RIOT ZONE: CHICAGO 1919

BY CHRISTOPHER LAMBERTI B.A., MIAMI UNIVERSITY (OHIO), 1998 A.M., BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2007

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AT BROWN UNIVERSITY

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY, 2013

© Copyright 2013 by Christopher Lamberti This dissertation by Christopher Lamberti is accepted in its present form by the Department of History as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date ______Elliott J. Gorn, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date ______Robert O. Self, Reader

Date ______Robert G. Lee, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date ______Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School

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CURRICULUM VITAE

Christopher Lamberti was born on February 27, 1975, in Evanston, Illinois, raised in the Chicago area, and currently resides in Chicago. He graduated with a

B.A. in American Studies from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio in 1998. For five years he worked as a web developer while volunteering in the exhibitions department at Chicago Historical Society (now Chicago History Museum), before entering the Teaching of History graduate program at University of Illinois at

Chicago. At UIC, he served as a research assistant and a practicum student teacher at Roberto Clemente High School. Christopher entered the Ph.D. program in history at Brown University in September 2006, earned his master’s degree in May 2007, and passed his qualifying exams in December 2008. While at Brown, he studied modern U.S. cultural history, global approaches to history, and public history. He served as a teaching assistant in U.S Civil War, American Revolution, and Early

American history courses. He earned a Brown University Howard and Jan Swearer

Graduate Fellowship for the 2010-11 academic year. During his time at Brown,

Christopher presented graduate conference papers on Brown University’s “History and Justice” report and on mapping the Chicago 1919 race riot. He authored the chapter "Chicago's Game," in Rooting for the Home Team: Essays on Sport,

Community, and Identity, forthcoming in 2013 from University of Illinois Press, edited by Daniel A. Nathan.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Research for this project brought me into contact with many gracious folks to

whom I owe thanks. William Tuttle kindly allowed me access to his personal papers on

the Chicago riot, and Sheyda Jahanbani and Jonathan Hagel were generous hosts in

Lawrence, Kansas. At the National Archives, I received assistance from Chris Elzey and enjoyed the hospitality of Cian Cashin while in Washington D.C. In Chicago, I thank

Daniel Greene, Doug Knox, and John Powell at the Newberry Library for their time and assistance. Lesley Martin and the Research Center staff helped me navigate the collections at Chicago History Museum. For helping me to track down source materials,

I would like to thank also historians Jim Grossman and Dominic Pacyga, Valerie Harris

at University of Illinois at Chicago, the staff at Special Collections Research Center of

the University of Chicago Library, Leonard Kurdek at the Polish Museum of America,

Erica Campbell at the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office, as well as Sarah

Donovan, James Epstein, and Peter Vernon.

I benefitted a great deal from a committee of remarkably talented scholars. I've

enjoyed Bob Lee's guidance as a teacher, a field advisor, and dissertation reader. Bob’s

insightfulness is extraordinary and beyond the purview of most others; I appreciate very

much having profited from it. There is no sharper mind than Robert Self's in the History

Department at Brown University. As an advisor, Robert's feel for the structural dynamics

that drive historical narratives is extremely impressive and has been tremendously helpful. As a faculty member, Robert has been a devoted friend to history graduate

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students at Brown. For that, we all thank him. Many years ago at Miami University as a

struggling third year college student I entered Elliott Gorn’s office, where he agreed to be

my undergraduate advisor. Lucky for me, as a devoted Chicago Cubs fan, Elliott has an

affinity for lost causes. During the more than fifteen years since then, Elliott has been

both an invaluable teacher and unwavering ally. I owe a tremendous debt to him for so

much of what I have accomplished; the completion of this dissertation is no exception.

I owe thanks to others at Brown who have helped me to grow as a scholar and a teacher including Steven Lubar, Michael Vorenberg, Karl Jacoby, Naoko Shibusawa,

Kerry Smith, and Seth Rockman. I would not have been able to navigate the winds of graduate student life without the kind assistance of Mary Beth Bryson, Julissa Bautista,

and Cherrie Guerzon. I appreciate the help and feedback I received in the early stages of this project from Holly Snyder at Brown University’s John Hay Library. I owe much to

Joan Richards, who helped me get back to Chicago, making the last years of writing this dissertation much easier to bear. In the current economic environment, receiving an advanced academic degree without accumulating significant loan debt is a challenge. So

I feel especially fortunate and grateful for the financial support that I have received from the Brown Graduate School over these six years.

Among my fellow graduate students, Sean Dinces and Will Brucher stand out as least discouraged by my tendency toward reclusion while at Brown. I have benefited greatly from getting to know them over the years. I appreciate also the advice and friendship of Sara Fingal, Sarah Seidman, Gosia Rymsza-Pawlowska, and Wen Jin.

Many thanks to the members of the Loyola University History Dissertation Writers

Group, especially Sarah Doherty and Ronald Martin, who welcomed me in their meetings

vi after I moved back to Chicago. I owe so much to my good friend and advisor Robert

Johnston at University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as Julie Peters, John D’Emilio, and

Leon Fink. At Miami University, I learned to love the study of history as an undergraduate in the American Studies program, from professors Daniel Nathan, Peter

Williams, and the late, great Jack Kirby.

Lastly, I thank Milena Sjekloca, my wife. Milena and I met in a Teaching of

History graduate program at University of Illinois at Chicago. After spending some time observing and teaching in the classroom, I decided that I was not up to the task, and retreated into a Ph.D. program. Milena went on to teach high school. While there have been some wonderfully gratifying moments since, she has endured much in her six years as a Chicago public school teacher. Milena’s many sacrifices for her students and school have benefitted me materially while I completed my degree, for which I am grateful to her. But for Milena’s passion, poise, intellect, and drive as well as the heartfelt support she has shown me during what has been an especially trying time for urban educators, I revere her.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: 1

CHAPTER 1: “The Center of the Trouble”: The Angelus Flat Building Riot 19 in Chicago’s Black Belt

CHAPTER 2: “A Pretty Tough Hole”: The Hostile Area West of the Black 76 Belt

CHAPTER 3: “They Did Not Bring With Them This American 141 Obsession”: The Packingtown Fire and Polish Workers at the Union Stock Yards

CHAPTER 4: “Reaping the Whirlwind”: Soldiering, Manhood, and First- 199 Class Citizenship in Chicago’s Race Riot

CONCLUSION: 253

BIBLIOGRAPHY: 267

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Map of the riot zone within Chicago city limits 8

Map 1.1: Chicago Race Riot Deaths/Injuries near the Angelus Apartment 24 Building

Map 1.2: The Ratio of Total Homes Occupied by Whites Owned by White 28 Residents by Census Tract

Map 1.3: White Population Percentage by Census Tract in 1920 29

Map 1.4: Chicago Community Areas Surrounding the Riot Zone 37

Map 1.5: The Bombing of Black Homes in Chicago 1917-1921 64

Map 1.6: Allan Spear’s Map of the growth of the African American population 66 in Chicago and the expansion of the Black Belt by 1910 and 1920 census tracts

Map 1.7: Black Home ownership by census tract in 1920 68

Map 1.8: The changing racial demographic of the Angelus district 1900-1920 73

Map 2.1: The Chicago Commission on Race Relations Riot Districts and 81 “hostile area”

Map 2.2: The percentage of total reported wounded during the riot in two of 82 seven designated Riot Commission riot districts versus the rest of the city

Map 2.3: Racial breakdown along the dead line 85

Map 2.4: The hostile area 88

Chart 2.1: Nationalities as a percentage of the foreign-born population in the 93 hostile area and citywide

Fig.3.1: Packingtown, the Union Stock Yards, and the incendiary fire area in 146

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relation to the Black Belt, the hostile area discussed in Chapter 2, and the riot zone designated by the Illinois state militia

Map 3.1: The riot district patrolled by the Illinois state militia 152

Map 3.2: Riot Activity Index: Number injured/killed plus residents of 153 injured/killed in census tract divided by total census tract population in 1920 multiplied by 10,000.

Map 3.3: “White Foreign-Born Ethnicity Index: POLISH”: Census tracts 154 where Polish foreign-born residents exceed the city average in 1920 Map 3.4: Census tracts with percentages of men employed in manufacturing 155 higher than the city average in 1920

Map 3.5: Census tracts with percentages of white foreign born higher than the 156 city average in 1920

Map 3.6: “Population Index Map: AFRICAN AMERICAN”: Census tracts 157 where African-American residents exceed the city average in 1920

Map 3.7: Census tracts with percentages of native born higher than the city 158 average in 1920

Map 3.8: “White Foreign-Born Ethnicity Index: IRISH”: Census tracts where 159 Irish foreign-born residents exceed the city average in 1920

Map 4.1: Whites injured or killed in Riot Commission riot districts 244

Map 4.2: Residences of white persons injured or killed in Riot Commission 246 riot districts

Racial Segregation in Chicago in 2000 (map by Sean Dinces) 264

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INTRODUCTION

“For a full hour the procession passed without a halt…. The line of bright

banners and waving plumes seemed interminable.” Thousands of Chicagoans gathered to

celebrate the groundbreaking for a new school, the De La Salle Institute, dedicated to

molding boys from poor immigrant families into model citizens. Archbishop Patrick

Feehan, leader of the Catholics Archdiocese of Chicago, presided over the promenade,

and he was joined by other clergymen, politicians, military personnel, policemen, the

Christian Brothers’ band, and even members of the Irish Nationalist Clan na Gael on this

May 19, 1889. Feehan declared that he felt grateful “above all” to non-Catholic

“business-men” who lent financial support to the Institute, which he promised would be

erected as “the teacher of those who [will] raise this Republic to a higher standard and

work to the best interests of our common country.”1

After a half century of rebuke, the De LaSalle celebration exemplified the larger

acceptance of Irish-American Catholics by Chicago’s Anglo-Protestant elites, and a shared vision of a new “Republic”: a religiously integrated, formally educated, white

Chicago. De LaSalle Institute would help usher in a cosmopolitan future that included

Irish Americans among the “civilized” men who would lead Chicago and the nation into

the modern era. The De LaSalle Institute, located in a mixed white community east of

State Street, symbolized both the peaceful assimilation of Irish immigrants into the

1 “De La Salle Institute,” Chicago Tribune, May 20, 1889, 2. For more on the Irish in Chicago see Chapter 2. 1

American mainstream and Irish national culture as part of the Chicago’s heritage. It was

an important civic alliance for the city’s wealthy and influential men, but also an

indicator of the increasing anxieties about labor radicals in the wake of the Haymarket

Square bombing and new immigrants from Eastern Europe in an industrial city with a population almost 80 percent foreign born. At the De LaSalle Institute precession, a white boy perched in a treetop taking in the spectacle remarked to a newspaperman, “I wish I had a dollar for every man in this precesh.” When asked what he would do with the money, according to the reporter, the boy quipped, “I’d buy Chicago and fence it in.”2

Chicago had never been, nor ever would be fenced in; borders shifted, flexed,

changed. And in 1919, the De LaSalle Institute, built thirty years prior in a mixed white community on Thirty Fifth and Wabash, operated in the middle of Chicago’s segregated

African American district known as the Black Belt. Right across the street was another

white bastion, the Angelus apartment building, a large residential complex inhabited by

all white tenants in this almost exclusively black neighborhood. On July 28, 1919,

thousands of African Americans inundated the streets surrounding the corner of Thirty-

Fifth and Wabash. Soon one hundred Chicago police officers on the scene firing into the

crowd, killing four African American men. It was day two of what would be a seven day

race riot in Chicago.

Well over two million immigrants entered Chicago between 1890 and 1920, and

many others migrated there from within the United States. Most of the 38 men killed

during the rioting were born beyond Illinois state lines. They originated in Austria, Italy,

Poland, Isle of Man, and Ireland, as well as Kentucky, Mississippi, Michigan,

Pennsylvania, Georgia, Alabama, Virginia, Tennessee, and Maryland. If the dead were

2 Ibid. 2

like most Chicago migrants in 1919, they were uprooted farmers who sought work and

wages in the modern industrial metropolis. They endured persecution in their places of

origin, and arrived seeking greater political freedoms and personal liberty. Thousands of

miles separated these men at birth; they died together in Chicago—shot, stabbed,

beaten—during a bloody race riot.3

The violence began over a boundary dispute. It was an unmarked border line,

enforced by white bathers, extending out beyond the shore of the Twenty-Ninth Street

beach into Lake Michigan, separating white and black swimming areas. On Sunday July

27, 1919, whites threw stones at fourteen year old Eugene Williams, as he clung to a

makeshift wooden raft. Williams eventually drowned. Witnesses informed the police

officer on the scene that twenty-four year old George Stauber, American-born of

German-Bavarian descent, was guilty of hurling the rock that killed the boy. Officer

Daniel Callahan, who would later testify about his willingness to “fight shoulder to

shoulder” with other whites against African Americans, refused to take Stauber into

custody and instead arrested a black man on the complaint of a white man.4

A growing defiance among indignant African Americans, news of racial violence

in other cities across the nation, and an uptick in the number of white assaults on blacks

in Chicago all contributed to a high level of racial tension in the city. The Williams

drowning and Callahan’s refusal to arrest Stauber was enough to send the city into a riotous frenzy. On Sunday evening, police met a crowd from the beach gathered at the

3 U.S. Bureau of Census. See also chart in the Chicago Tribune, April 26, 1980; Cook County Coroner, The Race Riots: Biennial Report 1918-1919 and Official Record of Inquests on the Victims of the Race Riots of July and August 1919 (Chicago, 1920), 16. 4 1900 U.S. Census, population schedule, Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, Enumeration District 61; 1920 U.S. Census, population schedule, Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, Enumeration District 40; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), 4-5, 451; “Report Two Killed, Fifty Hurt, in Race Riots,” Chicago Tribune, July 28, 1919, 1; "Riot Sweeps Chicago," Defender Aug 2, 1919, 1. 3

foot of Twenty-Ninth Street. James Crawford, a thirty-seven year old African American man born in Georgia, fired on them and was killed when the officers returned fire. The violence escalated into the night and early morning. Twenty-Seven blacks were beaten, seven stabbed, and four shot by “white gangsters” in the Irish American neighborhoods

west of the Black Belt.5

The temperature on Sunday was ninety-six degrees, fourteen above normal. The

heat continued through Tuesday. This meant that many people sought relief from their

steamy apartments on the streets and on doorsteps, in public where altercations were

much more likely. The heaviest rioting took place during these early-week days and

nights; twenty-eight of the thirty-eight riot killings occurred on Monday and Tuesday.

Rain came on Wednesday, and so did cooler temperatures. Riot activity slowed as the

weather drove more people into their homes. But the violence continued in the Black

Belt and in the white neighborhoods immediately west of it. At 10:30 p.m. on

Wednesday, Mayor William H. Thompson begrudgingly called in the Illinois state

militia, after having publicly announced his confidence in the ability of Chicago’s police

force to restore order. More than six-dozen military companies making up seven

divisions of the state’s militia were deployed from armories on the South Side. In the

days following, there were scattered incidents and a few reported injuries, but the soldiers

effectively quelled the rioting. That is, until Saturday, when white arsonists using grease

paint to disguise themselves as black set ablaze a Lithuanian and Polish neighborhood to

the west of the Union Stock Yards, beyond militia patrol.6

5 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 4-11. 6 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 4-11; Cook County Coroner, Race Riots, 20. 4

In the end, African Americans suffered a greater number of casualties and, due to

a racially biased criminal justice system in Chicago, a disproportionate number of arrests,

indictments, and convictions as well. Twenty-three black men and fifteen white men

were killed during the rioting. Of the 537 injured, 342 were black, 120 were white; race

was not recorded in seventeen cases. Police arrested 229 persons during the rioting,

among whom 154, about two thirds, were black. However, there were few convictions because the violence made it difficult to secure witnesses, corrupt police officers and judges protected white assailants, and much of the bloodshed arguably was in self- defense. Finally, there were nine indictments, six blacks and three whites, which led to four convictions, two white and two black.7

The rioting was concentrated on Chicago’s south side, in the African American residential area and the surrounding white neighborhoods. Chief of Police John J. Garrity

testified that during the race riot 2,800 police officers operated out of the Stanton Avenue

station at Thirty-Fifth Street and Rhodes Avenue in the Black Belt, "practically in the

heart of the district where the most trouble was." The number of officers stationed there

represented four-fifths of the city’s total police force. Only higher ranking officers and a

few patrolmen remained at other stations for emergency calls. The Stanton Avenue

station was located about a mile from Wentworth Avenue, known as the “dead line”

because it served as demarcation between black neighborhoods to the east and white

neighborhoods to the west. On the second day of the riot, Garrity ordered that police

officers form a two-mile line along Wentworth Avenue between Twenty-Second Thirty-

7 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 599-602. 5

Ninth streets. The chief instructed his men to “allow no colored people to go across to the west and no white people to go across to the east.”8

When the militia arrived Wednesday night, they took their posts around the dead

line from Twenty-Sixth to Sixty-Third streets, in an area that city official and the local

press referred to as the “riot zone.” The patrol area covered the northern, southern, and

western peripheries of the Black Belt, with more troops diverted to the west.

8 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 36-37. 6

Riot Zone Map Chicago Tribune Aug. 1, 1919

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Map of the riot zone within Chicago city limits

The narrative and analytical focus of this dissertation is the riot zone and the people who occupied and controlled this space. Although Chicago’s south side was one of the most culturally diverse places in the world in 1919, the riot zone was dominated numerically, socially, and politically by three main ethnic groups: Irish, Polish, and

African Americans. Most of the people who lived in the riot zone were of lower

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economic status: factory, city, service, or domestic workers. The dissertation examines

cultural interactions in the riot zone, making distinctions between racial tensions that

existed between groups and the racial violence that occurred before and on a much larger

scale during the rioting.

Like Reconstruction in the South half a century earlier, the nascent years of the

movement of African Americans to the North, known as the Great Migration, were a time

of great possibility for race relations and racial justice. In Chicago, African-Americans

were engaged in the political process. Black and white children mingled in a number of

integrated schools and playgrounds, and black and white commuters shared seats on

streetcars. Despite a checkered racial history, slowly but surely Chicago’s labor

organizations representing unskilled and semiskilled workers, many of them African

American and Eastern European, were integrating. Black and white professionals joined to create social organizations for the betterment of the city’s African American population including settlement houses, the Wabash Avenue YMCA, and the Chicago

Urban League.

However, residential integration gave even the most ideologically committed or philanthropic reformers pause. As the third decade of the century approached, Chicago’s

Black Belt grew ever more dense and decayed. Unlike other European migrant

“colonies,” which were ethnically diverse, African-Americans lived almost exclusively amongst each other. Poverty, vice, and civic neglect characterized the slowly expanding

Black Belt. Property depreciation and the stigma of blackness helped to justify white resistance, for whom there was nothing to gain and much to lose, by racial cooperation or cohabitation. White-collar community residents formed “protective leagues,” while

9 emboldened young men, sons of Chicago’s laborers, attacked blacks on the streets of their ethnic neighborhoods. When African Americans reacted rhetorically, then physically during America’s “Red Summer” of 1919, Chicago’s race riot ensued. During the riot and its aftermath, it became clear that housing and neighborhood integration was a line that whites’ would not cross. Subsequently, African-Americans turned inward toward their own community institutions, as working-class Chicago became increasingly racialized.

Each chapter of the dissertation considers a particular event during the rioting, and seeks to give it context and meaning. Chapter 1 begins with the violence at Thirty-

Fifth Street and Wabash Avenue, where an angry crowd of over a thousand African-

Americans gathered on the streets outside of the seven-story Angelus building on

Monday evening, the lone white residential building for blocks around. In the ensuing firefight, police shot and killed four black men, while numerous others were wounded.

Over the three decades since its construction, the Angelus had gone from a modern residential complex, serving “first-class parties only” in an upper-class white neighborhood, to a white residence that also housed a black labor organization, a black church, and black Republican headquarters. A few months after the riot, the white residents of the Angelus were gone, and black tenants filled the vacated apartments.

The demographic changes in the area surrounding the Angelus reflected the larger process of Chicago’s Black Belt expansion in the early twentieth century; an expansion characterized by the segregation of races in separate dwellings, even in areas that census reports would suggest were “mixed.” Often willing to accept blacks as civic equals by law (at least rhetorically), middle-class whites still struggled to view them as neighbors

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and social equals. The strangeness of black shoppers, worshipers, workers, voters, and so

forth quickly became transformed into black unworthiness, undesirability, inferiority.

Real estate was one of the keys to this process. Seeking to profit from the effects of racism on the housing market, black and white real estate businessmen played upon

white fears of black neighbors, prompting whites to abandon their residences in already

depreciated neighborhoods along the southern and eastern peripheries of the expanding

Black Belt. These realtors bought properties at rock bottom prices, subdivided them, and

then rented rooms to desperate blacks at enormous mark-ups. This cycle of white panic

and retreat piqued white resentment toward blacks, especially toward those who seemed

intent on challenging social and cultural norms, especially de facto segregation. In time,

misgivings about blacks and their integration into white society sent a clear cultural

message to European-Americans of the lower classes: “whites” must not mingle with

“Negroes.”

Chapter 2 looks at the white-on-black violence in the neighborhoods west of the

Black Belt. During the early days of the riot, roaming white gangs attacked black

laborers as they traveled to and from work, especially in the stockyards. Beginning

Tuesday evening, young white men sped through the Black Belt in their cars, firing as

they went, while neighborhood residents fired from behind makeshift barricades in the

streets. The violence continued Wednesday and then slowed with the arrival of the

Illinois State Militia, which would occupy the city’s “riot zone” for another ten days.

In the early twentieth century, the area of the city most outwardly hostile toward

blacks was directly west of the Black Belt. Although the residents of the “hostile area”

neighborhoods were an ethnic hodgepodge of native and foreign-born whites, the “new

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immigrants” among them emulated Chicago’s long-tenured Irish. The Irish controlled

local politics and patronage, the neighborhood parishes, and dangerous youth gangs

organized into athletic clubs. As part of a process that David Roediger and James Barrett

describe as “Americanization from the bottom up,” neighborhood residents adopted the

Irish-American “tradition” of hostility toward blacks.

The hostile area was working-class, but included more skilled workers than the

neighborhoods surrounding the stockyards to the west. Moreover, there were here a

disproportionate number of public service and transportation industry employees,

reflective of area residents’ influence in the Democratic machine. The machine thrived

partially because of the loyalty of athletic clubs, sponsored by influential politicians.

These glorified street gangs, made up primarily of 16 to 21 year white boys, guarded their

neighborhoods against racial integration through a campaign of terror against blacks who

dared cross the “dead line” at Wentworth Avenue.

Young white men west of the deadline were heavily invested in their

neighborhoods and their Catholic parishes, and patronage from the ward bosses was often the sources of their livelihoods. They would not tolerate black neighbors, nor would they

abandon their communities as readily as Protestant whites in white-collar communities.

Also, they often rejected Victorian standards of manliness that emphasized self-control,

self-improvement, and steady habits like sobriety; among the working class, on the other

hand, men often performed gender through violence. Following the riot, moneyed white

Chicagoans admonished the “hoodlums” of the lower classes, black and white, for their

“savage” behavior. While their means may have differed, bourgeois and working class

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whites were united in their goal: the physical separation of the white and black residents

of Chicago.

Chapter 3 delves into Chicago’s most destructive fire during the race riot. City

officials originally pointed to black men as the culprits of the incendiary blaze in a poor

Lithuanian and Polish neighborhood behind the stockyards on Saturday evening, which left thousands of stockyards workers and their families homeless. But further investigation revealed that the fire was started by white men in black face, who likely

originated from the Irish neighborhoods west of the Black Belt. For many Eastern-

European-born packinghouse workers this was the extent of their involvement in the riot;

attacked not by blacks but by white posing as blacks.

Evidence suggests that most of the whites injured or killed during the rioting fell

into one of four groups: 1.) young white males injured in “raids” across the deadline into

the Black Belt 2.) young white males from residential areas “contested by both negroes and whites” south of the Black Belt 3.) white policemen attacked during the rioting 4.) white male bystanders, attending to business in the Black Belt during the rioting

(peddlers, shop owners, and salesmen, many of them Italians or Eastern-European Jews).

Most of the new immigrant stockyard workers were geographically removed from the

Black Belt, and feared traversing the Irish neighborhoods that stood between them and the African-American section of town. Moreover, groups like the Poles had not yet.

Some still harbored Old World grudges toward other European groups, and for many a class consciousness outweighed an American sense of race consciousness based on a black/white racial dichotomy. 9

9 Quote in Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 8. 13

While Poles found it difficult to break into municipal and parish power structures, some obtained leadership roles in labor organizations, including the Stock Yards Labor

Council, representing packinghouse workers. At the time of the riot, the SLC was enjoying modest success organizing Eastern-European and African-American common laborers, in addition to the native-born German- and Irish-American “butcher aristocracy.” However, the riot halted the momentum enjoyed by labor organizers in the stockyards. And American-born sons of Eastern-European immigrant laborers adopted native-born, working-class, American cultural practices, which included racist attitudes toward African-Americans. Meanwhile, the resentment toward whites in the black community following the riot assured that in the coming years Chicago workers’ loyalties would lie with members of their race before their social class.

The subject of Chapter 4 is the impact of World War I and soldiering on the race riot. It begins on Tuesday night, when a mob of young white men wearing soldiers’ uniforms roamed the streets of Chicago’s business district known as the Loop, beating and killing black men and terrorizing local business owners. Very little indication of the

Loop faux-soldiers’ identities or motivations exists, but the symbolism implicit in their violent actions is hard to miss.

The war was important to the context of the riot. Following their exploits in

Europe, U.S. soldiers, or “doughboys,” were the darlings of the Western world. Some among the celebrated were African-American men, including Chicago’s famous all-black

8th Illinois Regiment, the members of which were treated to a parade down Michigan

Avenue in February of 1919. A month prior, army officials considered mustering out the

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8th Illinois before they returned to Chicago, as they did with other black regiments after

the war, for fear of violence between white citizens and black soldiers in uniform.

For African Americans, the proud service of black soldiers served as validation of

their manhood and fitness for full rights and citizenship in Jim Crow America. Black

leaders were quick to point out the hypocrisy of fighting for democracy abroad when one

considered its limited implementation on the home front. African American soldiers

became both the symbol of black pride and power, as well as important figures in “New

Negro” activist movements, advocating resistance to white aggression. Meanwhile,

among native-born, working-class whites, the success of African-American soldiers

resulted in confusion, insecurity, and anger. For years American popular culture as well

as many prominent intellectuals had trumpeted the superior manhood of the white race;

American soldiers—white ones, that is—were braver, stronger, and more cunning than

their enemies, who were often people of color. “War hero” was about as lofty a social

height as many young working-class white men aspired. With models like the 8th Illinois

Regiment, many African American men now dreamed warrior dreams too.

This dissertation is a story about men. Although many women in Chicago were affected by the race riot, especially those among the roughly one thousand rendered homeless by fire and vandalism, a scant few took part in the violence. No women were killed in the riot, and they represented only ten of the 537 injured (seven white, two black, one “race unknown”). Nearly all of these injuries were accidental; a black woman, chased with her brother by white gang members and seriously injured by a bullet, was the exception. In a word, women did not riot.10

10 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 1, 17. 15

While this story is not about women it is very much about gender. More specifically, it is about the gendered performances of men, which have everything to do with relationships with women. Traditional notions of men as the more able-bodied and innately violent sex, the powerful association between men and battle, as well as ideas about soldiering and citizenship in the context of World War I, helps to explain the almost exclusive role white and black men played in the violence during the race riot.

Moreover, racial tensions served to buoy the power of men in the era of women’s suffrage and increases in female employment, when men’s old exclusive prerogatives were slipping away. While American-born generations of male Chicagoans, black and white, became increasingly disaffected with dead-end jobs, and the association between manliness and marketplace production waned, men made claims to power through racial violence; white women needed white men to protect them from black men, it was believed, and vice versa.

One cannot undertake a project like this without acknowledging the centrality of

William Tuttle’s Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919. Published in 1970, it remains the preeminent work on the Chicago riot, and one of the most important books in the historiography of post-World War I urban-industrial America. I remain awed and envious of the subtlety and care with which Tuttle handles the complexities of politics, housing, and labor in Chicago leading up to the race riot, and his chapter on black masculinity, which predates much of the scholarship on gender as a category of analysis, is remarkably fresh and insightful, even today.11

With regard to argument, the major departures from Race Riot in the dissertation have to do with labor and ethnicity. One of Tuttle’s primary contentions is that the

11 William M. Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Atheneum Press, 1970). 16 history of race relations and racial prejudice at the stockyards were a major factor in the riot. He also suggests that Polish workers living on the South Side had a significant role in the rioting. I downplay race relations at the stockyards as a major cause of the riot.

While racial tensions existed at the stockyards and in the packinghouses, the unions represented by the Stock Yards Labor Council were experiencing some success organizing African-American and Polish unskilled workers and in changing the culture of racism that defined unionization at the Yards for so long. The SLC enjoyed modest gains because many Polish workers did not feel the same animosity toward African Americans as the longer tenured, less numerous, Irish American skilled butchers. In 1919, the Poles of Packingtown remained part of an insular community, still consumed by their ethnic traditions. During the riot, Poles were mostly outside observers; they did not feel as if they had a stake in the conflict between “whites” and “Negroes.”

The dissertation uses primary sources including census data to construct original maps, charts, and tables, which have helped to make distinctions between interracial tension and interracial violence. In early twentieth century Chicago, tension existed between blacks and whites of various classes, ages, ethnicities, etc., but the physical violence was limited to particular social and cultural groups, as the maps help to reveal.

With these maps and other sources, I argue that the Chicago race riot was less about jobs and more about conflicts over social and residential space.

The violence came from a generation of young men, many of Irish heritage, without interest in jobs at the stockyards, where their parents worked under poor conditions for meager pay. They roamed south side white neighborhoods in street gangs called “athletic clubs” like the infamous Ragen’s Colts. For these boys and the

17

politicians who backed them, the riot was about living and leisure space. By keeping

blacks out of their parks, beaches, and residential neighborhoods, they sought to maintain

the racial hierarchy, which served the psychological needs of these young white men, and

the material desires of Chicago’s ward bosses, industrialists, and real estate men.

This dissertation brings new types of analysis and fresh perspectives to the race

riot. Like historians David Roediger, James Barrett, Thomas Guglielmo, and Andrew

Diamond, I see the riot as related to the formation of a white racial identity among the

children of European immigrants. This facet of identity construction developed in

tandem with new perceptions of manhood, which affected the ways in which young men

performed their gender. The months leading up to the riot were a time of possibility for

equal rights and social justice through a shared worker consciousness, but ultimately the

tumultuous riot brought race to the forefront, especially among younger generations of

whites and blacks who were embracing gender identities that had less to do with work

and more with race. Instead of fighting as organized workers for “a common cause—a

square deal for all," a new generation of lower-class whites fought to “keep the Negro in

his place.” And African American men responded “[p]ressed to the wall, dying, but

fighting back!”12

12 See James R. Barrett and David R. Roediger, “The Irish and ‘Americanization’ of the ‘New Immigrants’ in the Streets and in the Churches of the Urban United States, 1900-1930,” Journal of American Ethnic History 24, no. 4 (Summer, 2005), Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), and Andrew J. Diamond, Mean Streets: Chicago Youths and the Everyday Struggle for Empowerment in the Multiracial City, 1908-1969 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). Sec SLC J.W. Johnston addresses organized workers in Alma Herbst, The Negro in the Slaughtering and Meat-Packing Industry in Chicago (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1932), 42; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 475. Claude McKay “If We Must Die,” in Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 489. 18

CHAPTER 1 “The Center of the Trouble”: The Angelus Flat Building Riot in Chicago’s Black Belt

The Angelus flat building depicted in a 1892 newspaper illustration and a 1912 Chicago fire insurance map. Source: Illinois Sanborn Map and Chicago Tribune, March 4, 1892, 3.

