A few avenues to the west, Model T automobiles delivered well-dressed ladies and gentlemen to the doors of imposing three-story brick and stone homes. Here, the small group of the Refined lived with all the luxuries of the day—lush, well-kept lawns and gardens, and a garage leading to ten to twelve gracefully decorated rooms. These mansions had been built by wealthy white families in the late nineteenth century and included two to four bathrooms, electric lighting, gas furnaces, and steam heat.
At last, the streetcar reached the southern edge of the Black Belt, where well-kept lawns and modest gardens adorned streets lined with wooden frame homes, most of which had been divided into two or more comfortably sized apartments. The small businessmen, government workers, and artisans who lived here could not afford the mansions of the Refined, but most of their homes were equipped with indoor plumbing, electric lights, and gas for cooking.
Jesse Binga Bank.
Mixed throughout were the suppliers of goods, services, and fellowship for the diverse black community. Ferdinand Barnett and other black lawyers and doctors hung out their shingles. Opened in 1908, the black-owned three-story redbrick Jesse Binga Bank was always bustling with customers who appreciated the courteous manner of the clerks and the availability of loans that the downtown banks were unlikely to approve for blacks. Nearby streets were lined with black-owned grocery stores, barbershops, beauty salons, and restaurants. Newsstands carried stacks of papers: the white-owned daily Chicago Tribune alongside the black newspaper—in the early years, Barnett’s Conservator; after 1903, Robert Abbott’s weekly Chicago Defender, the most widely read black paper in the world. A small cadre of black policemen patrolled up and down, prodding and protecting. Black firemen were at the ready should the alarm sound.
While parents were away at work, their youngest children were looked after in church-sponsored daycare centers and their older children were busy learning at school. Though by law public schools were open to all, many whites were not happy about their children being educated side by side with blacks. In 1900, the Tribune added its voice in a series of articles extolling the benefits of a segregated school system. Facing the danger that the Tribune’s suggestions might take hold, Ida Wells-Barnett mounted a counterattack, bringing together powerful white friends who were able to stop the segregationists’ momentum. But the issue raised its head again and again over the next several decades. Blacks could not take equal educational opportunity for granted.
A black policeman.
When the school bell rang at dismissal time, the social rooms of Quinn Chapel African Methodist Episcopal and Olivet Baptist churches, Ida Wells-Barnett’s Negro Fellowship League, and the Wabash YMCA attracted young people with boys’ and girls’ clubs, sports teams, and quiet places to read. On weekends, many Respectables gathered in these same spaces for relaxation and social events.
On Sundays, blacks had the choice of more than a dozen churches of various Christian denominations. For many, the church was their rock, spiritually and socially. Many Respectables found comfort and a space to replenish their spirits in the graceful stained-glass-windowed buildings of Olivet Baptist and Quinn Chapel AME. Many of the poorer newly arrived migrants preferred the more down-to-earth experience of smaller, unadorned storefront churches squeezed in among businesses on the commercial strips. At the other end of the spectrum, the Refined tended toward the more formalized ritual, setting up black churches within traditionally white denominations.
For those looking for a good time, the State Street “Stroll,” between Twenty-Sixth and Thirty-Ninth Streets, offered a lively place to listen to the jazz greats and exchange the latest gossip. The Defender proclaimed it “the popular promenade for the masses and classes.” Here on the Stroll, one black man commented, “for a minute or so one forgets the ‘Problem.’”
Not for long. The rest of Chicago would not allow it.
EIGHT
A Stone’s Throw
IN THE LATE 1800S, the people of Packingtown and those of the Black Belt ignored one another most of the time. They focused on children to raise, households to run, church, clubs, and local community events. Almost all of them toiled in grinding, low-pay jobs, but usually their paths did not cross. When they did, tensions flared.
Summer was the busy season on the docks along the Chicago River. Starting in 1846, the Chicago harbor was designated by an act of the United States Congress as an official port of entry. Boats arrived from Canada and from points around the United States, bringing in goods of all kinds. Groups of young men—mostly immigrants, a few blacks—roamed the docks, looking for jobs as cooks and sailors on ships, or work as stevedores loading and unloading goods on the docks. All else being equal, immigrants were hired before blacks. But sometimes blacks would win the job with an offer to do the work for lower wages, leaving the immigrants resentful and hostile.
The Chicago Harbor was a busy port in the 1800s.
One August day in 1862, an immigrant crew had negotiated themselves a good deal to unload a schooner when a group of blacks came along and agreed to do the job for less. The ship captain took the better deal and offered different work to the immigrant men. He failed to recognize that though the immigrants felt injury in losing the job, the insult lay in losing out to blacks. The whites’ outrage became painfully clear moments later in a barrage of kicks and punches and a determination to beat the blacks to a pulp that only subsided when police arrived, brandishing their guns.
Two summers later, a dozen or so blacks struck a deal to work on a lumber dock. Immigrants waited it out on the dock until the lumberyard owner showed up, then demanded that he fire the blacks. When he declined to do so, the immigrants gathered together, several hundred in number, and bore down on the black workers, pummeling them right off the dock.
