The life of a prominent Black Clevelander testifies to the “strange career” of American color lines.10 George A. Myers, born in Baltimore to free Black parents, migrated in 1879 to Cleveland, where he found work as a barber at one of the city’s leading hotels. Black Americans dominated the barber trade, and Myers rose on skill and close friendships he formed with upscale clients like Mark Hanna, who later became a US senator. Another client was Liberty E. Holden, publisher of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. When Holden decided to open a new hotel, Hollenden House, he loaned Myers the bulk of what he needed to open his own barbershop on the premises.
Hollenden Barber Shop and the hotel that housed it became legendary luxury establishments. The barbershop, which famously had a telephone installed at every barber chair, was a mecca for politicians, industrialists, and celebrities, including Mark Twain. Myers personally coiffed eight presidents, from Hayes to Harding. By 1920, he had more than thirty employees, including barbers, hairdressers, manicurists, and pedicurists. The staff was Negro, the clientele apparently only white, and Myers, who participated in both all-Negro and predominantly white civic institutions in Cleveland, did not seem to have any misgivings about de facto racial exclusion in the barber trade as he and his employees prospered from its exclusivity.11
Myers became an activist in Republican politics, serving as a lieutenant to Mark Hanna, who in turn was at the right hand of Ohioan and future US president William McKinley. Hanna tapped Myers to organize southern Black Republicans to support McKinley, and Myers became the premier Black Republican in the state, attending three national conventions as a delegate. In Myers’s archives, I found correspondence between him and my great-grandfather, Herschel V. Cashin, who had moved to Alabama and became a Reconstruction legislator, lawyer, Republican activist, and national convention regular. Herschel wrote fondly of their “acquaintance begun when we were both advocates of the matchless McKinley . . . whom we were happy to crown at St. Louis in 1896.” Both men believed in American democracy and the Negro’s rightful place in it but endured the bitter reversals of segregation and resurgent white supremacy.
The famed Hollenden Barber Shop
George A. Myers, proprietor
In Cleveland, white attitudes began to change in the 1910s as Black migrants became a multitude. Myers wrote about the influx in a letter to his close friend James Ford Rhodes, a white American historian and retired industrialist. He informed Rhodes that Cleveland’s small Black minority had tripled and that many of the migrants “are of the lowest and most shiftless class.” Myers’s conservatism and classism showed, but still, he decried: “Where Cleveland was once free of race prejudice, it is now anything but that . . .” He would grow militant in his politics and advocacy for colored folk as segregation spread.12
By 1916, whites had perfected methods of exclusion. Another prominent Black Clevelander complained that in some sought-after neighborhoods, realtors would not sell or rent to Negroes “no matter how much money we have to pay for the desired property.” A growing reluctance of white property owners outside the Central Avenue district to sell to Negroes became unofficial policy as restrictive covenants were increasingly inserted into property deeds.13
The great migrants were not the only immigrants to Cleveland. Peach- and olive-skinned Europeans also found their way to this American industrial powerhouse. One historian attributed racist resistance to Negro neighbors by Poles, Hungarians, Italians, and other white ethnic groups in Cleveland to “status anxieties.” They spurned proximity to Blacks because American society had designated this group as inferior and they feared perhaps they would get caught in the Negro’s undertow. Such attitudes, whatever their origin, helped to create ghettos.14
Because of this racism, most Black newcomers to Cleveland were forced to live in circumscribed areas. Jane Edna Hunter, a nurse, said she endured “the despairing search for decent lodgings—up one dingy street and down another, ending with the acceptance of the least disreputable room we encountered.” The sections designated for Blacks in Cleveland were adjacent to vice districts that enticed a racially diverse array of sinners with money to spend. The editor of a Negro weekly, the Cleveland Gazette, bemoaned the “speakeasies, gambling and questionable houses” proliferating in a decaying section of Hamilton Avenue. According to Hunter, brothels there engaged in “wholesale organized traffic in black flesh.” This pattern of locating vice districts near Negroes, or the other way around, was repeated in many, if not most, northern cities with neighborhoods that catered to the lustful. The association of Black neighborhoods and Black people with loose morals and vice became a self-fulfilling prophecy in the minds of many whites.15