African Americans did not take lightly the news of police negligence or the twin killing at the Twenty-Ninth Street beach on Sunday July 27, 1919. The Defender placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of Officer Daniel Callahan, who refused to arrest

George Stauber, and the white bathers who came to Stauber’s aid. When word of the murder of Eugene Williams and the shooting of James Crawford reached the Black Belt

Sunday evening, newspapers reported that retribution came from roaming gangs of black men pulling white men from passing street cars and automobiles, chasing and beating their targets along State Street. Police headquarters sent more officers to the area, which

19

remained quiet until morning. The peace was short-lived. Beginning Monday afternoon,

projectile hurling crowds grew along State from Thirty-First to Thirty-Ninth. In the

early evening, four black men stoned, stabbed, and killed an Italian peddler on State

Street at Thirty-Sixth. By Monday evening, swirling rumors had led large numbers of

black men from the neighborhood around Thirty-Fifth and State onto the streets. Word

circulated that armed white mob was gathering west of Wentworth aiming to “clean up

the ‘Black Belt,’” and that white men had been assaulting black women. There were

rumblings that a white gunman had fired a shot from a window of the Angelus building at

Thirty-Fifth and State, wounding a boy. This last rumor had black men on the move.1

According to the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, a crowd of fifteen- hundred African Americans, most likely almost all men, “besieged” the Angelus apartment building at 3501 South Wabash Avenue. The Defender called the Angelus the

“largest office and apartment building on the South Side”; it was also the only white- occupied apartment building on an all-black city block, in a largely black neighborhood.

Onlookers demanded that law officials apprehend the shooter, though police officers found it difficult to discern information amidst the chaos. Police Sergeant Middleton, the black officer who was on the scene at the Twenty-Ninth Street beach, described the situation as “everybody trying to tell you something and you couldn’t get anything.”

Another black police officer complained, “. . . everybody was saying, ‘He shot from that window’; I would go to that window and the crowd would say, ‘That is the window over there.’” A search of the building produced not a weapon or the sniper, leading the officer

1 "Riot Sweeps Chicago," Defender, August 2, 1919, 1; Cook County Coroner, The Race Riots: Biennial Report 1918-1919 and Official Record of Inquests on the Victims of the Race Riots of July and August 1919 (Chicago, 1920), 42; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), 29, 31, 661-62. 20

to conclude that the Angelus gunshot was “just a rumor that went around through the

crowd.” Historians probably will never know for certain whether or not a shot was fired

from the Angelus building, but regardless of the veracity of the claim, the growing mass

of people surrounding the apartment building believed it to be true, and grew more

agitated when the police failed to uncover the shooter. 2

A group of about one-hundred foot patrolmen and twelve mounted policemen rushed to the corner of Thirty-Fifth and Wabash around 8 P.M. The officers who arrived

early on the scene to search for the gunman were African Americans, but now white

reinforcements had arrived en masse, surely exacerbating the situation for agitated

members of the crowd weary of recent police abuses and negligence toward blacks.

Details of the ensuing melee remain sketchy. According to the Chicago Commission on

Race Relations, a number of policemen congregated at the north end of the intersection at

Thirty-Fifth and Wabash. One report suggests that an officer was hit by “a flying brick”

and/or “a Negro either threw some missiles or fired a shot at a policeman.” The

commission could not produce evidence of an order to fire, but next came a volley of

gunshots from the officers into the mob in front of the Angelus, killing two black men—a

migrant railway porter and a laborer, both in their late thirties—attempting to flee into the

Angelus building. Several members of the Angelus crowd ran for protection to the

2 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 6, 31, 661-62. The Riot Commission was conscious of exaggeration in prior riot reporting, and did its best to get the “facts” straight. Newspapers tended to exaggerate circumstances as well as the number of rioters and dead, and so did panicked police and federal government officials. For example, a War Department report estimated that 10,000 blacks and 2500 whites were armed and gathered at 35th and State on July 28. (Report of the Chicago Race Riot by Office Chief of Staff D.T. Hammond in Federal Surveillance of Afro-Americans (1917-1925): The First World War, The Red Scare & The Garvey Movement (FSAA), Reel 16, Microfilm Collection, Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, Chicago Public Library). And the Chicago Herald Examiner reported that black men at 35the and State were “all armed” after they had seized “hundreds of guns” (Mob Storms Eighth Armory; 250 Injured” Chicago Herald Examiner, July 29, 1919, 1; “Our People Becoming a Power in Financial Field,” Defender, June 14, 1919, 14. 21

nearby elevated train terminal at Thirty-Fifth Street, where police officers fired again,

wounding several black men and killing one, a twenty-one year old man born in

Alabama. By this time, the shots at the Angelus had spurred a violent response from both

the police and civilians on State Street, one block east of the building at the heart of the

city’s Black Belt. Subsequent stray fire killed another black man—a forty-eight year old

laborer native to Illinois—as he was leaving a Walgreen’s drug store at Thirty-Fifth and

State Streets. All told, “the Angelus riot,” as it was described, had left four dead, and

dozens injured. Later, the county coroner exonerated the policemen involved in the

shootings, made no recommendations for arrests or apprehensions, and the police and the

state’s attorney carried the investigation no further. 3

Violence continued in the area surrounding the Angelus for the remainder of the

week. The flat building sat near the center of the “Black Belt,” one of seven riot districts

described by the Chicago Commission in their report, and one of two that remained

“active” Sunday through Saturday. In the end, thirty-four percent of all riot-related

wounds would be inflicted in this section of the city, a tally second only to the

“Southwest Side and Stockyards District,” at forty-one percent. However, the Riot

Commission’s stockyards district covered an area about four times greater than its Black

Belt district, suggesting that, by far, the heaviest concentration of violence during the riot occurred in the segregated African American residential area. The largest number of deaths and injuries occurred along State Street, the commercial thoroughfare one block

3 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 31, 48, 661-62. Further details on deaths from Cook County Coroner, The Race Riots, 16: Sanford, Joseph, Age 37, Born Tennessee, Occ. Railway Porter, Mode Shot, Place 35th and Wabash, Date July 28, 8pm; Taylor, Hymes, Age 38, Born Unknown, Occ. Laborer, Mode Shot, Place 35th & Wabash, Date July 28, 8pm; Humphrey, John F., Age 21, Born Alabama, Occ. Unknown, Mode Shot, Place of Assault 35th & State, Date July 28 8pm; Lee, Edward, Age 48, Born Illinois, Occ. Laborer, Mode Beaten and Shot, Place 35th and State, Date July 28 8pm. 22

west of the Angelus, between Thirty-Fifth and Thirty-Ninth Streets. The corner of State

and Thirty-Fifth Streets marked the deadliest intersection in the most dangerous district in the city during the riot, where nine men were reported injured and one was killed. In nine blocks surrounding the Angelus building, from Dearborn Street to Michigan Avenue,

Thirty-Fourth Street to Thirty-Seventh Street, seven people sustained deadly wounds and forty-four others were reported injured. Indeed, the Daily News referred to the Angelus

clash on July 29 as “the center of the trouble.”4

4 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 8 [map], 7-10, 27. 23

Map 1.1. Chicago Race Riot Deaths/Injuries near the Angelus Apartment Building. Source: The Negro in Chicago, Chicago Commission on Race Relations (1922)

While the Angelus building was in a location in the middle of much of the riot violence (as indicated by Map 1.1), and despite the scale of the violent outbreak that

24

made the Angelus conflict seem central to the rioting, to recognize the actors involved in

the Angelus melee as representative or the encounter as typical of others early in the

week of July 27 would be to skew our understanding of the race riot. In terms of class

and ethnicity, the types who occupied the Angelus, mostly lower middle-class native

whites and a few Russian Jews, were not the white Chicagoans involved in the rioting by

and large. Moreover, the violence that took place outside the building occurred between local law enforcement and black neighborhood residents. Heated encounters between black men and police officers were common during the rioting. Still, I would argue that they were peripheral; the dynamic between African-American men and white policemen was a product of the racial tensions in the city, not a root cause of them, as Chicago law enforcement officers served to moor the pre-existing power structure.5

Maps, published lists of those injured, and anecdotal evidence suggest that the

Angelus riot was somewhat anomalous. Most African Americans injured or killed during

the rioting were men traversing the white neighborhoods outside of the Black Belt

traveling to jobs or entertainment districts, or young men defending black neighborhoods

along their contested borders to the far south and immediate west of the Angelus building. Most of the whites injured or killed during the rioting fell into one of four groups: 1.) young white men injured in “raids” across the deadline into the Black Belt 2.) young white men from residential “areas contested by negroes and whites” south of the

Black Belt and miles from the Angelus 3.) white policemen attacked during the rioting 4.) white male bystanders, attending to business in the Black Belt during the rioting

(peddlers, shop owners, and salesmen, many of them Italians or Eastern-European Jews).

5 On the functions of the Chicago police force see Mark H. Haller, “Historical Roots of Police Behavior: Chicago, 1890-1925,” Law & Society Review 10, no. 2 (Winter, 1976): 303-23. 25

Despite the exceptional nature of the violence outside the Angelus building, the event remains critical to understanding the larger social and cultural context within which

the rioting occurred. A group of African Americans intent on defending their own turf

descended upon the most notable all-white building in the area. Tactically, the Angelus,

with its white tenants and ownership, remained an impediment to African American

business operations and entrepreneurship in the emerging Black Metropolis.

Symbolically, the Angelus represented a history of white antagonism to a growing black

presence in Chicago.

Examining the history of the Angelus building more closely helps us to address

some important questions about racial geography more thoroughly and adeptly. How did

the area around Thirty-Fifth Street and Wabash Avenue come to be part of the Black

Belt? How could a group of people who represented a mere 4% of the city’s population

have made such a claim to space? What were the factors that determined the shape and

directional outgrowth of the Black Belt?

The story of the Angelus also provides a necessary cultural context for the riot,

revealing a white Chicago that sought to isolate and contain black Chicagoans, a desire

that stemmed from white aversion to intimate contact between the races. This culture of

containment affected the sharing of residential and public space, rooted in widespread

beliefs about racial difference and racial hierarchy, and driven partly by sexual taboos

and fears of depressing housing prices. An ideological adherence to segregation as a

principle characterized the position of most whites in Chicago in 1919.

Whites of all social classes in the neighborhoods surrounding the Black Belt

resisted its expansion. However, the increase in Chicago’s black population due to

26

migration made the demand for (and potential profit from) black housing too great, and

the Black Belt grew regardless. In the early twentieth century, the development of the

African-American residential area was determined largely by a low demand for property

among whites and a low number of white homeowners in communities along the Black

Belt’s frontier. On Chicago’s south side, this meant the blocks to the south and east of

the Black Belt, occupied by wealthy and middle-class native whites with a high degree of

residential mobility. To the west of the Black Belt, working-class ethnic whites owned

cheaper homes in their parish communities, where young males patrolled the streets,

chasing and beating any African American men that could be found in the area. Few

blacks attempted to rent or buy homes in these neighborhoods, and no realtors would dare

sell to an African American family.

Map 1.2 depicts graphically the percentage of white home owners among white

residents in the census tracts in and around the Black Belt in 1920. The white and pale

yellow sections of the map represent the tracts in which white home ownership was

below or slightly above the average home ownership rate for all Chicagoans (26.6%); in

other words, areas where whites were in large part renting from lessors. With the

exception of some properties immediately surrounding the stockyards, tracts with the

highest percentage of white lessees lay to the east and south of the Black Belt. These

were the areas where black residences had spread and would continue to spread during

the 1920s and 30s.

Map 1.3 shows the percentage of whites living in each census tract surrounding

the Black Belt in 1920. In conjunction with Map 1.2, it helps to reveal the process of

Black Belt expansion. African Americans not only moved into neighborhoods where a

27 lower percentage of whites owned homes, they moved where fewer whites resided.

However, as the history of the Angelus will illustrate, the areas in which a high percentage of whites lived and owned homes in and around the Black Belt had drastically decreased in the decades preceding the race riot. White residential areas became black residential areas in a matter of a decade or less. This historical dynamic, and the associated tensions it caused between whites and African Americans in Chicago in the years preceding the riot, is the subject of this chapter.

Map 1.2. The Ratio of Total Homes Occupied by Whites Owned by White Residents by Census Tract in 1920. Source: E. W. Burgess and Charles Shelton Newcomb, Census Data of the City of Chicago 1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1931).

28

Map 1.3. White Population Percentage by Census Tract in 1920. Source: E W Burgess and Charles Shelton Newcomb, Census Data of the City of Chicago 1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1931).

29





The Angelus apartment building stood in the district known to Chicagoans as the

Douglas community area. About three miles directly south of the Loop, Chicago’s

downtown commercial district, Douglas made up the northern portion of the area that

would come to be known as Black Metropolis or Bronzeville beginning in the 1920s (see

Map 1.4). However, prior to the onset of the twentieth century, whites occupied homes in this district. A significant number of black Chicagoans, who had grown as a group from 4,000 in 1870 to 15,000 by 1890, resided north of the Douglas community, mostly along State Street between Twenty-Second and Thirty-First Streets. West of State Street,

workers in the meatpacking, railroad, and brewing industries lived in cheap balloon-

frame houses and small brick cottages, bordering the larger Irish-American working-class

neighborhood of Bridgeport. To the east, wealthy white urbanites made their plush

homes along the thoroughfares between Thirty-First and Thirty-Fifth Streets closer to the

lake. The building of Michael Reese Hospital in 1881 and the elegant Kehilath Anshe

Mayriv Synagogue in 1890, along with a growing number of higher-end residential

apartment buildings between State Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, attested to the

area’s wealth and promise.6

Two factors helped spur the surge of the Douglas community in the late nineteenth century: a world’s fair and developments in commuter transportation. In

6 Adrian Capehart, “Douglas,” Chicago Neighborhoods and Suburbs: A Historical Guide, ed. Ann Durkin Keading (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 132-35; Homer Hoyt, One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933), 161-62. 30

February 1890, the U.S. Congress endorsed Chicago as the site for a lavish celebration to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage to America.

However, years prior to any official sanctioning of the event’s location, Chicago real

estate speculators had been anticipating the coming of the World’s Columbian Exposition

in 1893, as well as the city’s choice of fair grounds—Jackson Park and the adjoining

Midway, about two miles south of the site of the Angelus building. Between 1888 and

1892, property values and development increased markedly in the south eastern region of the city. "It is a poor neglected corner of the South Side that does not have its hotel scheme," remarked one Chicago Tribune writer in April of 1890. The world’s fair affected the commercial growth of such a large area of the city because a network of

commuter lines would make it possible to swiftly transport fairgoers from one area of the

South Side to another. 7

As Chicago’s manufacturing and railroad industries expanded in the late-

nineteenth century, transportation made Douglas neighborhoods particularly attractive to

members of Chicago’s growing business class. In the early 1890s, elevated steam

railroads and electric surface lines on the South Side exceeded in pace and comfort the

old horse car lines on the North and West sides. The Angelus district boasted multiple

“transfer corners,” or intersections where two street-car lines met—along Thirty-First,

Thirty-Fifth, and Thirty-Ninth Streets—running commuters down and across the South

Side’s main boulevards and to Illinois Central Railroad terminals. In 1891, the Chicago

City railway company ran ninety-eight trains daily to and from south State Street and the

Loop, along with ninety-six trains up and down South Wabash and Cottage Grove

Avenues. The development of the new transportation system drew native white business

7 Hoyt, Land Values, 155-58, 171. 31

professionals to the South Side. One newspaper writer noted in 1890 that upon these new

street cars, “The passengers have refined faces, are well dressed, and speak English

without an accent.” An opportunity to cater to these Chicagoans, together with the

coming fair and the growth of the city in general, made the Douglass community particularly attractive to investors.8

Late in the year 1889, the real estate development firm Howard & Berwin

obtained permits for the construction of a large pressed brick apartment building with seventy-five feet of frontage along Wabash Avenue and one-hundred and fifty feet of

depth along Thirty-Fifth Street. The sizable initial investment of over $180,000 for the

property and building permit before construction costs, plus an additional $1800 laid

down in 1890 for a permit to build two additional floors, suggested a sturdy confidence in the market for renters in the district. While the structure would pale in comparison to the new steel frame skyscrapers being erected in the downtown district at this time, at seven

stories, it would be among the largest office and apartment buildings on the South Side.

The developers called their structure at 3501 South Wabash Avenue the “Ozark Flat

Building,” before building operators renamed The Angelus two decades later.9

Building managers began advertising for renters in the spring of 1891, seeking

“FIRST-CLASS PARTIES ONLY” to occupy three to eight room flats in the

“magnificent,” “ELEGANT NEW OZARK.” The “handsomest and most convenient

apartment building in Chicago,” located one half block from the elevated railroad station

8 Hoyt, Land Values, 144-47, 171, 191, 303; “Know by Experience” Chicago Tribune, November 20, 1891, 2; Chicago Tribune, April 13, 1890, 35; John P. Hankey, “Illinois Central Railroad,” accessed August 9, 2012, http://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/627.html. The Cottage Grove Avenue line ran a few blocks west of the Angelus, catering to the developing upscale neighborhoods of Hyde Park and Kenwood. 9 The Economist, November 16, 1889, 1072; Record of Building Permits for Permanent Structures Issued by the Commissioner of Buildings, November 13, 1889 (Chicago History Museum); Record of Building Permits for Permanent Structures Issued by the Commissioner of Buildings August 6, 1890 (Chicago History Museum); “Ozark Flat Building is Sold Again,” Chicago Tribune, March 4, 1892, 3. 32

and one block from the State Street and Indiana Avenue street cars, also boasted the most modern aesthetic and service amenities: “two passenger elevators, freight and servants’ elevators; hardwood finish; Venetian blinds; steam heat; janitor service; hot water;

electric light; gas ranges; window screens; REFRIDGERATORS FURNISHED WITH

ICE; laundries with steam clothes dryers; telephone; magnificent DINING-HALL in

charge of first-class caterer.” While building managers hoped that the Ozark’s décor and

conveniences would appeal to the taste and lifestyle of upscale white Chicagoans, they also hoped to entice out-of-town roomers, arriving to witness the spectacle of Chicago’s world’s fair. And in the spring of 1893, the Ozark accommodated twenty-three members

of a European press club, representing publications in England, Germany, Austria,

Hungary, and Denmark.10

But the south side real estate market was so inflated that even the business

generated by the Columbian Exposition was not enough to sustain it. In the years prior to

the fair, land values had reached astronomical heights and real estate activity surged as

many sought property “under the most extravagant notions” of the income they would

reap from the impending fair hordes. Opportunistic speculators drove up prices using

dubious business practices. Multiple transfers of contracts to purchase a given piece of

property took place ahead of any official recording of the deed. Unprincipled realtors

notified unwitting newspaper editors of sales to dummy companies at high prices,

suggesting a rising demand for south side properties. In the rush on property purchases,

unscrupulous sellers swindled anxious buyers into signing fraudulent title agreements.

Attempts to regulate the market were few and futile, as the city grew and the money

10 Chicago Tribune, April 29, 1891, 11; Chicago Tribune, June 8, 1891, 7; Chicago Tribune, June 15, 1891, 7; Chicago Tribune, October 20, 1891, 11; Chicago Tribune, February 1, 1892, 7; “Formed a European Press Club,” Chicago Tribune, May 5, 1893, 8. 33

flowed fast and furious. Anyone who dared question the soundness or sustainability of

the market in the booming city was considered a “traitor to Chicago.”11

By the time the fair came in 1893, the south side real estate bubble had burst. The failure on the part of banks to continue making loans for real estate, plus a decline in

employment and business profits after the hasty construction of the fair’s White City, precipitated a lull in market activity. Large numbers of realtors possessed properties they could not sell, and they struggled to keep up with loan payments, taxes, and assessments. Land owners overbuilt new structures in order to recoup their losses, contributing to the glut of commercial and residential space. To make matters worse, the

Columbian Exposition drew fewer roomers than expected, and when the fair closed, the spike in vacancies required landlords to slash rents. Properties and building projects like

the Ozark had “lost their potency to stampede the buyers.”12

Across the country, Americans faced the panic and depression of 1893. And in

Chicago, the closing of the fair left a large number unemployed. Rents in dwellings surrounding the Ozark decreased to accommodate the reduced earning capacity of tenants. The lower rents attracted tenants from all over the city in the winter of 1893-4, including wage-earners, changing the class complexion of formerly exclusive south side

neighborhoods. Many families doubled up in living quarters. Increasingly, Douglas-area

landlords accumulated debts from vacancies and rents unpaid. Buildings fell into

disrepair, many were sold at a loss, and others went into foreclosure.13

For wealthy whites, the Douglas community had begun to lose its exclusiveness.

The noise, pollution, and congestion due to the growth of south side manufacturing made

11 Hoyt, Land Values, 172-73, 177. 12 Ibid., 173-79. 13 Hoyt, Land Values, 156-58, 208-10; “Real Estate Market,” Chicago Tribune, April 29, 1894, 31. 34

the area a less desirable place to live. After further transportation developments, new rail

and streetcar lines extended far into the North and West Sides. Well-to-do whites began

abandoning their Douglas community mansions east of Michigan Avenue for areas such

as Kenwood, Hyde Park, a tract along Lake Shore Drive around Twenty-Second Street on

the South Side, as well as the north side “Gold Coast” and the city’s developing “railroad

suburbs” on the North Shore. Over the course of the exodus, property along Prairie

Avenue, the most exclusive of the Douglas neighborhood thoroughfares, decreased from

$1000 per front foot at their peak in 1890 to $400 in 1915.14

At Thirty-Fifth and Wabash, the posh Ozark flats still attracted well-to-do white

tenants, but rents were dropping. Building managers who had earlier sought “first-class

parties only,” now advertised the Ozark’s “moderate” prices. Seven bedroom flats that

went for $90-$100/month in 1891 were being advertised at $50/month following the fair;

the cost of a five bedroom apartment in the Ozark dropped from $35-$45/month to

$25/month. In this market, ownership of the Ozark building changed hands no fewer

than nine times between 1891 and 1895. Before Howard & Berwin had completed

construction of the Ozark, the firm had sold the building for $400,000. In December

1894, just three years and several leaseholders later, the property was foreclosed and

subsequently bid in by a realtor for $167,819 who promptly sold it again for $200,000 in

1895.15

14 Robert Bruegmann, “Built Environment of the Chicago Region” in Chicago Neighborhoods and Suburbs: A Historical Guide, ed. Ann Durkin Keating (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 79; Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford University Press, 1985), 93; Hoyt, Land Values, 305. 15 Chicago Tribune, April 29, 1891, 11; Chicago Tribune, June 8, 1891, 7; Chicago Tribune, June 15, 1891, 7; Chicago Tribune, February 1, 1892, 7; Chicago Tribune, June 22, 1893, 11; Chicago Tribune, April 27, 1894, 9; Chicago Tribune, November 17, 1895, 25; “Rumor of a Big Real Estate Sale,” Chicago Tribune, February 28, 1891, 3; “Co-Operative Investment Scheme,” Chicago Tribune, April 4, 1891, 9; “Ozark Flat Building is Sold Again,” Chicago Tribune, March 4, 1892, 3; “Real Estate Notes,” Chicago Tribune, 35

The drastic reduction in the Ozark’s value was typical of the real estate market in

this area of the South Side, where in 1894, in the depths of a national economic

depression, many holders were accepting a 30% reduction in price for lots they had

purchased in 1890. Near South Park Avenue and Thirty-Third Street, houses that rented

for $75 and $65 in 1892 were being rented for $40 and $35 per month in 1897. In the

next three decades, land values would fail to reach 1890 heights again. In the area

bordered by Thirty-First and Thirty-Ninth Streets between State Street and Cottage Grove

Avenue, where much of the new building had taken place, average land values dropped from $60,000 per acre in 1892 to $30,000 per acre in 1910. Much of the residential land

valued at more than $100 per front foot in 1892 had dropped to $50 per front foot in

1910. Many areas of Chicago experienced a notable decrease in land values over this

eighteen year period—on the South Side and at the city’s outskirts—but the deflation in

the Ozark district was particularly dramatic and widespread, including nearly all of the

Douglas community and neighboring Grand Boulevard community to the south, areas into which the Black Belt would soon expand (See Map 1.4).16

December 4, 1892, 38; “Orders The Property Released,” Chicago Tribune, March 24, 1896, 7; “Sale in Wabash Avenue,” Chicago Tribune, December 15, 1895, 31. 16 Hoyt, Land Values, 179, 206, 216, and 186-87, 220-21 [maps]. 36

Map 1.4. Chicago Community Areas Surrounding the Riot Zone. Source: “Community Areas of Chicago” (1930), E.W. Burgess Papers, University of Chicago.





Due to the failure of the sharecropping system and the rise of Jim Crow in the

South, blacks migrated to Chicago in larger numbers after 1890. Oblivious to the

37

hardships facing African Americans in southern states, and anxious about the increasing

numbers of “unrefined” blacks overcrowding the city, the Chicago Tribune began

weighing in on the so-called “Negro Problem” as early as 1903:

There is . . . a little trickling stream of darkies going day by day, and almost more often night by night, away from the warm, moist fields and into the dark, dank, degraded hovels of the cities. . . . This movement is no more intelligent than anything else the negro does. It is not even intuitive, because the agricultural negro in the south is pretty well off, if he did but know it. So the country negro drifts to the city, and, being uncouth and odoriferous to a degree not appreciated by northern people, he finds his first employment in the most menial and the hardest labor to be had.17

Contrary to the presumptions of this newspaper writer, material conditions for

African Americans in northern cities like Chicago were better, by and large. However,

jobs remained relatively scarce and racial barriers limited housing options, as very few

Chicago whites cared to reside in a neighborhood that included even a modest number of

black residents. As a result, the growing African American population became

increasingly concentrated and isolated. By 1900, sixteen of thirty-five city wards were at

least 99.5 percent white, and half of Chicago’s blacks lived in three adjacent south side

wards.18

Over the next twenty years, the residential division only deepened, so that by the

time of the riot, 90% of black Chicagoans lived on the South Side, a majority of them where most of the depreciation had occurred around the Ozark building between 1890

and 1910. By 1920, African Americans represented over 83% of the population in the

five census tracts immediately surrounding the Ozark/Angelus. Additionally, many

17 "Negro Problem Centuries Long," Chicago Tribune, July 29, 1903, 1. 18 Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920, (University of Chicago, 1967), 14-20 38

African Americans rented homes along a strip of land three blocks wide between the

Rock Island tracks to the west and State Street to the east, an area abandoned by white

speculators originally anticipating the expansion of nearby industrial development. In

order to make bank and tax payments, these property owners hastily constructed rental

housing that soon after fell to ruin, then was purchased by white speculators of another

type, those seeking to purchase the property at a discount and then charge high rents to

black Chicagoans with limited housing options. By 1910, the Black Belt extended all the

way south to Garfield Boulevard (Fifty-Fifth Street) via Federal Street, and by 1920 even

further, indicated the relatively high African American population in census tracts 382,

385, 388, 432, and 434 (See Maps 1.3, 1.6). 19

African Americans were not incorporated into the areas east of the Rock Island corridor nearly as rapidly, where white residents vigorously resisted black encroachment.

Entry into every white neighborhood to the south of the Black Belt meant a new crucible for African Americans intent on bettering their lot, who battled white indignation in the face of black “encroachment.” In her 1911 study of black housing conditions in

Chicago, sociologist Alzada Comstock noted "The strong prejudice among the white people against having colored people living on white residence streets, colored children attending schools with white children, or entering into other semi-social relations with them, confines the opportunities for residence open to colored people in all positions of life to relatively small and well-defined areas." 20

19 E W Burgess and Charles Shelton Newcomb, Census Data of the City of Chicago 1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1931); Thomas Lee Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Immigrants, Blacks, and Reformers in Chicago, 1880-1930 (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1991), 152-3. 20 Alzada P. Comstock, “Chicago Housing Conditions, IV: The Problem of the Negro,” The American Journal of Sociology 18, no. 2 (Sept, 1912): 241-57. 39

In the blocks north of the Angelus Apartments, Comstock found black tenants

occupying one- and two-story homes she characterized as “dark” and “gloomy,” with

some rooms so damp they were uninhabitable. Apartments were subdivided and

overcrowded, and housing conditions in general were the worst in the city. Unlike poor

European immigrants, African Americans could neither integrate themselves into existing

white neighborhoods nor so easily get home loans. Bank lenders were among those who

blamed the deterioration of black neighborhoods on the people who resided in them, even

though white property owners, previous and current, were more often responsible for the property neglect. All but 4% of the African Americans surveyed by Comstock were

renters. Most of them paid significantly more than those living in European immigrant

ghettos. Landlords were negligent, requiring that black tenants pay for their own home

repairs, making it more difficult to save for the future. For additional income, many

families took in lodgers, who represented twice the number of children in Comstock’s survey.21

The alarming abundance of anti-black sentiment and dearth of empathy shown by

whites toward African Americans in early twentieth-century Chicago has been well-

documented by Allan H. Spear, Thomas Lee Philpott, and others. Scorn and derision was

commonplace and often public, justified by the widespread belief among whites that

black men in particular had no one to blame but themselves for their plight because of

their indignant behavior, their penchant to agitate whites, and the danger they posed to

white women. The threat of white on black violence often accompanied the message, as

articulated here by a concerned white Chicagoan in a 1908 Tribune editorial. The author

21 Comstock, “Problem of the Negro,” 244-53; Spear, Black Chicago, 24-26; Philpott, Slum and the Ghetto, 159-60. 40

makes reference to the recent race riot in Springfield Illinois, where whites killed at least

seven African Americans and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in property

damage to black homes and businesses:

The negro knows that the whites dislike his presence, and that is why he likes to irritate them, and, as has happened in dozens of cases, he even attempts to become familiar with white women. . . . Perhaps no one except the person who has occasion, to visit the homes of hundreds of residents monthly can gauge the racial bitter spirit which the negro, by his own crazed ideas of 'social equality,' has engendered on the south side. . . . Restrict the negro to negro quarters, keep him in his proper place, and conditions may be better. Otherwise prepare for a far worse riot than that at Springfield, and that in a short time.22

Middle-class blacks pushed east of State Street, to the city blocks immediately north of the Angelus. While whites continued to occupy buildings on Michigan

Avenue—still a “select” residential thoroughfare—blacks had begun to fill aging town houses and apartment buildings along the eastern avenues of Vernon, Calumet, and

Groveland. As the South Side began to lose its illustrious appeal and wealthy whites moved on, homes on large lots once valued at $100,000 were sold for $30,000.

Depreciation continued and foreclosures followed, some homes sat vacant and untended.

