During Mayor Richard J. Daley’s reign over the city from 1955 to 1976, high-rise public housing units were built in Black neighborhoods, creating a high concentration of racialized poverty. During Mayor Michael Bilandic’s term, there was benign neglect of the Black sections of town, which was demonstrated during the 1979 blizzard: the streets in the downtown area were cleaned, while the Black neighborhoods remained buried in snow. The next mayor, Jane Byrne, campaigned on the promise of equal snow removal for all neighborhoods. When Harold Washington was elected in 1983 as the first Black mayor, he was met with a virulent group of aldermen nicknamed the “Vrdolyak 29” who did everything in their power to block his initiatives.
Twenty years later, when Mayor Richard M. Daley, the son of the earlier Mayor Daley, dismantled high-rise public housing units, residents faced many barriers to moving into predominantly white areas of the city. The reality of the resulting “mixed-income housing” was that poor Black people moved into lower- or middle-class Black neighborhoods. The idea of Black Chicagoans sharing in educational, economic, and housing opportunity was hard fought against, as was evident in the early 2010s, when Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed more than fifty schools and several mental health clinics in predominantly Black neighborhoods on the South and West Sides. That decision, combined with the uneven distribution of tax incremental financing (TIF) money, led to significant investment in downtown and the North Side and contributed to the underdevelopment of the South and West Sides. These developments represented a continuum of policies that negatively affect Black people, who still live in highly segregated neighborhoods.
After the 1919 Chicago Race Riot, the city responded by implementing and maintaining policies that kept racial segregation in place. One hundred years later the city is considered “global,” boasts gleaming tall buildings, and is home to many multinational corporations. Its residents also have a thirty-year discrepancy in life expectancy, depending on the neighborhood in which they reside. Racial disparities are evident in education, employment, income, home ownership, property values, crime, relationship with the police, access to healthcare and healthy food—all related to racially segregated neighborhoods.
For decades Chicago has worked to overcome deeply entrenched racial separation and divisions that have been part of the fabric and makeup of the city. The 2019 election of Mayor Lori Lightfoot—the first African American and openly lesbian woman to hold the position—could be a step toward the progress the city needs. The fact that Lightfoot is a North Sider married to a white woman challenges some of the racial and geographic divides. And the fact that she won all fifty wards during the election suggests that residents in every part of the city were ready for a change. In the twenty-first century, Chicago might finally live up to the promises and expectations outlined by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations in the aftermath of the 1919 Race Riot.
1924–1929
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE
Farah Jasmine Griffin
By the summer of 1924, when influential observers began to take note of the artistic flowering known as the Harlem Renaissance, Harlem was already an exciting and vibrant Black enclave.
Blacks had started moving to the area in the early decades of the century and it could boast at least four major publications. Socialists Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph founded The Messenger and published editorials exploring “The New Negro” as early as 1920. They asserted an ascendant political and economic militancy among the new generation of Black people who populated Harlem. In addition to The Messenger, The Crisis (1910), published by the NAACP and edited by the formidable W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey’s Negro World (1918), and the Urban League’s magazine Opportunity (1923) were all important shapers of an emerging Black public sphere.
The Crisis literary editor Jessie Fauset published many of the young writers who would become literary lights of the Renaissance. However, in 1924 Opportunity upstaged both The Crisis and Fauset by announcing itself as the vehicle that would usher Harlem’s writers to mainstream publishers, critics, and reviewers.
In March 1924, sociologist Charles Johnson, director of the Urban League and editor of Opportunity, hosted a now-legendary dinner at the Civic Club, widely hailed as “the first act of the Harlem Renaissance.” The dinner was not so much the start of the Renaissance as its public coming-out. The evening was planned as a tribute to Fauset for her tireless efforts on behalf of Black writers and for the publication of her novel There Is Confusion. Instead, the event served to highlight the younger writers and offered them valuable introductions to members of the white literary establishment who were in attendance.
Two writers who would become the brightest stars of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, were absent that evening. Having already published works in The Crisis and Opportunity, both were on the brink of very promising literary careers, but neither had relocated to New York. By August 1924, the literary flowering that had started with the publication of Jean Toomer’s Cane in 1923 was fully under way, attracting a bevy of young artists drawn by the energy, community, and opportunity of the Black Mecca.
Significantly, a future literary great made his arrival in Harlem that summer as well. James A. Baldwin was born at Harlem Hospital in August 1924. He would come of age in a Harlem shaped by, but quite different from, the heady days of the 1920s.
In spite of the cultural ascendancy of Harlem, the summer of 1924 offered continued challenges to Black people. That summer the Ku Klux Klan was present and influential at both the Democratic and Republican national conventions, and lynching was still prevalent throughout the South. Harlem was fully aware of these horrific conditions, as many of its inhabitants had fled virulent racism. Once they arrived in Harlem, they devoted themselves to the fight against it. If the artists sought creative freedom, they also saw themselves as participants in a larger movement that asserted the humanity of Black people. Johnson, Du Bois, and others saw the arts as central to the struggle for full citizenship.
