Chicago on the Make

by Andrew J. Diamond

  Some Puerto Ricans relocating to the barrio during these years were displaced by urban renewal projects, particularly on the Near West Side, but many more were swept there by the currents of white flight, as entire neighborhoods on the West and South Sides transformed into black ghettos at breakneck speed. Puerto Ricans fled along with European Americans from their black neighbors, but they had quite different motivations. A good many Puerto Ricans, in fact, were Afro–Puerto Ricans whose ancestors had been brought to the island as slaves, and Chicagoans tended to identify them with African Americans. Reflecting on this situation, one Puerto Rican immigrant in Chicago recounted a story of being refused service at a bar on the grounds that he was black. When he responded that he was Puerto Rican, the bartender yelled back, “That’s the same shit.”17 This incident was part of a larger process of “racialization” that forced Puerto Ricans to compete with blacks for housing in the lowest-rent neighborhoods and for work in the lowest-paying sectors of the labor market. Moreover, discriminatory practices by realtors and landlords relegated many of Chicago’s Puerto Ricans to the fringes of black ghetto neighborhoods, where, in some cases, they very quickly found themselves serving as buffers between white and black.

  Even if whites tolerated Puerto Ricans somewhat more than their black neighbors, a wave of vicious attacks against Puerto Ricans on the West Side in the mid-1950s left little doubt about which side of the color line most whites felt they belonged. In West Town, where Italian and Polish residents commonly referred to their Puerto Rican neighbors as “colored,” a series of fatal arson fires struck low-rent buildings housing Puerto Ricans, and along the Near West Side’s northern boundary, Italian and Mexican gangs led the resistance against Puerto Rican settlement with repeated beatings.18 Such circumstances explain a great deal about why Puerto Ricans would close ranks by transforming a section of the famed Division Street into a vibrant barrio that would, by 1980, contain almost half the Puerto Ricans in the entire city. But Puerto Ricans moved not only to escape the antagonism of their white neighbors but also because they understood that their proximity to blacks—racially and spatially—had placed them in a precarious position.

  Historian Robert Orsi’s concept of a “strategy of alterity” provides an apt way to describe the Puerto Ricans’ tendency to put distance between themselves and African Americans.19 Nor was residential location the only tactic they pursued. According to a 1960 report on the city’s Puerto Rican community conducted by the Chicago Commission on Human Relations (CCHR), dark-skinned Puerto Ricans adopted a range of behavioral tactics to mark themselves off from African Americans. “The dark Puerto Rican,” the authors of this study concluded after hundreds of interviews, “develops unique defensive attitudes in order not to be taken for an American Negro; thus he will speak only a bare minimum of English, trying to convey the impression that he is a foreigner rather than a Negro.”20 But this tendency to use the Spanish language to distinguish themselves from blacks also pushed them closer to their Mexican neighbors, who, themselves, began to engage in their own strategies of alterity.

  Mexicans, for their part, had also served as buffers between white and black in parts of the Near West Side as well as in the South Chicago community area around the Illinois Steel mill, and there is ample historical evidence that Mexican youths were active participants in the gang and mob attacks against blacks in these areas.21 Yet Mexicans were second-class citizens in the society of whiteness, and, as such, were the targets of racial hate in the 1950s and 1960s. One poignant example of anti-Mexican aggression during these years occurred when a group of youths mistook a Native American family for Mexicans and repeatedly stoned their East Garfield Park home, once leaving a note pinned to the door that read, “Ha Mex, get out of here”—signed by “the Whites.”22