Douglas neighborhood realtors and property owners, saddled with large debts, and struggling to meet white tenants’ demands for repairs, began to accede to black demand

for housing in the area.23

Douglas community landlords sought to increase revenues by housing African

American tenants who would pay higher rents. Tenured black Chicagoans were willing

to do so for the chance to relocate from their homes in the older, denser areas of the

22 "Voice of the People," Chicago Tribune, August 27, 1908, 8. 23 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 119, 198-99; Hoyt, Land Values, 215-16; Philpott, Slum and the Ghetto,153. 41

Black Belt. And black newcomers had little experience as renters and no sense of the market. “They know but little of the theory of rents,” wrote African American scholar

Richard R. Wright Jr. about black migrants to Chicago in 1908, “they generally have to pay whatever rent the landlord or his agent asks.” With demand for housing among

African Americans so high, and whites so averse to social contact with blacks, residential areas swiftly changed from all white to all black. In this racially charged market, neighborhood turnover rarely occurred innocuously.24

Realtors used racist attitudes to their advantage, turning fear and prejudice against the entrenched white residents who harbored these feelings, which gained agents market advantage by quickening white abandonment of an area while garnering more collective racial tension to be exploited. In a practice known as “blockbusting,” subagents (often

African American) would help to move middle-class blacks into all-white neighborhoods, causing surrounding white residents to panic and sell out. In other cases, agents need only parade groups of African Americans, the greener in appearance the better, through a white neighborhood with empty apartments in order to achieve the desired effect. When white residents began moving out, realtors would rent the vacant dwellings to poorer black families who would have to take on boarders in order to pay higher rents. In a short time, the neighborhood would be occupied almost entirely by African Americans to the delight of rent collectors.25

At the time of the riot, blacks encountered public anti-black sentiment in the Hyde

Park and Kenwood communities further south, but in the first decade of the twentieth century, Douglas community whites represented the vanguard of resistance to integrated

24 Ibid., 149. 25 Ibid., 150-51. 42

neighborhoods. In 1908, a group of white property owners in the Douglass community

signed an agreement not to sell or rent to blacks east of Wabash. And many landlords

made attempts to rent to whites at lower rates before offering apartments to black home

seekers. In 1912, one realty company ran two classified advertisements for the same

seven-room flat in one daily newspaper; one listed the apartment at $25, the other “for

colored people, $37.50." However, with African Americans entering domiciles, “it is with difficulty that anyone [i.e. “anyone white”] is secured to occupy adjoining flats or

houses," explained the Economist in 1908. 26

As African Americans moved into south Douglas and toward the Grand

Boulevard community, gambling and prostitution rackets moved with them. The

movement of the black population in early twentieth-century Chicago was inexorably tied

to the history of vice and the corralling of red light activities on the South Side. For

decades, city authorities had pushed vice away from white middle-class neighborhoods

and into black areas. In 1912, the city made a sustained effort to close down houses of

prostitution in the old red light district around State Street between Eighteenth and

Twenty-Second Streets; this sent proprietors scurrying south into the area surrounding the

Angelus building. Like black home seekers, vice operators were willing to pay higher

rents than would-be white tenants. With vacancies in the Douglas neighborhood, realtors

accommodated the spillover of cabarets, saloons, and bath-houses from the red light

district to the north, unnerving local whites.27

26 Spear, Black Chicago, 23-24; Hoyt, Land Values, 216. 27 St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, Revised and Enlarged Edition Volume 1 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970) , 56; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 199; Spear, Black Chicago, 25. 43

The influx of vice precipitated a crisis in the Douglas community. In the summer

of 1908, the Tribune reported that at the behest of white reformers, the police department

had begun raiding “resorts” in a residential area immediately northeast of the Angelus building. Blacks quickly filled apartments formerly occupied by fleeing prostitutes, raising the ire of the Douglas Neighborhood Improvement Association, made up of white businesspersons, property owners, and politicians, who protested to the mayor’s office concerning the black “invasion” of their neighborhood. The president of the Chicago

Law and Order League, representing the reformers, conceded that "Yes, the colored folks do move into places so vacated,” but he added, “there is nothing so undesirable as the saloonkeeper or the evil woman…. The property owners should not object to respectable colored folks." However, the protestations of the Douglas association forced the mayor and the chief of police to concede that their city wide crusade “ought to have its limits,” and subsequently, the Tribune reported no further raids of the Douglas neighborhood. In the rhetorical debate that pitted one group of “undesirables” against another, Chicago’s municipal power structure imagined vice more politically palatable than racial integration.28

But conditions were such that the penetration of the Black Belt deeper into

Douglas and Grand Boulevard seemed inevitable to white residents and property holders

in these areas. Unlike in the Hyde Park and Kenwood communities that will be examined

later, the realities of a depreciated housing stock and tepid white demand in Douglas

undercut the financial viability of backroom realtor pacts aimed at keeping out blacks. In

October 1909, the managers of the Crawford, a large apartment building one block south

28 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 342 [map]; "Immoral Baths Take Hint," Chicago Tribune, July 27, 1908, 3; "Blacks Replace Disreputable," Chicago Tribune, August 1, 1908, 3. 44

of the Angelus, “aroused” neighborhood residents when they opened flats to black

renters. Three days after the Crawford began accepting applications from African-

Americans, twenty-five of the sixty apartments, many of them previously vacant, had

been rented by black individuals and black families. The “invasion” of the district by

blacks was not a new development, according to the Tribune, but the opening of the

Crawford emphasized “the rapidity with which they [African Americans] are seeking

location in this neighborhood."29





While the racial makeup of the neighborhood was changing between 1900 and

1910, the Angelus building (as it had come to be known in 1905) remained almost exclusively white. Of the 120 Angelus residents participating in the Federal Census of

1900, only one was African American. Clara Farrell—age twenty-two, born in Illinois of parents from Missouri—was a live-in servant for a young doctor and housewife with no children. Farrell was one of six black live-in servants in the census enumeration district that contained the Angelus in 1900, bordered by State Street and Michigan Avenue between Thirty-Fifth and Thirty-Seventh Streets. There were only two African American heads of household, a barber and a waiter, in this six block area. Of the white Angelus residents, 13% were foreign-born and 59% of “foreign stock” (one or both parents born outside of the United States), a comparatively small proportion of ethnic whites considering that Chicago’s population at large in 1900 was 35% foreign-born and 77%

29 "Aroused by Negro Invasion," Chicago Tribune, October 13, 1909, 11. 45

foreign stock. The ethnic heritage of Angelus residents was exclusively “old

immigrant”—English, German, Irish, French—during a time when an increasing number

of Eastern and Southern Europeans were drifting to Chicago. Among building residents,

52% were women; eight men were boarders and three households employed live-in

servants; of the twenty-nine married women, none were employed outside of the home;

55% of building residents held jobs, none of them were laborers. It is safe to conclude

that the Angelus remained a fairly exclusive Chicago residence in 1900, largely made up

of solidly middle-class, upwardly mobile white families.30

In 1900, African Americans represented 1% of the population in the Angelus

census district; by 1910 that number had risen to 32%. However, only whites lived in the

Angelus. Guy Lewis—thirty eight years old from Indiana—was the building’s elevator

operator and its sole black resident. The building’s white tenants remained largely

native; 13% were foreign-born, and 42% were of foreign stock compared to 36% and

78% citywide in 1910. And patriarchal families continued to be the norm; male heads of

household were employed outside of the home and sometimes single, young-adult sons

and even a few daughters held jobs as well. 31

However, there are hints that the demographic complexion of the Angelus was starting to change at this time. The U.S. Census listed only 109 residents in the apartments in 1910, down eleven persons from 1900. Perhaps the average household size had decreased, but given some of the other changes, it seems more likely that the building’s owners were having trouble keeping apartments occupied. As the total

30 1900 U.S. Census, population schedule, Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, Enumeration District 91. 31 Note: The borders of the Angelus enumeration district changed slightly between 1900 and 1910. In the latter survey, the Angelus was included in a district bordered by State and Indiana between Thirty-Fifth and Thirty-Sixth Streets. 46

number of residents declined, the number of lodgers increased from eight to seventeen,

suggesting the beginnings of a money-strapped clientele, renting space on a more

temporary basis. Additionally, now only one family had a live-in servant, down from

three a decade before; one wife worked outside the home where none had before; two

heads of household listed themselves as laborers, again up from zero ten years earlier.

The number of foreign-born ticked up too, including a family of Russian Jews and a few

Scandanavians. These are tiny shifts in work and ethnicity, but they suggest that the

Angelus was becoming not quite so solidly middle class. Even more noticeably, the neighborhood was changing. Of the census district’s 1260 residents, 407 were African

American by 1910. Most of these were respectable members of the black community with steady jobs such as porters and railroad employees, domestic servants and drivers, cooks and waiters. They were the representative of a growing black working class; people who had the means to migrate away from the poverty of the old Black Belt.32

Land values continued to fall in the new century, and wealthier whites increasingly moved out of the neighborhood. Meanwhile, owners of the Angelus struggled to turn a profit. In 1907, the building was swapped for another piece of property; both were valued at around $100,000. Just three years later, the Angelus was again in foreclosure; at auction, a large hotel company bought it for just $31, 000. The real estate editor of the Tribune remarked that the Angelus “was constructed just prior to the world’s fair, and at that time was regarded as one of the best apartment buildings in that part of the south side. [emphasis added]”33

32 1910 U.S. Census, population schedule, Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, Enumeration District 237. 33 “Real Estate Transaction,” Chicago Tribune, December, 7, 1907, H14; “Real Estate Transaction,” Chicago Tribune, July 9, 1910, 16. 47

The Angelus was becoming a relic in more ways than one. Even in the years

before the Great Migration, when tens of thousands of black Southerners poured into the

city beginning in 1915, African American culture flourished along State Street near the

Angelus flats, and many of the black social and cultural institutions had been established in the area, including the Defender in 1905, the Olivet Baptist and Bethel A.M.E. churches, Provident Hospital in 1891, and the Wabash Avenue YMCA in 1913. That same year, several prominent black pastors and business entrepreneurs, anointed by the

Defender as “The Men Who Have Built Up The South Side,” staged a “Business Men’s

Emancipation Celebration.” The “carnival district” included the area immediately

surrounding Thirty-Fifth Street and Wabash Avenue, and the celebratory precession

wound directly past the Angelus building, home to more than a hundred exclusively

white residents.34





The year 1915 marked the beginning of an event in United States History known

colloquially as the Great Migration. World War I in Europe had all but halted

immigration to the United States. In the meantime, American industrialists sought to fill

large contracts to provide allied armies with raw materials and foodstuffs, expanding the

operations of Chicago’s steel and meat enterprises. When Congress brought the United

States into the war, many young American males were required to serve through

conscription. The result was a manufacturing labor shortage in Chicago during a period

34 “Business Men’s Emancipation Celebration,” Defender, July 26, 1913, 1. 48

of high demand. For the first time in the country’s history, northern producers were willing to offer African Americans jobs in their factories as full time workers (rather than as replacement workers, or “scabs”). Chicago’s meat packers sent agents south via railroad to recruit laborers. In the American South, cotton producers and other agriculturalists were facing down seasons as a result of floods and pest infestations; menial farm work, often procured by African Americans, was scarce. Throughout the

South, white terrorism in the form of black lynching was on the rise as well. 35

While many of the early migrants to Chicago arrived from the Upper South,

during World War I a greater number of African Americans were arriving from states in

the Deep South, where social and cultural conditions were ripe for a mass exodus.

Between 1916 and 1918 an estimated 500,000 African Americans left the South for the

North. In Chicago, the black population increased from 44,103 in 1910 to 109,594 in

1920; a rise of 148%, the bulk of it occurring in the latter years of the decade. In the

same ten year span, the white population in Chicago increased 21%. For the first time in

the city’s history, its African American population was increasing at a higher rate than its

white population.36

Racial tensions existed in Chicago before 1915, but the migration exacerbated

them. In the Douglass neighborhood, the growing black population increased the pressure on land owners to sell and rent to black Chicagoans of modest means seeking relief from the overcrowded Black Belt. Blacks looking for new housing created panic

35 See Walter F. White, “The Success of Negro Migration,” Crisis 19, no.3 (January, 1920), 112-15 and United States Department of Labor Division of Negro Economics, The Negro at Work During the World War and During Reconstruction: Statistics, Problems, and Policies Relating to the Greater Inclusion of Negro Wage Earners in American Industry and Agriculture (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1921), Chapter 1 “Migration.” 36 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 79. 49

among neighborhood whites, many of whom articulated their concerns in monetary

terms. “The whites do resent the appearance of colored people in white neighborhoods,”

explained the Tribune in the midst of the race riot, “because depreciation of property

values always follows.” A member of the Kenwood Improvement Association

complained bitterly that black neighbors, “injure our investment. They hurt our values.”

In their extensive post-riot study, the Chicago Commission on Race Relations found that

“No single factor has complicated the relations of Negroes and whites in Chicago more

than the widespread feeling of white people that the presence of Negroes in a

neighborhood is a cause of serious depreciation of property values. To the extent that

people feel that their financial interests are affected, antagonisms are accentuated.”37

Yet concerns about property depreciation were always accompanied by more visceral fears. One south side woman explained in a Chicago Commission interview,

“When we came here this was a nice neighborhood. After some years a colored family

moved in, then two or three more, and more and more, until you see what we have here

now. I tell you the white people right on this street have to be afraid for their lives.”

Often, white fears preceded contact with blacks. A south side man told the commission,

“I know I don’t want niggers living next door to me, but I can’t tell you why . . . I guess they are pretty wild, but I have never seen them.”38

Land speculators, both black and white, taking advantage of the race prejudice,

did their best to make acquisitions on the southern periphery of the Black Belt. In 1919,

one white woman sold her Wabash home at a loss of almost fifty percent because her

37 “Race Riots” Chicago Daily Tribune July 29, 1919 p8; Carl Sandburg, The Chicago Race Riots, July, 1919 (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2009), 14; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 194-95. 38 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 440, 457. 50

agent had advised her that "the colored people were coming into the neighborhood and

the property was surely going to take a slump." As we have seen, land in the Douglas

neighborhood had been depreciating for decades, but “negrophobia” sunk values even

lower. Amidst the panic, homes recently valued at $15,000 were being sold for $8,000 or

$6,000 all along Wabash Avenue.39

In contrast to widespread belief, however, black residents most often stabilized or increased land values after they arrived. By comparing land value maps in 1912 and

1920 to the black population by census tract in 1910 and 1920, it becomes clear that land values over this period decreased in areas where blacks were just starting to move in, but increased in areas in which blacks already represented more than half of the tract population. "Unquestionably, race antagonisms were fomented for business purposes in

Chicago,” remarked Herbert J. Seligmann of the NAACP in 1919, who argued that realtors found the African American migrant, “a rich field for exploitation.” For white and black capitalists, race prejudice was profitable, which made the cycle of black housing crisis/white housing panic, street by street and block by block, all the more entrenched. Perpetual white fears of a growing black presence in the city, and a consciousness of these white fears among black leaders seeking to address misconceptions and prejudice, affected nearly every aspect of race relations in Chicago.40

Facing limitations, leaders in the black community sought to build stature through social and cultural uplifting of the race, quarantined as it was in a particular area of the

39 Sandburg, Race Riots, 26-27. 40 Sandburg, Race Riots, 27; Olcott's Land values Blue Book of Chicago and Suburbs for 1912 (Chicago: G. C. Olcott's & Co.); Olcott's Land values Blue Book of Chicago and Suburbs for 1920 (Chicago: G. C. Olcott's & Co.); Spear, Black Chicago, “Negro Population By Census Tracts, 1910,” “Negro Population By Census Tracts, 1920,” following page 14 [maps]; Herbert J. Seligmann, "What Is Behind the Negro Uprisings?," Current Opinion 67, no.3 (September, 1919): 154. 51

South Side. African Americans dominated demographically the neighborhoods in which they lived, much more so than any other numerically significant ethnic group in the city, which gave blacks almost exclusive political control and cultural influence of the Second

Ward that contained the Black Belt, and especially along State Street and in the city blocks to the east near the Angelus. More and more African Americans ran businesses, others ran for political office. State Street around Thirty-Fifth Street, known as “The

Stroll,” teemed with restaurants and clubs, inviting both a white and black clientele dressed to the nines. The place became central in the collective African American imagination, as renaissance figures began to express through art, music, and literature a northern urban identity. A young Langston Hughes recalled encountering The Stroll for the first time in 1918, when “South State Street was in its glory,” characterized by

"excitement from noon to noon. Midnight was like day." Standing stoically one block away, day and night, was the Angelus flat building.

While the building’s tenants remained white, evidence suggests that its ground floor was home to several institutions that symbolized black culture and influence in

Chicago. In the years immediately preceding the race riot, Chicago’s Second Ward

Republican headquarters was located at the Angelus. “The clubhouse,” as the Tribune referred to the venue, served as a meeting place for all Second Ward Republican party officials and constituents, often to debate party positions and potential candidates during a time when blacks were consolidating power within the Republican Party. After the

Chicago’s redistricting in 1915, the city’s Second Ward included roughly the area between Twenty-Sixth Street to Thirty-Ninth Street, and Wentworth Avenue to the Lake.

In 1915, black Republicans in Chicago had the ear of the ward organization, but by 1919

52

Carl Sandburg wrote that "The Black Belt of Chicago is probably the strongest effective

unit of political power, good or bad, in America."41

Black political power in Chicago was rooted in African American voter

participation. In comparison to the city’s native and foreign-born white population, a

higher percentage of migrant blacks were U.S. citizens of voting age; while blacks

represented 4% of Chicago’s population in 1920, they represented 6% of the adult

citizenry. For many incoming blacks, voting was a symbolic expression of their freedom;

a higher percentage of eligible black voters registered than whites. Overwhelmingly,

blacks remained loyal to the party of Emancipation and Reconstruction. As a result of

William Hale Thompson’s active and earnest campaigning in the Black Belt, blacks helped “Big Bill” win the Republican primary and general election for mayor in 1915 and they were indispensable in re-electing him in a closely contested race in 1919. In the latter contest Thompson’s margin of victory citywide roughly equaled his substantial numerical victory in the city’s black wards. As mayor, Thompson placed blacks at the forefront of his administration, as his adversaries derisively referred to city hall as “Uncle

Tom’s Cabin.” Thompson also aided black politicians in their elections to prominent positions in city, state, and national governments.42

Along with politics, black churches were critical in creating African American

cultural coherence, and the Angelus was home to an important house of worship, the

National Metropolitan Church founded by Reverend J.A. Brockett in 1918. Born in

North Carolina in 1855, Brockett moved to Boston as a child where he was adopted and

41 Sandburg, Race Riots, 4; “Harmony in 2nd Ward Rep. Organization,” Defender, November 29, 1919, 16. 42 Harold F. Gosnell, "The Chicago 'Black Belt' as a Political Battleground," Journal of Sociology 39 (November. 1933): 329-337; “The Primary Result,” Defender, March 1, 1919, 20; S.R. Gibson, “Thompson Re-Elected,” Defender, April 5, 1919, 1; Spear, Black Chicago, 187-9. 53

raised by a white family. Ordained in New York City and a Baptist minister by trade,

Brockett was an early black renaissance figure; a journalist, sculptor, and author of books

relating race and history to classical art and philosophy. The National Metropolitan

Church was part of the People’s Church movement in Chicago, which downplayed

Christian sectarian differences and focused on the education of black rural migrants.

“The Metropolitan is projected on the broadest possible basis, as a people’s church,”

exclaimed the Defender, “Its special work will be not only the preaching of the Gospel,

but the instruction of our new citizens.”43

The third black institution operating out of the Angelus building was the Railroad

Men’s International Benevolent Industrial Association. R.L. Mays, the president of the

radical black union, stationed himself in an office on the north side of the Angelus,

overlooking Thirty-Fifth Street. The association was founded in 1915, and on the eve of

the riot was enjoying a fair amount of success organizing a variety of black railroad

workers—firemen, switchmen, trainmen, and coach employees—into one union. Late in

1919, Mays made his way to Washington D.C. to lobby for an amendment to a federal

wage bill prohibiting any union that excluded blacks from receiving government contracts. In Chicago meanwhile, the association had been running advertisements in the

Defender in the months before and after the race riot encouraging black workers to

“Think! Act!! Organize!!!” and to “meet force with force, intelligence with intelligence,

offensive action against us with equally prepared or better prepared defensive action.”44

43 Walter F. White, "Race Relations," The Bookman: A Review of Books and Life, 56, no.4 (December, 1922): 500-2; “Church Opens Doors Rev. Brockett Pastor,” Defender, March 30, 1918, 13; "Death Claims Dr. J.A. Brockett, Formerly on Editorial Staff of Boston Transcript," Defender, February 9, 1935, 4. 44 Display Ad, Defender, June 21, 1919, 6; Display Ad, Defender, November 1, 1919, 18; "Mays Before U.S. Gov. Wage Board," Defender, November 1, 1919, 1; "Madden Again Goes to Bat for the Race," 54





The growing sense of community in the Black Belt was complicated by class and

regional identities. Despite obstacles, some African Americans had gained middle-class

status, and like white members of the middle class, they wanted to separate themselves

from the poorer segments of society in a neighborhood of good repute. However,

because poor blacks paid disproportionately high rents, and because hostile whites made

it difficult to cross the color line, African Americans of various income levels often lived

side by side in black neighborhoods. Since many newcomers gained employment in

Chicago factories, and lived as borders in increasingly overcrowded apartments and

partitioned homes, the laboring population around the Angelus was growing. In ten

years, the number of black Chicagoans living in the Angelus district who were listed as

“laborers” multiplied eight fold, jumping from less than 2% in 1910 to over 16% in 1920.

Of course the black population had more than doubled, from 407 in 1910 to 1092 in

1920, which meant that, over ten years, eight black laborers became over 160.45

Cultural differences exacerbated class tensions in the black community. African

American newspapers and social agencies tried to “civilize” uncouth new settlers. The

Chicago Urban League figured prominently in this effort. It warned that rural migrants

should learn “new habits of self-respect and cleanliness,” attend to their “personal appearance on the street or when sitting in front of doorways.” The Urban League urged

Defender, December 20, 1919, 19; Spear, Black Chicago, 165. More on African Americans and unions in Chapter 3. 45 Philpott, Slum and the Ghetto, 149-50; 1910 U.S. Census, population schedule, Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, Enumeration District 237; 1920 U.S. Census, population schedule, Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, Enumeration District 109. 55

that newcomers “refrain from wearing dust caps, bungalow aprons, house clothing, and

bedroom shoes out of doors,” and arrange their “toilet within doors and not on the front

porch . . . insist upon the use of rear entrances for coal dealers, hucksters, etc. . . . refrain

from loud talking and objectionable deportment on street cars and in public places" and

do their "best to prevent defacement of property either by children or adults."46

While the motivation for this didactic approach may be partly explained by a

general annoyance and disdain toward the lower class, a more immediate concern for

well-to-do blacks was being associated with the behavior of these rustics by unwitting

whites. "From all sides the organized and intelligent forces of the colored people have

hammered home the suggestion," observed Carl Sandburg, "that every mistake one of the

colored men or woman may result in casting a reflection on the whole group." The

Defender complained that many poor black Southerners had erred in their conduct,

“much to the humiliation of all respectable classes of our citizens," and by doing so had

"here given our enemies ground for complaint."47

Informed African Americans knew that, when it came to the conduct of black men

in particular, it was not only social status that was at stake, but the safety of the black

community. White on black violence in the South was most commonly a response to

reported advancements of black men upon white women, rooted in fears concerning

primal black manhood and pure white womanhood. According to the Chicago

Commission report, one “editor of a black newspaper” wrote: “We must set a good

example . . . and respect all women, regardless of race, color, or creed. Then you will

46 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 193. 47 Sandburg, Race Riots, 12; Spear, Black Chicago, 168. 56

win the admiration of all civilized people. Men who do not respect and honor their

women are not worthy of citizenship.”48

African American community leaders sought greater access to structures of power

and influence in the city of Chicago. They were keenly aware that white public opinion

was an obstacle to success in this endeavor. They feared that whites would cling to

images of the droves of unkempt, ill-mannered transients and use them to form opinions

about racial hierarchy. Black fears proved warranted. To their dismay, the white press

largely ignored the advancement made by business and community leaders in the Black

Belt, choosing instead to run sensationalized stories of black crime and violence.

Through this kind of coverage in the white press, “The beliefs handed down through

tradition concerning the weak moral character of Negroes and their emotional nature are

thus constantly and steadfastly held before the public,” argued the Riot Commission,

which affected the attitudes of white Chicagoans "consciously or unconsciously.”49

The alienness of black behavior and black bodies, reflected most starkly in the newcomers, excited and terrified the editors of Chicago’s dailies as the city’s African

American population swelled. The area of health was a good example. When blacks from the South began to arrive in Chicago in larger numbers, the Tribune suggested that,

“The most pressing condition at present is the health and living habits of the newcomers,” and that inspectors from the city’s health department in 1917 had determined that conditions in the Black Belt, “threaten the health of the city.” In 1919, one Tribune columnist reported that a medical examination performed by a local physician on over

48 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 306. For fears of black manhood and lynching, see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 49 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 524-26. 57

five hundred black men, ninety-five percent of whom were recent migrants, provided “an opportunity to compare the physical condition of Negroes with whites.” The examiner required that each man carry a sack of books weighing 125 pounds across the room, finding that “the general muscular development of the Negroes was surprisingly good.”

However, upon physical examinations of the men the doctor found that almost all had

“Bad teeth, flat feet and venereal disease” and that many younger men showed signs of advanced age. The physician concluded that on average, the tissue in a Negro’s body “is older than a white man who is five years older in calendar years. A Negro at 35 is older than a white man at 40.” 50

In hindsight, the physical condition of these men is not surprising. Most of the

African Americans arriving in Chicago were poor field hands with strong bodies who had worked for years in the hot sun and lived in terribly unsanitary conditions. But backed by early twentieth-century science and printed in a respected newspaper, this type of anatomical study reinforced the superiority of the white race in the American collective unconscious.

Racial hierarchy was further reinforced through pseudo-scientific observation of the “Negro church.” The Great Migration profoundly affected Christian worship in

Chicago. As large white churches and their congregations fled the South Side, African

American churches and their growing congregations occupied the vacant buildings; others worshipped in less imposing storefront churches, which sprouted up all over the

Black Belt. The city’s black churches, from the Olivet Baptist Church congregation of

50 “Negroes Arrive By Thousands; Peril To Health,” Chicago Tribune, March 15, 1917, 11; “Seek To Check Negro Arrivals From The South,” Chicago Tribune, March 16, 1917, 13; Dr. W.A. Evans, “How to Keep Well,” Chicago Tribune, August 20, 1919, 8. 58

9000 to numerous storefronts with a few dozen members, were all influenced to some

effect by the wondrous idiosyncrasies of Southern Christian worship.51

Whites approached “these black zealots” with astonishment and ambivalence. As

the Tribune proclaimed a few months before the riot, “New Phases of Negro Problem

Found in Church.” “Old stone churches, once the pride of rich and powerful white congregations . . . are colored people’s churches now . . . where a sedate gospel once was expounded, you hear today the jubilant yell of the dusky brother who has found grace.”

Using the moniker “Eye Witness” and “laboriously trying to be fair” in his observations,

the white journalist reacted with both admonishment and surprise to the response of the

large black congregation during the sermon at Olivet Baptist Church near the Angelus

building: “Their emotionalism was grotesque and wild, but it did not find utterance in

slang or in any foul or cheap phrases. Never once.” Eye Witness failed to articulate

clearly what was problematic about the “phases” of the “Negro Problem” found in black

churches; seemingly, it was something more instinctive than quantifiable to whites who

preferred to worship in a more austere manner.52

The Riot Commission found that outward expressions of racial animosity among

whites in positions of authority in Chicago occurred frequently, whether products of

perceptions of African Americans in the press and other forms of popular culture, a belief

in black inferiority or predatory nature passed down through family and peers, tense

personal encounters with black Chicagoans, or some combination of all of these things.

For example, the president of a branch of the Illinois Federation of Women’s Clubs

warned, “A woman must be careful not to put herself in a position of causing them [black

51 Spear, Black Chicago, 175-78. 52 Eye Witness, “New Phases of Negro Problem Found in Church,” Chicago Tribune, May 6, 1919, 12. 59

men] to have a grudge against her, as you know a white woman has to fear a colored

man.” The Commission described one white union member’s opinion that "no Negro had, or could even acquire, intelligence enough to run an engine.” A Chicago public school teacher opined, “when a Negro boy grows a mustache his brain stops working.”

And an assistant principal said that, "“When it comes to morality, I say colored children

are unmoral. They have no more moral sense than a very young white child.”53

These opinions sometimes became a matter of official record with people in positions of power. For example, Miss Alice M. Hogge, a white principal of a racially mixed grade school in the vicinity of the Angelus building filed a statement with the

Chicago branch of the Department of Intelligence in January of 1919. Hogge’s report, filled with contradictions and innuendo, claimed that black soldiers had used the school’s playground buildings for “immoral purposes” after closing. Hogge reported that she and a white truant officer at the school had been “accosted on the street by both colored men and women, asking us to enter these saloons and brothels of the neighborhood.” Hogge acknowledged witnessing brawls between local white and black youth, claiming, “When white and negro children engage in any altercations, the negro adults encourage their activities." During one altercation, “a negro drew a revolver while a street brawl was raging, whereupon he was stoned by the whites of the neighborhood and severely injured." Hogge recognized the overcrowding and poor housing conditions among black residents in the area, though reserved her pity because she felt, "The negros [sic] . . . are entirely to blame for this, because of their own destructiveness.”54

53 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 439-40. 54 Department of Intelligence "Intercepted letter from Miss Alice Hogge," Federal Surveillance of Afro- Americans, Vivian Harsh Collection, Reel 21 (0220), Woodson Library Chicago. 60

Expressions of racial hostility among white businessmen were pervasive and

accepted, even if they were not always welcomed. When the Tribune’s “Eye Witness”

sought views from black and white “leading men” on the “Negro Problem,” the

interviewer was subjected to “far more, insensate language from the lips of white men than of black men” in May of 1919. He wrote:

Among [white] men like publicists and administrators of large affairs . . . there was often an unfeeling kind of don’t-give-a-damn cry when they talked on this subject . . . when a white employer . . . had railed about ‘these damn niggers,’ they appeared to think they had said something rather gallant and decisive, for they would smile fatuously and expect acquiescence . . . And more terrible than the language was the insensate state of mind such language betrayed. The only way one could avoid the suspicion that one was listening to a potential lunatic . . . was to allow . . . that these men don’t mean one-tenth of what they say. If they did they would be fomenters of race wars.55

But administrators of large affairs were not fomenters of race wars. Most were versed in different tactics. Middle- and upper-class whites preferred a more clandestine approach to preventing blacks from entering their neighborhoods, involving collusion and premeditated violence, but less often direct confrontation. Over the past decade, the wealthy and influential white residents of the Hyde Park and Kenwood communities, represented by census tracts 400 and 401 (see Maps 1.2 and 1.3), had organized themselves to keep African Americans out of their neighborhoods. In these areas whites were largely successful because, unlike in the Douglas community, property values in these neighborhoods surrounding the prestigious University of Chicago remained high, as did rates of white homeownership. Through boycotts, segregation ordinances, vandalism, and buyouts, wealthy white residents successfully drove out African Americans from

55 Eye Witness, “Opinions Vary on Chicago’s Negro Problem,” Chicago Tribune, May 4, 1919, A6. 61

Hyde Park and Kenwood by 1909, and property owners in 1919 were intent on keeping

them out. In 1920, when areas to the northwest had begun to lose their racial

exclusiveness, whites represented 99% of the population in tracts 400 and 401.56





Kenwood-Hyde Park Property Owners Improvement Association was prominent

among community organizations, and the actions of its members were testaments to the

privilege afforded to whites on the basis of skin color, wealth, and long standing ties to

the local power structure. When Walter White of the NAACP infiltrated a Kenwood-

Hyde Park Property Owners meeting at Lake Park Avenue and Forty-Seventh Street in

June of 1919, he found that tactics for keeping blacks “in their part of the town” included

purchasing the mortgages of black home owners in the hope that a payment might be late

resulting in immediate ejection. Another involved persuading white employers to fire

from their jobs black home owners.57

Despite their wealth and influence, the white residents of Kenwood and Hyde

Park positioned themselves rhetorically as victims. In an interview with an agent of the

Federal Department of Justice, realtor Frank M. Smith, head of the Property Owners

Association, complained that African Americans had "aspirations to mingle and live and work with whites irregardless of the sanction of wishes of the whites." He cited depreciation on “[p]roperty owned and paid for by the whites . . . on account of the colored householders in various vicinities." Smith’s direct message to Chicago blacks

56 Spear, Black Chicago, 22-23. Data compiled from E W Burgess and Charles Shelton Newcomb, Census Data of the City of Chicago 1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1931). 57 Walter F. White, “Chicago and Its Eight Reasons,” Crisis, 18, no.6 (October, 1919), 296. 62

was "we were here first; this is our country and you are interlopers." The real estate man drew upon stereotypes of lower-class social decorum in his convoluted racial characterization, as privileged whites were wont to do, when he spoke of the African

American presence in the "aristocratic section,” of the South Side, “going home from their labor on first class surface lines east and west, and intermingling with high class commuters [sic] and residents, with their flagrant clothes and haughty manner displayed, having no regard for women passengers whatsoever, much less the men of the most part middle class."58

Through backroom deals and with direct access to the popular press as well as

city administrators and investigators with whom they could make their case, members of

the Kenwood-Hyde Park community kept their neighborhoods white. In other areas

where defiant African Americans continued to push south and east, more direct action

was taken. The bombing of black homes, and the offices of realtors who made those

homes available to African Americans, was endemic to the expansion of the Black Belt

during the late teens. By the spring of 1919, black Chicagoans were treated to explosions

from homemade devises at a rate of two per month. The bombings and ensuing cover

ups were part of a citywide conspiracy. The white press did not often report these acts of

terrorism, and when they did the incidents were given very little ink. Police investigators

were slow to turn up suspects or make arrests. The few whites who faced charges

enjoyed court continuances from city judges who were in no rush to convict. And so the

bombing went on unabated. Map 1.5 (derived partly from a map that appears in Drake and Cayton’s Black Metropolis) shows where these incidents took place; a few in the

58 “Investigation of Riot from Three Govt Special Agents,” Federal Surveillance of Afro-Americans, Vivian Harsh Collection, Reel 12 (0168), Woodson Library Chicago. For more direct quotes from Frank Smith see Sandburg, Race Riots, 14. 63

Kenwood-Hyde Park areas that remained largely white but largely in the Grand

Boulevard neighborhoods into which the growing black population was expanding.59

Map 1.5. The Bombing of Black Homes in Chicago 1917-1921. The yellow star is the Angelus.

