small, unstructured, and often consisted mostly of musicians themselves, many of whom took turns on the stage. This was not music one could dance to, and white audiences found it discordant, edgy, and nervous, which, on some level, was the point. Bebop connected on an aesthetic level to the new spirit of racial militancy that was sweeping through much of the urban North during the 1940s, but it also represented an attempt by black musicians to create a cultural form so opaque that it resisted both commercialization and critical denigration by white society.38 In the process, they created an art form that lacked popular appeal among average blacks as well. By the late 1940s, bebop’s practitioners were venturing into more commercial projects in order to make a living, but the avant-gardist spirit remained in the Harlem music scene for decades to come. Such circumstances meant that from the 1940s through the mid-1960s, the years of the blues, soul, and Motown, New York would take a back seat to Chicago and Detroit, where southern culture cross-fertilized a northern spirit of “getting ahead” to produce the music that touched African Americans across the nation.39
THE ROAD TO SEGREGATION
Viewing the Englewood neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side today, it is difficult to imagine that it once sat at the crossroads of progress. In the 1920s and 1930s, its respectable turn-of-the-century brick two-flats and single-family bungalows housed middle-class workers of Irish and German descent, many of whom held jobs in the stockyards to the north. Its shopping district at Halsted and 63rd was one of the city’s busiest, and thousands of elevated trains, streetcars, and suburban commuter trains serviced the neighborhood every day. Many of those who could afford to live in this neighborhood had the unions to thank for raising their wages, and loyalty to a union was surpassed only by loyalty to one of the area’s ten Catholic parishes, whose pastors were frequently heard urging their parishioners to support union campaigns. A good many of the Irish Catholics in the area were also, no doubt, beneficiaries of the Irish control over the city’s political machine and the wealth of patronage resources it had to spread around.
Cut to turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Englewood: a neighborhood chopped up by vacant lots strewn with rubbish and debris, where cryptic gang graffiti was splattered on countless boarded-up homes and businesses, where the only white faces were those of policemen and other civil servants, where the unemployment rate was triple the national average, and where a never-ending turf war between some of Chicago’s most notorious street gangs—the Gangster Disciples, the Black Disciples, and the Black P-Stones—bestowed upon the neighborhood the ignominious claim of having the highest crime rate in the city, which ranked it near the top of the list of highest in the country. In 1991, eighty-one murders were committed in this one corner of the city in just four months. Most people in the United States live their entire lives without hearing a live gunshot pierce the night; in the Englewood of recent years, they have been almost nightly occurrences.
Englewood is a poster child for what historians refer to as the “urban crisis” that overwhelmed many northern industrial cities in the postwar decades.40 In Detroit, the crisis spread like a cancer throughout the entire city, creating an impoverished black core ringed by more prosperous white middle-class suburbs; in Chicago the crisis was quarantined, contained within broad swaths of the black South and West Sides. One of the
great intellectual challenges of the past few decades has been explaining how this transpired, how the roughly twenty-year period between the end of World War II and the turbulent race riots of the mid-1960s came to produce, in the famous words of the Kerner Commission studying the riots, “two societies, one black, one white—separate but unequal.” The position Americans take on this question inevitably determines, in part, whether they fall on the conservative or liberal side of the ideological fence. Conservatives tend to privilege explanations that reflect cultural racism (such as “blacks live in poor ghettos because their culture is dysfunctional and therefore they underachieve”), free market rationalities (such as “blacks and whites have simply chosen to live in their own separate neighborhoods, as is their right to do so”), or some combination of the two (such as “blacks and whites have chosen to live apart because of irreconcilable cultural differences”).41 Liberals, on the other hand, have historically referred to the power of racial discrimination in housing, education, and employment, and, to a lesser extent, to economic circumstances and policies that have eroded inner-city employment bases while promoting suburban growth. Although most reputable historians of the postwar American city are more likely to be liberal than conservative in their outlook, they have offered different interpretations of the causes and origins of the urban crisis. Until somewhat recently, the dominant view was that the struggle for racial integration was lost as a result of the ghetto riots and black power consciousness of the 1960s. Such circumstances, the story goes, allowed the Republican Party to stoke white middle-class fears to provoke a broad-based backlash against racial liberalism that enabled it to capture the White House in 1968.42 To be sure, many of those middle-class whites who imagined themselves within the ranks of the “silent majority” Nixon claimed to represent were scratching their heads and wondering: “Why should my hard-earned money be used to support people who burn their own neighborhoods and who hate white people?”
Yet such accounts are of little use in trying to make sense of a place like Englewood, which had already been transformed from a thriving white middle-class neighborhood to a distressed black ghetto by the time of the Watts rebellion of 1965—the first major uprising of the black power era. Englewood’s story suggests that the origins of the urban crisis can be found way back in the 1940s and 1950s, when, faced with the prospect of racial integration, whites formed neighborhood associations and unruly mobs to oppose it with all the means at their disposal, including sometimes lethal terrorist tactics.43 Any assessment of what went so horribly wrong in Englewood, for example, cannot avoid considering such events as the Peoria Street riot of 1949, when crowds as large as seven thousand or more gathered to vent their anger at what they wrongly believed was a black family moving into a home at 56th and Peoria. African Americans, had, in fact, been spotted entering the premises at this address, but their presence had nothing to do with real estate transactions. Rather, they had come to the home of Aaron Bindman that night for an informal labor union meeting and celebration. In a moment filled with tragic irony that speaks volumes about the decline of the U.S. labor movement in the postwar years, Bindman, an officer of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, attempted to no avail to use his union credentials to win over the angry crowd at his doorstep. His appeals to working-class solidarity only poured fuel on the fire, eliciting shouts of “Kike!” “Lynch the niggers!” and “Communists!”44 Here, in the streets of Englewood, the sanctity of whiteness trumped any appeals to the class struggle, especially when issued from the lips of someone like Bindman—a Jew and thus an outsider in a part of Englewood that was home to the nearly four thousand Irish Catholic members of Visitation Parish. Although pastors of this and other Englewood parishes had once used their authority to promote the unions, they now rallied their flocks to protect the parish against racial invasion and white flight. Fear fermented into anger as residents heard rumors of friends and neighbors planning to move away. Homeowners worried about falling property values, longtime renters worried about having to cut ties with the parish, and those unable to move so easily worried about being left behind as the area morphed into a black ghetto. All this angst was focused on the two-story flat at 56th and Peoria that November night. If blacks could move here, most of those in the crowd reasoned, the neighborhood was lost. These were the circumstances that turned otherwise law-abiding citizens into rioters along Chicago’s color line in the postwar years.