  Such circumstances explain why, when Puerto Ricans were moving en masse into the West Town/Humboldt Park area, Mexicans were gravitating towards the Pilsen neighborhood between 18th Street and 22nd Street, which by the mid-1970s had become the unequivocal center of Chicago’s Mexican community. Once again urban renewal played its part, with the construction of the new UIC campus essentially wiping out what had been a substantial and long-standing Near West Side Mexican community. For decades, Mexicans and Italians on the Near West Side had shared—if at times grudgingly—parks, streets, and community centers. Similarly, in the South Chicago area, the children of Polish and Mexican steelworkers mingled, played, flirted, and sometimes scrapped in the streets and schoolyards. Mexicans had arrived in Chicago in the early years of the twentieth century seeking work on the railroads and in the steel mills and packinghouses. Although they had earned the enmity of many when the bosses employed them as strikebreakers to break the organizing efforts of steelworkers, by the 1930s they had founded newspapers, tortilla factories, restaurants, bodegas, and Spanish-language newspapers. To be sure, they lived in ethnic enclaves—colonias, so to speak—but by the 1950s they were well on the path towards integration. However, the demographic shift around this time constituted a rather significant bump in the road. Established Mexicans quickly found themselves being reracialized by the arrival into their neighborhoods of both Puerto Ricans and Mexican immigrants who spoke little English and knew nothing of American ways. Although in 1957 Mexican faces were conspicuous amidst the mobs of youths rallying around white supremacy in Calumet Park, many Mexicans seemed less certain of their place in the ranks of whiteness in the following years—a situation revealed poignantly in the early 1970s when activists in Pilsen began using the term la raza to designate the Mexican community.

  Indeed, just as a color changes in relation to which colors surround it, the racial identity of Mexicans seemed to change in a city with increasing numbers of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans themselves. In a matter of years, the ethnoracial identities that had taken shape along the interfaces between Puerto Rican, Mexican, black, and white would be called forth in the name of political movements demanding rights, equality, justice, and power. Those rallying behind these identities would, at times, look outside their communities to build bridges with others around universalistic notions of class justice—Chicago, after all, would be where the notion of a “rainbow coalition” was first imagined and tried. And yet, with Puerto Ricans packing into the Division Street barrio, Mexicans flowing into the colonia of Pilsen, the black population becoming increasingly ghettoized, and whites fleeing the city, the odds seemed long for any kind of reform coalition politics capable of unifying different ethnoracial groups behind a sense of shared class injustice. Although working-class whites, blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans would all be scarred by the injuries of class, the racially inflected circumstances of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s would ensure that the cause would be perceived or felt in racial rather than class terms: that race would be, as Stuart Hall has written, “the modality through which class [was] lived.”23

  THE BIRMINGHAM OF THE NORTH

  In late July 1963, the Chicago Daily News referred to the growing black mobilization for civil rights in Chicago as “a social revolution in our midst” and “a story without parallel in the history of our city.”24 Such pronouncements reflected, in part, events transpiring in the southern civil rights struggle. In particular, Birmingham was the word on the lips of blacks in Chicago and elsewhere that spring as the news media brought startling images of police turning attack dogs and high-pressure hoses on peacefully protesting men, women, and children, and Governor George Wallace declared he would “stand in the schoolhouse door” to prevent federally ordered integration at the University of Alabama. But Chicago’s civil rights leaders were quick to bring their fight into the discursive space opened up by the situation in Birmingham, challenging the notion long held by the Daley machine and some middle-class blacks that such problems were endemic to the South and did not apply to Chicago’s black community.