59 White, “Eight Reasons,” 296; St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, Revised and Enlarged Edition Volume 1 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), 64; Philpott, Slum and the Ghetto, 170; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 532-34. 64

Source: St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, Revised and Enlarged Edition Volume 1 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), 63 [map].

By the time of the race riot, blacks had crossed into residential districts containing

whites of less status: ethnically mixed middle-class neighborhoods, including a large

contingent of Irish-Americans of the St. Elizabeth, Holy Angels, and Corpus Christi

parish communities as well as a number of Jewish families from Eastern-Europe who

faced prejudices in their own right. Dozens of bombs were hurled at black homes in

these Grand Boulevard neighborhoods during the years surrounding the riot. Because of

their religion and non-Anglo racial “stock,” these Chicagoans were representative of

groups very much on the margins of the white racial community that made claims to

power in the city; they had much to lose by associating with African Americans as

neighbors.60

As Map 1.6 shows, despite imminent danger to African American renters and home owners, the Black Belt crept southward between State Street and Cottage Grove

Avenue. However, to the west of Wentworth Avenue, no African American family dared

trespass, let alone attempt to establish residency. Running north and south, Wentworth

Avenue was known to those familiar with Chicago’s racial geography as the “dead line”

(see Map 1.5). The Rock Island railroad tracks running parallel made for a natural

boundary line, but more importantly, the neighborhoods on the other side of the dead

line, inhabited by working-class whites, were dangerous for any African American to

60 Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 63 [map]; Dominic A. Pacyga, “Chicago’s 1919 Race Riot: Ethnicity, Class and Urban Violence,” in The Making of Urban America, ed. Raymond Mohl (New York: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1997), 190 [map]. See also "Chicago's gangland" [map], prepared by Frederic M. Thrasher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), accessed August 17, 2012, http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/maps/chisoc/G4104-C6E625-1926-T5.html. 65 traverse, day or night. Working-class whites to the west actively patrolled their territory for blacks, using makeshift weapons to terrorize, chase down, and assault any invaders publicly on the streets. The Irish in particular were known for their ferocity.61 As it turned out, bricks were even more intimidating than bombs; African Americans slowly moved south into middle class Grand Boulevard, but the tenacious Irish thugs resolutely kept them from migrating west across the deadline into white working class territory.

Map 1.6. Allan Spear’s Map of the growth of the African American population in Chicago and the expansion of the Black Belt by 1910 and 1920 census tracts. Source: Digital scan from Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920, (University of Chicago, 1967), 14 [maps].

61 For a map of the deadline area see “Map 5.7” in Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto, 134. 66

African Americans on the Black Belt side of the dead line tended to be poor and

working class as well. Middle class blacks sought homes wherever they could, especially

outside of the older black residential areas. Map 1.7 shows that African Americans

moving into the census districts to the south of the existing Black Belt were buying homes at a much higher rate, in some tracts equal to or exceeding the city average rate of home ownership (26.6%). Because home loans were difficult to obtain for all but the wealthiest and well established African Americans, Map 1.7 can also be thought of cautiously as revealing the social geography of African Americans on the South Side.

The red and orange areas indicate census districts in which more well-to-do black

Chicagoans resided. Members of the growing black labor force, many of them migrants and lodgers, occupied the pale yellow areas of the map, in districts that served as a buffer between wealthier blacks and the bellicose Irish beyond the dead line.62

62 I write “cautiously” because it is important to remember that African Americans did not have a lot of residential mobility, and many middle-class blacks were forced to live among poorer blacks. 67

Map 1.7. Black Home ownership by census tract in 1920. Source: E W Burgess and Charles Shelton Newcomb, Census Data of the City of Chicago 1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1931).





In 1919, the Angelus sat in this increasingly black working-class buffer zone, a reportedly all-white apartment building in a now mostly black neighborhood, where

African Americans were subjected to routine harassment, for example, on their commutes to and from the Union Stock Yards to the west. Inside the walls of the Angelus the class

68 and ethnic complexion of residents had changed as well. The Chicago Commission and authors of newspaper accounts of the riot referred to the Angelus as a white apartment building, and surviving city directory records seem to support this. Many Angelus residents were of Russian and Jewish descent, some others were native-white Americans of “old immigrant” heritage. Angelus resident Joseph Schafer was a Russian-born

“steam railroad” clerk single and in his early twenties. Samuel Berman was a Yiddish- speaking tailor in his early thirties married with two sons. Arthur Schlink—married, in his early thirties, and born in Indiana—owned and operated a photography shop at 3512

South State Street. Other Angelus residents in 1917 had common English and Irish surnames: Catherine and Miles Burke, James Scully, Margaret and Joseph Newell, Miss

L Sheehan, and a bricklayer named James Smith.63

Why the Angelus remained white in 1919 remains somewhat of a mystery.

Although the black population in the Angelus area was growing at an astounding rate, the district remained 28% white in 1920. Very few residential buildings were racially mixed in the area; live-in black servants in wealthier white homes were almost the sole

63 The Chicago city directory from 1917 is in the Chicago History Museum database. It is possible, though less likely, that some of these persons with English and Irish names were “black” or “mulatto.” Generally, I've determined that Angelus residents in 1917 were mostly, if not all white based on matching the city directory to 1910 and 1920 census records. If I can't find the particular person, all persons of that name in Chicago were white based on 1920 and sometimes 1910 censuses. Some of this is not exact, not all persons in Chicago are listed in the census and/or the directory. If I can’t find an exact name from the directory in the census, I sometimes I check surnames in the census and all are white. In other cases, common logic was used. For example, Thomas Kennedy was listed as a head of household in the city directory 1917. According to the 1920 census, the only black Thomas Kennedy in Chicago (Thomas Ashforth Kennedy) was 8 years old in 1917, and clearly not the same Kennedy listed as an Angelus resident in the 1917 directory. At times, it was easier to search for any black people with these names rather than go through all the whites (i.e. limit the search to "race: black"). In general it's hard to pin people down b/c they all moved after the riot, so many common names, and occupations changed over 3 years in chicago. Race is also listed as "mulatto" in many cases. To a certain extent I am relying on the search capabilities of ancestry, as I limited searches to Cook County (after some names were not coming up by limiting to Chicago). Remember that not all residents were listed in city directory; included were only heads of household and/or persons employed. Note: Joseph Schafer was listed as “Shafer” in the 1917 city directory database. Arthur Schlink was listed as “Aurther” in the 1920 census. 69

exceptions to this rule. Most likely the operators of the Angelus resisted renting and up

until 1919, the building managers found enough whites to fill the buildings’ vacancies.64

Some Angelus residents, like many of the whites who resided in Black Belt homes and apartments, were business owners and operators. Black migrants poured into the Black Belt, and the residential dynamics of many neighborhoods changed, but white proprietors of grocery stores, meat markets, cafes, saloons, and hotels along and around the bustling Stroll often profited from the new consumers in the neighborhood. This economic dynamic did not go unnoticed by black community leaders, and white business operators became the object of scorn. “The Caucasians,” complained the Defender in

1915, “are getting rich through the patronage of a race of people whom they shun as absolutely inferior outside of the places where they are surrounding their dimes."65

There is evidence to suggest that whites doing business in the Black Belt were targeted during the rioting. On the thirty-six hundred block of State Street black men stoned, stabbed, and killed an Italian grocery peddler named Casmero Lazeroni, age sixty five. A fifty-five year old shoe merchant born in Poland named Morris Perel was stabbed and killed en route to his place of business by a black mob around Fifty-First and

Dearborn Streets. An unidentified black man shot dead a fifty year old Polish-born shoemaker named David Marcus as he stepped outside the doorway of his shop at 511

East Thirty-Seventh Street. A forty-seven year old white insurance agent born in

Kentucky named George Wilkins died from a gunshot wound inflicted while conducting business at the thirty-eight hundred block of Rhodes Avenue.66

64 1920 U.S. Census, population schedule, Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, Enumeration District 109. 65 "Patronize Worthy Race Enterprises Along 'The Stroll,'" Defender, May 8, 1915, 4. 66 Cook County Coroner, The Race Riots, 42, 44, 49, 53. 70

In Race Riot to Sit In, Arthur Waskow singles out events in Chicago during the

last week in July, 1919 as the first “ideal type” of race riot, in which white and black

injury and death tolls were both significant. Waskow writes that “many observers noted

the wholehearted commitment of the Negro community to ‘fighting back’ when

attacked.” However, there was a notable pattern to black violence against whites.

African Americans stoned, stabbed, and shot white Chicagoans found within the Black

Belt. They also opened fire without warning, "from ambush and barricade,” upon

vehicles carrying armed whites across the deadline and into black residential areas. But

few if any African Americans went beyond the boundaries of the Black Belt looking for

trouble.67

Written words and violent actions suggest that African Americans were intent on

assuming territorial control of the Black Belt from whites. As one of the larger

residential complexes on the South Side, the Angelus apartment building was symbolic of

the continuous influence of whites in African-American neighborhoods. Then just six

weeks prior to the riot, the Angeles came under African American management. R. W.

Hunter & Co., a black operated Chicago banking firm, signed a lease for the building

effective in July of 1920. The Defender called Hunter & Co., “the largest and strongest

Colored banking firm in the world.” Hunter was a new organization, but according to the

Defender, in little more than a year, its three branches had 2,800 depositors and investors.

The firm intended to convert Angelus office space into a bank that would service the

black community. “It will enable us to have a Race institution of our own that will

employ a large number of Colored men and women,” proclaimed the Defender, “Let us

67 Arthur I. Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-In: 1919 and the 1960s (New York: Doubleday and Company Inc., 1966), 10. Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 6. 71

get wise in this country and unite like the other races and do business with one another.”

The Defender told its readers that Hunter’s customers would be making more than

money; “you are assisting in making history for your Race."68

At the time of the Angelus riot, its white occupants were short timers finishing out

their lease agreements. The confrontation may have been a reflection of the residual

effects of racial tensions surrounding the occupancy and sale of the Angelus in the weeks

and months prior. At any rate, by late 1919, the residents of the Angelus were all African

American, making the racial turnover of the once white neighborhood over the course of

twenty years almost entirely complete. Map 1.8 shows this change in the district over time, and also suggests how African Americans, a mere four percent of the population,

were making such claims to the neighborhoods in which they lived. Nowhere else was

the residential concentration of a particular ethnic group so dense. Blacks lived on these

streets almost exclusively, and they wanted political and economic control of their

neighborhoods after being excluded in other areas of the city.

68 “Our People Becoming a Power in Financial Field” Defender, June 14, 1919, 14. 72

Map 1.8. The changing racial demographic of the Angelus district 1900-1920. Sources: U.S. Census Data and Illinois Sanborn Maps.

The riot helped to establish African American dominion over the Black Belt. But the growing success and influence of African American businessmen in the black district, as well as the coordinated efforts to ward off whites in the black neighborhoods during the rioting, gave whites the impression that segregation was the most logical means of racial peace and black advancement. A white real estate broker interviewed by members

73

of the Chicago Commission after the rioting advocated “creating definite districts in any

portion of the city where the colored men may find it necessary to live.” Although he

“disclaimed any desire to promote segregation. . . . he maintained that so long as the races

mixed, clashes were inevitable.” Likewise, the principal of an integrated school believed

that “absolute segregation was necessary.”69

Segregation was the answer for segments of the white press and some official

bodies as well. The Chicago Daily Tribune pondered, “Can the two races continue to live in peace in Chicago without segregation? . . . We believe since the race riot in

Chicago that segregation . . . will be the only cure to prevent race riots in the future.”

And the Coroner’s Jury that investigated the riot-related deaths concluded, "We believe voluntary segregation would follow and to a considerable extent remove one cause of unrest."70

“Voluntary segregation” was a popular solution among whites who, whether it

was a result of being uninformed or of soothing their collective conscience, convinced

themselves that African Americans preferred to live amongst each other and that as long

as this was the case, the separation of races was acceptable and different than the forced

segregation practiced in the Jim Crow South. The president of the Cook County Real

Estate Board told the Chicago Commission that he believed “that Negroes . . . have hitherto virtually segregated themselves.” The director of Union Park contended that

“the Negroes had a tendency to separate from the whites, not because they wished to avoid them, but because they preferred to associate with their own race.”71

69Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 224, 285. 70 Ibid., 491. 71 Ibid., 226-7, 285. 74

Among fifteen “intelligent” African Americans whose occupations included

“business men, physicians, ministers, school teachers, lawyers, and social workers,” to

whom the Chicago Commission posed a series of questions, most were critical of

segregation, none openly advocated the measure. In the published responses, the

Chicago Commission implied that whites had mistaken “race solidarity” for voluntary

segregation. As one anonymous African American respondent explained:

Racial segregation is harmful as a social aim. Racial segregation is the result of the attempt of a more powerful group to impose its ideas of racial inferiority upon a weaker group. The weaker group in its attempt to defeat this program rightly adopts racial solidarity as a definite aim in order to strengthen itself both to resist discrimination which usually follows segregation and to attack the vicious and narrow-minded motives of proponents of racial segregation.72

The support African Americans provided for each other, the safety they found in numbers, and the collective actions they took to stake a claim to power in the city of

Chicago were a reaction of the limited access to the white world, and the dangers that

existed in the white neighborhoods surrounding the Black Belt.

72 Ibid., 510. 75

CHAPTER 2 “A Pretty Tough Hole”: The Hostile Area West of the Black Belt

A mob of young white men search for an African American man during the race riot. Source: Digital scan from Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922).

On Monday, gangs of ruffians grew in numbers and assertiveness on the streets in the white neighborhoods between the stockyards and the black residential area. “But for them,” deplored the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, “it is doubtful if the riot would have gone beyond the first clash.” According to the Riot Commission, seventy-six percent of riot-related violence was inflicted on those traveling between work and home, and many victims sustained their injuries in the blocks east of the stockyards. Black workers boarded street cars after their Monday shifts, and were attacked passing through the predominantly Irish working-class neighborhoods of Hamburg and Canaryville.

Young white men between the ages of 16 and 21 formed the “nuclei for crowd and mob

76

leadership.” Armed with makeshift weapons they detached trolleys from electric wires,

dragged black men from the cars and beat them. Other African Americans were attacked

at street car transfer corners. Stones and bricks brought down those who attempted to

flee. Shouts of “Get the nigger!” and “Kill the black son of a bitch!” were heard among

the pursuers. The white bystander who cried for mercy was ridiculed as a “Nigger

lover!” by members of the mob. Four black men were murdered in the street car attacks

in this area, thirty black men were reported severely beaten, and one white man was

killed by an African American man in an act determined by investigators to be self-

defense.1

Early Monday morning, the Thirty-Ninth Street surface line car stopped at Union

Avenue where an abandoned truck parked across the tracks impeded the street car’s path.

When the car came to a stop, a gang of white men forced their way on, sending black

passengers fleeing on to the street. An unidentified white man killed a thirty-six year old

black stockyards worker from Alabama, beating him to death with the iron lever from the

street car door. A few hours later, a black cook, born in Maryland and employed by the

Chicago & Great Western R.R. Co, boarded the southbound Wentworth Avenue streetcar

downtown. The man was later found lying beaten and unconscious at the corner of

Wentworth Avenue and Fortieth Street, his suitcase and valuables missing. The man

would later die at Provident Hospital.2

White gangs roamed the streets on Monday evening, terrorizing black men, burning and pillaging black homes in areas around the periphery of the expanding Black

1 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), 6-7, 10-11, 17-18, 24, 19. 2 Cook County Coroner, The Race Riots: Biennial Report 1918-1919 and Official Record of Inquests on the Victims of the Race Riots of July and August 1919 (Chicago, 1920), 16, 28, 52. 77

Belt where black families had “invaded” white neighborhoods. Around 5:30 P.M., some

among a crowd of white men began hurling stones at a street car traveling east along

Forty-Seventh Street east of the stockyards. Near Union Avenue, a member of the mob

pulled the trolley pole, bringing the car to a halt. When a thirty-seven year old black

laborer fled the car, white men pursued and overtook him, then beat the man to death.

Minutes later, a white mob pursued and killed another black man, a twenty-seven year

old laborer, who was stabbed in the chest eight blocks north near Thirty-Ninth and

Wallace Streets. 3

Around the same time, motor truck and automobile raids into the Black Belt

began. Whites sped through the neighborhoods east of Wentworth Avenue, discharging rifles and revolvers. Armed African Americans sniped at automobiles from barricades

and positions out of sight of drivers. In the hours preceding the riot at the Angelus apartment building on Monday evening, a thirty-one year old white man riding in an automobile – a plasterer born in the Isle of Man – was struck by a brick and killed by an

unknown black man at Thirty-Fifth Street and Wabash Avenue. Later, a thirty-three year

old black laborer was killed from a bullet that burst through the front window of his home at 544 East Thirty-Seventh Street. The shot came from the revolver fired by an unknown white man in a passing automobile.4

At midnight, a general strike of Chicago’s surface and elevated line workers

began, which lasted until the end of the week. On Tuesday, Black Belt residents were

forced to walk to and from the yards through hostile white territory. In the morning, a

3 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 4-11; Cook County Coroner, Race Riots, 16, 48-49, 51-52 4 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 4-11; Cook County Coroner, Race Riots, 16, 45-46, 54-55. 78

twenty-nine year old Irish-born laborer was stabbed and killed in a "general mixup" just east of the stockyards. The killer, a black man, was in the opinion of the Cook County

Coroner "guilty of no wrong doing," for he had been the victim of an "unprovoked" attack by whites, which was "the result of the intense passion due to race hatred." A few hours later, white men beat to death a fifty-two year old black laborer at Fortieth and

Halsted Streets. Terrified, black packinghouse employees did not report to work on

Wednesday, and for the remainder of the week few made an attempt to reach the

stockyards. Tuesday and Wednesday, white gangs continued to loot and set fire to homes

in racially mixed neighborhoods at the outskirts of the Black Belt, including areas as far

south as Sixty-Third Street in the Englewood community.5

Later in the evening on Wednesday, Mayor William H. Thompson called for military aid to restore order. Seventy-two companies and one battalion of the Illinois

Reserve Militia and Illinois National Guard stationed themselves around the Black Belt, and mostly along what was known as the “dead line” at Wentworth Avenue, separating black and white districts, and two more battalions stationed in armories waited in reserve.

Though riot-related violence slowed and all but ceased over the next few days, the all- white militia would occupy this area of the city for more than a week, often enduring verbal abuse from white rioters intent on entering the Black Belt (there were no reports of berating from blacks). On August 5, one white militia member set upon a group of white young men at Forty-Seventh Street and Forestville Avenue in the Irish middle-class neighborhoods south of the Black Belt. The militiaman stabbed and killed one man and injured another by bayonet. The soldier was later exonerated of any crime, but the

5 Cook County Coroner, Race Riots, 16, 38; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 4- 11. 79

circumstances of this incident were never entirely brought to light. For weeks following

the mustering out of the troops, many of the registered clubhouses in the riot zone, used

by gangs officially known as athletic clubs, remained closed by city officials.6



6 “How Troops Are Guarding Riot Zone,” Chicago Tribune, August 1, 1919, 4; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 13; “Clubs Closed by Riots Seek to Open Again,” Chicago Tribune, August 23, 1919, 3. 80

81

Map 2.1. The Chicago Commission on Race Relations Riot Districts and “hostile area” analyzed in this chapter. Source: Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922). 



Map 2.2. The percentage of total reported wounded during the riot in two of seven designated Riot Commission riot districts versus the rest of the city. Source: Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922).

82

When a young Studs Lonigan—the street tough in James T. Farrell’s trilogy of novels and indispensable sources of Chicago history—hears about the race riot, he and his gang want badly to join the fray, “to hang every nigger in the city to the telephone poles.” However, the boys soon realize that the fray is not so easy to find. “For two hours, they prowled Wabash Avenue and State Street, between Garfield Boulevard and

Fifty-ninth Street, searching for niggers.” They are joined by other whites, “men and kids,” but “[t]he streets were like avenues of the dead.” Eventually, Studs and his pals

come upon a ten year old African American boy. They chase down the youngster, burn

his clothes, slap his face and urinate on him before running him off naked.7

While Chicago’s race riot was a product of unbounded racial antagonism, the

violence was confined mostly to one area of the city. Of the seven riot districts

designated by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations in their published report on

the riot, only two experienced a high volume of violent incidents from Sunday through

Saturday: District I, called the “Black Belt”—shaped like a key with the broad end

beginning at Twenty-Second Street, narrowing at Thirty-Ninth Street and proceeding

southward along the eastern side of Wentworth Avenue to Garfield Boulevard (Fifty-

Fifth Street)—and District III, designated as the “Southwest Side and Stockyards

District,” which included the neighborhoods south of the Chicago River west of the Black

Belt (See Map 2.1). When combined, these two districts represented less than 10% of

the total area of the city but accounted for 75% of the total number of dead and wounded

during the riot (See Map 2.2).8

7 James T. Farrell, Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy Comprising Young Lonigan, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, and Judgment Day (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 217-18. 8 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 8-9. 83

Critical to understanding the patterns of violence during the Chicago riot is an

understanding of the city’s racial geography. Districts I and III were adjacent to each

other but varied widely in terms of racial demographics. Because of limited access to

housing in other white neighborhoods, African Americans made up 73% of the residents

in the 1920 Federal Census tracts that lay along the western edge of District I, from

Thirty-Fifth to Fifty-First streets. Along the eastern boundary of District III were

working-class neighborhoods in census tracts that were 99% white. Separating these

almost uniformly black and white areas was Wentworth Avenue, known to locals as the

“dead line” (See Map 2.3).9

9 E W Burgess and Charles Shelton Newcomb, Census Data of the City of Chicago 1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1931). 84

Map 2.3. Racial breakdown along the dead line. Source: E W Burgess and Charles Shelton Newcomb, Census Data of the City of Chicago 1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1931).

The violence on either side of the dead line may have been overwhelming during the rioting, but it was not a new development. In 1927, urban sociologist Frederick

Thrasher called Wentworth Avenue “The most important colored-white frontier in

85

Chicago,” explaining that, “Clashes occurred along this boundary for many years before

the race riots of 1919 and they have continued ever since.”10

The Riot Commission repeatedly invoked the word “hostile” to describe the white

people and neighborhoods west of Wentworth Avenue. In one instance the commission

described the area as one where “hostility toward Negroes has often been displayed,” and

elsewhere as a district where “hostility to Negroes is so marked that [they] not only find it

impossible to live there, but expose themselves to danger even by passing through.”11

Particularly hostile were the Hamburg and Canaryville neighborhoods, bounded by Thirty-Fifth Street to the north and Forty-Seventh Street to the south, lying between the Black Belt east of Wentworth Avenue and the Union Stock Yards west of Halsted

Street. Most of the riot violence outside of the Black Belt occurred along street car lines that ran between black residential areas and the packing houses, in which 6148 of 35,479 employees were black in early 1920. Three of these surface car lines ran through this

“hostile area.” During hours of heavy commuting, blacks represented between 60 and

100 percent of passengers on the Thirty-Fifth, Thirty-Ninth, and Forty-Seventh Street lines daily through these white neighborhoods (see Map 2.4).12

Most of the injuries to blacks in the hostile area occurred on the way to and from the stockyards on Monday and Tuesday, and six of the thirty-eight deaths citywide occurred within these blocks. Two if the city’s most violent corners marked the northwest and southwest boundaries of the hostile area. Ten black and three white men

were injured in the vicinity of a street car transfer point at Thirty-Fifth and Halsted

10 Frederic M. Thrasher, The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago (Chicago: New Chicago School Press Inc., 2000) 71; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 115. 11 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 298, 115. 12 “List of Chicago Industries Employing Negroes in Large Numbers,” J. Rosenwald Papers, University of Chicago, Box 6, Folder 4; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 300 [map]. 86

Streets. At Forty-Seventh and Halsted, seven black men were attacked traveling east after leaving the stock yards, and two white men also sustained injuries. In this twenty- four block radius and along its periphery, forty-eight people were injured or killed, most of them in three days before the state militia arrived. The hostile area made up the heart of the district delineated by militia forces as the “riot zone,” or the portion of city occupied by the Illinois Reserve and National Guard. And thirty-six of about seventy- five state militia companies called in to restore order in Chicago’s streets were stationed near Wentworth Avenue between Thirtieth and Fifty-First Streets.13

13 Cook County Coroner, Race Riots, 16; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 10, 8 [map]; “How Troops Are Guarding Riot Zone,” Chicago Tribune, August 1, 1919, 4. 87

Map 2.4. The hostile area. Source: Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922).

88

For purpose of thorough analysis in this chapter, I have designated the shaded

region in Map 2.4 the hostile area. Racial confrontations occurred in white

neighborhoods in other parts of the city, but statistical and anecdotal evidence suggests

that these were the streets where violence against African Americans occurred more frequently and over a longer period than in any other white area of Chicago during the rioting. The Riot Commission and other observers characterized the dangerous element in this space in terms of class, ethnicity, custom, and more implicitly, gender. “The residents here are largely Irish working people and distinctly hostile to Negroes,” explained the commission, which wrote further that the area harbored “many organized gangs and ‘athletic clubs,’” made up of young men and boys, and that “its racial antagonisms appear to be traditional.”14

The Riot Commission’s conclusion was substantiated by other sources. Mary

McDowell, the director of the University of Chicago settlement house near the stockyards, described the white rioters in her report as “boys,” “young ruffians,” and

“Irish toughs”; second generation Irish Americans holding a “deeper-seated prejudice”

against African Americans than their parents. The Cook County Coroner’s riot jury

called the offenders “young men of the criminal class,” and “disorderly young men and boys,” who congregated on public streets and defied the authorities.15

While white boys became immersed in the “tradition” of racial antipathy in their neighborhoods, they were simultaneously negotiating another aspect of their identity:

gender. Among the many masculine identities available for neighborhood boys to aspire

and emulate, many would be allured by the pugnacious, rugged independence of the local

14 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 607 15 Mary McDowell and Municipal Housekeeping Chapter 3 “Prejudice,” Mary McDowell Papers, Box 4, Folder 23, Chicago History Museum, 31-2; Cook County Coroner, Race Riot, 24. 89

street tough. Frederick Thrasher spent a good amount of time researching the education

and socialization of “gang boys” into manhood.

The study of gangs in Chicago during this period was rooted in Progressive Era

concerns about the effects of poverty on urban youth. Multiple state, municipal, and

academic bodies conducted studies on housing, crime, and juvenile delinquency in poorer

areas of the city. The most notable study of youth gangs in Chicago came from Thrasher,

part of the “Chicago School” of sociology made famous by University of Chicago’s

Robert Park and Ernest Burgess. Thrasher’s exhaustive research on gangs is invaluable

to cultural historians interested in the sons of Chicago’s immigrant laborers.16

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the group most active in the violence during the race riot: white working-class “street toughs” in the area from which most of the attacks on blacks during the riot came. These hostile area boys had little to gain from lawful behavior or much to lose from lawlessness. They were undereducated, their destinies circumscribed by social realities; they could chose to be functionaries of either the shop foreman or the ward boss. The hostile area street tough chose to serve the latter.

The boss demanded his boys put in work on election day—putting up signs, stuffing ballot boxes, intimidating campaign opponents—but the rest of the time the political patron was a powerful enabler. He provided a bankroll and a clubhouse, a likeminded cohort among which the boy would find strength in numbers, and most importantly, he offered immunity from the law. It was an unfortunate collaboration for residents of the

16 For example, Jane Addams referred to a “boy of nineteen” in The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, Archive.Org, accessed August 20, 2012, http://archive.org/details/thespiritofyouth16221gut, and the Riot Commission wrote "Boys between sixteen and twenty-two banded together . . ." in Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 6. 90

nearby Black Belt, because the street tough embraced white supremacy and had a

penchant for violence.





The neighborhoods to the west of the Black Belt were historically Irish and

working poor. They emerged out of the original Irish settlement of Hardscrabble,

founded by canal builders who with picks and shovels connected the Mississippi River to

Lake Michigan. A growing number of Irish immigrants and Irish-Americans from the

eastern United States found work as unskilled workers in the factories and brickyards that sprang up following the opening of the canal in 1848. This industrial center by then was known as Bridgeport, the epicenter of Chicago’s substantial Irish population in the late

nineteenth century. In 1890, 183,844 first and second generation Irish Chicagoans

represented about 17% of the city’s population.17

In the late nineteenth century, the Irish remained overwhelmingly manual workers, although as the millennium neared, fewer and fewer toiled as unskilled laborers.

As Chicago matured into a mecca of industrial production, the Irish and other English-

speaking workmen advanced to be factory foremen, for example, or members of the

“butcher aristocracy” at the stockyards, or motormen and conductors on street-railway

and interurban lines, part of Chicago’s vast and expanding transportation network.

17 Finley Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley and the Chicago Irish: An Anthology, ed. Charles Fanning (New York: Arno Press, 1976), xiv-xv; Homer Hoyt, One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933), 283-84; Michael F. Funchion, “Irish Chicago: Church, Homeland, Politics, and Class—The Shaping of an Ethnic Group, 1870-1900,” in Ethnic Chicago: A Multicultural Portrait, eds. Melvin G. Holli and Peter d’A. Jones (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1995, 4th Ed.) 57-59. 91

Simultaneously, more and more second-generation Irish workers held white collar jobs,

such as clerks and salesmen, as Chicago’s population and service industry expanded in

tandem.18

The most prosperous among the Bridgeport Irish sold their homes to new

immigrants, and invested the proceeds into homes along new elevated or electric lines

that radiated out beyond the city’s old core. At the turn of the century, it was an

unmistakable demographic change recognized by “Mr. Dooley”, Irish barkeep and fictional sage, created by turn-of-the-century Bridgeport scribe Finley Peter Dunne, who

lamented when “th’ Hannigans an’ Leonidases an’ Caseys moved out, havin’ made their pile,” only to be replaced by “Polish Jews an’ Swedes an’ Germans an’ Hollanders” who

had “swarmed in, settlin’ down on th’ sacred sites.”19

Despite these changes, the white neighborhoods west of Wentworth Avenue had

retained their working-class Irish essence at the time of the race riot. By 1920, Eastern

Europeans were arriving in Chicago in the greatest numbers. Poles, the most numerous among them, represented 17% of the city’s foreign born, while the Irish represented just

7%, ranking sixth among Chicago’s immigrant nationalities. However, in the hostile area

west of the Black Belt, the Irish represented over 38% of persons born outside the United

States. Irish immigrants resided here in numbers over five times their city average, and

18 Funchion, “Irish Chicago,”76-77; Immigrants in Industries Part 11: Slaughtering and Meat Packing, Reports of the Immigrant Commission (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1911), 205. 19 Hoyt, Land Values, 201; Charles Fanning, “The Literary Dimension,” in The Irish in Chicago, ed. Lawrence J. McCaffrey (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 108-9; Finley Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley and the Chicago Irish: The Autobiography of a Nineteenth-Century Ethnic Group, ed. Charles Fanning (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1987), 122. 92

they were the most numerous of the foreign-born by nearly a four to one margin over the

next largest nationality.20

Chart 2.1. Nationalities as a percentage of the foreign-born population in the hostile area and citywide. Source: E W Burgess and Charles Shelton Newcomb, Census Data of the City of Chicago 1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1931).