What was happening in Englewood was hardly unique to Chicago. The Peoria Street riot was one of the more serious events in what historians now consider to have been a broad-based wave of grassroots activism against racial integration throughout the industrial Midwest in the postwar years. Between 1944 and 1946, some fifty homes in Chicago were firebombed, stoned, or otherwise vandalized, usually in hit-and-run fashion under the cover of night, resulting in the deaths of three of their occupants.45 These acts were most often perpetrated by teenagers running with street gangs. The movement of white resistance taking shape was a family affair, with mothers and children not infrequently seen on the front lines. But young men in their teens and twenties—a generation that had come of age after the great labor struggles of the 1930s—most commonly constituted the core of the racist mobs. Out of twenty-nine local residents arrested during the Peoria Street riot, for example, all were male and only one did not fall between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five.46 It was this element of the mob that began pursuing bolder tactics of resistance in the late 1940s.47 Hence, in August 1947, as crowds of between 1,500 and 5,000 whites battled police around the Fernwood Park Homes housing project at 103rd and Halsted over the city’s plan to move in black veterans, groups of marauding whites pulled blacks out of passing automobiles and streetcars to beat them up.48 The following month teenage gangs attacked numerous black youths and incited hundreds of students at Wells High School on the Near Northwest Side to strike over the transfer of 60 blacks to their school, despite the fact that these additional students brought the total number of African Americans at Wells to a mere 130 out of a student body of 2,200.49 In late July 1949, some two thousand incensed residents besieged a two-story building that had recently been purchased by a black teacher and his social worker wife at 7153 South St. Lawrence, around the southern edge of the Black Belt, burning mattresses and throwing stones at the house until daybreak.50 And these were but a handful of the seemingly countless actions taken by whites to terrorize African Americans who dared to cross the color line.
MAP 4. Major incidents of racial violence and the black population, 1946–1952.
Through such terrorist tactics white Chicagoans were able to stave off the advancing color line—if, in many cases, only temporarily—during a period when the Chicago Housing Authority possessed a leadership committed to promoting racial integration in the housing market. The Housing Act of 1949 made substantial federal funding available to municipalities for the purpose of building public housing, and the CHA, still under the direction of tireless liberal Elizabeth Wood, was ready with a list of proposed sites in white neighborhoods. Yet site after site met with dogged resistance from aldermen who understood all too well that allowing black housing into their wards would be committing political suicide. Since the city council had the power to veto any CHA project, Wood did not stand a chance without the support of the mayor. And, watching nervously as his base hurled insults at police fending off attacks against African Americans, Mayor Kennelly chose the path of least resistance, which was to refrain from taking on the city council’s segregationist ways. Like most of the aldermen on the city council, the mayor had his ear to the ground, and the rumblings of white discontent began to sound like a freight train on a collision course with the mayor’s office. Moreover, Kennelly’s lack of resolve in backing the CHA against the city council was matched by his reluctance to deploy adequate police protection for the black residents targeted by racist mobs. Time and time again, human relations officials and other eyewitnesses criticized the police f
or insufficient manpower, incompetence, unwillingness to make arrests, and, perhaps most importantly, complicity with the mob. Kennelly scrambled to institute reforms, but complaints about the police continued. In the summer of 1953, for example, when yet another attempt by the CHA to integrate a housing project—the Trumbull Park Homes on Chicago’s Far South Side—met with fierce neighborhood resistance, black tenants and outside observers once again criticized the police for failing to protect black tenants and sympathizing with their aggressors.51
Looking back upon this early chapter in the urban crisis, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that mob rule was allowed to shape a segregated future for Chicago while the city’s leadership stood idly by. Not only would the CHA not pry open the housing market for African Americans, as Elizabeth Wood dreamed, but it would, in the years ahead, even become a lever of hyperghettoization.52 With Wood resigning out of utter frustration in 1954 and the memories of the white housing riots of the 1940s and 1950s etched in the minds of the political establishment, the monstrous housing complexes built for black families in the 1950s and early 1960s would end up only in black ghetto areas or adjacent to preexisting projects on the city’s South and West Sides. But the whites taking the streets in the Peoria Street riot and many of the other racial disturbances of these years won only a Pyrrhic victory. The dynamics of segregation in Chicago were as much about resistance as they were about flight.53 The black population in Englewood increased from 11 percent in 1950 to 70 percent in 1960, as over 50,000 whites left the area. Those whites left behind, moreover, were hardly mixing with blacks; rather, they were preparing for their own departure. Ten years later Englewood was solidly black, along with many of the surrounding areas. Whites in Chicago, with astonishingly few exceptions, were unwilling to share their neighborhoods with African Americans, and with the federal government guaranteeing long-term, low-interest loans for veterans and other potential homeowners, they began heading for more leafy environs far from the color line. And Chicago was well on its way to becoming one of the most segregated cities in the nation.
Chicago on the Make Page 17