Several days later, another mob gathered to drive blacks away from the docks. The Tribune reported, “A man brought the information to Police Headquarters, but [Superintendent of Police] Turtle refused to interfere.”
When the Civil War ended in 1865, most of Packingtown turned hopes for employment to the newly opened Union Stock Yard. It was clear from the beginning that the giant meatpacking companies were on the same page, filling almost every position with white workers. Sixteen years went by before the Lewis brothers, one a butcher, the other a beef boner, became the first black hires in the Yard. Two decades later, though more than thirty thousand blacks were living in Chicago, only five hundred had jobs in the meatpacking industry.
Those few black souls lucky enough to get work from Swift and the other meatpackers were good union men, treated as members of the butcher brotherhood. One black butcher who died with no family to provide a proper burial was given a full, all-expenses-paid union funeral parade. The union journal reported that seventy-four union men attended the ceremony, which was performed “with the honor and respect that is due to every member” of the union.
In the first few decades after the Union Stock Yard opened, white packinghouse workers were not focused on blacks. They were too busy figuring out how to counter Gustavus Swift and his fellow meatpacking company owners, who were relentlessly creating divisions in order to prevent the workers from showing a united front. The bosses banded together to divide and conquer, and they played their cards well, sometimes raising wages for the butcher aristocracy while coming down hard on the unskilled laborers, then reversing course—always looking to drive a wedge between skilled and unskilled. The bosses maintained the upper hand by staying united, decade after decade. When Gustavus Swift died suddenly in 1903, acknowledged by the Tribune as having “revolutionized the industry,” his son Louis filled his shoes without missing a beat. In contrast, time after time, quarrels between skilled and unskilled laborers left the work force weak and defeated.
In 1903, the meatpacking laborers got a new leader, a passionate union organizer named Michael Donnelly. Their union, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America, also got a new motto: Unity of all rank and file workers, �
��from the man who takes the bullock on the hoof until it goes into the hands of the consumer.” It was a new day. Interpreters were enlisted to reach out to workers in their own native languages and to translate speeches for them at rallies. For the first time, eastern Europeans were included in decision making.
Women packinghouse employees caused greater commotion among men who did not want to address women’s concerns. In the early decades, women workers were easy for the men to ignore. Confined to the canning and labeling departments, they were among the lowest-paid employees. But by the early 1900s, their roles were expanding, and women were tough in defending their rights; they were determined to have a voice in the larger union efforts. This did not sit well with some men, who worried about women infringing on “man’s work.” But the majority thought it was best to include them—skilled and unskilled, men and women together.
Donnelly worked to inspire passion for the union, and when he felt the laborers’ union spirit was strong enough, he called a strike. Midday on July 12, 1904, twenty-eight thousand men and women employed by meatpacking companies throughout the Stock Yard put away their tools and walked off the job. The strike was to be orderly and peaceful: signs posted in five languages reminded strikers to “Obey the union’s rules to molest no person or property, and abide strictly by the laws of the country.” Street fighting began nine hours later.
Michael Donnelly organized the packinghouse workers and led the 1904 strike.
Under cover of darkness, a wagon driver approached the Yard, hauling a load of mattresses for delivery to Swift & Company. With his workers on strike, Swift was preparing to bring in outsiders to take their place and to provide the strikebreakers with temporary sleeping quarters inside the Stock Yard. This tactic was commonly used by industrialists to combat strikes and was well-known among laborers.
Out of the silence, nearby saloons sprang to life, disgorging hundreds of strikers who blocked the roadway, overturning the cart and dragging the driver away. A couple of hours later, fifty men recruited from the streets of the Black Belt were spirited into the Stock Yard, where they looked to get a good night’s sleep, with or without mattresses, before taking the place of strikers on the early-morning shift.
The next day, the Yard was quietly active. Strikers stopped in to pick up their last paychecks. Foremen and superintendents, along with a few laborers who decided to stay on the job and the recruited blacks, were doing what they could to keep the disassembly line running. As the day went on, their numbers were increased by more job seekers looking to take advantage of the opportunity to replace strikers. According to the Tribune, men and women, Greeks, Italians, Poles, and Scandinavians signed up to fill in.
A crowd that included many children during the 1904 Union Stock Yard strike. The rocks on the ground might have been used later against the strikebreakers.
Strikers idled in bars around the Yard, staring out the window at the steady stream of men and women the packers were bringing in. It started with local residents. A few days later, trainloads of out-of-towners were being deposited at the Great Gate of the Union Stock Yard. Many had the familiar look of newly arrived immigrants. Most visible, and most upsetting to the strikers, were the groups of blacks up from the South.