The Irish remained the ethnic group with the greatest amount of social, political,

and cultural influence in hostile area neighborhoods. The parish community structure

was critical to Irish authority. Aside from being a spiritual center, the local Catholic

Church was the most important social institution in Irish Chicago. Two parishes served

the hostile area communities between Halsted Street and Wentworth Avenue. Nativity of

Our Lord Church was founded in 1868 in a livery stable near the new Union Stock Yards,

20 “Occupations,” Burgess and Newcomb, Census Tract Data 1920; U.S. Census of Population and Housing, 1920. 93

where the Hamburg neighborhood residents celebrated mass amidst the waft of the

slaughterhouse refuse depository known as Bubbly Creek. St. Gabriel Church was

organized in 1880 to serve the Irish of the Canaryville neighborhood, then a part of the

Town of Lake district outside the city limits before 1889. Father Dorney, pastor of St.

Gabriel, was known among the congregation as “King of the Yards,” for his role as a

community leader who acted in the interest of packinghouse workers. After rough

beginnings, both St. Gabriel and Nativity built beautiful new churches in the 1880s, each

with adjoining schools. Like all Irish churches, St. Gabriel and Nativity reinforced a

sense of national identity and forged bonds among parish members based on a shared

religious experience that permeated other aspects of community living.21

Perhaps the most important source of Irish working-class hegemony was politics.

With their knowledge of English as a first language and experience in organizing in

opposition to British oppression in Ireland, the Irish successfully entered the political

realm upon their arrival in the Chicago, mostly as members of the Democratic Party,

affording them clear pathways to naturalization, patronage, and lucrative public contracts.

The disproportionate numbers of Irish in public service and local leadership positions—

precinct captains, policemen, firemen, and union officers—were emblematic of the ethnic

assimilation to which many members of more recent European immigrants aspired.22

21 Funchion, “Irish Chicago,” 65; Harry C. Koenig, ed. A History of the Parishes of the Archdiocese of Chicago: Vol. 1 (Chicago: Catholic Bishop of Chicago, 1980), 302-24, 654-56. See also, Michael F. Funchion “The Political and Nationalist Dimensions,” The Irish in Chicago, ed. Lawrence J. McCaffrey (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 61-97. 22 Dennis Clark, The Irish Relations: Trials of an Immigrant Tradition, (East Brunswick, NJ: Associated University Presses Inc., 1982), 145-47; Christopher Adamson, “Defensive Localism in White and Black: A Comparative History of European-American and African-American Youth Gangs,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 23, no. 2 (March, 2000): 277; James R. Barrett and David R. Roediger, “The Irish and ‘Americanization’ of the ‘New Immigrants’ in the Streets and in the Churches of the Urban United States, 1900-1930,” Journal of American Ethnic History 24, no. 4 (Summer, 2005): 3. James Barrett and David Roediger have explored the didactic role the Irish played as “Americanizers” in mixed-ethnic, working- 94

Politicians were central figures in the neighborhood economy, operating within a system of competing political factions or “mini-machines,” which served to bring wealth and power to bosses in the late nineteenth century. “Boodle” alderman received kickbacks from local businessmen in exchange for fruitful contracts. Underworld operators of prostitution and gambling bribed precinct captains and local policemen for protection from the law. At the same time, Irish machine politicians secured employment for their constituents, who had no money to invest in formal education required for white collar work. In 1900, Irish immigrants and their children represented 43% of those occupied as “watchmen, policemen, firemen, etc.” in the Chicago census, even though the Irish foreign born were only 14% of the city’s population.23

The hostile area was a bastion of Irish political power in the city, and subsequently political patronage. A look at the 1920 census reveals “neighborhood economies” throughout the hostile area, with a high percentage of people dependent upon the political machine for employment. In comparison to citywide averages, men were more than twice as likely to earn a living in public service, consisting of a variety of

municipal service and patronage jobs. Some men were employed among the ranks of the city's almost 6000 police officers or over 2000 members of the fire department, over

15,000 others worked jobs as "guards, watchmen, and doorkeepers," public service

"laborers," and city and county inspectors among other municipal occupations. In census tract 375, immediately to the east of St. Gabriel's Church in Canaryville, almost one in ten working men held a job in public service.

class, urban communities at the turn of the twentieth century. While tensions between ethnicities often ran high, for “new immigrants” in Chicago the Irish were “what an American looked like,” and “the figures . . . immigrants wanted to emulate.” 23 Funchion, “Irish Chicago,” 72-74 95

By contrast, hostile area jobholders were not likely to find themselves in

professional service. In fact, men in the hostile area were almost five times less likely to

be a part of the city's professional class of lawyers, physicians, architects, designers,

artists, small business owners, and others. What the 1920 census conveys is that the

hostile area residents were less employable outside their own neighborhoods, beyond the

influence of ward bosses.24

At the turn of the century, machine politics had elevated the hostile area from a

collection of working poor to mixed working class communities. The employment rate in

the hostile area was higher than the city average. In addition to public service jobs, clout

in politics and unions meant access to the growing number of jobs in the transportation

industry; in census tracts 377 and 379, in the center of the hostile area, almost one in four

working men held transportation jobs—as draymen, teamsters, and ‘expressmen.’ 25

Still, hostile area residents were more likely to be foreign born or have had foreign parents than people in other parts of the city. Many of the employed in these neighborhoods continued to toil long hours for low pay in nearby foundries and metal works, lumber and coal yards, ice factories, and of course the meatpacking plants at the stockyards. 26 The subject of an interview by author Stephen Longstreet identified only

24 “Occupations,” Burgess and Newcomb, Census Tract Data 1920; U.S. Census of Population and Housing, 1920. 25 Ibid. 26 See Appendix Maps derived from Census data, Burgess’s Chicago 1920, and other sources; “Class” was not a category on the 1920 federal census, but generally, whites of this sort were more likely to have been toiling as laborers. Other historians have put forth that these neighborhoods were working class: as far back as Drake & Cayton in their study of Chicago’s Black Metropolis and as recently as Dominic Pacyga in his article about the riot (Map page). See St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, Revised and Enlarged Edition Volume 1 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), 63 [map] and Dominic A. Pacyga, “Chicago’s 1919 Race Riot: Ethnicity, Class and Urban Violence,” in The Making of Urban America, ed. Raymond Mohl (New York: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1997), 190 [map]. Anecdotal evidence suggests the same. For example, the Riot Commission described those west of Wentworth as “working people” (p607). A relatively high percentage of African 96

as “A.B.” and described as “an Irish kid in the tough wards” of Chicago, probably grew

up in the hostile area. A.B. recalled of the neighborhood at the time of the race riot, “Our

lives were hard and bare-assed.” Many children had parents working for the packing

companies. “[Y]our old man got drunk on payday after a week of cow-shit shoveling for

Armour, or my mother putting in time at a sausage-stuffing machine. You ever smell a

broad, no matter if they could wash up, that has been doing ten hours pushing crap into

yards of gut?” If politics had brought some prosperity to hostile area neighborhoods,

there were still plenty who lived hand to mouth.27

Irish Chicagoans who still lived and worked among the newer Slavic immigrants

in and around the stockyards were known as the “backwash Irish,” after many others had

moved on to better jobs and middle-class communities. They were part of a larger

demographic recognized colloquially as the “shanty” Irish living in the hostile area. They

existed in contrast to the more moneyed “lace curtain” or “steam heat” Irish who had

escaped the old neighborhoods. Unlike more recent European arrivals, the Irish had

experienced some upward mobility, and now were distinguishable by class, characterized

by occupation but also by the homes they occupied, and the streets along which their

abodes rested.28

Unlike the area to the east that by then contained a large portion of the city’s

African-Americans, there was never any high grade residential or apartment building

Americans on the other side of the Wentworth Avenue dead line were working class as well, home renters with manufacturing jobs, making racial conflict along the dead line an inter-class affair. 27 Stephen Longstreet Chicago:1860-1919 (New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1973), 510; Located between the stockyards, the railroads, and the river, the amount of manufacturing businesses in the hostile area is astounding, see Sandborn Maps Chicago Vol.13, 1905-51. 28 See William Jenkins, “In Search of the Lace Curtain: Residential Mobility, Class Transformation, and Everyday Practice among Buffalo’s Irish, 1880—1910,” Journal of Urban History 35, no. 7 (November, 2009): 970-97, and "The Good Samaritan of Chicago," Box 1, Folder 3A, Mary McDowell Papers, Chicago History Museum, 6. 97

development among the lower-class Irish-Americans in the neighborhoods west of

Wentworth and south of the river. In 1891, the area was connected to the rest of the city

via horse car lines rather than newer cable and electric surface lines. Land in this area east of the Union Stock Yards was valued between $50 and $99 per front foot, while the

value of land east of State Street, boasting public transport to the Loop and high grade residential development, sold for three times as much on average. In 1910, after a prolonged real estate slump on the South Side, land values sunk to between $4 and $50 as this region continued to be a buffer between a more exclusive residential area to the east and a large manufacturing district to the west.29

In the early twentieth, as the city was sprawling south and west, it was becoming more profitable to build new communities on Chicago’s prairie outskirts near expanding

surface lines rather than to redevelop aging areas of its original core. Proximity to the

growing Black Belt to the east and stockyards to the west made the hostile area an even

less attractive candidate for urban redevelopment. Between 1912 and 1920, front foot

property values in the hostile area increased slightly around newly erected Comiskey

Park, home of the White Sox, at Thirty Fifth Street and Shields Avenue, but the rest of

the area remained unchanged. Many residents with an aversion to the stink, the waste,

and the people who worked in the butcher factories for hours on end relocated if they

could. Combined, census tracts 374, 375, and 379 in the hostile area experienced nearly

a six percent decline in population between 1910 and 1920.30

29 Hoyt, Land Values, 186-87, 220, 303. 30 Hoyt, Land Values, 362; Olcott's Land values Blue Book of Chicago and Suburbs for 1912 (Chicago: G. C. Olcott's & Co.); Olcott's Land values Blue Book of Chicago and Suburbs for 1920 (Chicago: G. C. Olcott's & Co.); Burgess and Newcomb, Census Tract Data 1920, Tracts 374, 375, 379; Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor, American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago and the Nation (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000), 18. 98

Housing throughout the hostile area was largely one or two story wood frame cottages interspersed with modern brick tenements. In a study of a nearby Lithuanian neighborhood just to the north between Thirty-Second Street and Thirty-Fourth Place, typical of others in the area, sociologist Elizabeth Hughes found that many of these single-family dwellings, “old and more or less run down,” were divided into multiple apartments with poor ventilation and inadequate access to toilets. A testament to the mixed working-class character of the area, Hughes found great variety in the tenure of residents in their homes as well as rent amounts paid out to landlords.31

In a short story about the home life of a boy named Johnny Callahan growing up on Forty-Fourth Street just west of Wentworth Avenue in the hostile area, author James

T. Farrell, intimately familiar with this part of the South Side, described the abode that housed ten Callahans as “a rambling old wooden house with five dirty rooms, a leaky roof, an outhouse, a weedy backyard, and a damp, unusable cellar.” Johnny’s father drank and abused his wife and children. He sent Johnny to the local saloon for libations, and the boy “remembered once how his old man kicked the living hell out of him when he had spilled a can of beer.” More than the beatings from his father Johnny fretted over the poor family’s ignoble reputation on their block, and the boy yearned to break free of his family and the neighborhood.32

Hostile area neighborhoods bred discontent. Some residents felt hopelessness and desired escape. If one was not destitute, one at least recognized that they were on the

31 Elizabeth Hughes, “Chicago Housing Conditions, IX: The Lithuanians in the Fourth Ward,” The American Journal of Sociology 20, no. 3 (November., 1914): 289-312; quote 294. Similar in construction to houses surrounding University of Chicago settlement house as well, see “Beginnings,” Mary McDowell Papers, Box 1, Folder 1, Chicago History Museum. 32 James T. Farrell, “Johnny’s Old Man,” in Chicago Stories, ed. Charles Fanning (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 228-230. 99

precipice of the poverty endured by their neighbors. “Sometimes I think they'se poison in

th' life iv a big city,” remarked the pensive Mr. Dooley of turn-of –the-century

Bridgeport. “Th' flowers won't grow here no more thin they wud in a tannery, an' th' bur-

rds have no song; an' th' childher iv dacint men an' women come up hard in th' mouth an'

with their hands raised again their kind.”33

The characteristics of the neighborhood alone did not engender racist aggression.

The homes, churches, and factories west of the Black Belt served as a backdrop but they

were not factors that determined one’s attitude toward African Americans. Not all hostile

area residents felt the impulse to batter African Americans on the streets during the

rioting, or to join mobs of whites in cheering on others who pursued, stoned, and murdered black men.

According to settlement house director Mary McDowell, a woman on the east

side of the stockyards beckoned for a black man being pursued by a white gang to run

through her house and out the back. Afterwards the tenderhearted woman, “with her

splendid Irish courage,” faced the mob of men. “I kept them with my talking as long as I

could so that the poor creature could get away,” the woman told McDowell. Another act

of heroism came from “a brave Irish priest,” who prevented a white mob from entering his church where he was harboring a black man. “This is a sanctuary,” he told them,

“and not one shall enter until the civil authorities come to protect this negro.”34

Within the hostile area there was no elixir of social and cultural factors that

determined the violent and/or criminal tendencies of local residents. It was a

phenomenon that perplexed even the enlightened Mr. Dooley, who asked rhetorically in

33 Fanning, “The Literary Dimension,” 108. 34 McDowell, “Prejudice,” 31-32. Although McDowell did not identify the church, it was likely St. Gabriel or perhaps St. Cecilia. 100 one of his musings, “Who’ll tell what makes wan man a thief an’another man a saint? I dinnaw.” However, there was a confluence of elements that made it more likely that one person over another would be involved in the rioting. Among other things, white violence against blacks was a performance of an identity rooted in a shared understanding of gender, race, and class; or an outward manifestation of what it meant to be a white, working-class man in Chicago’s rough and tumble neighborhoods.35

The history of interracial violence is a particularly rich field within which to study the interplay of collective identities, which historians recognize as developing in tandem.

Chicago’s race riot is no exception. From the time of Chicago’s earliest Irish laborers, the canal dredgers and factory workers, a shared concept of what it meant to be men in

America developed, partly defined by what outside observers like Frederick Thrasher and members of the Riot Commissioned called a “tradition” of race antagonism.

The tradition of racism among Irish workers had both material and cultural roots.

Facing persecution in Civil War era Chicago, it was more often a desire to be recognized as a patriotic American, rather than a sense of racial justice, that motivated nearly

150,000 Irish-born men to enlist in the Union army. Abolitionist leader Frederick

Douglass called the Irish “deaf, dumb, and blind” to the issues of slavery. In fact,

African Americans were a perceived threat to the Irish, who were overrepresented among the white labor force; they believed freedmen would compete for jobs and undercut wages. In Chicago in 1862, following the arrest and trial of an Irish omnibus driver who had ejected a black man from his bus and then beat him in front of witnesses, a group of

Irish workers stoned windows and fired shots into homes in one of the city’s black

35 Dunne Mr. Dooley and the Chicago Irish, 160. 101

residential districts. Two years later, upwards of five-hundred Irish long-shoremen

reportedly attacked a small party of black men working on a lumber dock.36

Following emancipation, a growing number of black Chicagoans found

themselves increasingly at odds with the poor Irish, both economically and politically.

Many of the Irish were dependent upon Democratic political machines, and saw blacks as

a threat at the polls. African Americans were loyal Republicans, the party of

emancipation and of the white business and artisan classes, who supported the rights of

employers. During one postbellum election parade Irish citizens were seen wielding

signs demanding "LET THE NIGGERS PAY FOR THEIR OWN SOUP"; "NO NIGGER

VOTING"; "WHITE SUPREMACY." In an 1864 editorial, the Chicago Daily Tribune,

sympathetic to Republican and Protestant perspectives, suggested that "no class of people in Chicago fear the competition of the handful of blacks here, except the Irish. The

Germans never mob colored men for working for whoever may employ them. The

English, The Scotch, the French the Scandinavians, never molest peaceable black people.

Americans never think of doing such a thing.”37

Such reproach was not unmerited, but requires some qualification. Lambasting

the Irish disposition suited the Tribune’s political purpose, and also may have been fueled

by Anti-Catholic and Anti-Irish sentiments that, while not as prevalent in Chicago in the

1860s, existed nonetheless. Moreover, the Irish were a particularly insular group, with a

history of defiance of hardship and oppression in Ireland, and a reputation for distrusting

36 “The Omnibus Riot,” Chicago Tribune, July 17, 1862, 4; “A Plea For Order,” Chicago Tribune, July 18, 1862, 2; “The Spirit of Oppression,” Chicago Tribune, July 17, 1862, 1; “Mobbing Negroes” Chicago Tribune, July 15, 1864, 4. 37 Clark, Irish Relations, 144; Arnold Shankman, "Black on Green: Afro-American Editors on Irish Independence, 1840-1921," Phylon 41, no.3 (3rd Qtr., 1980): 285-286; Drake and CaytonB,lack Metropolis 42-44. 102

outsiders in general, not only African Americans. Most importantly, almost all Irish

immigrants were manual workers, a high percentage of them unskilled laborers.

Animosity toward African Americans following emancipation was not necessarily a

product of being Irish, but a product of being men and providers immersed in a labor

system less reliant on apprenticeships and skilled work, within which barriers to entry

were wearing away. Blacks were feared competitors in this labor market.38

While factory production in industrializing cities like Chicago eliminated competition from artisans and craftsmen and depressed the wages of an increasingly interchangeable workforce, being a good provider, a breadwinner, remained the essence of manhood. As a consequence, daily labor suddenly presented male wage earners not only with a lack of means but with a crisis of masculinity, one that working-class men resolved by redefining the manly ideal, rebelling against antiquated Victorian standards.

The new concept was characterized by a more primal definition of manhood. It was performed during men’s leisure hours at saloons and billiard halls, where its advocates proved through violent ritual their toughness, honor, ferocity, and prowess.39

Simultaneously, race became increasingly important component of working-class manhood. A white racial identity provided free laborers with what WEB Dubois called a

“psychological wage,” which helped to alleviate anxieties over social immobility and

fears of dependency through a sturdy confidence in the superiority of the white race. “He

began to want, not comfort for all men but power over other men,” wrote Du Bois of the

postbellum white worker, “He did not love humanity and he hated niggers.” By the early

twentieth century, ideas about white supremacy were the basis of a larger ideology that

38 Funchion, “Irish Chicago,” 73-77. 39 Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bareknuckle Prizefighting in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 140-1 103

justified claims to power made by white men. Collectively, American-born men of Celtic

heritage sought desperately to share in Anglo-Saxon social privilege, and so the Irish

spearheaded the cause of white supremacy, driven by an assumed biological superiority

of all Caucasians.40

Race prejudice, fueled by an assemblage of social and cultural factors, earned the

Irish a national reputation for intolerance and violence among African Americans in early

twentieth century America. A writer in the Indianapolis Freeman explained in 1904,

"The Irish, as is shown in their daily history, are the most prejudiced race of all toward a black man. In the North the word 'nigger' comes almost exclusively from [the children of] this race . . . [and] is taught to them in their homes and through popular songs." The feeling became mutual. In 1919, The Messenger, a black publication out of New York

City, declared plainly, "Irishmen [are] the race which Negroes as a whole dislike most."41

In many Irish American families and communities, race prejudice was handed

down to younger generations by word of mouth or by practice. James T. Farrell made

this continuing pattern of racism a theme throughout his stories and novels. In these

stories older generations of Irish Americans complain about the roosting of “niggers and

whores” in their neighborhoods. Fathers warn young ones to "put pepper on the tails” of

the “eight-balls" in order to "keep these smokes in their place and not let ‘em get gay.”

They suggest that one day "all the Irish from back of the yards will go into the black belt,

and there’ll be a lot of niggers strung up on lampposts with their gizzards cut out."42

40 David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, (London, New York: Verso, 1991), 6, 123; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 5. 41 Shankman, "Black on Green,” 284-85. 42 Farrell, Studs Lonigan, 14, 80. 104

Farrell’s Irish American boys accept the racist attitudes of their parents. When

one boy encounters “groups of Negroes lolling and talking on the corner,” he is afraid,

“because at home they always said that niggers would do things to him, and you could

never trust a nigger.” Some more brazen adolescents tussle with African American boys

in public parks because "Niggers didn’t have any right in a white man’s park." They

adopt their fathers’ matter and manner of conversation when they discuss with one

another "the niggers that’s gonna overrun the south side.” By the early twentieth century,

racial intolerance was an established part of ethnic identity for many Irish Americans.

James T. Farrell expressed it succinctly when he wrote that Studs Lonigan and his cohort

“couldn’t understand an Irishman being a nigger-lover.”43





In his study of the Chicago 1919 race riot, William Tuttle argues that, in addition

to housing and politics, “the riot was also a violent outcrop of the long-standing discord between white and black job competitors in the Chicago labor market.” While race, ethnicity, and labor in Chicago will be addressed in Chapter 3, it is worth emphasizing here that few stockyards workers took active part in the violence during the riot. Black stockyards workers returning home from work were victims of assaults instigated not by fellow packing house laborers, but by 16 to 21 year old neighborhood gang members.

When black laborers left the yards they were met by “gangs of these so-called 'Athletic

Clubs,'” according to Mary McDowell. “This newer generation of Irish were the sons of

43 James T. Farrell, My Baseball Diary (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), 47; Farrell, Studs Lonigan, 110, 196-97, 408. 105

Irish laborers in the packing houses and stock-yards,” wrote the Illinois Association for

Criminal Justice in their 1929 crime survey, "averse to the plodding, seasonal, heavy and odoriferous labor of their parents."44

Youth gangs were not unique to a particular area of Chicago, especially among

the sons of working-class ethnic whites. Frederick Thrasher counted more than 1300

organized gangs throughout the city in the 1920s. But social and cultural conditions in

the hostile area culminated in some of the most dangerous gangs in Chicago. They were

unusually brutal and territorial. “There is the Canaryville bunch in there and the

Hamburg bunch,” explained one Chicago police officer to the Riot Commission about the

hostile area, “It is a pretty tough hole in there.” In these neighborhoods, white gangs

known as the “Dukies” and “Shielders” battled over turf in the form of public parks and

playgrounds. However, they joined forces in patrolling the area against blacks. Among

African-American youths, the gangs west of Wentworth were known as the “Mickies”

because the Irish were so prevalent among them. Mary McDowell described the hostile

area as a place “where the Irish dominate and where the community feeling of the young

Irish toughs ran high.”45

44 William M. Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Atheneum Press, 1970), 109; John H. Wigmore ed., The Illinois Crime Survey (Chicago: Illinois Association for Criminal Justice, 1929), 1002. 45 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 12; McDowell, “Prejudice,” 31; Shankman, "Black on Green,” 284-85; Frederick M. Thrasher, The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 138-39. 106

Members of a street gang called the “Woodlawn Boy Bandits” in 1907. Gangs were numerous throughout Chicago, but especially in the hostile area. Source: Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum.

Irish gangs were known for their pugnacity, “not only do they defend themselves but they seem to look for trouble,” noted Frederick Thrasher. Ragen’s Colts, perhaps

Chicago’s largest and most notorious gang, operated from their clubhouse at Fifty-

Second and Halsted Streets, five blocks south of the stockyards. The Colts were the model “club gang,” organized and registered with the city as an “athletic club.” One member boasted Ragen’s Colts territory to include the blocks between Cottage Grove and

107

Ashland Avenue between Forty-Third and Sixty-Third Streets, roughly an area of three square miles. The Colts’ motto was “Hit me and you hit two thousand.”46

Demographic data supports suggestions of swollen gang ranks in the hostile area.

The 1920 census reveals that in the neighborhoods making up the district fewer young

adults were in school, particularly among those within the 16 to 21 age range most

aggressive during the rioting. School attendance among hostile area children between the

ages of seven and fifteen was largely consistent with the rest of the city. However, only

10.5 percent of boys and girls ages sixteen to twenty attended school in the hostile area,

compared to over 17.5 percent citywide. Sixteen and seventeen year old boys attended

school at a rate of over 30 percent across Chicago, but in the hostile area only 18 percent

of boys this age attended school. As boys got older the contrast in school attendance

grew even starker; 4.8 percent of eighteen and nineteen year old boys attended school in

the hostile area compared to 13.5 percent citywide, while for twenty year olds the

percentages were 3.3 percent for the hostile area versus 8.5 percent citywide. 264 boys

and girls between the ages of sixteen and twenty reported living in central hostile area

census tracts 377 and 378 in 1920; among them, nine attended school.47

It is doubtful that many of these boys were working. Their lack of formal education would not have afforded them much in the way of employment opportunities.

Perhaps as factory hands, but all of them were white and most of them were native born, and a 1924 study of Chicago’s manufacturing industries found that nearly 80 percent of unskilled laborers were foreign-born or African-American. And the hostile area boasted

46 Tuttle, Race Riot, 199; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 13-14; Thrasher, The Gang (1963), 138-9. Andrew J. Diamond, Mean Streets: Chicago Youths and the Everyday Struggle for Empowerment in the Multiracial City, 1908-1969 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 28. 47 Burgess and Newcomb, Census Tract Data 1920; U.S. Census of Population and Housing, 1920. 108

a relatively low percentage of manufacturing employees when compared to surrounding

districts.48 For the most part, these second and third generation whites looked with

disdain upon the prospect of factory work. Streamlining the production process in

Chicago’s factories (in the meatpacking industry in particular) meant that laborers

worked faster, were supervised more closely, and were likely engaged in repetitious work

requiring less skill. The work was monotonous, the take home pay meager, and many of

these boys knew firsthand the mean existence that came with the job.49

The hostile area was ripe with other economic opportunities; easier paydays for young men willing to shirk the law. “The trouble with Chi when I was growing up in the time of World War I was that being honest on our block starved you,” confessed A.B. to

Stephen Longstreet, “So when easy money come along for a gink like me—lookout for a crap game, or driving a beer truck . . . all we wide [sic] guys we took.” Organized street gangs were the way into this netherworld of illegal and shady dealings.50

The education of the street tough began in early adolescence and took place in and

around local poolrooms, gang clubhouses, and parks. “Loafing” was a common pastime, defined by Thrasher as “telling dirty stories, indulging in low horseplay, or annoying

passersby.” Other activities included “smoking, chewing, crap-shooting, card-playing,

pool, and bowling.” Gang boys learned to play craps as soon as they were old enough to

48 According to the 1920 census, about forty percent of employed men in hostile area neighborhoods worked in the “Manufacturing and Mechanical Industries,” an occupational category that included most lower-level, wage-paying jobs available to working-class young adults. The Hamburg and Canaryville neighborhoods that made up the hostile area east of the stockyards stood in contrast to other tracts in the larger Bridgeport community area, where men working in manufacturing sometimes represented fifty and sixty percent of those employed. Among the new immigrants in the New City community area tracts west of the stockyards, where an even larger number of foreign-born lived, employment in manufacturing among men was as high as eighty-six percent. Burgess and Newcomb, Census Tract Data 1920, Table 53 “Occupations: Bridgeport” 49 Diamond, Mean Streets, 31,56. James R. Barrett, “Unity and Fragmentation: Class, Race, and Ethnicity on Chicago’s South Side, 1900-1922,” Journal of Social History 18, no. 1 (Autumn, 1984): 40. 50 Longstreet, Chicago, 510. 109

hold the dice. Wayward adolescents hung around street corners, camped near railroad

tracks surrounding the stock yards, or slept under sidewalks or in undeveloped prairie

lots. They broke into boxcars, robbing meat from the packinghouses, other goods when they could get them. They scavenged for wire and scrap metal, and stole automobiles for joy riding. Alcohol, opium and cocaine were not uncommon recreational drugs among the members. Many were truants and had put in time in jail or juvenile homes, but their criminal records were a matter of pride in the group.51

Ostensibly, life on the streets was an escape from the constraints of wage work

and bourgeois expectations: freedom from the punch clock, the lack of upward mobility,

the sexual confines of courtship, or the social contract of marriage. But among young

men on the streets were powerful pressures to conform. Gang life was characterized by a

nihilistic outlook and an aversion to more tender or thoughtful sensibilities; a narrow

definition of masculinity limited to the pursuit of being “tough and the real stuff.” The

lifestyle led precocious working-class youth to “feel like men,” according to Mary

McDowell. 52

Violence was an integral part of gang culture. A gang earned its reputation by

fighting, and hierarchy within each organization was determined likewise. Gangs

operated within a larger urban working-class milieu characterized by brutish conditions, especially in the hostile area and others near manufacturing districts. Disease and child mortality rates were unusually high. Factories stank. Outside the meatpacking plants the sounds of dying animals carried from more than 2000 livestock pens; inside workers

51 Thrasher, The Gang (2000), 21; Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912), 64. 52 Fanning, “The Literary Dimension,” 122; Farrell, Studs Lonigan, 118; “Statement From Miss McDowell (February, 1922),” Mary McDowell Papers, Box 4 Folder 20a, Chicago History Museum; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 55. 110

were maimed by factory equipment and sharp implements. The psychological reaction to

such an environment was a hardening of wills and the suppression of softer emotions

among men for whom they did not serve the purpose of survival. Surely many gang

members took pleasure in doling out pain. In a world of chaotic suffering, to inflict a

beating was to have some control over the violence, to have a say in where and when it

took place, and how much was enough.53



In their Illinois Crime Survey, the Illinois Association for Criminal Justice called

Ragen’s Colts “the sentinels of the frontier of the white race against the spread of the

colored race.” And by several accounts, the Colts weighed in heavily during the riot.

When stockyard workers were interviewed by the U.S. Department of Labor following

the riot, investigators found “considerable mention in the testimony of an Irish athletic

association, known as Regan's Colts.” After a raid by two to three hundred whites on black homes along Shields Avenue on the South Side, a white resident of the block testified to the Riot Commission that he had been warned by several of the men, “If you open your mouth against ‘Ragen’s’ we will not only burn your house down but we will

‘do’ you.” Mary McDowell testified that settlement house residents reported Colts members storming Forty-Seventh Street during the riot, firearms in hand, shouting “We’ll get those niggers!” Chicago’s dailies reported on the Colts involvement, and the Daily

News published testimony from “[s]everal colored persons,” who claimed to have been

53 Gorn, Manly Art, 144-47. 111 told by white youths looting a candy store, “Remember, it’s Ragen’s Colts you’re dealing with.”54

Unidentified young white men stone to death an African American man during the rioting. Source: Digital scan from Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922).

The Colts were not alone responsible for the violence and destruction during the

riot, other gangs in the hostile area were participants as well. Among others mentioned in

testimony to the Riot Commission following the riot, the “Lorraine Club” was implicated

54 Wigmore, Illinois Crime Survey, 1003; United States Department of Labor Division of Negro Economics, The Negro at Work During the World War and During Reconstruction: Statistics, Problems, and Policies Relating to the Greater Inclusion of Negro Wage Earners in American Industry and Agriculture (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1921), 27; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 14, 55; “Ragen’s Colts Deny Riot Responsibility,” Chicago Daily News, August 2, 1919, 3. Even James T. Farrell, in his fictional account of the riot as experienced by boys in the Washington Park area, implicates the stockyards gang. As Studs Lonigan and crew prepare to launch from their Washington Park neighborhood to join the fray, one character tells the gang “how the Regan Colts were marching into the black belt and knocking off the niggers.” In Farrell, Studs Lonigan, 217. 112 in violence around Forty-Seventh Street and Wentworth Avenue on July 29, burning homes, driving out black families, and stealing away with their furniture. Reportedly, the

Lorraines were also responsible for attacking an undertaker as he attempted to remove the body of a fallen black man. On Monday, members of the “Aylward Club” armed with clubs waited for blacks as they left the stock yards and then beat them in front of police officers, who stood by watching. “Our Flag Club” operated around Forty-Seventh Street and Union Avenue. Police recognized a number of them dragging a black man from a street car; the man was later killed. Members of the “Sparkler’s Club” loitered at a fire at

5919 Wentworth Avenue, where two black families lived; three Sparklers were later tried in juvenile court for making off with a photograph and silverware from the home.55

Out of fear for their safety—and sometimes under explicit threats of violence— few citizens came forth to testify against Chicago’s gangs, backed as many of them were by powerful political patrons. However, members of the occupying Illinois state militia were not so reticent in their discussions with the Riot Commission. A colonel reported taking gunfire in the riot zone from the Hamburg Athletic Club, Ragen's Colts, the

Emeralds, “and a whole bunch of them,” as he put it, “who didn't like to be controlled!"