George Myers was able to purchase a home in the predominantly Jewish Glenville neighborhood. However, he wrote with despair to Booker T. Washington about emerging separation in the city. Washington was the dominant Black voice in the country at the time, having called on Negroes to cast down their buckets in the commercial world, use their hands to work, and accept exclusion from politics and social equality in his famous Atlanta Compromise speech. Myers disagreed with his friend. In his letter to Washington, he declared, “Segregation here of any kind to me is a step backward and will ultimately be a blow to our Mixed Public Schools.” In ensuing years, Myers would use his influence to protect Negroes in their use of a public swimming pool and the same City Hospital that whites used. He and allies also successfully campaigned for hospital privileges for colored medical interns and nurses.16
Yet physical segregation took root in Cleveland, and the footprint of Blackness slowly expanded. Langston Hughes, who resided in Cleveland in this period, wrote in his autobiography that “the Negro district was extremely crowded” and that during his high school years he lived “either in attic or basement, and paid quite a lot for such inconvenient quarters.” “As always,” he continued, “the white neighborhoods resented Negroes moving closer and closer—but when the whites did give way, they gave way at very profitable rentals.”17 When restrictive covenants failed, or a white owner decided to sell to a Negro, some whites turned to thuggery to protect themselves from a feared invasion. In 1917 and 1919, white mobs attacked the homes of Negroes who migrated.18
Cleveland suburbanites were even more vicious in their response to a rare Negro migrant. When Arthur Hill purchased a home for his family in Garfield Heights in 1924, a mob of two hundred whites surrounded the home and demanded that they vacate within ten days. Hill asked the mayor for police protection. The mayor refused, citing costs, and declared that “colored people had no right to purchase such a nice home.” The Hills abandoned their house after enduring months of threats by white mobs. When E. A. Bailey, a Black physician, moved to an even more exclusive Cleveland suburb, Shaker Heights, whites threw stones, fired shots into his house, and set flame to his garage. Dr. Charles Garvin, one of Negro Cleveland’s most prominent citizens, built a home near the border of Cleveland Heights in 1925, prompting whites to circulate a pointed handbill:
Certain niggers have recently blackmailed certain residents of . . . Cleveland Heights . . . They are now trying to erect a house at 11114 Wade Park Avenue to blackmail us. But they will not. The residents of the Neighborhood will not give one cent to those blackmailers.
Appoint your committees to oppose and eradicate this group of black gold diggers. Let them know we can duplicate [the] riots [that took place] in Tulsa, St. Louis, Chicago, and Baltimore.19
Such anti-Black violence and hatred were common throughout the country, as were race riots. And it didn’t matter whether Negroes were upright or uncouth. Blackness itself was a provocation, especially when a Negro achieved something. The Tulsa pogrom of 1921 was ignited by a claim that a Black shoeshine, Dick Rowland, assaulted a white female elevator operator. In the nonhysterical account, he accidentally stepped on her foot as he entered the elevator and she screamed.20 She did not press charges, but the clarion call of rape brought a mob of whites to the county jail that held Rowland. Some armed Black men arr
ived to protect Rowland, a shot was fired, and the mob and complicit state actors proceeded to burn, loot, and bomb from the air a thriving Black community.
Blacks had moved to Oklahoma Territory before it became a state. Their hope and prayer had been to be left alone to build something for themselves, apart from the strictures of supremacy. They tried to use the railroad tracks that separated the white and Negro sides of Tulsa as a barrier of protection. In Greenwood, they erected schools, a library, and a hospital, in addition to many businesses. Unlike the fictional people of Wakanda, they could not hermetically seal themselves from dangerous invaders.