  One could witness such processes in motion in early July, when Mayor Daley addressed NAACP delegates gathered in Chicago for
their annual national convention. In classic fashion, Daley had arrived with a speech devoid of real substance, but when he proudly declared that there were “no ghettos in Chicago”—meaning that his administration did not view black neighborhoods in such negative terms—the head of the Illinois NAACP, Dr. Lucien Holman, blurted out, “We’ve had enough of this sort of foolishness.” “Everybody knows there are ghettos here,” he told a dumbfounded Daley, “and we’ve got more segregated schools than you’ve got in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana combined.” Nor was this an isolated incident. A few days later, as Daley again addressed convention delegates and other black Chicagoans at the end of the July 4th “Emancipation Day” parade, his attempt to extend a friendly hand was once more met with derision. This time a crowd of about 150 protesters approached the platform shouting things like “Daley must go!” and “Down with ghettos!” Unable to complete his speech, Daley hurried off the stage, but his replacement, Reverend Joseph H. Jackson, minister of the South Side’s 15,000-member Olivet Baptist Church, fared no better. Jackson, a political ally of Daley and an outspoken critic of the civil rights movement, was met with a chorus of jeers and boos before he even uttered a word. The situation deteriorated so much that police had to escort him out of the area amidst shouts of “Kill him!” and “Uncle Tom must go!” While Daley later dismissed the whole affair with his quip that the protest must have been set up by Republicans, it was clear that something very real was afoot in black Chicago.25

  By the fall of 1963 the many hundreds of miles stretching between Birmingham and Chicago could no longer keep the cities apart in the minds of many black Chicagoans. Reporters for the Chicago Defender missed few opportunities to highlight the link, especially in their coverage of the unraveling struggle being waged by local civil rights groups and ordinary parents about the deplorable conditions of black schools throughout the city. When school superintendent Benjamin Willis stubbornly clung to the ideal of colorblindness in resisting demands for student transfers to alleviate the problem of overcrowding, the Defender referred to him as Chicago’s own “Gov. Wallace standing in the doorway of an equal education for all Negro kids in the city.”26 Yet although the southern movement for civil rights lent African Americans in Chicago a sense of their own “historicity” as they organized to take on the status quo, such ideas were clearly secondary to the more immediate concerns—namely, the indignities and inequalities experienced by African American children in woefully inadequate schools.

  Why the schools of black Chicago had fallen into such a sorry state by this time had a great deal to do with the city’s inability or unwillingness to effectively accommodate the rapidly increasing black population. Problems began to arise in the 1950s when Chicago’s overall population declined by almost 2 percent, but the number of African Americans living there increased by some 300,000, bringing the total to 812,637—nearly a quarter of the city’s 3.5 million inhabitants. The increasing densification of black neighborhoods and the fact that newly arriving black families during these years tended to be quite a bit younger than the white families they were replacing further strained existing school facilities in black Chicago. At the Gregory School in the Garfield Park area of the West Side, for example, the student body rose from 2,115 in 1959 to 4,194 in 1961.27 Citing the sanctity of the “neighborhood school” and the need to separate school policy decisions from city politics, Superintendent Willis responded to the problem of overcrowded black schools with an extensive double-shift program and trailer-like temporary classrooms—referred to by protesters as “Willis wagons.”

  While Willis had dictated that the school district not keep any “record of race, color or creed of any student or employee,” several independent studies revealed the deep-rooted racial disparities that Willis’s colorblind ideals and band-aid policies were attempting to cover up. A 1962 Urban League study, moreover, found that class sizes were 25 percent larger in black schools and expenditures per pupil were 33 percent lower.28 Most African Americans, however, did not need such studies to confirm the injustices they confronted on a daily basis. Widespread disgust with the situation led first to the Chicago NAACP’s Operation Transfer campaign to have black parents register their children in white schools, and after that failed, to a series of parent-led sit-ins in several black neighborhoods, including Woodlawn, where the Alinskyite TWO (The Woodlawn Organization) organized school boycotts and demonstrations against the use of mobile classrooms at a local elementary school. Capitalizing on these uprisings from below, the Chicago Urban League, TWO, the Chicago NAACP, and a number of other newly formed community groups forged an umbrella civil rights organization, the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), to carry on the fight.