He continued, "They would load up heavy trucks with rowdies and try to force through the lines. They'd come tooting their horns and having back pressure explosions like gatling guns." 56

The gangs were so hostile to the militia because they were used to operating with impunity, especially when it came to terrorizing the local African American population.

In short, some gangs were above the law. At one point during the rioting, soldiers of the

55 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 13-15 56 Ibid., 42, 13. 113

Illinois reserve militia took into custody ten men they claimed were members of Ragen’s

Colts, turning them over to the police. The militiamen charged that the men were intoxicated, threatening to “take away their arms and invade the Negro district.” Police at the stockyards station, however, promptly released the gang members for lack of evidence, denying the suspects were members of Ragen’s Colts.57

One way to think about the 1919 Chicago riot is as a particularly violent week

during an ongoing race war on the streets of these south side working-class

neighborhoods. For years before and after the riot, an army of local street toughs,

estimated in the thousands, enforced the dead line at Wentworth Avenue. Learning the

ropes of Chicago neighborhoods in 1918, poet Langston Hughes was pummeled by a group of Irish boys west of the dead line “who said they didn't allow niggers in that neighborhood." Hughes’ beating was not a mere petty crime, it was part of a long strategy of force and intimidation.58

In his haunting tale of pursuit by a “whole gang of blood-thirsty hoodlums,” a

black university student and war veteran recounted events after attempting to transfer

street cars west of the dead line. This was in September, 1920, fourteen months after the

race riot. The man was “chased and hunted for five hours and a half” through streets and

alleys, along railroad tracks, and in hiding among weeds in “No Man’s Land” between

Halsted and Wentworth. From his hiding place the hunted man witnessed whites who he believed to be members of Ragen’s Colts hold up an automobile “at the point of a revolver in the hands of one member of a gang while they searched the car apparently looking for colored men." The pursued man finally crossed Wentworth Avenue at

57 "Militiamen Arrest Ten; Charge Men Made Threats," Chicago Tribune, August 6, 1919, 2. 58 Cohen and Taylor, American Pharoah, 29-30 114

Thirty-Seventh Street near dawn. "I vowed that morning never to let the sun set on me west of Wentworth Avenue, and never to go into that section unprotected, even in daytime."59

The Defender implicated Ragen’s Colts in the murder of a forty-seven year old black man, a Union Coal Company laborer, viciously attacked and killed by a white mob near his home around Fifty-Fifth Street and Shields Avenue in late June, 1919.

Following this murder, and the slaying of another black man by a white mob in the same area days later, anonymous authors posted signs along Garfield Boulevard calling for community assistance in their attempt to “’get’ all the ‘niggers’ on July, 4, 1919.” Local police made only a half-hearted effort to investigate the murders. About a month earlier, it was said that ten members of Ragen’s Colts struck a black man repeatedly and ejected him from a saloon onto the street. The man had entered a bar at State and Fifty-First

Streets and simply attempted to get service. When he man defiantly called out the white men on the street, the gang entered another saloon nearby, obtained firearms, and then beat him mercilessly. A black police officer later arrested the white men based on the testimony of witnesses, but their cases were dismissed by a local judge for “lack of evidence.”60

These events attest to the complicity of law enforcement officials, politicians, and community members in the terrorizing of African Americans. Public threats, manhunts, criminal brutality: all and more were tolerated by a populous with a collective desire to keep blacks out of white districts. Gangs enforced racial segregation in an urban environment where it was not sanctioned by law. For many, street gangs were a

59 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 481-84. 60 “Ragan’s Colts Start Riot,” Defender, June 28, 1919, 1; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 54-57. 115

necessary evil during the early years of the Great Migration. “While adults frowned on activities which undermined the quality of community life,” writes Christopher Adamson in his study of American youth gangs, “they approved of the youth gang’s role in keeping strangers, especially blacks, off their streets and beaches, and out of their parks, baseball diamonds, swimming pools, saloons and dance halls.”61

Moreover, “criminal” and “citizen” were not so clearly delineated in hostile area

neighborhoods. Both shared values and cultural experiences growing up on the city’s

social and economic margins. Gang members were tied to the neighborhood—

religiously, ethnically, and socially—and often performed community service and had

connections with the local church. Gangs represented their neighborhoods in local

athletic events, carried the neighborhood reputation with them in street brawls, and

brought honor to the community with their exploits. “What needs to be appreciated,”

stated the Illinois Association for Criminal Justice, “is the element of the genuine

popularity of the gangster, home-grown in the neighborhood gang, idealized in the

morality of the neighborhood.”62

Politicians especially protected and nurtured local gangs. Organized gangs

registered with the city as athletic clubs were tied to the local political organization,

usually by a patron who bankrolled their activities. These clubs fielded athletic teams,

and also functioned as social organizations, but the members’ main purpose was to serve

as muscle for their benefactors. “I think they are athletic only with their fists and brass

knuckles and guns,” quipped the foreman of the grand jury investigating the riot.

61 Adamson, “Defensive Localism in White and Black,” 278. 62 Mark H. Haller, “Urban Crime and Criminal Justice: The Chicago Case,” The Journal of American History 57, no. 3 (1970), 620; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 16; Wigmore, Illinois Crime Survey, 1001. 116

Athletic clubs, wrote the members of the Riot Commission, “really are organizations of

hoodlums and criminals formed for the interest of politics.”63

As boys in neighborhood gangs neared voting age they drew the interest of

elected officials. A local alderman or some other machine politician rented commercial

space to serve as a clubhouse for the boys and funneled money into the organization.

“Every street gang in Chicago,” claimed Thrasher, “aspires to be an athletic club with

rooms of its own.” Traditionally, athletic club members were in their late teens and early

twenties, but by 1919, politicians were recruiting boys in their early teens. The boss was

a ubiquitous presence at club social functions. 64

In addition to club subsidies, politicians put gang members on official payrolls

and provided them with protection from the police. Cops turned a blind eye to craps

games in alleyways, truants hung in poolrooms unimpeded, minors sipped liquor in

saloons unmolested. Politicians took a cut of the profits from illicit activities, but votes were the most important commodity exchanged with to the patron for his recourse. “The relation of the gangster and the politician becomes most obvious to the public on election day,” explained the Illinois Crime Association in its report. According to Thrasher, gangs controlled, “votes of its members, hangers-on, and friends,” and performed for the politician, “various types of ‘work’ at the polls, such as slugging, intimidation, kidnapping, vandalism (tearing down signs etc.), ballot-fixing, repeating, stealing ballot

boxes, miscounting, falsifying returns, etc.”65

63 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 16; Wigmore, Illinois Crime Survey, 1001. 64 Thomas Lee Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Immigrants, Blacks, and Reformers in Chicago, 1880- 1930 (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1991), 278; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 55; Thrasher, The Gang (2000), 156-7. 65 Wigmore, Illinois Crime Survey, 1001; Thrasher, The Gang (2000), 162-3; Jane Addams, “Recreation as a Public Function in Urban Communities,” The American Journal of Sociology 17, no. 5 (March, 1912), 617. 117

Ragen’s Colts, the largest and most famous athletic club on Chicago’s south side, boasted a lavish “clubhouse”—with all the modern amenities, including a gymnasium— at Fifty-Second and Halsted Streets. President Frank Ragen served as Cook County

Commissioner and was, according to the Riot Commission, “a politician whose record and methods have long offended the decent citizenship of Chicago.” The club permeated all areas of social life for men from ages 18 to 30 in the neighborhoods south of

Canaryville. The Colts fielded highly competitive football, baseball, and rugby teams.

Boxers, runners, and wrestlers trained in the club gymnasium. Dances, picnics, and an annual minstrel show attracted swells of locals.

The club enjoyed support from local professionals “in every line in the neighborhood,” and provided an organizational training ground for future city politicians.

While refraining from calling them out by name, Thrasher was clearly referring to

Ragen’s Colts in The Gang when he described “[o]ne of the most politically powerful athletic clubs . . . out of which were to come athletes, alderman, police captains, county

treasurers, sheriffs, and so on.”66

The Colts’ function went beyond social gatherings, athletics, and political education; the club earned their keep on election day, when “the knuckles of the club members made themselves felt at the polls,” explained Ladesco. But Regan’s ruffians did not limit their felonious activities to election season. Among politician-sponsored gangs, the Colts were “the worst type,” composed of “bandits” and “holdup boys,” according Mary McDowell. Despite their lawless behavior, gang members rarely faced arrest or prosecution, given the clout of their benefactor. “[Frank] Ragen’s influence has

66 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 54-5; Thrasher, The Gang (2000), 158. 118

often been able to protect the ‘Colts’ from punishment for criminal acts,” lamented the

Riot Commission, “including the persecution of Negroes.”67

It would be a mistake to think of assaults against African Americans as empty

hatred, for the violence had a purpose. More than just a racial boundary, the dead line at

Wentworth Avenue also represented a division of political power. Irish American

Democrats largely controlled the Bridgeport and New City community areas in Chicago’s

fourth and fifth wards, but the influx of African American migrants had strengthened the

electoral power of second ward black Republicans to the east. News reporter Carl

Sandburg called Chicago’s black second ward at this time, “probably the strongest

effective unit of political power, good or bad, in America." Opening hostile area

neighborhoods to black residents and voters directly threatened the white power

establishment upon which so many locals relied for their livelihoods.68

Those who made up the local power structure in neighborhoods west of the Black

Belt came from insular communities. Politicians, judges, policemen, and gang members

shared similar experiences and values. By necessity and preference ward heelers and

precinct captains preferred maintaining order to upholding the law. Arrests and

prosecutions overburdened Chicago’s criminal justice system. Local judges had the

power to determine which cases were heard, and subsequently who went to prison.

Political leaders appointed judges who were loyal to the party, and thus would show

67 Wigmore, Illinois Crime Survey, 1001-2; “Statement From Miss McDowell (February, 1922),” Mary McDowell Papers, Box 4 Folder 20a, Chicago History Museum; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 55 68 Carl Sandburg, The Chicago Race Riots, July, 1919 (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2009), 4; For more on political tensions, see William Tuttle’s chapter “politics” in Tuttle, Race Riot. 119

leniency to criminal members of gangs and others connected with the local political faction.69

Control of the local police precinct was critical to the operation and authority of

the local machine. Like judgeships, jobs with the police force and promotions within

were rewards for service to political factions. Policemen could be found taking part in

everything from distributing campaign posters to collecting levies upon local businesses, money used for financing the political organization. “Police protection,” wrote Thrasher,

“often extended at the command of the political boss, has always played an important

part in the immunities enjoyed by gangs and their members.”70

Police officers were tied socially to the neighborhoods they patrolled, frequenting

saloons, barbershops, and retail stores on their beat. In the late nineteenth century, half of

those making up the Chicago police force were Irish immigrants or Irish Americans. A

1930 study found that 76 percent of Chicago’s police captains were of Irish background.71

As men of Irish heritage, many police officers shared in the “tradition” of race

antagonism, and Chicago police officers had a reputation for harsh treatment of African

Americans. For a black man "to seek polis protection,” admitted Mr. Dooley in 1900, “is

th' polite name f'r fracture iv th' skull." Much police harassment of blacks went

unreported, but arrest reports are revealing. In 1918, African Americans accounted for

9% of citywide arrests, when they represented roughly 3% of Chicago’s population. A

69 In 1926, of more than 13,000 felony arrests in Cook County, 70 percent were dismissed before trial. After trial, less than 1 percent were found guilty of the original charge, 2.6 percent plead guilty to the original charge, and 11 percent were found guilty of a lesser charge, usually after pleading guilty. Haller, “Urban Crime,” 620, 633. 70 Mark H. Haller, “Historical Roots of Police Behavior: Chicago, 1890-1925,” Law & Society Review 10, no. 2 (Winter, 1976), 307; Thrasher, The Gang (1963), 328. 71 Haller, “Police Behavior,” 308; Haller, “Urban Crime,” 620. 120

study from 1914-1919 found that blacks on trial were more likely to be convicted than

whites, and even more so among those charged with serious crimes. Of the 703 black

defendants studied, most were unskilled workers with very little education.72

The culture of crime and punishment in Chicago’s poorer neighborhoods did not suddenly shift during the week of the riot. Police arrested black men at a much higher rate and were more willing to ignore, and occasionally assist in, white crimes against blacks. Mary McDowell complained that, while Ragen’s Colts ran roughshod over the neighborhood waving firearms and shouting epithets, “policeman in vicinity . . . did nothing to stop them,” and she added that gang members beat blacks with clubs as they were exiting the stockyards “while the police were looking on.” 73

Shockingly, police stations were located at both of the stockyards most violent

corners described previously. At the corner of Thirty-Fifth and Halsted Streets, where

eight black men were injured, stood the Fifteenth Precinct station, headquarters of the

Eleventh Police district. Five African Americans were assaulted further south on Halsted

Street at Forty Seventh, outside the “stockyards station,” or Thirteenth Precinct, headquarters of the 10th district.74

Black victims of white assaults made numerous complaints after the riot

concerning police apathy toward and complicity in white crimes. After witnessing a

black man getting beaten by whites on the Forty-Seventh Street elevated train platform, a white police officer reportedly arrested the black man for rioting; he was held in jail for a

72 Finley Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley's Philosophy, (New York: R. H. Russell, 1900), 218; James Langland, ed., Chicago Daily News Almanac and Year-Book for 1920 (Chicago Daily News Co. 1919), 902; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 320-30. 73 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 55; McDowell, “Prejudice,” 31. 74 Langland, ed., Daily News Almanac 1920, 902; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 320-30. 121 week. The Riot Commission reported that the gangs felt confident that "there need be no fear of the coppers from the station at the Yards for they were all fixed and told to lay off on club members." Police officers were said to have been riding along in automobiles with gang members to protect the rioters from arrest.75

Police officers search African American men for weapons at a police station during the riot. Source: Digital scan from Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922).

75 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 34, 12. 122

While police officers assisted white rioters, they used deadly force with African

Americans. Of the thirty-eight riot deaths, the police killed at least six black men and no

whites. At the Angelus apartment building, they fired into a crowd of African

Americans, killing three, possibly four, and wounding others. Before the militia arrived,

Chicago police did little to hinder the movement of whites or vehicles operated by whites

in and out of the Black Belt. But the continuous personal searches of black men entering

and exiting the area by police along the dead line, under the auspices of Chicago’s new

Sadler gun law, resulted in numerous arrests and fines for carrying concealed weapons

and disorderly conduct. It is likely that many of these men were stockyards workers who had armed themselves knowing they had to traverse neighborhoods of rioting whites on the way to work.76

In his testimony one year after the riot, Officer Daniel Callahan (the policeman

who was suspended and reinstated after he refused to arrest George Stauber for hurling

rocks at Eugene Williams at the beach on that fateful afternoon) was quite explicit about

the connection between the police officers and neighborhood white men, and their mutual

attitude toward blacks:

So far as I can learn the black people have since history began despised the white people and have always fought them . . . . . It wouldn't take much to start another riot, and most of the white people of this district are resolved to make a clean-up this time. . . . . If a Negro should say one word back to me or should say a word to a white woman in the park, there is a crowd of young men of the district . . . who would procure arms and fight shoulder to shoulder with me if trouble should come from the incident.77

76 “Council Acts on Ten Moves to Stop Riots,” Chicago Tribune, August 3, 1919, 1; “All Riot Weapon Toters to Be Held Under New Law,” Chicago Tribune, July 31, 1919, 3; “Negroes Join the Plea For More Guards at Work,” Chicago Tribune, August 1, 1919, 3; “Brundage, Hoyne to Punish Mobs,” Chicago Tribune, July 31, 1919, 1. 77 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 451. 123

According to the Riot Commission, of the 520 persons injured during the riot, 342

were black. A police report on criminal activity during the riot accused 154 blacks and

75 whites of crimes. Following the riot, the state’s attorney reported indictments for 81

blacks and 47 against whites. According to these reports, during the riot blacks

represented about two-thirds of those injured and two-thirds of the criminals.78

At one point following the arrests of rioters, the grand jury walked out in protest

after the state’s attorney had failed "to supply it with information of crimes perpetrated by whites against blacks." The maneuver effectively brought the hearings to a halt until evidence against whites could be gathered and heard. In the end, only nine riot-related cases resulted in indictments. Three cases against four white men resulted in two convictions, while six cases against seventeen black men resulted in three convictions.79

Street gang members were responsible for much of the rioting, but the riot cover up was a larger conspiracy among parties interested in protecting violent offenders in a political climate conducive to dropped charges, failed investigations, and jury acquittals.

Immediately following the race riot the governor and state’s attorney promised swift justice. But troubles securing evidence and witness testimony, the fiscal costs of separate grand jury and county coroner investigations, lessened the enthusiasm of government officials. Meanwhile, most Chicagoans wanted news of the race riot to go away, damaging as the story was to the reputation of the great city. While the complicity of hostile area community members needs to be recognized, what also should not be overlooked is the hypocrisy of those who tried to distance themselves from the racial tensions along the dead line.

78 Ibid., 35. 79 Ibid., 35, 48. 124



White working-class men and boys between the ages of 16 and 21 from the city’s athletic clubs, contributed disproportionately to the violence during the riot. Chicagoans recognized this. The large role played by “hoodlums” in the rioting was how the story was told. The hoodlum narrative contained several self-serving assumptions for well- meaning white Chicagoans of greater social privilege and education who did not condone nor fully understand hostile area values or neighborhood economies. Those who embraced the hoodlum narrative reached some combination of five conclusions: 1.) Race rioting was for unreasonable, unlawful, uncivilized men. 2.) White and black hoodlums were equally to blame. 3.) One man was as good as another, race did not matter, but it was understandable that blacks and whites did not want to live near one another. 4.) Yes, there was a race problem, but the solution would come from enlightened men of both races, not impulsive cretins. 5.) The fighting on the street must stop; it is hurting the city’s reputation and giving decent people a bad name.

An editorial from the Chicago Herald Examiner titled "Sane Men and Rioters," published while the conflict still raged, is a fine example of the hoodlum narrative:

Race rioting is asinine. . . . A mob by nature is opposed to peace. . . .There is just as much sense in expanding an isolated clash between Negroes and whites into a general race engagement as there would be in bald-headed men and red-headed men shooting each other because of a rumor that a bald-headed man and a red- headed man had exchanged shots in another town. . . . Rioting is barbarism. It is defiance of law. . . . Hoodlums Negro and hoodlums white--men with chips on their shoulders, who would much rather engage in a brawl than witness orderly operations of the law--usually constitute the backbone of any rioting.

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The editorial went on to explain how the riff-raff, black and white, threatened the city’s

best interests.

. . . In the cracking of heads nobody wins. The entire community loses. Certain Southern [sic] newspapers will take good care to see that Chicago gets a black eye in their territories in consequence of the actions of a few thoughtless individuals among us. . . . Should we care? Ask the bankers and the business men who have been striving to weave the commercial interests of Southern states into our own through the Mississippi Valley Association with the object of making Chicago the greatest city in the world. . . . the best type of man is absent in any riot.80

There were both veritable truths and underlying deceptions within this narrative.

One mistruth lurked in placing blame on black and white hoodlums equally, when there were many more white gangs operating in the city during this time, many more of whom were involved in beating and killing a greater number of black men during the riot. But in one sense, “hoodlumism” effectively placed blame where it belonged, on the shoulders of street thugs; in another however, it was an open condemnation of working-class values by the wealthier classes, who through their grandstanding sought to distance themselves from racial tensions rooted in social and cultural realities they the wealthy themselves had a hand in creating. Manufacturing employers reinforced divisions between workers to depress wages, industrialists had little concern about working conditions, bankers enjoyed the billions in transactions resulting from increased profits, and consumers enjoyed the price and convenience of mass-manufactured goods. Yet, too many admonished the hoodlum; a criminal but also a boy rejecting a condition of industrial servitude.

Hoodlumism had a geographic pattern, and considering the number of factories in the vicinity and the number of poor, native-born whites therein, the hostile area was high risk. Carl Sandburg observed following the riot: "There was one section of the city that

80 "Sane Men and Rioters" Chicago Herald and Examiner, July 29, 1919. 126

supplied more white hoodlums than any other section. It was the district around the

stockyards and packing houses."81

There were three ways that critics and social theorists linked delinquent behavior to working-class family life. The first argued that criminal behavior was innate to the boy. The second suggested that the hoodlum was a product of the home environment, while the third pointed to elements outside of the home.

The hoodlum critique took aim at the city’s young criminals, without much discussion of whom they were or where they came from. “Hoodlums are the nucleus of a mob,” wrote the members of the coroner’s riot jury, “the young, the idle, vicious, and in many instances degenerate and criminal, impatient of restraint of law, gather together, and when fortified by sufficient numbers, start out on a mission of disorder, law- breaking, destruction, and murder.” For editorialists, there was something innate about the hoodlum; he was born, not made, and there was no sense in trying to understand his criminal impulses. "Weapons and mob spirit are the means of expression of the unthinking,” read a Tribune editorial, “The hoodlum sees a chance to heave a brick, heaves it . . . It's no good trying to impress reason upon such."82

However, among sociologists “hoodlumism” was a class critique, often

articulated in gendered terms, aimed at justifying social difference by way of socialization.83 “The hoodlum is a definite social type,” wrote Thrasher in The Gang,

“He does not hold a job. He is often on the streets or in the poolrooms. He is a loafer

81 Sandburg, Race Riots, 3. 82 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 17; “The Race Riots,” Chicago Tribune, July 30, 1919, 8. 83 Thrasher writes: “Theoretical psychology no longer supports instincts as the basis of human behavior. . . . What writers on the gang have attributed to instinct is the result of pervasive social habits arising out of the human struggle for existence and social preferment. . . . The gang. . . is a function of specific conditions. . . It is not instinct, but experience—the way he is conditioned—that fixes his social relations.” Thrasher, The Gang (2000), 14. 127

and idles away countless hours in smoking, gambling, and rough horseplay. His bravado is always ready to foment a brawl, but he is seldom willing engage in a fair fight unless backed by his pals.” For sociologists, the hoodlum was the criminal byproduct of an upbringing without proper nurturing in a working-class family. “The problem of dealing with the boy can be stated very largely in terms of his leisure hours," wrote Thrasher,

"The most important agency in directing the spare time activities of the boy is the family.

In the underprivileged classes, family life in a large number of cases – either through neglect, misdirection, or suppression – fails to provide for or control the leisure-time

behavior of the adolescent."84

In their 1920 report, members of the Chicago Crime Commission showed concern for “ineffective environments” for children. According to the Crime Commission, while the home environment, “may be conducive to the proper rearing of children into manhood and womanhood, the influence immediately outside the home may be exactly the opposite." The authors noted, “In Chicago our chief district of this character is . . .

‘Canaryville’ and much of the other territory immediately adjacent to the Stock Yards. . .

. It is in this district that ‘athletic clubs’ and other organizations of young toughs and gangsters flourish, and where disreputable poolrooms, hoodlum-infested saloons and other criminal hangouts are plentiful.” The Crime Commission argued that there was nothing wrong with the boys, and that their families did alright with them; it was the gangs and clubs that ruined the boys. 85

In the early years of the century, during the Progressive Era, reformers and

sociologists believed that two factors increased the likelihood that children would

84 Ibid., 27, 135. 85 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 342. 128

become hoodlums: “a gaunt involuntary poverty” and an “ineffective environment.” But

when it came down to specific reforms, the latter carried the day. In the end, middle-

class Chicagoans comprehended criminal and other undesirable behaviors as products of a cultural environment in which community values were inferior to their own. Thus

Chicago’s reformers felt they could control crime and delinquency through "efficiency, elimination of political corruption and favoritism, higher competence for political officials, [and the] creation of a more moral urban environment." Poverty, inequality, the grind of working class life were largely beyond reform. 86

With the First World War, the discrepancies between rich and poor became starker. On the one hand, war made bankers and industrialists even wealthier. The value

of manufactures in Chicago increased from just over $2 billion in 1916 to nearly $4

billion in 1918. Bank clearings in Chicago increased from $20.5 trillion in 1916 to $29.7

trillion in 1919. On the other hand, workers who in good faith agreed not to strike or

make wage demands during the war (including in the meatpacking industry) received lower real wealth and income in a post-war inflationary economy. Chicago experienced

dozens of strikes in 1919. As wealth and income increasingly divided the city, the fear

of “hoodlumism” helped to transform class differences into distinctions of character, and

thereby justify inequality. Native white Protestant reformers failed to recognize that

“ineffective environments,”—that is, white working-class neighborhoods--were not a

product of bereft morality but a response to the inequalities of the new industrial

capitalism. With little social mobility and access to resources in the legitimate world,

86 Sandburg, Race Riots, 4; Haller, “Urban Crime,” 626. 129 underprivileged whites turned to the underworld economy and patronage jobs for their livelihoods. 87

The race riot not only reflected the realities of an ongoing race war, but an ongoing class war as well. Both were articulated in gendered terms, as in this cartoon published on the editorial page of the Chicago Herald on August 1, 1919:

87 Hoyt, Land Values, 222, 488. 130

Behind the “Good Citizen,” with his cool head and sound judgment, stand the hoodlums representing “violence,” “hate,” and “rowdyism.” Deformed, oafish, wearing prison stripes and workers overalls, and looking quite pathological, the representative of

131

bourgeois righteousness casts them out with a wave of his hand. Absent from this image

is anything that would strongly suggest the hoodlums’ race or ethnicity. In this

cartoonist’s view, the riot was not the result of the race problem, but a “hoodlum,” or

class problem.” 88

This is the message the white social elites brought to influential members of the

black community, many of them influenced by the philosophy of Booker T. Washington

and often embarrassed by the appearance and conduct of the black lower classes.

Together, whites explained, the intelligent men of both races would lift up the ignorant

people of the underclasses, who gave the city a bad name.

However, the motivation came from an ideological position that white men of

social esteem imagined was reasonable: there were inherent differences between the

races. “We are swiftly getting to the point where our thoughtful colored fellow citizens

must look the facts in the face,” opined the Tribune, “There will be no political injustice.

There will be social differences. They need not be unjust. They do exist, and they will."

With an implied aversion to the positions taken by less enlightened men of their race,

these whites suggested that, for better or worse, white Chicagoans resented black

encroachment upon their neighborhoods, and that this was understandable. The Tribune

editorial continued, "It may be unjust and unreasonable for whites to resent this so-called

'intrusion' [of blacks into white neighborhoods]. But the whites do resent it. And thus the fact persists. . . . The thinking Negroes must use their influence with their race. They must realize the facts and conditions."89

88 “Beat It!,” Chicago Herald and Examiner, August 1, Editorial Page [cartoon]. 89 “The Race Riots,” Chicago Tribune, July 30, 1919, 8. 132

Through their appeals to a “better class of black men,” northern whites sought a

similar solution to the race problem as their southern counterparts, though northerners

envisioned a more enlightened, benevolent, and benign system of voluntary racial

separation. It was “natural” not to want black neighbors, but it was barbaric to keep

blacks out violently. Whites wanted segregation, and they wanted the blessing of

African Americans for its institution. “I venture to suggest a new phrase, namely,

‘Segregation by agreement,’” wrote a race riot juror in the coroner’s report, “Let the

leaders of both peoples come together and agree for the general good to dwell apart.”90

Whites tried to negotiate segregation peacefully by suggesting it was in the best interest of African Americans. And unruly white working-class hoodlums, beating and killing black men, helped make segregation seem necessary. The riot took the focus off of the systematic prejudice against blacks in politics, housing, jobs, policing, and the justice system, and made a priority the safety of African Americans from a violent white underclass that could not be controlled. Three years later, the Chicago Commission on

Race Relations brought to light many of the social and political injustices that white

Chicagoans like the members of the Tribune editorial board preferred to deny.

But the Riot Commission’s voice was a tiny one. The hoodlum narrative was loud and clear, and oddly enough, reassuring. Few Chicagoans in 1922 wanted to re- think the race riot, especially by way of a seven-hundred page academic volume. Perhaps most important, although Charles S. Johnson, the primary author of the Riot Commission report, would not come out openly against segregation until World War II, the report had a decidedly anti-segregationist tone. And although Chicago’s wealthier whites were quick to condemn working-class hoodlums for their actions during the riot, they desired

90 Cook County Coroner, Race Riots, 60. 133

the same outcome. They differed in their methods, but white Chicagoans for the most part shared an ideological position when it came to race relations: all classes wanted

blacks physically separated from whites in the residential areas of the city.



Tensions between white and black Chicagoans swelled in the months leading up

to Eugene William’s death. Whites wanted to keep African Americans out of white

residential and leisure spaces in the city; blacks were becoming more defiant toward

segregation. But few whites were prepared to take the drastic measures displayed during

the riot, beating and killing African Americans out in the open. The intolerance, fear, and

ignorance shared by many whites, building in response to a rapidly growing, and

increasingly indignant African American population, informed the actions of Irish

American young men living west of the Black Belt, where the violence during the race

riot represented the most extreme expression of a shared desire to keep blacks

geographically sequestered.

These young “hoodlums” were a distinctive urban group, engaged in a

performance of youthful masculinity. Street toughs possessed their own tribal identity.

They valued camaraderie and loyalty in homosocial environments like street corners and

pool rooms. Though the various groups—organized into athletic clubs, as well as less formal groupings—shared a common street culture, their cultural homogeneity was punctuated by struggles for group dominance. Thus, the on-going street brawls over gang territory, as well as election day battles, when gangs and clubs came out in force to

134

get their bosses through, not to mention the organized athletic events, when the exploits

of fellow members—on the baseball diamond, the football field, the wrestling mat, or in

the boxing ring—reflected on the reputation of the entire group.

However, throughout the hostile area and beyond, among the most dangerous

white gangs that patrolled the streets between the stockyards and the Black Belt, the

street tough was a collective identity adopted by a new generation of Irish Americans no

longer content with the prospect of manual labor, but still intent on making claims to

power made by men earning a livelihood.

In the mid-nineteenth century, David Roediger writes, “it was by no means clear

that the Irish were white.” Despite their poverty, members of the working-class made claims to whiteness based on their status as free laborers, as opposed to slaves. In antebellum America, slavery was a state of servitude for which only African Americans were eligible. From this distinction emerged DuBois’ psychological wage of whiteness, and a black/white racial dichotomy, the maintenance of which became an imperative for working-class Irishmen after emancipation.91

Entering the third decade of the twentieth century, the Irish had “become white.”