The Greenwood business district, aka Negro Wall Street, was then America’s most prosperous concentration of Black entrepreneurs, home to nearly six hundred Black-owned businesses, including grocery stores, hotels, restaurants, law offices, pharmacies, and movie theaters. Over eighteen hours, crazed individuals and state actors destroyed more than one thousand homes and businesses and killed hundreds of Blacks. The local white paper called Greenwood “Niggertown” and condoned its destruction.21 Reportedly, the first bombs ever dropped on American soil fell on Greenwood, in one of the nation’s worst domestic terror attacks.22 Eyewitnesses reported that “the scope of the attack was equal to warfare: homeowners shot dead in their front yards, planes dropping turpentine bombs onto buildings, a machine gun firing bullets on a neighborhood church.”23
The New York Times quoted Adjutant General Charles F. Barnett, who commanded the Oklahoma National Guard brought to the city to quell the violence: “Twenty-five thousand whites, armed to the teeth, were ranging the city in utter and ruthless defiance of every concept of law and righteousness. [Motor cars swept through,] their occupants firing at will.”24
White supremacy was resurging. In 1915, D. W. Griffith’s infamous film, The Birth of a Nation, was America’s first box-office blockbuster. The three-hour movie dramatized the founding of the Klan after the Civil War, depicted Reconstruction legislators as buffoons, and showed a white woman leaping to her death to flee a Black man played by a white actor in blackface. It also showed the Klan lynching that character. President Woodrow Wilson watched the movie at a White House screening. Wilson, a Virginian, had sanctioned the introduction of segregation in federal agencies, a serious retrenchment in opportunities and dignity for Negro federal workers.25
In Ohio, George Myers launched a letter campaign against screening the movie, without much success. Nationally, the NAACP protested the film and whites flocked to see it. In several cities, some viewers left movie theaters and attacked Blacks. The film inspired others to reconstitute the Klan the same year. At least one-third of new Klan members lived in cities throughout the country.26 The Fox Film Corporation competed for white audiences with a popular film called The Nigger. According to the Black-owned Cleveland Advocate newspaper, the film depicted “huge mob scenes and race riots,” “the crack of the white man’s whip and the scream of blacks.”27 Race riots broke out in three dozen cities during what would be called the Red Summer of 1919. Some whites were incited by false claims of Black men assaulting white women. But the real tinder seemed to be white World War I veterans who disembarked in America, alongside Black veterans, and could not accept the suggestion of racial equality or integration. The collective death toll of the riots was in the hundreds.28
Greenwood burning, Tulsa Riot, June 1921
The process of ghettoization, of defining Black space and attributing declining conditions caused by such containment to the allegedly innate character of Negro people, did not improve race relations which, by design, were quite broken in the 1920s. As described, this self-fulfilling process had begun in Cleveland. Myers blamed property owners who refused to rent or sell decent housing to Negroes for the squalid housing conditions in Cleveland’s Black neighborhoods. In a letter to Judge George S. Adams, he wrote, “While I do not condone crime, (all criminals look alike to me), the negro, morally and otherwise, is what the white man has made him, through the denial of justice, imposition and an equal chance.”29
Myers could not protect his employees from racism. Hollenden House management informed him that, when he retired, they would be replaced with white people. Myers delayed retiring for as long as his weakening heart would allow. He died on January 17, 1930, the very day he planned to tell his staff that he had sold the barbershop to Hollenden management and that they would be let go. At lunch-time, he sought to purchase a ticket for a vacation. Before he could return to the shop to give his employees notice, he collapsed, as his heart failed.30
• • •
Ghettoizing proceeded at varying paces throughout the North. As Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall were chipping away at the southern regime of Jim Crow through court litigation, whites elsewhere were institutionalizing the Black ghetto as much as possible or, in the case of sundown towns, excluding Blacks from living in or being present in their localities after sunset. Ghettos were erected much faster and with extreme precision in cities like Chicago and New York, likely because of the sheer numbers of Negroes there that whites felt compelled to avoid. In Cleveland and western cities like Omaha, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles, and in most southern cities, the process was slower. But ghettos, orchestrated with great intention, became the predominant response to Black people, wherever they existed in large numbers.31
The ideology of supremacy animated not only ghettoization but also eugenics laws authorizing state-enforced sterilization of undesired populations, and a 1924 federal law that banned or severely restricted immigration for all nationalities except people from northern Europe. Discriminatory immigration, sterilization, and segregation policies would continue for much of the twentieth century. White supremacy was embedded in American culture, and politicians easily tapped it for their own purposes.32 Unlike European ethnic migrants, who whitened and ultimately were incorporated as equal citizens, the great migrants would be treated quite differently. Their ghettos were more extreme, enduring, and damaging to American race relations. Many African American social scientists would later grapple with the iconic ghetto and its consequences, including St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, covering Chicago through the 1930s, Kenneth Clark in Harlem in the 1960s, William Julius Wilson in Chicago and nationally, beginning in the 1970s, and Elijah Anderson in Philadelphia in the 1980s.33
In Black Metropolis, Drake and Cayton noted that Blacks in the first great wave of migration to Chicago were largely confined to an eight-square-mile area they referred to as the Black Belt. Later generations referred to it generally as the South Side, future home to Michelle Robinson, who became Michelle Obama. Black neighborhoods also emerged on the West Side.