The stories of the black strikebreakers died with the men who lived them, never recorded for future generations. But their decision to answer the packers’ call might have been based on thinking like Howard Cayton’s. As a young black man during World War I, Cayton made the acquaintance of a white union member. His new friend “Red” lectured him: “I got nothing against the colored. . . . But on the whole the colored don’t make good union men. The white bosses have held them down so long they can’t believe in anything except the rich. . . . The bosses make scabs out of Negroes to divide the workers. Negroes shouldn’t let themselves be used but they do.” To this, Cayton had an honest reply: “We can’t trust any white man. It’s the same with every last one of you. We colored have to wait and be patient. . . . What it all comes down to is that we’re not equals. Hell, I don’t trust you. We’re supposed to get our pie in the sky when we die?” Cayton was clear: “I’d break a strike to get a decent job.”
As trainload after trainload of black strikebreakers from the South rolled into the Stock Yard, they were met with violent anger. At regular intervals along the way, white strikers and their families stood along the train route and heaved barrages of stones and bricks. The strikers were consumed with hatred—not limited to strikebreakers but directed at blacks as a race.
Strikebreakers were safe inside the Yard, but those who journeyed beyond the Great Gate at day’s end walked into danger. Mobs of strikers massed for attack, usually launching a hail of stones followed by a melee of fists and kicks.
White strikebreakers were sometimes attacked, but blacks were the focus of the most vicious fury. Three black strikebreakers watching a baseball game in a vacant lot caught the attention of a Packingtown mob and were quickly engulfed in a swirl of raging humanity. One of the blacks pulled out a gun in self-defense and shot an attacker in the cheek. When police arrived, they dispersed the mob and arrested the black man. Another black man was beginning a streetcar ride home with his ten-year-old son when the pair caught the eye of some strikers. As the streetcar made its way along the avenue, the group of strikers chasing the car and throwing stones snowballed to a mob of nearly two hundred. When the streetcar stopped, the father and his son made a run for it, all the while bombarded by stones. Both were badly injured.
Packingtown rallied around the strikers. Wives took up work outside the home, earning what they could to sustain their families over the rough patch. Sons and daughters joined their mothers to support their fathers as they marched or picketed around the Yard. The local saloons and other businesses formed a Stockyards Aid Society, and relief stations distributed groceries to those families nearing starvation. Small business owners refused to cash checks of individuals who were crossing the picket line. Parish leaders used the pulpit to lend “the arm of the Church to what we believe is a righteous cause.” Local politicians chimed in. The Irish Justice of the Stockyards District Police Court, with jurisdiction over minor crimes in that neighborhood, dismissed more than eighty percent of claims brought against strikers accused of violent attacks. This blatant disregard of the law outraged the packinghouse owners; future cases were removed to the court of another community where the law was better upheld. Along with the community institutions, individuals donated what they could. A bride who received money pinned to her wedding dress in the Polish tradition was reported to have regifted it to the strikers’ relief fund. Stories like this were everywhere.
Police escorted strikebreakers to the packinghouses during the strike.
Still, as the strike wore on, food and money were running out. Some days more than six hundred families stood in line for a handout of rice, oatmeal, potatoes, flour, and coffee, along with a little meat if there was any to be had. Some days, shelves at the commissary were bare long before day’s end, leaving hundreds to walk away with nothing. One woman wept as she cradled her nine-month-old infant, having just been told there was no milk to give her. Another family with eight children was reduced to living on crusts of bread for nearly a week.
Packinghouse owners provided a male escort for women strikebreakers.
As Labor Day rolled around, the strikers’ prospects looked dim. In the end, though the rank and file wanted to keep on fighting, union leader Donnelly knew they could not win. On September 8, he called off the strike. The immigrants had lost.
As the summer of 1904 faded away, disillusionment sat heavy over Packingtown and the Black Belt. Powerful currents of distrust collided as immigrants and blacks sold each other out and business owners did their best to capitalize on the divisions.
The packers had won the latest round. But Louis Swift and his fellow industrialists could not rest easy; a new standoff was always just around the corner, requiring new strategies to keep the bosses one s
tep ahead of their workers.
The immigrants of Packingtown had come together to demand a better life, to no avail. Mary McDowell, a leading settlement house social worker, observed that the defeated strikers seemed “unmanly and without self-respect.” They finally had stood together—skilled and unskilled—with nothing to show for it. A national union leader, Homer Call, questioned the immigrants’ access to the American dream: “Shall the standard of the most poorly paid workers of Europe be established by the packers as the standard of life for American citizens?”
The strikers’ confidence in the union was destroyed. Over the coming months, they deserted in droves. They resented Swift and the other big bosses who had mercilessly beaten them down. But perhaps more than anything else, they blamed blacks for their predicament. In their eyes, black people were, and always would be, the “scab” race.
When the packinghouse strike ended, the pre-strike configurations settled back into place. Even in defeat, the immigrants regained their dominance over laboring positions in the Stock Yard, and black strikebreakers returned to the South. Before long, however, blacks would be back. This time, it would be to stay.
PART THREE
UP FROM THE SOUTH
The Union Stock Yards.
I pick up my life
And take it with me
A Few Red Drops Page 5