A Few Red Drops

by Claire Hartfield

  The Defender was clear about the solution. It did no good to turn a blind eye, turn up a nose, or wish the migrants away. The newspaper reminded the old settlers of the high stakes: “It is our duty, if resolved to a selfish duty, to guide the hand of a less experienced one, especially when one misstep weakens our chance for climbing.” The Defender’s message was a reminder to the black old settlers that whites did not make distinctions between the old-timers and the newcomers. The whole black race was on trial. They had to be in this together.

  Black community leaders launched a campaign for respectability. The Defender printed “A Few Do and Don’ts,” and the Urban League posted similar advice along residential blocks. Both gave instructions on proper behavior: Don’t hang out on street corners. Don’t laugh or talk loudly. Don’t sit outside barefoot. Do plant yard gardens. Do give your seat on the bus to ladies. Do start a bank account.

  Churches joined the movement. Olivet Baptist was the biggest of them all, membership nearly doubling from 4,271 in 1916 to 8,430 in 1919, earning it the title of largest black church in the world. In addition to Sunday worship, the large churches created programs to gently bend the newcomers into the northern mold. Childcare for the youngest children offered women a chance to work outside the home, to begin earning their way to a better life, knowing their little ones were cared for. After-school clubs for boys and girls invited them in, away from the streets, providing a place to build friendships and stay away from the Riffraff. Social groups for women encouraged lively exchange between old settlers and migrants, creating a willing audience for modeling proper behavior.

  Some migrants resisted these attempts by northerners to rid them of their southern ways. Most, however, were open to tips on how to navigate northern social norms. With enthusiasm, most newly arrived migrants set out to become a respected part of their adopted city.

  The walk toward assimilation progressed, a little at a time. But effort toward black respectability did not get very far in earning white respect. Reading the Chicago Tribune was a daily reminder of just what whites were thinking. Blacks found themselves characterized in an article headline as “Half a Million Darkies from Dixie,” referred to in a letter to the editor as “the more unfortunate and ignorant race,” and discussed in many articles as “the Negro Problem.”

  A black choral society.

  Children, now attending the schools that their parents had been so excited about, were learning that many of their white teachers did not think they were capable of being educated. Most migrant children found their first steps into school directed down the hall to the “subnormal” classroom for “retarded” students. Some teachers recognized that the lack of schooling in the South left these children behind and found that many caught up quickly. But one commented that the children had “no sticking qualities” and another opined that blacks quickly reached “the limit of [their] mental ability.”

  Though many schools in the Black Belt had mostly black children in their attendance zone, all schools included some whites. On the school playground, the youngest children delighted in interracial games of tag or hopscotch or jump rope. Even so, prejudice sometimes reared its ugly head. One school choir’s excitement about performing for immigrant children in Packingtown evaporated when the singers were pelted with stones by some neighborhood toughs.

  At the high school down the street, their older brothers and sisters no longer socialized together. They gathered in the school lunchroom at separate black and white lunch tables, and after school, those black students who were not on athletic teams made their way to Ida Wells-Barnett’s Negro Fellowship League or the Wabash YMCA, a church club, or a neighborhood park, or hung out on the street. White students were invited to stay and participate in all-white after-school social clubs.

  Whether coming from work, home, or school, or just out for a good time on the town, there was a decent chance for blacks to cross paths with trouble. Immigrant gangs were often on the prowl, looking for victims to jump. The Barnetts’ sons found themselves under regular attack by white boys in their own neighborhood. Ida kept a pistol in the house.

  Calling the police was not necessarily the right decision in these situations. One black man on his way home from work learned the hard way. As he stood on the elevated train platform near Packingtown, a mob jumped him, pounding his body with punches. The policeman stopping to break it up seized the black man, hauled him off to the police station, and threw him in jail for the next five days. The mob was left to search out its next victim.

  Just catching a policeman’s attention might well cause a black person’s heart to skip a beat. A typical example was a raid on a bar following a vague tip that someone was gambling. Police rushed in, arrested everyone in sight with no evidence of wrongdoing by anyone, threw them all in a holding cell for the night, and hauled them off for fingerprinting the next day.

  There was no public outrage at this kind of tactics. The Tribune bought in to the stereotypes, often reporting allegations against blacks without any evidence of their truth and skipping a retraction when innocence came to light. One principal said out loud what many were thinking, expressing concern over “the emotional tendency of the colored to knife and kill.”

  Blacks at a police station being searched for weapons.

  In the face of this systemic disrespect, blacks were encouraged by their leaders to hold their heads high. The primary message they received was that the migrants were no longer in the land of white supremacy. The Defender counseled, “Quit calling the foreman ‘boss.’ Leave that word dropped in the Ohio River. . . . We call people up here, Mister This or Mister That.” As to white coworkers, “Treat them as you want them to treat you—AS A MAN.” One school principal observed that black mothers instructed their children “not to take anything from a white child.” And they encouraged their teens to stay in school, even in the face of prejudice. Life was not easy. But it was a new day, and a new black consciousness was taking hold.