Violence was a favored tool for containing Black Chicagoans. Between 1917 and 1921, nearly sixty homes were firebombed when Negroes dared to move into a white neighborhood. The restrictive covenant also systemically blocked Blacks from purchasing near whites and forbade willing whites from selling to them. White terrorists even occasionally firebombed the homes of white realtors or other allies that facilitated a sale to a Negro family.34
Ghettoization was the process of working out the physical mechanism of white supremacy. Racism begat the Black ghetto and the ghetto, in turn, begat more racism. Drake and Cayton noted the “vicious circle” in which whites feared economic loss and social isolation if their neighborhood became “all-Negro.” This concern, coupled with “race prejudice,” made residential segregation, fear, and racism mutually reinforcing. If segregation had not been chosen in the first place, the authors surmised, the vicious circle would not have been set in motion. Negroes put constant pressure on housing markets adjacent to the Black Belt because they had nowhere else to move, yet the vast majority of whites preferred segregated housing. Drake and Cayton cited a Fortune magazine opinion poll in which 77 to 87 percent of respondents from sections across the country favored it.35
This was a produced result. Negative stereotypes about the Negro had been inscribed in American culture, and they were read
ily available to shape housing markets. In Chicago, property owners’ associations sponsored mass meetings to arouse whites about the peril of Negro “invasion.” “They published scathing denunciations of Negroes branding them arrogant, ignorant, diseased, bumptious, destructive of property and generally undesirable,” wrote Drake and Cayton.36
The Black Metropolis authors also underscored how conditions in the ghetto hardened white attitudes as well as the perimeter between Black and white space. In the Black Belt of Chicago, descendants were forced to live ninety thousand residents per square mile compared to whites living a mere twenty thousand residents per square mile. They were confined to the worst housing, where disease festered due to extreme overcrowding; the city purposely provided poorer services; and schools, inferior and overcrowded, ran on shifts. Drake and Cayton attributed social ills they observed, like juvenile delinquency, to segregation and argued, per the vicious circle, that whites tended to blame Negroes for the conditions in the ghetto that concentrated segregation caused. Blacks, in turn, were deemed “unfit” to be included in American society, and therefore, whites felt justified in keeping them “quarantined behind the color line.”37
While invisible to most whites, African Americans could see the beauty and genius in their Black world. Drake and Cayton, like Du Bois before them, documented the entire strata of Negroes, their pursuit of happiness, the vital Black culture and institutions they created, the “race men” and women who uplifted their people. The authors used the glowing name Bronzeville, alternatively the “Black Metropolis,” when describing these positive aspects of life in the segregated Black Belt.38 For Drake and Cayton, “ghetto” was a descriptor of extreme residential segregation, not a pejorative label about Blackness itself.
Gunnar Myrdal in An American Dilemma also recognized a vicious circle in American race relations, although he predicted that whites would evolve.39 Drake and Cayton were pessimistic. They argued that the color line persisted because whites did not live by the civic ideals of “democracy, freedom, equality, fair play” that they professed to believe in.40
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