In 1925 Howard University philosopher Alain Locke guest-edited a special issue of the journal Survey Graphic, titled “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro.” Devoted to life in Harlem, featuring essays by Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, and a number of promising younger writers, the special issue quickly sold out. Its popularity led to the anthology The New Negro, also edited by Locke and published in 1925, which according to Arnold Rampersad not only served to “certify the existence of a great awakening in Black America but also to endow it with a Bible.”
Meanwhile in 1925 Hughes, who first published in The Crisis, and Hurston, whose writings would appear in Opportunity, came from Washington, D.C., to Harlem. The painter Aaron Douglas relocated as well. In May the New York Herald Tribune became the first publication to use the phrase “Negro Renaissance” to describe the flowering of art. The Crisis launched its literary prizes and a research project on the social conditions of American Blacks. The first prizes were issued in August 1925.
Although best known for an abundance of literary work, the Renaissance produced music and visual art as well. Louis Armstrong parted with his mentor King Oliver to join the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra and came to the city that was as big as his sound—New York. Bessie Smith and other blues queens were among the most popular musical artists of the day. Both Hurston and Hughes attended rent parties and after-hours joints where they might hear Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, and Willie “the Lion” Smith, musical giants who would join the partying crowd after they’d finished performing in some of Harlem’s whites-only clubs. Also in attendance were Black workers and Black debutantes, whites in search of a little excitement, and members of Harlem’s thrilling, vibrant, and brilliant queer community.
Like their contemporaries, Hurston and Hughes found sponsors among wealthy whites, philanthropist friends of the Negro. Amy Spingarn, an artist and philanthropist, gave Hughes the funds he needed to attend Lincoln University
. Hurston met Annie Nathan Meyer, author and founder of Barnard College, at the second Opportunity dinner in March 1925. Meyer offered her a spot at Barnard that evening and later helped her find the resources she needed to attend.
In 1926 some of the movement’s inherent tensions surfaced. Nowhere is this more notable than in two of the year’s most significant publications, the singular issue of the journal FIRE!! and “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” by Langston Hughes. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” is the aesthetic manifesto of a generation. It is boldly assertive, unabashedly in love with Black people, and insistent on the value of Black vernacular culture. Hughes’s metaphor of the racial mountain takes on several meanings. Here it is an “urge within the race toward whiteness.” It is that which the Black artist must climb “in order to discover himself and his people.” It is the rocky road, but one that ends with the younger Black artists “building temples for tomorrow…on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.” If “Racial Mountain” provides the theory, FIRE!! is the practice.
FIRE!! appeared only once, in November 1926, but remains a lasting document of the period. Having been nurtured and chided by their elders, Hughes, Hurston, and Douglas, along with Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, and others, joined forces to produce a groundbreaking publication. The issue contained fiction, drama, essays, and visual imagery focusing on both urban and rural Blacks. The group met at Hurston’s or Douglas’s apartment, where they edited manuscripts, made design decisions, and produced a work by Black people free of the oversight of their Black elders and white funders. The issue contained Nugent’s beautiful and impressionistic story of queer desire, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade”; Hurston’s “Color Struck and Sweat”; poetry by Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Helene Johnson; and drawings by Douglas and others. It was a beautiful hand grenade, a modernist gem.
At the beginning of 1927, Hurston received a fellowship under the direction of Columbia’s Franz Boas. Armed with a pistol and driving herself, she ventured south to collect folklore in a land where the threat of racial violence, lynching, and rape was real. She would spend the next two years there collecting material that she eventually published in the groundbreaking Mules and Men.
If Hurston turned her attention to folklore, 1928 saw the ascendancy of the novel as preferred form: Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem. Du Bois’s Dark Princess. Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun. Newcomer Nella Larsen’s Quicksand. Larsen, who would later be dubbed the “mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance,” was for a brief moment a favorite writer of Du Bois for her depiction of the Black elite and the talented tenth, and what he saw as her critical dissection of the absurdity of racial classification. What he missed was her exploration of female sexual desire and her critique of the elite’s adherence to respectability and its own racial hypocrisy. Quicksand would be followed by Passing in 1929. Both novels were critical successes and ensured Larsen a prominent place among Harlem’s literary lights.
In the shadows of the literary lights, economic desperation was growing among Harlem’s Black residents. Whites owned more than 80 percent of Harlem businesses. But following the Wall Street crash in October 1929, fewer and fewer white people came to Harlem in search of a good time. When Hurston returned to Harlem that year, she confronted enormous poverty and Harlem friends “all tired and worn out—looking like death eating crackers.” But when she visited her white benefactor, Charlotte Osgood Mason, there was no evidence of the Great Depression in her penthouse. She ate caviar and capon.
1929–1934
THE GREAT DEPRESSION
Robin D. G. Kelley
The Fascist racketeers were no fools. They understood the psychology of their starving victims. Their appeal to them was irresistible. It went something like this: “Run the niggers back to the country where they came from—Africa! They steal the jobs away from us white men because they lower wages. Our motto is therefore: America for Americans!”