  Black leaders backed their talk with political muscle. Robert Horton had marveled, even before the migration, at the power of blacks living in Chicago to elect their own. The first black alderman had been elected in 1915, and he was later elected to Congress. The previous black congressman had served thirty years before.

  Also in 1915, blacks played a decisive role in electing the mayor, Republican William Thompson. “Big Bill,” a white man, was a larger-than-life hero to the black community. One black leader, Reverend Archibald Carey, went so far as to put Thompson on a pedestal with Abraham Lincoln. Big Bill, whom the Defender called “the spectacular, nervy Mayor of Chicago,” publicly spoke out against the slights that blacks found so demeaning, and made a great show of celebrating their successes. He banned screenings of the racist film The Birth of a Nation and trumpeted black heroes like the boxer Jack Johnson. In 1915, Black Belt voters were crucial to Big Bill’s victory. Returning the favor, Big Bill appointed black leaders to high-profile positions in government.

  Buoyed by this example of success, thousands of new migrants massing in the city’s second ward in 1917 and 1918 took to the polls and elected two black aldermen to represent them. The Black Belt shone as a symbol of the power of the ballot all across black America.

  “Thompson for Mayor” poster.

  By 1918, nearly fifty thousand black migrants were settled into their new city. They took up work in the stockyards, steel mills, and other industrial plants, accomplishing what they had been recruited to do. But they also exercised a new freedom to make decisions of their own—about work, housing, school, voting. And as the people of Chicago were learning, these newly arrived black citizens were making decisions that could affect them all.

  PART FOUR

  REAPING THE WHIRLWIND

  Mob with bricks during the race riot, 1919.

  Like, men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

  Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

  —Claude McKay

  “If We Must Die” />
  FIFTEEN

  Tensions Rising

  IN 1917, A NEWLY ORGANIZED meatpacking workers’ union called the Stockyards Labor Council made plans to bring the new black laborers into the fold. The worker shortage caused by the war left the shapeup empty and laborers in high demand. Union leaders John Fitzpatrick and William Z. Foster were galvanized by the golden opportunity for a big union win if they could just bring all the workers together before the bosses divided them. To drum up excitement, Fitzpatrick and Foster tapped talented men to lead—one to solidify support among Johnny Joyce’s cattle butchers, another to organize blacks. John Kikulski, a rousing speaker much beloved in the Polish community, was tasked with energizing the eastern Europeans.

  Louis Swift’s goal was to keep black and white workers separated. The packers kept track of Fitzpatrick and Foster’s efforts, and they did not like what they saw. If the union could bring all workers together, it would be a powerful force to contend with. Louis Swift recalled his father’s strategy: “When . . . the strikes threatened his prosperity through no fault of his own, then he proceeded to do everything he could to break them.” The packers needed to head off trouble by stirring up conflicts among the workers to weaken the union. As an initial step, they were pleased to find an ally in a black small-time newspaper editor and entrepreneur, Richard E. Parker.

  Parker did not trust unions. He was in good company there. More than a few blacks could still feel the sting of the waiters’ union double-cross. Others could tell a story or two about vicious name-calling and fights with white union men. Many newly arrived from the South soaked up the stories, their only source of information about unions. As they walked into their workplaces, they accepted the handbills Parker held out to them, warning them not to join the “White Man’s Union.” It all fit in nicely with the packers’ goal to divide and conquer.

  Keep blacks out was the mantra of the Chicago Real Estate Board as blacks continued to pour into the city and push the boundaries of the Black Belt into white neighborhoods. In April 1917, the Board appointed a committee of seven to orchestrate an all-out effort to keep blacks at bay. Take action now, they warned white homeowners, before property values fall.

  Black leadership would have none of it. When the Real Estate Board tried to enlist the help of the Defender’s Robert Abbott and the Wabash YMCA’s A. L. Jackson to persuade black realtors to keep hands off white neighborhoods, Abbott and Jackson turned them down flat. As reported in the Chicago Daily News, black leaders believed in black people’s freedom to spend their money “wherever the white man’s money is good.”

  On July 1, someone resorted to a violent approach, exploding a bomb in the hallway of a black family’s home and blowing the front wall to smithereens. Police were on the scene quickly but did not find any leads. No arrests were made.

  Summer moved into full swing and so did the meatpacking workers’ union, the Stockyards Labor Council. This time, the union set up locals for unskilled workers throughout the laborers’ neighborhoods. An unskilled worker could join the local of his choice, but as union leaders expected, members sorted themselves along ethnic lines. With high hopes, the leaders established Local 651 in the Black Belt.

  This black family home was destroyed by a bomb.

  In September, the union was ready to sign up the masses. Leaders organized parades through the neighborhoods and meetings at union halls and in smoking rooms. On the street, organizers handed out fifty thousand flyers in various languages, all encouraging union membership: “BE MEN—JOIN THE UNION.” John Kikulski was particularly effective, speaking in Polish and Lithuanian to capture the hearts of the eastern European workers. His predominantly Polish and Lithuanian Local 554 was the largest in the city.