Farrell suggested as much in his Studs Lonigan trilogy, filled with feelings of dread and

self-pity among Irish American characters, as “white men” in “Irish neighborhoods,”

amidst the encroachment of outsiders, known disparagingly as “shines,” “kikes,” and

“batty foreigners.” However, the threat of the presence of African-American and others

to Irish American racial status in Farrell’s novels was “symbolic rather than actual,”

91 David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, (London, New York: Verso, 1991), 134. 135 writes Irish American Cultural Historian Lauren Onkey, because “Studs Lonigan didn’t have to fear losing whiteness.”92

Working-class racism was rooted, at one time, in collective anxieties about poverty, conformity, and powerlessness in the changing labor market. By the twentieth century race prejudice became entrenched among a new generation of lower-class Irish

American men whose whiteness was unquestioned, but who felt above lowly occupations for “jiggs, and Hunkies, and Polacks”; 93 a new generation whose sense of manliness did not come from their work or their mortgages but increasingly from their physical dominance of foreigners and non-whites, especially blacks who did not “know their place.” The street tough was a particularly malevolent performance of masculinity; characterized by pugnacity and defiance of authority, informed by a white male supremacist ideology.94

Fisticuffs were the modus operandi of the street tough, and the encounters upon which boys and gangs built their reputations.95 And together with racism, fighting made the street tough an elementally Irish-American performance. The Riot Commission

92; Lauren Onkey, “James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan Trilogy and the Anxieties of Race,” Éire-Ireland 40, no. 3&4 (2005), 117; Farrell, Studs Lonigan, (“shines and kikes”) 55, (“batty foreigners”) 108. Farrell uses “white” and “Irish” interchangeably throughout his novels, for example “a good Irish neighborhood” (79) was a part of “white men’s neighborhoods” (14) and “where’ll a white man go” (110) in Farrell, Studs Lonigan. 93 Quote from Studs Lonigan in Farrell, Studs Lonigan, 55. 94 It was a white male supremacist ideology. The manly preeminence of the street tough justified his sexual dominance over women, from whom he demanded satisfaction of his carnal appetites. Ragen’s Colts’ famous dances disgusted members of Chicago’s Juvenile Protective Association, who branded them as “orgies” as wild as “Roman saturnalia.” They involved men costumed as “serving maids” and women dressed in “boy’s attire.” Liquor was sold to “young girls” who would then engage in “obscene conduct.” At other “stag parties” held by athletic clubs, the Association reported nude entertainers, sexual encounters involving one girl and thirty boys, and mass rapes known as “gang bangs.” See New Year Ball of Ragen Colts Branded as Orgy,” Chicago Tribune, January 3, 1918, 11; Clubwomen See Fighting Girls End Wild Dance," Chicago Tribune, March 22, 1915, 14; Philpott, Slum and the Ghetto, 278-79. 95 Members of the same gang fought each other to determine the leadership hierarchy. Skilled boxers and wrestlers were of particular importance to the club. “[E]very gang has it pugs,” remarked Thrasher, “and a flattened nose, a cauliflower ear, or an otherwise battered “phizz,”. . . are marks of distinction.” Thrasher, The Gang (2000), 33. 136

recognized Chicago’s “Irish working people” as being “distinctly hostile to Negroes,” as

well as a “general hostility between the Negroes and the Irish in the United States.” In

his study of gangs, Frederick Thrasher called fighting among the Irish “a national habit,” and observed that bricks were known popularly as “Irish confetti.” These were common stereotypes, characteristics taken out of context by outsiders that did not apply to all members of the group, but for the street tough they served a purpose; when he performed

Irishness, his reputation proceeded him: “Irish gangs are probably the most pugnacious of all,” wrote Thrasher, “not only do they defend themselves but they seem to look for trouble. . . . Irish athletic clubs are probably the most numerous and most vigorous in

Chicago." 96

The clubs west of the Black Belt had Irish reputations and Irish leadership.

African Americans knew them collectively as the “Mickies,” despite their factions and

rivalries. The patron of the Hamburg club was Alderman Joseph McDonough, an

ascending figure in the Irish Democratic machine. Tommy Doyle, member of the Illinois

House of Representatives, and later a member of U.S. Congress, served as Hamburg

president in 1914. Ragen’s Colts were led by a well-known Irish American benefactor,

and a club president named Jimmie O’Brien.97

It is doubtful that all Ragens, the two thousand boasted by club members, were descendants of Irish parents. Mary McDowell described “The Ragen Club,” as “mostly

Irish-American” in her testimony to the Riot Commission. Despite Irish American

political and cultural dominance west of the Black Belt, area residents represented a

mixed bag of European nationalities born in the United States and abroad. Boys 16 to 21

96 Thrasher, The Gang (2000), 72-74. 97 Thrasher, The Gang (2000), 138-39; Wigmore, Illinois Crime Survey, 1003. 137 years old joined gangs, some ethnically homogeneous and others mixed. Sons of Eastern

European laborers clashed with Irish American clubs on the streets, but they strongly desired to be accepted as Americans, and so second generation Poles and Slavs welcomed the beliefs and practices of the assimilated Irish American boys. In a country where race afforded whites social and psychological advantages over other groups, the “street tough” performance was one of the few avenues through which underprivileged children of

European immigrants could make such claims to power.98

The street gang functioned as a means of American assimilation among boys of

European descent. Gangs dissolved ties to the Old Country and its traditional hostilities, and helped boys to find commonality in America based on their performance of gender.

“I never ask what nationality he is,” a Lithuanian gang leader told Frederick Thrasher.

The sentiment was echoed by a Polish gang leader, who declared “Aw, we never ask what nationality dey are.” The boy added, “A Jew or a nigger can be a pal of mine if he’s a good fellow.”99

The Polish boy’s testimony suggests the uncertain position occupied by “new immigrant” children in the racial hierarchy; an African American kid was at once his pal and a nigger. Gang life was a means by which children shed their provincial identities and became members of a homogeneous group of white Americans. In short, gangs produced white boys. “Negro hoodlums do not appear to form organized gangs so readily,” observed the Riot Commission, “Judges of the municipal court said that there

98 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 55; Thrasher, The Gang (2000), 74. 99 Thrasher, The Gang (2000), 74. 138

are no gang organizations among Negroes to compare with those found among young

whites.”100

There were no ethnic distinctions or countries of birth indicated in the death tolls

among “Whites” and “Negroes” or “Colored” listed in Chicago’s dailies during the

rioting; attack an African American man and the street tough was “white” in the popular

imagination. Rivalries between white gangs could reinforce national differences, but

violence against African Americans reinforced whiteness and a black/white racial

dichotomy.101

Shortly after the riot, a gang made up of Polish boys called the Murderers sought to boost their reputation in the streets just west of the stockyards. A mere thirty boys filled the ranks of the gang, but they announced their presence in the neighborhood by placing a number of placards reading “The Murderers, 10,000 Strong, 48th, & Ada.”

According to Thrasher, in addition to activities such as “loafing, smoking, chewing, crap-

shooting, card-playing, pool, and bowling,” members of the Murderers claimed that they would “‘get’ the ‘niggers’ as they came from the stock yards at Forty-seventh and

Racine,” and then “would hit them and knock them out of the cars.”102

While the violence against blacks during the riot was mostly the part of Irish

American gangs, it sent a message to many second-generation boys of more recent

European immigrants: white Americans are superior to African Americans, and blacks

must be kept “in their place” by force if necessary. More than violently lashing out

100 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 12. 101 “The Dead,” Chicago Herald-Examiner, July 30, 1919, 1; “Roster of those Slain, White and Colored,” Chicago Daily News, July 29, 1919, 1. 102 Thrasher, The Gang (2000), 21. 139 against forward and defiant black Chicagoans, Irish American street toughs were teaching an American-born generation of Eastern European boys how to be white.

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CHAPTER 3 “They Did Not Bring With Them This American Obsession”: The Packingtown Fire and Polish Workers at the Union Stock Yards

After the Packingtown Fire. Source: Digital scan from Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922).

Groups of white men attacked black workers leaving the Union Stock Yards early in the week, but relatively little rioting occurred around the pens, in the packinghouses, or

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in the surrounding stockyards workers’ residential area known as Packingtown.1 The race riot began at a beach a few miles east of the pens and packinghouses, and only a small number of isolated clashes were reported in the area early in the week, due in part to the fact that few black packinghouse workers made the effort to reach the stockyards after the violence began. Following the arrival of the state militia mid-week, the stockyards and the adjoining residential area to the west became part of the heavily patrolled “riot zone,” and reports of riot activity became even less frequent.

However, before dawn on Saturday, arsonists set fire to wood frame row houses in a Lithuanian and Polish neighborhood west of the stockyards. Only one woman and child were reported injured, but the blaze destroyed forty-nine homes, caused $250,000 worth of property damage, and left 948 people homeless, mostly from poor immigrant families of packinghouse workers.2

Initially, city officials suspected black men, assuming the fire was an act of

retaliation for numerous white raids on Chicago’s segregated African-American district

known as the Black Belt. Thirteen witnesses seemed to confirm police and fire

inspectors’ suspicions. Some testified to seeing black men on the running boards of automobiles, speeding through the streets shortly before buildings went up in flames simultaneously in different areas of the neighborhood. One woman told police she saw a

1 I sometimes refer to the area as Back of the Yards in this chapter. The Back of the Yards neighborhood covered the same area as Packingtown in all directions except south, where Back of the Yards extended four blocks further to 55th Street. See James R. Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packinghouse Workers 1894-1922, (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 70 and Ann Durkin Keating, ed., Chicago Neighborhoods and Suburbs: A Historical Guide, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 103. 2 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), 7; Report of the Chicago Race Riot by Office Chief of Staff D.T. Hammond in Federal Surveillance of Afro-Americans (1917-1925): The First World War, The Red Scare & The Garvey Movement (FSAA), Reel 16, Microfilm Collection, Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, Chicago Public Library. 142

black man starting a fire to a house in one area. A milk wagon driver said he witnessed a

group of black men setting fire to a barn in another. The Chicago Daily News printed at

length the statements of the city’s fire marshal, who claimed that police and state

militiamen were sweeping the South Side, searching for a group of eight black men who

had started the fire.3

However, many had doubts that African American men were the culprits.

General Dickson of the Illinois State Militia found the premise that black men could have made their way to Packingtown from the Black Belt—east of the heavily patrolled and barricaded “dead line” that separated white and black residential areas—to be implausible. “[I]t would have been impossible for automobile loads of Negroes to escape from the South Side riot district,” Dickson remarked, “they would have been halted by

military sentries on guard not far away.” Beyond the armed sentries, the black men

would have had to travel through the working-class Irish neighborhoods directly west of the Black Belt, where resident white men were traditionally hostile to blacks. “I believe it goes without saying,” stated a packing company superintendent, “that there isn't a

colored man, regardless of how little brains he 'd have, who would attempt to go over into

the Polish district and set fire to anybody's house over there. He wouldn’t get that far.”

African American Second Ward alderman Louis B. Anderson was indignant: "It is

preposterous to think that any colored man would go west of Halsted Street without a

guard of police or militia in these times." Anderson suggested the implication that

3 Report of the Chicago Race Riot by Office Chief of Staff D.T. Hammond in FSAA, Reel 16, Microfilm Collection, Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, Chicago Public Library; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 540. 143

African American men started the fire only served, "to stir up more riots and race prejudice."4

Despite original witness testimony and public statements by city officials at the

scene, a rumor persisted on the South Side that the firebugs were white men with

blackened faces. When later pressed by investigators employed by the Chicago

Commission on Race Relations—the body appointed by the governor to study the causes of the riot—one man who had testified to seeing a truck full of black men roaming the district before the fire stated "Sure, I know they were colored. Of course I don't know whether they were painted." Testimony also suggested a police conspiracy; after witnessing men set the barn ablaze, the milk-wagon driver notified a police officer, who responded that he was “too busy” and “it is all right anyway.” One state militia officer believed that white men with blackened faces had started the fire; his opinion was based on conversations with police officers in the Stock Yards district.5

Within days, locals and riot investigators generally accepted that white men in

blackface had committed the crime. The question of their identity remained. General

Dickson articulated the fears of U.S. Department of Intelligence and many anti-

communists when he suggested that the men in blackface were “I.W.W. plotters,” irate

over the “refusal of the foreigners in the district to take sides with radical labor agitators.”

Fear of I.W.W. influence in matters pertaining to Chicago’s riot greatly outweighed the

4 "Gen. Dickson Says Negroes Did Not Start Stock Yards Fire," Chicago Whip, August 9, 1919, 1; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 20-1; “Negroes Didn’t Set Fires, Say Their Aldermen,” Chicago Tribune, August 3, 1919, 2. 5 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 20. 144

reach of that labor organization in 1919, though the radical group proved a convenient

scapegoat. 6

As it turned out, the incendiaries were members of boys’ gangs and “athletic

clubs” from the neighborhoods to the east of the stockyards. These groups had initiated

most of the violence in and around the Black Belt and members often enjoyed the protection of white police officers and local machine politicians.

In the post-riot aftermath, investigators and community leaders were in agreement. The grand jury report following the riot stated that the fire in Packingtown was the work of athletic and social clubs from the Irish neighborhoods to the east, described as “organizations of hoodlums and criminals formed for the interest of local politics.” Mary McDowell, director of the University of Chicago Settlement located in

Back of the Yards, said before the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, “I don't think the Negroes did burn the houses. I think the white hoodlums burned them. The Negroes weren't back there, they stayed at home after that Monday.” Additionally, inquiry by the

Commission at the Stock Yards police station “disclosed the fact that no Negroes had

been apprehended on this charge, and the belief was expressed that the act was committed by white men with blackened faces.” However, “The matter had been dropped for lack of evidence.”7

6 "Gen. Dickson Says Negroes Did Not Start Stock Yards Fire," Chicago Whip, August 9, 1919, 1. 7 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 16, 20, 540. 145

Fig.3.1 Packingtown, the Union Stock Yards, and the incendiary fire area in relation to the Black Belt, the hostile area discussed in Chapter 2, and the riot zone designated by the Illinois state militia.

It seems clear that the arsonists were white men disguised as black men, likely members of an athletic club backed by a local politician like the infamous Ragen’s Colts,

146

to which much of the violence during the riot was attributed. The motivation for the

assault on the Polish and Lithuanian residential district to the west of the stockyards is

much less clear. Perceptions of race and racial identity clearly informed this crime.

David Roediger attributes the Packingtown fire to “building increasingly inclusive unities

among European immigrants as white Americans.” For Roediger, the incendiary blaze

served as an “act of inclusion” by Irish Americans toward more recent European

immigrants “who did not have a secure place in U.S. systems of racial privilege and who

did not sufficiently identify and act as whites.” In short, Irish Americans invited

unaffected Poles and Lithuanians to recognize a shared racial identity and to embrace

white supremacy.8

Possibly, but the conclusion is mostly speculative given the evidence, and there is

plenty of room for doubt. White men in black grease paint posing as African Americans

frequently committed crimes in the South around the turn-of-the-century, and in Chicago

as early as 1914, when the Defender complained, "With a blackened face crimes of all

kinds are committed and laid at the door of an innocent Afro-American." The number of

robberies and assaults by white men in blackface increased in Chicago during the early years of the Great Migration.9

Perhaps whites painted their faces and performed the role of a black criminal as

an act of catharsis, as Roediger has suggested, a visceral response to the suffocating cadences of working-class life, in contrast to the supposedly freer ways of black folks.

8 David Roediger, "Racism, Ethnicity, and White Identity," Encyclopedia of Chicago website, accessed June 12, 2012, http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1033.html. 9 “White Man, Blackened, Snatches Purse,” Defender, October 3, 1914, 6. See also “Police ‘Wash’ Blackened Morons, Lo! They’re White” Defender Jan 7, 1922, 2; “White Holdups Black Faces to Commit Crimes” Feburary 2, 1918, 6; “Black Face To Commit Assault On White Woman,” Defender, September 21, 1918, 15. 147

More simply, black make-up became a way to disguise one’s identity while snatching a

purse or holding up a grocery store, taking full advantage of a racially biased criminal

justice system, as growing numbers of unknown African Americans arrived in Chicago

daily. In either case, white criminals in blackface were not new, and they operated

throughout the city. To identify their crimes as acts of inclusion—inviting victims of

robberies and assaults to be “white”—is a stretch.10

Roediger’s interpretation of the fire downplays the tensions between Irish

American and newer European immigrant communities, Poles, the most numerous of the

newcomers, in particular. Upwardly mobile Irish Americans mostly had moved out of

Packingtown, but using their skills in political strategizing, organizing, and canvassing,

they maintained notable influence in the area, through representatives in various city and county offices. Irish political power utterly frustrated local Polish leadership. In 1918,

Chicago’s Polish newspaper Dziennik Zwiazkowy accused the Irish of resorting to “old

political tricks” when the faction placed another Pole on an election ballot. The split

Polish vote resulted in the nomination of an Irish candidate for clerk of the municipal

court in a heavily Polish precinct. Such chicanery, and worse, was common in Chicago

politics. As Polish leaders pushed their political candidates in Irish controlled wards, the

Packingtown fire may have been an act of retribution.11

10 For more on whiteness and black minstrelsy, see David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, (London, New York: Verso, 1991). Some of the blackface crimes involved assaults on white women, suggesting a channeling of black male sexuality in the white mind, or merely white criminals taking advantage of the stereotype in order to better their chances of getting away with their crimes. For racially biased criminal justice system, see Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 327-56. 11 "Political Notes," Dziennik Zwiazkowy, September 3, 1918 Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey (CFLPS). See Also "Our Local Politics" Dziennik Zjednoczenia, March 20, 1922 (CFLPS); "Comments on Ninth Ward Politics," Dziennik Chicagoski, April 6, 1894 (CFLPS); "The Policy in American Politics" Dziennik Zwiazkowy, September 16, 1916 (CFLPS). 148

There were three Catholic churches and parochial schools in the immediate vicinity of the fire. As more Eastern European immigrants moved into the area, Polish parishes St. Joseph and Sacred Heart of Jesus grew rapidly; their schools became overcrowded with children. Meanwhile, a dwindling number of students attended school at the Irish parish of St. Rose of Lima in Back of the Yards. Despite the growing numbers of Polish Catholics in Chicago, the Irish continued to dominate church leadership. In 1910, most Chicago Poles stayed home in protest when an Irish archbishop was assigned to confirm a number of parishioners at St. Casimir Church on the Southwest

Side. “Neither the religious nor the national societies came out to welcome the archbishop, as is the custom," reported Dziennlk Zwiazkowy, "In this instance we find that nationalistic feelings have taken an upper hand even over religious feelings." It may not have been racial inclusion, but national rivalries within Chicago’s Catholic subculture that motivated the fire starters.12

Neither were the old and new immigrant groups united as union laborers. Poles had struggled to ascend to leadership roles in their city and church, but they had gained a foothold in the stockyards unions. However, organizers of unskilled workers in the

Stockyards Labor Council were of Polish descent and had ties to the more radical IWW, while the Irish and German “butcher aristocracy” at the packinghouses belonged to AFL- affiliated unions with Irish representatives. In an effort to organize all stockyards workers, Polish laborers aligned themselves with African Americans in the struggle against the packers. As opposed to a racial welcoming, the Packingtown fire may have been a warning, meant to disrupt an alliance between Eastern European and African

12 Dziennik Zwiazkowy September 3, 1918 (CFLPS); Dziennik Zwiazkowy. November 26, 1910 (CFLPS). 149

American workers, whose interests differed from longer tenured Irish Americans at the

stockyards.13

South side Irish Americans had a history of meeting outsiders with violence.

Their neighborhoods east of the stockyards were off limits to the Eastern Europeans living in Packingtown, just as they were to African Americans living in the Black Belt. A white Republican city politician who ran against Richard J. Daley in 1967 feared as a boy entering the Irish community of Bridgeport from his Slavic neighborhood to the west;

“you’d never think of just walking into their neighborhood,” he recalled, “or you’d get the hell knocked out of you.” The Lithuanian press complained about the mistreatment of their countrymen in the neighborhoods to the east of Packingtown. “In the vicinity of

33rd and Halsted Streets, robbery and attack on Lithuanians by Irish gangsters is a daily

occurrence,” reported Lietuva in 1911. The fire during the race riot was not an isolated

act of aggression toward Poles and Lithuanians.14

The Back of the Yards fire, then, more likely seems the work of malicious

criminal opportunists, backed by local police and politicians, than an Irish American

vanguard of white racial accord. Still, the fire is important for understanding the riot. It

suggests the outsider status of a large number of Poles in early twentieth century

Chicago. Attacked by white Americans posing as black Americans, Polish immigrants

were neither. Polish Chicagoans, living in relative isolation and clinging to their Old

World ways, had not yet fully come to grips with their racial identity in America.

13 Alma Herbst, The Negro in the Slaughtering and Meat-Packing Industry in Chicago (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1932), 43-4. 14 Mike Royko, Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (New York: Dutton & Co. 1971), 37; Lietuva, March 10, 1911 (CFLPS). See also Naujienos, January 4, 1915 (CFLPS). 150

The purpose of this chapter is to examine race relations and racial identity among

“new immigrant” cultural groups in Packingtown and among the tens of thousands workers at Chicago’s stockyards and packinghouses along the western boundary of the riot zone. Certainly, some of the more acclimated white migrant laborers harbored racist attitudes toward African Americans. However, for most Polish and Lithuanian stockyard workers the Packingtown fire was the extent of their involvement in the riot, which is to say being attacked not by blacks but by whites posing as blacks. Indeed, the race riot undermined the incipient efforts of Polish unionists at organizing African American workers, rolling back any progress the Stockyards Labor Council had made toward a powerful and enduring interracial labor union.



In two enviable and deservedly lasting works of Chicago history published over forty years ago, William Tuttle and Alan Spear made two arguments with regard to

Chicago’s 1919 race riot that have since been called into question. The first was that racial strife among the nearly fifty thousand workers at Chicago’s Union Stock Yards was a root cause of the riot. Second, these authors described Chicago’s Poles, who represented a disproportionate number of stockyard workers, along with Chicagoans of

Irish descent, as characteristically “hostile” and “violently antiblack.”15 Roughly two decades later, James Barrett was perhaps the first to question the role of labor and the

15 William M. Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Atheneum Press, 1970), 266; Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920, (University of Chicago, 1967), 150. 151 wartime stockyards union drive in the rioting; around the same time Dominic Pacyga questioned the involvement of Chicago Poles in the violence.16

Maps of the reported assaults and the social-cultural geography of the areas surrounding the riot zone support the position that Polish packinghouse workers were involved only sparingly in the rioting. Map 3.1 below indicates the riot zone patrolled by the Illinois state militia beginning Wednesday July 30. Map 3.2 is a visual representation of the “Riot Activity Index,” for which I used a formula to determine the ratio of riot activity to number of residents living in each census tract; the red census tracts are areas where the level of violence was extremely high, oranges are high, yellows are moderate to low, and whites are areas where no reported violence occurred.

16 Barrett, Work and Community, 202-3; Dominic A. Pacyga, “Chicago’s 1919 Race Riot: Ethnicity, Class and Urban Violence,” in The Making of Urban America, ed. Raymond Mohl, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2d. Ed. 1997). 152

Map 3.1. The large shaded area indicates the riot district patrolled by the Illinois state militia. The bounded numbers represent census tracts. Source: E. W. Burgess and Charles Shelton Newcomb, Census Data of the City of Chicago 1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1931).

Map 3.2. Riot Activity Index: Number injured/killed plus residents of injured/killed in census tract divided by total census tract population in 1920 multiplied by 10,000. Source: E. W. Burgess and Charles Shelton Newcomb, Census Data of the City of Chicago 1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1931).

Map 3.3 shows the areas in which the Polish foreign-born were overrepresented among census tract residents in 1920. Comparing Map 3.3 to Map 3.2, it seems that there was not a strong correlation between census tracts with a significant Polish element and the red and orange area of the Riot Activity Index map where most of the rioting occurred. Map 3.4 shows the census tracts in which manufacturing workers (a high

153 percentage of which were factory workers) were overrepresented. Unsurprisingly, there is a strong correlation between Polish foreign-born areas and areas consisting of a relatively high number of manufacturing workers, since the Poles--along with members of other, less-numerous, “new immigrant” groups from Europe--filled the many unskilled labor positions available at the packinghouses and other manufacturing plants. Map 3.4 also suggests that census tracts with high numbers of white manufacturing workers, many of them union men, were removed from the heavy rioting that occurred to the east.

Map3.3. “White Foreign-Born Ethnicity Index: POLISH”: Census tracts where Polish foreign-born residents exceed the city average in 1920; red=extremely high level of Polish foreign-born, oranges=high, yellows=above average, whites=below average. Source: E. W. Burgess and Charles Shelton Newcomb, Census Data of the City of Chicago 1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1931).

154

Map 3.4. Census tracts with percentages of men employed in manufacturing higher than the city average in 1920; red=extremely high number of manufacturing workers, orange=very high, yellow=above average, white= below average. Source: E. W. Burgess and Charles Shelton Newcomb, Census Data of the City of Chicago 1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1931).

Map 3.5 shows the census tracts with high percentages of white foreign born residents. While there does seem to be some correlation between European immigrants and riot violence, I would argue that it is not a strong one. Census tracts 353 and 358 rank high in the Riot Activity Index and contain a disproportionate number of foreign- born residents, however in this instance, the maps are a bit misleading. Tracts 353 and

358 contained the Union Stock Yards, and only a small number of residences. Because groups of whites from other census tracts attacked African Americans in the immediate vicinity of the stockyards, the Riot Activity Index ratio of residents to riot-related injuries is heavily skewed. If we take this into account and consider tracts 352 and 358 as relative

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anomalies, then much of the foreign-born element in and around the riot zone was to the

west of the heavy rioting.

Map 3.5. Census tracts with percentages of white foreign born higher than the city average in 1920; red=extremely high number of foreign born, orange=very high, yellow=above average, white= below average. Source: E. W. Burgess and Charles Shelton Newcomb, Census Data of the City of Chicago 1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1931).

According to maps 3.3, 3.4, and 3.5, Poles, immigrants, and manufacturing workers did not reside in areas where the heaviest rioting occurred. Maps 3.6, 3.7, and

3.8 show group residential patterns that more strongly correlate with the violence. Map

3.6 shows census tracts with a high percentage of African Americans; the dense red area in Map 3.6 is the area known as the Black Belt. Comparing Map 3.6 to the Riot Activity

Index (Map 2), it is clear that much of the intense violence during the riot occurred in the areas of the Black Belt that bordered white neighborhoods. Map 3.7 indicates census

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tracts with high numbers of native-born residents. African Americans in the Black Belt made up many of the native born in this map, but there were a higher percentage of

native-born whites in the riot-zone neighborhoods west of the Black Belt, where much of

the rioting occurred. Finally, Map 3.8 shows the distribution of the Irish foreign born in

census tracts surrounding the riot zone, dispersed in and around African American

residential areas, and heavily concentrated just west of the Black Belt. Many of these

Irish were among the two million “second wave” migrants arriving in the United States

between 1870 and 1920, who settled among second and third generation Irish

Americans.17

17 Matthew Pratt Guterl, “The New Race Consciousness: Race, Nation, and Empire in American Culture, 1910-1925,” Journal of World History 10, no. 2 (1999): 314. 157

Map 3.6. “Population Index Map: AFRICAN AMERICAN”: Census tracts where African-American residents exceed the city average in 1920; red=extremely high level of African-American residents, oranges=high, yellows=above average, whites=below average. Source: E. W. Burgess and Charles Shelton Newcomb, Census Data of the City of Chicago 1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1931).

Map 3.7. Census tracts with percentages of native born higher than the city average in 1920; red=extremely high number of native born, orange=very high, yellow=above average, white= below average. Source: E. W. Burgess and Charles Shelton Newcomb, Census Data of the City of Chicago 1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1931).

158

Map 3.8. “White Foreign-Born Ethnicity Index: IRISH”: Census tracts where Irish foreign-born residents exceed the city average in 1920; red=extremely high level of Irish foreign-born, oranges=high, yellows=above average, whites=below average. Source: E. W. Burgess and Charles Shelton Newcomb, Census Data of the City of Chicago 1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1931).

By zooming out from the riot zone with our analytical lens— mapping ethnicity and occupation by census tract and comparing the results against a map of the most violent tracts—we learn that injuries and deaths during the rioting occurred in areas in which higher percentages of Irish Americans and African Americans resided, not near the homes of the Polish and other Eastern European stockyards workers. Even if Poles were intent on harming African Americans, in order to get to Black Belt they first would have had to risk traversing some unwelcoming white neighborhoods. In short, most of Polish packinghouse laborers were physically isolated from the rioting. And a closer look at these new immigrants suggests that they were socially and culturally isolated as well.

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

In 1864, 320 acres of land four miles south of the Loop was purchased for

$100,000 for the development of the Union Stock Yards, where virtually all of Chicago’s

livestock trade and meat production would take place, allowing the city’s butchers—

utilizing the nine major railroads that ran into the city and the overabundance of cheap

migrant labor—to centralize production, regulate distribution, and control industry prices

by means of a stockyard trust headed by five large meatpacking firms. Seventy-five

thousand pigs, twenty-one thousand steers, twenty-two thousand sheep, and two hundred

horses were led to the pens in the first week of operations in 1865. The labor hired to

corral and butcher these animals in the slaughterhouses settled in the area known to

workers as Packingtown, bounded by Thirty-Ninth Street on the North, Fifty-First Street

on the South, Halsted Street to the East, and Western Avenue to the West.18

Despite Chicago’s reputation as a modern marvel, the city developed hurriedly

and unevenly after the 1871 fire. Some community areas were neglected, mostly because

they were removed from commuter lines and contained indigent people of little social or

political influence. In 1894, in the midst of Chicago’s City Beautiful and American

Renaissance movements, and shortly after Frederick Jackson Turner captivated audiences

with his romantic “Frontier Thesis” at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, Mary McDowell

described the community west of the stockyards lamentably as having “many of the

characteristics of a frontier town,” or someplace out of the Turner’s mythic pioneer past.

18 Stephen Longstreet Chicago:1860-1919 (New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1973), 56-57; Sophonisba P. Breckinridge and Edith Abbott, “Housing Conditions in Chicago III: Back of the Yards,” The American Journal of Sociology 16, no.4 (1911): 433-468. 160

Gross Avenue, the main thoroughfare, was badly paved with cedar blocks, and

stilts supported the wooden sidewalks well above the muck below. Frame cottages stood

along back streets filled with prairie mud. Since Packingtown was beyond the reach of

Chicago’s sewer system, ditches filed with standing waste lined the roads. Inside some

homes, the walls “were so black with flies that the color of the paint was only seen in

small spots,” and babies died at a rate of one in every three born. To the east were one

square mile of animal pens and the meat-packing plants. To the north of the settlement

oozed the noxious, stagnant waters of Bubbly Creek, “a cesspool for the sewage of the

packing houses.” To the west were Chicago’s garbage dumps, where trash filled giant

cavities in the earth leftover from clay excavation for brick making. Among the old

refuse, the “New City” community area containing Packingtown was incorporated into

Chicago in 1889, separated from the larger city by forty-two lines of railway track

surrounding the stockyards.19

At the time of the race riot, community aesthetics had not changed much; while

the packinghouses were the vanguard of industrial modernization, the surrounding

residential area remained primitive. The railroad tracks, the dumps and brickyards, and

the south branch of the Chicago River set apart the community from the rest of the city

but so did the poverty and living conditions of its residents. Land values in Packingtown

were among the lowest of any part of Chicago’s old “core” settled before the expansion

of the transportation system. Low salaries often required that both parents find work at

the stockyards, and that parish schools and shelters supervise their children.20

19 “Beginnings,” Mary McDowell Papers, Box 1, Folder 1, Chicago History Museum. 20 Dziennik Zwiakzkowy, Feb 14, 1918 (CFLPS); see maps in Homer Hoyt, One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933), 187, 211. 161

Packingtown had always been home to Chicago’s newest arrivals, and in 1920,

forty-five percent of its residents were born outside of the United States. The Irish used

to be plentiful in the neighborhoods surrounding the stockyards, but subsequent generations had moved from Packingtown to other areas of the South Side by the turn of the century. Some became conductors and motormen on newly constructed transportation lines, others joined the occupations of the Chicago’s growing middle class in the city’s service sector. The Irish represented a little more than three percent of the foreign-born population of Packingtown, less than half of their percentage citywide (See

Appendix D).21

To finance new homes elsewhere, older Packingtown residents sold their houses

to recent arrivals. Most of these immigrants were Eastern Europeans, for whom home

ownership was emblematic of success and status in the New World. Holding deeds

separated new arrivals from native-born members of the working class. In 1920, foreign-

born heads of households owned almost all of the homes in Packingtown, although they

made up less than half of the population.22

Many of the immigrants were Lithuanians, who at seven percent of the foreign-

born population in the neighborhoods surrounding the stockyards, were about three times

more numerous than their citywide average. However, Poles dominated the immigrant

population in Packingtown. Citywide, Poles represented seventeen percent of the foreign

born; in Packingtown, they accounted for more than half. In 1909, University of Chicago

21 E W Burgess and Charles Shelton Newcomb, Census Data of the City of Chicago 1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1931). 22 Immigrants in Industries Part 11: Slaughtering and Meat Packing, Reports of the Immigrant Commission (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1911), 205; Hoyt, Land Values, 200-1; for importance of immigrant home ownership see David R. Roediger Working Toward Whiteness (New York: Basic Books, 2005); Dominic A. Pacyga, "Crisis and the Community: The Back of the Yards 1921," Chicago History 6, no. 3 (1977): 167-76. 162

sociologists Sophonisba P. Breckinridge and Edith Abbott studied Packingtown’s

“Whiskey Row,” a “typical” area neighborhood along Ashland Avenue, where they

found 1167 out of 1562 heads of household to be Polish or Lithuanian.23

Chicago’s strict building codes were often ignored and rarely enforced in

Packingtown. Two story frame tenement homes were dark, poorly ventilated, and

severely overcrowded. Sometimes, as many as six families plus additional lodgers

(necessary to make high rents or bank payments) lived in a single home and used the

same outdoor water closet. A typical meal for a family of a laborer at Chicago’s

meatpacking plant consisted of grains and leafy greens--such as rye bread and cooked

cabbage. Dozens of women and children daily picked over the city dump for usable

items like kindling, food, clothing, and furniture.24

The Catholic Church and its teachings brought some measure of comfort for the

Packingtown poor. For Poles, the parish priest served as an advisor to immigrant families

in their new environment. The parish was the most important space in the city for many

folk, organizing their religious and secular activities, including fraternal activities, burial

societies, insurance organizations, as well as dramatic, literary, and singing groups. All

helped to limit social interaction to Polish members of the same parish.25

Alcohol consumption brought the immigrant poor some relief from their

destitution, a tradition from their peasant past, but brewing and distilling were also a

response to the unsanitary conditions in postbellum Chicago. Waste and offal from the

23 Burgess and Newcomb, Census Tract Data 1920; Breckinridge and Abbott, “Back of the Yards,” 437-8. 24 “Toilets – Borders – The House – a report by Mary McDowell 1921” Mary McDowell Papers Box 2, Folder 12, Chicago History Museum; “'Yards' Inquiry Traces Poverty To Squalid Lair,” Chicago Tribune, February 21, 1918, 9; Breckinridge and Abbott, “Back of the Yards,” 447, 467; Dziennik Zwiakzkowy, November 7, 1911 (CFLPS); “Living Cost 58 Per Cent More Now In 'Yards'” Chicago Tribune, February 22, 1918, 13. 25 Dominic A. Pacyga, Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago: Workers on the South Side, 1880-1922, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 126-28, 140-41. 163

stockyards made its way to Lake Michigan, the city’s source of drinking water, via the

south branch of the Chicago River. Outbreaks of bacterial diseases were common. The wealthy imported spring water, but the poor drank steam beer, keg lager, cider,

buttermilk, and home brewed wine.26

In the early twentieth century, frequenting saloons continued to be a shared

experience among men of Chicago’s ethnic and working-class communities. In 1900, 1.7 million Chicagoans consumed over 153 million gallons of alcoholic beverages annually.