Anyone living in Donald Trump’s America will find these words eerily familiar; the author’s name, not so much. When Angelo Herndon penned this passage over eight decades ago, the twenty-four-year-old with a sixth-grade education was one of the most famous Black men in America. He had spent almost three years in a Georgia jail cell, about five years in Southern coal mines, and at least two years as a Communist organizer in the Deep South.
Herndon’s conviction under Georgia’s insurrection statute and his subsequent defense made the handsome young radical a cause célèbre. His story upends typical Great Depression images of despondent men and women in breadlines and soup kitchens, waiting for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to save the day.
Instead, the story of thousands of Angelo Herndons is a story of Black antifascism.
As American finance capital eagerly floated loans to the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and Fortune, The Saturday Evening Post, and The New Republic ran admiring spreads on Italian Fascism, Black radicals called out and resisted homegrown fascism in the form of lynch law, the suppression of workers’ organizations and virtually all forms of dissent, and the denial of civil and democratic rights to Black citizens. As this was the state of affairs in much of the United States long before Mussolini’s rise, Black radicals not only anticipated fascism, they resisted before it was considered a crisis. As Herndon aptly put it, his case was “a symbol of the clash between Democracy and Fascism.”
Born Eugene Angelo Braxton on May 6, 1913 or 1914, he and his seven siblings grew up poor mainly in Alabama, though by his own account he was born in Wyoming, Ohio. His parents, Paul Braxton and Harriet Herndon, both hailed from the Black Belt town of Union Church, just southeast of Montgomery, in Bullock County, Alabama. Angelo was barely five years old when their father succumbed to “miners’ pneumonia” and his death sent Harriet and her children back to Union Church, where she sharecropped to make ends meet. In 1926 Angelo (thirteen) and Leo (fifteen) worked in the coalfields of Lexington, Kentucky, before moving in with their aunt Sallie Herndon in Birmingham, Alabama.
In 1930 Angelo was working for the Tennessee Coal and Iron company in Birmingham when the fledgling Communist Party began organizing there. He was primed for its message of militant class struggle and racial justice, having once dreamed of organizing “some kind of a secret society that was to arm itself with guns and ammunition and retaliate against the Ku Klux Klan and the American Legion.” On May 22, he attended his first Communist-led mass meeting and listened to party leaders denounce racism, segregation, and lynching, and demand that Black people have the right to equality and national self-determination—that is, the right of the subjugated Black majority in the South to secede from the United States and form a truly democratic government if they so desired. This position, adopted by the Communist International in 1928, promoted not separatism but rather the rights of a subjugated nation to choose. Consequently, the policy led the party to greater support for civil rights and racial justice. Impressed with the Communists for fighting for all workers and for advocating openly for “Negro rights,” teenaged Angelo joined the party that night.
Using his birth name, Eugene Braxton, he immediately threw himself into the work, organizing coal miners, the unemployed, and sharecroppers, and spending many a night in an Alabama jail cell. The political situation heated up in March 1931, when nine young Black men were pulled from a freight train near Paint Rock, Alabama, and falsely accused of raping two white women. Following a hasty trial, all the defendants except the youngest were sentenced to death. The Communist-led International Labor Defense (ILD) built an international campaign to defend the “Scottsboro Boys,” eventually leading to their release.
Meanwhile, in the fall of 1931, the party dispatched Herndon to Atlanta. The reputedly liberal city had become a hotbed of fascism. Between March and May 1930, Atlanta police arrested six Communist leaders—Morris H. Powers, Joseph Carr, Mary Dalton, and Ann Burlak, all white—and African Americans Herbert Newton
and Henry Storey. The state charged the Atlanta Six, as they came to be known, under a nineteenth-century statute that made it potentially a capital crime for anyone to incite insurrection or distribute insurrectionary literature.
Liberals across the country objected to this arcane law largely on the grounds that it violated free speech. Most white Atlantans, however, were less concerned with the party’s incendiary literature than with its interracialism. That white women and Black men had attended an antilynching meeting together was an egregious violation of Southern conduct and the primary reason for their arrests.
Unemployment fueled the party’s growth in Atlanta, which in turn fueled the fascist movement. During the summer of 1930, about 150 Atlanta business leaders, American Legionnaires, and key figures in law enforcement founded the American Fascisti Association and Order of Black Shirts. Their goals were to “foster the principles of white supremacy” and make the city (and its jobs) white. The Black Shirts held a march on August 22, 1930, carrying placards that read “Niggers, back to the cotton fields—city jobs are for white folks.”
Since the Black Shirts were of the better class, the anti-insurrection statute did not apply to them, though they earned the ire of merchants and housewives who feared losing access to cheap Black labor, and of unemployed white men who got black shirts but no jobs. By 1932, the city began denying Black Shirts parade permits and charters, though racial terror and discrimination continued unabated.
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