  Special efforts were made to reach out to black laborers, who were now a quarter of the Yard’s work force and without whom the union was going nowhere. Reaching the old settlers was not difficult. Many in this small group of old-timers signed on. But the majority of black workers were migrants. This southern group, pleased with the wages and social perks courtesy of Louis Swift and other employers, was a tougher nut to crack.

  Even so, the union was picking up enough steam to worry the government. President Wilson needed a steady production of meat from the Stock Yard to feed the hungry troops. A workers’ strike could cut off food supplies, jeopardizing the war effort. Wilson was not about to let that happen. He took charge, stripping away the right to strike and appointing Judge Samuel Alschuler as federal administrator to arbitrate all disputes between the packers and the union.

  In February 1918, the union organized the people of Packingtown to tell their story to Judge Alschuler. Referring to a novel published in 1906 about Packingtown’s crumbling, disease-ridden community, union leader William Z. Foster commented, “It was as if the characters in The Jungle, quickened to life, had come to tell their story from the witness chair.” Union lawyers highlighted the inequities of the laborers’ lot by putting Louis Swift and other packinghouse owners on the witness stand to describe their own luxurious homes and lifestyles.

  A month later Judge Alschuler issued his first order. Forty thousand men and women gathered in Davis Square Park in Packingtown to hear union leaders triumphantly announce the judge’s decision to give packinghouse workers large wage increases and extra pay for overtime worked beyond an eight-hour day. Union leader John Fitzpatrick capitalized on the emotions of the moment to bring more workers—especially black workers—into the union fold: “It’s a new day, and out in God’s sunshine, you men and you women, Black and white, have not only an eight-hour day, but you are on an equality.”

  Now there was a flurry of registration for union membership. A white union leader gushed that organizers “do nothing but take in applications from morning to midnight.” But a black union leader took a dimmer view: “The work of organizing [black laborers] has proceeded more slowly than I anticipated.”

  Down on the shop floor, it was clear that all was not well. Immigrants’ distrust and anger toward the black race that had exploded in the 1904 meatpacking strike was still raging in 1918. Incensed immigrant workers lashed out at blacks with racial taunts. In one plant, someone hung a sign on the break-room door claiming the space “For White People Only.” Blacks responded with profanities and ethnic slurs. Sometimes exchanges ended with threats of violence.

  Summer brought these tensions outdoors. The warm weather had Chicagoans looking for fun at the parks and beaches. But there was not enough park space for all of the new residents crammed into the Black Belt. Some blacks started looking beyond their neighborhood for places to play in nearby white areas. The prospect of sharing space did not sit well with many whites.

  At venues where blacks regularly outnumbered whites, facilities were unofficially redesignated for black use. Such was the case with the Twenty-Sixth Street beach. The head of the Municipal Bureau explained, “As the colored population gradually got heavier and more demand came for the use of that beach it gradually developed into a beach that was used almost exclusively by Negroes.” At parks that remained mostly white, blacks were seen as intruders and fights were frequent. One park director recounted “some very serious clashes between the black and white children.”

  The bleak area shown here was the largest playground in the Black Belt.

  Migrants continued to pour into the city. Throughout 1918, property owners’ associations stepped up their rhetoric to stop the “invasion.” In October, a defiant letter sent out to white residents proclaimed: “We are a red blood organization who say openly, we won’t be driven out.” Physical violence was rising. Mobs frequently assembled outside the homes of black families who had ventured beyond the Black Belt, smashing up the buildings with bats, rocks, and bricks. Most frightening of all, between March 1918 and the end of the year, eleven bombs were exploded at the offices of black real estate agents and in the homes of black families.

  A typical schoolyard playground in a white neighborhood, with plenty of equipment
and children at play.

  There was more to come. On November 11, 1918, the war ended. Soldiers began flooding back into the tension-filled city. Big Bill Thompson showed up to help celebrate the return of the all-black Eighth Regiment. But before long, the party was over and grim reality set in.

  SIXTEEN

  Last Straws

  AS RESIDENTS RANG IN THE NEW YEAR of 1919, there was plenty of anxiety to go around. Everyone worried about a shortage of jobs. Blacks worried the most. Past experience taught them that blacks were last hired, first fired, especially true for black women. One honest employer confirmed the truth in these worries: blacks were hired “solely on account of the shortage of labor. . . . As soon as the situation clears itself no more colored help will be employed.” A black administrator for the United States Employment Service echoed the concern: “There has not been a single vacant job in Chicago for a colored man.”

  Black soldiers took it hard. They had risked their lives for their country, had fought with extraordinary bravery, were covered with medals of honor—the Médaille militaire, the Croix de Guerre, and the Distinguished Service Cross—heaped upon them by both the French and the Americans. Now, back at home, they were once more treated as unequal and unworthy of respect. One soldier bitterly observed, “I went to war, served eight months in France; I was married, but I didn’t claim exemption. I wanted to go, but I might as well have stayed here for all the good it has done me.” Yet this same soldier had gained a new resolve to persevere. Retracting his earlier thought, he concluded, “No, that ain’t so, I’m glad I went. I done my part and I’m going to fight right here till Uncle Sam does his.”