  By the summer of 1963 school protests had spread into several black communities on the South and West Sides, including the Englewood area, where parents joined activists from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in a spirited effort to halt the installation of mobile classrooms. Laying their bodies down at the construction site at 73rd and Lowe, the Englewood demonstrators provoked police into hauling them off, a spectacle that offered a first glimpse of the militant Chicago movement that was beginning to come together that summer. Renowned comedian and activist Dick Gregory was among the more than one hundred protesters arrested,29 some of whom broke with CORE’s nonviolent philosophy by kicking and stoning police. The militancy that day spawned a range of grassroots civil rights organizations seeking to carry on the fight for better schools, including the Parents Council for Integrated Schools and the Chicago Area Friends of SNCC (CAFSNCC), and those familiar with the fiery rhetoric from the charismatic Nation of Islam minister Malcolm X around this same time began to brace for some rough times ahead. So palpable was the anger of black protesters against the stonewalling tactics of Willis and the Daley machine that even after Chicagoans and the rest of the nation beheld what seemed like nonviolence’s finest hour—the spectacle of more than two hundred thousand gathered in Washington that August to hear Martin Luther King evoke his “dream” of racial integration—organizer Bayard Rustin told the Sun-Times that the march marked not the end but rather the beginning of a campaign of “intensified nonviolence” in Chicago.30

  While somewhat nebulous, Rustin’s reference to intensified nonviolence was indicative of a tendency among civil rights leaders in this moment to stretch the concept of nonviolence to its breaking point—both rhetorically as well as through increasingly provocative protest actions. This was still some eight months prior to Malcolm X’s popularization of the call to armed struggle in his famous speech “The Ballot or the Bullet,” but many activists frustrated with the slow pace of progress were beginning to articulate tactics, ideas, and emotions that looked more and more like the ideological position Stokely Carmichael would describe as black power in June 1966. As historian Robert Self has argued, by paying too much attention to charismatic leaders like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, most scholars have treated black power as a “distinct, even fatal, break with the civil rights movement,” an interpretation that overlooks how much black power politics evolved gradually and logically out of the failure of integrationist approaches at the grassroots level.31

  If by the hot summer of 1966 young African Americans shouting “black power” were rioting on the West Side and packing into halls to hear Stokely Carmichael speak, if they had begun to imagine complete control of their communities as the only form of political arrangement possible, that was because they had already run up against the unbending will of the machine. What was happening in 1966 was part of a longer story that had begun in 1963, just days after the March on Washington, when the Chicago Board of Education (CBOE) had raised the hopes of black Chicagoans by agreeing to an out-of-court settlement of a nearly two-year-old lawsuit filed by TWO charging racial segregation in the Chicago school system. In addition to agreeing to name a study group to come up with a racial head count and devise a plan to address racial inequalities, the CBOE had also adopted a rather symbol
ic transfer plan to permit a limited number of top students to switch to schools with honors programs when their own schools did not offer them. Yet even this cautious plan provoked virulent reactions in white neighborhoods around several of the schools on the transfer list, and Willis quickly caved in to this pressure, removing fifteen schools from the original list of twenty-four. When the CBOE ordered him to reinstate the schools, Willis refused, and then when faced with a court order to do so, he resigned. But in a surprising turn of events, the CBOE responded by voting not to accept his resignation, a move that received broad support among white residents on the city’s Southwest Side.

  This outrage—not just the CBOE’s decision but also the emergence of Willis as a hero in the Bungalow Belt—provided the spark activists were looking for to consolidate the movement and take it to the citywide level. Two days later, Lawrence Landry, a University of Chicago graduate student and leader of CAFSNCC, called for a mass boycott of Chicago schools on October 22. On the day before the boycott, the CCCO published a list of thirteen demands in the Chicago Daily News, which included, among others, the removal of Willis as superintendent, the publication of a racial head count and inventory of classrooms, a “basic policy of integration of staff and students,” the recomposition of the board of education, the publication of pupil achievement levels on standardized tests, and the request by Mayor Daley for federal emergency funds for remedial programs in all schools where test scores were revealed to be subpar.32 Prior to the boycott, organizers were counting on the participation of between 30,000 and 75,000 students. When the day arrived, a stunning 225,000 answered the call to stay home from school.