Over six thousand saloons occupied a total of thirty-one miles of street frontage, perhaps

nowhere more numerous than in the stockyards district. When “old immigrants” of

northern European stock originally settled in Packingtown, German and Irish names

adorned the facades of local saloons, which were more numerous than groceries. By the

early twentieth century, more tavern proprietors were Polish and Lithuanian. 27

By way of neighborhood bars, immigrants retained a sense of foreign national

identity among other ethnic groups living in the same area. In addition to feeding men

and their families, saloon owners hosted weddings and other festivities in banquet halls in

the rear of their establishments, rooms that also functioned as a “club house” for

members of the ethnic community. Saloons were also places of labor organizing for

wage-earning patrons. And to the vexation of Progressive reformers, mainstream

Americana was often filtered through the tavern proprietor. “[T]he saloon keeper, with

the ward politician,” complained Mary McDowell, “is too often the only interpreter of

American institutions.”

26 Longstreet Chicago, 58-59. 27 Hoyt, Land Values, 205; Dziennik Zwiakzkowy, November 7, 1911 (CFLPS); “Handbook of Settlements,” pp2-3, Mary E. McDowell Papers, Box 1, Folder 3A, Chicago History Museum. 164

In a community lacking many formal institutions beyond parish influence, saloons

served an important social and political function for men in Packingtown. McDowell

called the Back of the Yards saloon, “the most hospitable place in the community to the

non-English speaking people.” The demand for intoxicants as well as their social

function made saloons especially numerous around the Yards. One writer in the Polish

newspaper Dziennik Zwiakzkowy described the saloons in Packingtown as “one next to

the other” and “always crowded.” In 1909, among 109 business establishments owned

by Lithuanians in the area around Forty-Seventh Street and Ashland Avenue in

Packingtown, 36 were saloons.28

Outside of the workplace, very little contact took place between the European immigrants of Packingtown and black Chicagoans. Partly, the social separation between blacks and groups like the Poles was a result of the existing racial geography of the city, coupled with a custom of insularity found in ethnic parishes and neighborhood saloons.

Mary McDowell argued that, because of this lack of contact with native-born Chicagoans of either race, the Eastern Europeans of Packingtown did not share with other whites racist attitudes toward African Americans. She wrote that the Eastern-European residents of Packingtown as outsiders, “did not have to meet the American prejudice against the negro,” and therefore, “the foreign born held no feelings towards the darker-skinned people.”29

McDowell contrasted attitudes toward African Americans held by recent

immigrants with those of Irish heritage; for whom race prejudice originally rose out of

28 Lietuva, September 10, 1909 (CFLPS); “Handbook of Settlements,” pp2-3, Mary McDowell Papers, Box 1, Folder 3A, Chicago History Museum; Breckinridge and Abbott, “Back of the Yards,” 464. 29 Mary McDowell and Municipal Housekeeping Chapter 3 “Prejudice,” Mary McDowell Papers, Box 4, Folder 23, Chicago History Museum, 28. 165 political and economic rivalries: “The first generation of Irish had latent sentiment against colored laborers, who interfered with their so-called ‘American rights’; and the second generation held a deeper-seated prejudice which showed itself during economic clashes,” wrote the Packingtown settlement house director, “but among the Slavic peoples an antagonistic feeling against negroes grew very slowly.” Among European immigrants, rivalries between cultural groups had to do with nationality or religion, not race. “Old World prejudices were many in the stock yards . . . ,” wrote McDowell, “but the kinds of prejudice indigenous to our own soil had not yet taken root in the minds of the newcomers." 30

McDowell recalled that black stockyard workers wandered through Packingtown neighborhoods unmolested, and explained that “[t]o the foreign born, color of the skin does not present a fixed line separating those who must live within the same political or industrial areas.” However, McDowell admitted that surrounding the settlement house,

“there were no colored people in the community,” suggesting limits to feelings of racial inclusion. While the whites of Packingtown mingled with many African Americans in the packinghouses, according to the 1920 census, blacks made up a scant 0.24% of

Packingtown residents.31

The neighborhoods surrounding the livestock pens and slaughterhouses were not desirable places to live, but Packingtown homes were not much worse than in the Black

Belt. The community offered advantages like proximity to work away from more hostile white neighborhoods. Yet by census count, only sixty-one African Americans lived among over fifty-seven thousand people in Packingtown. If there was not bitterness

30 Ibid. 31 McDowell, “Prejudice,” 28-29; Burgess and Newcomb, Census Tract Data 1920. 166

between Poles and blacks, there was at least an understanding of difference, and a desire to dwell apart.

By contrast, Polish and Lithuanian immigrants were at odds. For centuries,

Lithuania was part of Poland, sharing Roman Catholicism under the Polish monarchy.

Since the late nineteenth century however, a spirit of nationalism had swept through

Lithuania coming from a younger generation of educated peasants, who had contempt for

Poland. In Packingtown, blocks that contained many Lithuanians contained few Poles,

and the groups maintained separate Catholic churches. Despite this, Poles and

Lithuanians shared the district. National rivalries did not preclude shared residential space, only skin color did. Polish and Lithuanian Chicagoans understood this at least.32

Beyond simple recognition of the convention of racial segregation, the depth of understanding and experience with racism varied among Polish immigrants in

Packingtown. Those who worked at the stockyards had encountered white prejudice against African Americans, and some freely used the word “nigger,” presumably without understanding its historical context. However, the editorial staffs at Polish foreign language newspapers Dziennik Chicagoski and Narod Polski (which served all of

Chicago’s Polonia, including the large population on the Northwest Side away from the stockyards and the Black Belt) felt their readers needed the racial tension in Chicago explained. Polish editorialists did so using terms familiar to the foreign group, namely the word pogrom, usually associated with anti-Jewish riots, which had occurred time and again for centuries across Eastern Europe.33

32 Roman Dyboski, “Poland and the Problem of National Minorities,” Journal of the British Institute of International Affairs 2, No. 5 (1923): 187-9. 33 David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 103-4. 167

Following the fire, the Polish press in Chicago sought simultaneously to condemn

the violence between black and white Chicagoans, to understand the resentment that

“civilized” whites felt toward African Americans, and to revive the Polish-American

community in the wake of the Back of the Yards fire. “[T]oday we have a new

expression, ‘pogroms of negroes,’” read Chicago’s Polish-Catholic newspaper Narod

Polski on August 6, which went on to ask, “Why are such barbarian expressions and acts

becoming popular in civilized countries?” In a largely misguided, misinformed and

ethnocentric analysis, the Polish publication claimed to have caught sight of the

“German-bolshevik hand” in the rioting, which was able to access “negroes through

ignorance” in the same way it was able to access “the Jews through money.” However,

Narod Polski relayed to its readers that, although “[t]he whites feel hurt,” it was “not

always through the fault of the negroes.” Recommending that “the Poles should behave peacefully in the presence of all this. Let there not be any of us among those staging the pogroms.”34

Another Chicago Polish language newspaper, Dziennik Chicagoski, ran telling

editorial cartoons during the riot and the weeks following. In one cartoon from August 2

(Img 3.1), a black man brandishing a knife and a white man clenching a gun kick up dust

as they angrily confront one another. Behind them, members of a tribunal of evil

characters look on approvingly. These characters, heavily stereotyped, represent threats

to Polish independence, American democratic freedoms, and Western civilization. The

Ukrainian depicted in the cartoon watches the scene with delight. The Bolshevik points to the skirmish, labeled as “race riot,” and asks, “Is this American democracy?” The

34 Narod Polski, August 6, 1919 (CFLPS). For more on Polish Anti-Semitism in the early twentieth century see Dyboski, “Poland and the Problem of National Minorities,” 179-200. 168

African cannibal calls the scene “civilized” and the Mexican bandit shouts approvingly

“They’re trickier than me!” The editorial cartoon is titled “GODNI SIEBIE” or “Worthy of Each Other.”35

Img 3.1. “Worthy of Each Other.” Source: Dziennik Chicagoski, August 2, 1919.

35 “Worthy of Each Other,” Dziennik Chicagoski August 2, 1919, 1. 169

Img 3.2. “Beat It!” Source: Chicago Herald and Examiner, August 1, 1919.

Like the artist of the Herald-Examiner cartoon “Beat It!” (Img 3.2) analyzed in

Chapter 2, the artist of “Worthy of Each Other” condemns the rioters. However, there is a stark difference in the way that each cartoonist imagines the reader. In “Beat It,” which appeared in a popular Chicago daily with a large native-white readership, the reader

appears in the frame; he is the “Good Citizen” with his newspaper in hand. More than an

observer, the Good Citizen has a role in this narrative. The hoodlum rioters have entered the office, his private space, and the danger they pose is immediate; there is little physical

170 distance between the thugs and the cool-headed urbanite. The hoodlums speak directly to the Good Citizen, they ask to assist the man, the reader directly addresses the hoodlums, retorting “Beat It!”36

By contrast, there is a greater distance between the reader and events depicted in the Dziennik Chicagoski cartoon. The point of view of the reader in the Polish newspaper is beyond the panel, watching from a position above the fray, judging the combatants and those who are taking great joy in their scuffle. The reader does not engage with the rioters, she or he has no role in the outcome of the fight, but knows that such behavior suggests that the rioters belong among villains from far off places, about whom they have heard similar stories of depravity.

Img 3.3: “Town of Lake.” Source: Dziennik Chicagoski, August 6, 1919.

36 “Beat It!” Chicago Herald and Examiner, August 1, 1919. 171

A second cartoon appeared in Dziennik Chicagoski on August 6 (Img 3.3), following the incendiary fire to the Polish and Lithuanian community in Packingtown.

This illustration depicted “Polish Spirit,” taking the form of a woman with the wings of an angel, holding tidings of “eternal peace” and “remembrance and knowledge,” while

calling for citizens to “stand up” for justice. She hovers above the smoldering

community labeled in English, “Town of Lake,” an antiquated name for the

Packingtown/Back of the Yards neighborhood before it was incorporated into the city.37

The scene is nostalgic and hopeful, but it is also reclusive. There is no

engagement with outsiders, including the Lithuanians who along with Poles occupied

homes in the incinerated community. A Polish national identity, buttressed by shared

religious beliefs, is displayed prominently here. But no evidence exists in this cartoon

that what took place in the Town of Lake was the result of a race riot, or “Chicago’s race

problems” as displayed so prominently by the Good Citizen in the Herald- Examiner.

What the cartoon suggests, is a readership that did not imagine African Americans as

enemies, or even as a “problem,” any more than they did white Americans, who were

social and cultural outsiders as well. It was a group obsessed with national traditions but

not race history. Poles would not welcome African Americans into their social circles,

but unlike white Americans, they would not dismiss out of hand other forms racial

interaction.



37 “Town of Lake,” Dziennik Chicagoski, August 6, 1919, 1. 172

By 1905, the value of output from Chicago’s slaughtering and meat-packing had

grown to nearly $270 million, almost thirty percent of the industry total in the United

States. The number of wage earners at the stockyards topped twenty-two thousand. In

1918, the Daily News Almanac reported that almost three million cattle and over eight

million hogs were butchered every year in Chicago, in what had become a globalized

industry; the packers sent over five million pounds of meat and by-products abroad. By

1919, output had increased to over $1 billion for Chicago’s meatpackers, who were

delivering wages to over forty-five thousand workers.38

Together with greater numbers of livestock handlers and “butcher workmen” came organizational and technical innovations: increases in work specialization, in the scale and efficiency of production, and in the profitability of food commodities. “In one building,” wrote Mary McDowell, “one could see the fruit in preparation and at the same

time hear the pigs squealing their protests against being killed.” Animals were

slaughtered on the highest floors of the packinghouses, after which pieces of the hogs or

steers would slide down chutes to other shops for treatment. By the time the animals

reached the ground their flesh, bones, hair, and innards had been converted into canned

meat, fiddle strings, buttons, and upholstery. Meanwhile, work in these factories became

more rapid and repetitive, requiring less-skill, and subsequently yielding less pay.39

Before 1880 it was thought that “only an Irishman knew how to cure meat, and only a German could make sausage,” so laborers of these ethnic backgrounds were employed at the packinghouses almost exclusively. However, at every opportunity

Chicago’s original packinghouse workers abandoned their jobs of the packinghouse floor,

38 Immigrants in Industries, 191-92; Herbst, Negro in the Slaughtering and Meat-Packing Industry, 151 (Appendix A). 39 “Beginnings,” pp5-6, Mary McDowell Papers, Box 1, Folder 1, Chicago History Museum. 173

filling management and more skilled positions at the meat plant, or moving on to more

desirable vocations. Work became less specialized and by 1907, the proportion of

unskilled jobs at the stockyards had risen to two in three, and peasants from Eastern

Europe rushed to fill them. Foreign-born laborers accounted for more than seventy-eight

percent of over fifteen thousand Chicago meatpacking employees studied by the federal

Immigration Commission in 1905. Polish workers made up over twenty-seven percent of

the workforce studied, Lithuanians represented twelve percent, and Slovaks, Bohemians

and Moravians, and Russians made up a combined twelve percent of packinghouse

laborers. By this time, the number of German workers had fallen to about ten percent,

followed by the Irish at seven and a half percent.40

Like many major producers in the United States before the rise of unionized labor,

the meatpackers profited greatly from low wage labor. When the University of Chicago

established its settlement house in 1894, Mary McDowell admitted to being "utterly

ignorant of this marvelous organization for preparing meat and making money." She

soon came to realize that, in meatpacking, "like all great industries, the human being is

the last factor to be considered, and he is not considered until he becomes restive or

makes a protest that disturbs the equilibrium of the business."41

Early efforts to organize stockyards laborers were unsuccessful. The first came in

1886, when the packers rebuffed a workers’ strike for an eight hour day. In 1894, a

poorly organized strike in sympathy with Chicago’s Pullman railroad workers failed.

Unions demanded wage increases in 1904 during a walkout that lasted nine weeks. But

the packers brought in African American and immigrant strikebreakers, and the workers

40 George Irwin, “New Workers at the Yards Come from Southern Europe,” Chicago Tribune, May 26, 1907, E6; Immigrants in Industries, 196, 199-200. 41 “Beginnings,” p6, Mary McDowell Papers, Box 1, Folder 1, Chicago History Museum. 174

were forced to return to work on the packers’ terms. After 1904, the employers refused

to recognize labor unions at the stockyards or the rights of workers to bargain

collectively.42

Without union protection, conditions for workers deteriorated further in the years

immediately preceding the war. In 1918, the head of the welfare department at Armour

& Co, one of larger packing companies operating in the stockyards, conceded that half of

Armour’s more than twenty-two thousand employees were either injured on the job or

became seriously ill with tuberculosis, pneumonia, or other infectious diseases as a result of conditions in the packinghouses. The company offered little in the way of health,

compensation, or death benefits.

It was not because Armour and the others could not afford it. In 1918 the bare

minimum income needed to raise a family of five in the stockyard district was about

$1300 according to a study by the Amalgamated Meat Cutters union; the average stockyard worker made $2.75 a day or $825.50 yearly. Meanwhile, buoyed by the war in

Europe, packing industry revenues swelled. Swift & Co., for example, reported a profit of more than $14 million in 1915, over $20 million in 1916, and more than $34 million in

1917.43

Much of the packers’ leverage against workers came from the availability of

cheap labor in early twentieth century Chicago. Men could be found lingering in front of

the stockyards gates and in adjacent saloons, seeking unskilled day labor for as little as

sixteen cents an hour. Such work was unsteady and seasonal. It was difficult to organize

part-timers working lower skilled jobs, often speaking different languages and holding

42 Immigrants in Industries, 231-32. 43 “Welfare Chief Testifies at Yards Inquiry,” Chicago Tribune, February 23, 1918, 13; Dziennik Zwiakzkowy, Feb 14, 1918 (CFLPS). 175 traditional grudges toward one another. And the packers did their part to maintain an insular workforce, keeping workers of various departments mixed racially and ethnically, retarding the development of a collective worker-consciousness. The Lithuanian newspaper Naujienos complained in 1916: “The capitalists are doing everything within their means to keep their employees divided and away from each other; in order to do so they hire workers from as many nationalities as possible, keep their employees in darkness and ignorance by denying them an opportunity to become enlightened, and by preventing them from becoming 'Americanized.'"44

World War I had a huge impact on labor and production at the packinghouses.

Many foreign-born men returned to their native countries for armed service and European immigration to the United States all but ceased. American anti-immigration laws excluded Chinese and Japanese workers as replacements. Labor shortages increased when the U.S. entered the war in 1917 and native-born American men were shipped out to Europe. Simultaneously, the war helped to expand industry in the United States in response to the large demand for American munitions, clothing, leather, iron, steel, and food products in Europe. Employers at Chicago’s Union Stock Yards were forced to draw from non-traditional labor pools. For one, the packing industry became the largest employer of women in Chicago during the war. But the packers’ most earnest recruitment efforts took place in the American South among failed sharecroppers and

44 Irwin, "New Workers,” E6; Naujienos , May 12, 1916 (CFLPS); See James R. Barrett, “Unity and Fragmentation: Class, Race, and Ethnicity on Chicago’s South Side, 1900-1922,” Journal of Social History, 18, No. 1 (1984): 37-55. 176

poor farm hands; African Americans entered the northern industrial labor force en masse

for the first time.45

The packers sent agents to southern railroad depots, farms, and small towns in order to secure labor for their factories. African Americans in the Jim Crow South sought steady work and higher wages as well as an escape from discrimination and white on black violence. In 1915 and 1916, the boll weevil destroyed the cotton crop in large sections of the South, storms and floods ravaged others, creating high levels of famine and unemployment among farm workers across the region. Agents of the Chicago Urban

League, the city’s most notable African-American employment and social service agency, placed 40,000 men and 12,000 women in the early years of the migration, 8000 of them at the stockyards, the largest employer of the migrants. The Illinois Central led to the stockyards, and in some cases, its railcars almost literally carried laborers from their southern towns directly to the gates of the Union Stock Yards. Mary McDowell reported that five or six trainloads of Southern black men arrived there daily. While this may have been an exaggeration, it speaks to the wonder with which local whites imagined the early days of the Great Migration.46

The war presented a great opportunity for organized labor because of the scarcity

of workers and an increase in the prices of meat products. Before this time, several

45 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 357-8; Carl Sandburg, The Chicago Race Riots, July, 1919 (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2009), 17, 24-5. 46 McDowell “Prejudice,” Mary McDowell Papers, 25, 29; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 81; United States Department of Labor Division of Negro Economics, The Negro at Work During the World War and During Reconstruction: Statistics, Problems, and Policies Relating to the Greater Inclusion of Negro Wage Earners in American Industry and Agriculture (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1921), 10-11; Walter F. White, “The Success of Negro Migration,” Crisis, l19, No.3 (1920), 113; St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, Revised and Enlarged Edition Volume 1 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970) , 58- 60. The most comprehensive study of black migration to Chicago during World War I is James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 177

national organizations had jurisdiction over the various unions at the stockyards

representing workers of different skill levels in different jobs on different shop floors. In

1917, union leaders called a meeting of all local unions of packinghouse workers, where

they formed the Stockyards Labor Council (SLC), which had the power to bargain

collectively for a multitude of stockyard workers.47

The SLC reached out to groups that had been previously neglected by stockyards

union organizers. In 1920, women made up 12.6% of meatpacking industry employees in

Chicago. The Labor Council appealed to women by adding to their list of demands equal

pay for women doing the same work as men. The SLC also had a mandate to organize

African Americans, and to treat them equally with whites. “We didn’t want any Jim

Crow situation out there,” explained labor leader John Fitzpatrick with respect to the

stockyards organizing drive.48

However, the migration of black workers from the South provided an immense

challenge for organizations whose policies had been traditionally exclusionary of blacks, and whose rank and file harbored deep racial prejudices. Clearly, if workers were to make any gains in this new market environment, organizers would have to make an earnest appeal to black stockyard workers. The ensuing effort was designed to develop a worker-consciousness among laborers—Eastern Europeans of Packingtown and newly hired African Americans prevalent among them—that downplayed racism. The result was a high degree of racial tolerance among unionized unskilled workers at the

47 Barrett, Work and Community, 193-7; Rick Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago’s Packinghouses, 1904-54 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 48-72. 48 Barrett, Work and Community, 52, 195; Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris, The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement (New York: Columbia U Press, 1931), 270. 178

stockyards, which may have been the foundation of a longstanding harmonious

relationship among workers had it not been for the race riot in 1919.



If union officials were going to organize black and white workers at the

stockyards, there was a fair amount of social distance, cultural misunderstanding, and ill will to overcome. Most black newcomers found residence in the Black Belt, an area separated from white working-class neighborhoods by the imaginary “dead line” running north and south through the South Side along Wentworth Avenue. Therefore, most interracial contact occurred at the stockyards, in an environment where in the past competition for jobs had been fierce. At the time of the riot, cultural groups were competing for advancement, higher wages, and job security. Black stockyards workers interviewed by the Race Commission shortly after the riot complained that they were not given the same opportunities as Polish workers to make overtime, and that they were being passed over as foremen of mixed gangs; others claimed to have been fired without grounds then rehired without seniority benefits.49

The animosity between African Americans and various ethnic white groups at the

stockyards had a history. In the late nineteenth century, many Eastern European men and

women had served as strikebreakers but they mostly avoided the kind of reputation

among native-born white workers that African Americans acquired. Many established

Chicago Poles feared that the dominant society might lump members of the Polish

community in with the “lower races” if they continued to take work as replacements for

49 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 389-90. 179

union workers. After striking lumberyard workers attacked their Polish replacements in

Tonawanda, New York in 1893, the editors of Dziennik Chicagoski warned their readers,

"We, the Poles, should long ago, for our own good and for the preservation of our honor,

have left the role of scabs, the drudges of capitalism, to the Negroes and the Chinese."50

At the stockyards in 1894, the packers brought in both central European immigrants and southern blacks to replace the Irish and Germans who had walked out in the sympathy strike, but it was a “Negro” effigy that swung from a telegraph pole at Root and Halsted streets adjacent to the Yards. In 1904, perhaps as many as ten thousand

African Americans along with many recent arrivals from Europe replaced members of the

Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America who were out on strike. Black strikebreakers made an impression both because of their overrepresentation during labor walkouts and because of their absence at the Yards during times of peace between capital and labor. Most blacks were laid off after the strikes of 1894 and 1904.

After blacks had served as strike breakers in 1894 and 1904, William Tuttle writes, "The words 'Negro' and 'scab' were . . . synonymous in the minds of numerous white stockyards workers.” Prior to the wartime labor drive, packinghouse employers did not hire African-Americans so as not to upset white workers. 51

This history presented an obvious barrier to peaceful integration and organization

at the stockyards among tenured workers and African American arrivals. Herbert J.

Seligmann of the NCAAP described in an article in Current Opinion the bitterness of

white unionists, especially in the stockyards, toward the influx of Southern black labor.

50 Dziennik Chicagoski, July 27, 1893 (CFLPS). 51 Spero and Harris, Black Worker, 265-68; Chicago Commission on Race Relations. Negro in Chicago, 431; Pacyga, "Back of the Yards," 168; Tuttle, Race Riot, 119. 180

After the riot, one union official told the Department of Justice that “the white employees

of the stock yard resented the negroes getting their jobs."52

Many African Americans arrived in Chicago with little or no experience in factory work, and this exacerbated the tension and helped to perpetuate stereotypes. A large majority of black migrants had worked in agriculture in the South and were not prepared for the continuous hours, the six day week, the monotony, the pace, the dank and dangerous work environment. Many quit or were fired shortly after they arrived.

Others had little idea about unions, their techniques or their purpose.53

African Americans articulated their complaints about the workers who filled the

union rank and file. “The Irish and Poles are a mean class,” argued one black stockyard

worker shortly after the race riot. First labor organizations tried to block them as members, then offered them second-class status: “They try to get the Negroes to join the

Union. . . . White members of the union got paid when their houses had been burned

[during the riot] —$50 if they had families and $25 if they were single. Colored members of the union got nothing when their houses had burned. That’s why I won’t join. You pay money and get nothing.”54

For African-American workers, alabaster was the face of both labor and capital; the unions were white, wresting decent wages from “the pockets of capital” for their members, and employers were white, hiring black workers as scabs or at lower wages, or in some industries, not at all. “The antipathy of union labor toward colored men, coupled

52 Herbert J. Seligmann, "What Is Behind the Negro Uprisings?," Current Opinion 67, no.3 (September, 1919): 154; “Investigation of Riot from Three Govt Special Agents,” Federal Surveillance of Afro- Americans, Vivian Harsh Collection, Reel 12 (0168), Woodson Library Chicago. 53 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 356; Spear, Black Chicago, 166; “Seek to Check Negro Arrivals From the South,” Chicago Tribune, March 16, 1917, 13. 54 Seligmann, "What Is Behind the Negro Uprisings?," 154; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 177-78, 404; Walter F. White, “Chicago and Its Eight Reasons,” Crisis, 18, no.6 (October, 1919), 293–297. 181

with the threatening big stick that the capitalists holds [sic] over his head,” read an

editorial in Chicago’s black newspaper the Whip in 1919, “the negro is now thrown

between the 'frying pan and the fire.'"55

For stockyards employers, opening up packinghouse jobs to southern black

laborers served a purpose beyond addressing the labor shortage. With the labor shortage

caused by the War, the packers anticipated that the SLC would have trouble organizing

black migrants. Employers did their part to insure that this would be the case by

underwriting influential black ministers, politicians and other community leaders (such as

the secretary of the Wabash Avenue YMCA), and by contributing heavily to the Chicago

Urban League, a privately funded social organization that placed many black newcomers

in the packinghouses. In exchange the packers expected these leaders to steer men away

from unions. Additionally, the packing companies targeted African American workers

with other “welfare-capitalist” blandishments, such as sponsoring glee clubs and athletic

clubs. As employers and benefactors, the packers earned the trust and confidence of

many black arrivals, sentiments that remained elusive to union organizers.56

The packers were willing to go even further to undermine the union cause. After

a strike of white workers at a particular division of Wilson’s packing facility, the company gathered non-union black workers from other shops to use as replacements.

Actions like these, testified one black union man in 1919, “Increases the prejudice between the white and the colored.” The packers also employed a number of black packinghouse workers as company agents to intimidate union members and dissuade other African Americans from joining. Verbal abuse and threats of violence from a few

55 "The High Cost of Being a Negro," Chicago Whip, August 21, 1919, 10. 56 White, “Chicago and Its Eight Reasons,” 293–297; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 427. 182

such agents on shop floors resulted in an impromptu walkout among hundreds of black

and white union members across five departments at Wilson and Co. about a month

before the riot in 1919. Agents patrolled areas where workers congregated outside of the

stockyards, intent on intimidating union organizers. One union leader said, "it is a fact

that some of the organizers were actually afraid to go around to some of these saloons

and poolrooms where [African Americans] congregated because of the agents of the

packers . . . and they felt their lives were in danger.”57

On July 6, exactly three weeks before the race riot, the SLC planned a “giant

stockyards union celebration,” kicked off by a march of black and white workers from

the stockyards through the Black Belt. The packers had police revoke the permit for the

precession claiming that a race riot would likely ensue along the parade route. But the

fact that police insisted black union marchers steer clear of State Street, where many

African Americans resided, suggested to union leaders that the packers wanted to keep

the spectacle of united black and white workers beyond the purview of Black Belt

residents. The city forced the union to split their parade in two, one white and one black,

effectively undermining the purpose of the demonstration. Black and white marchers met

at Beutner Playground in the African American residential area; there they mixed and

listened to impassioned oratory from union leaders.58

The packers’ response to the organizing drive reflected the perceived threat and potential viability of the integrated union movement. Although the initial motivation to

organize blacks in the stockyards may have been problematic—out of necessity rather

57 CCRR 429; See also “Alschuler Arbitration between the Chicago Packers and Their Employers,” June 20, 1919, Vivian Harsh Microfilm Collection, Woodson Library Chicago. 58 Herbst, Negro in the Slaughtering and Meat-Packing Industry, 42; Sandburg, Race Riots, 32-33; "Black and White Workers Are Fighting the Same Battle Say Labor Chiefs," Chicago Whip, August 15, 1919. 183

than a collective sense of equality or justice—the effort on the part of union leadership to

appeal to African Americans was concerted and sincere. The Chicago Commission on

Race Relations reported following the race riot that the Chicago Federation of Labor

(CFL)—Chicago’s AFL subordinate umbrella organization that oversaw the Stockyards

Labor Council—had “been very active in all efforts to organize Negroes, especially in the

Stock Yards.” A union official at the stockyards before the riot stated insistently, “I will

say this, and I was on the organizing committee and probably in closer touch with the

situation than anyone else here in the city . . . the standing instructions were to look after

[black workers] very carefully.”59

Few historians, including Tuttle, have recognized the significance and promise of

the stockyards wartime organizing drive. With its mandate to integrate tens of thousands

of workers employed at the stockyards, the SLC under the CFL was taking steps toward

organizing a multi-ethnic, interracial proletariat in a residentially segregated city. It was

a place and time of great possibility for racial tolerance fostered through a shared

working-class consciousness. "The bosses think that because we are of a different color and different nationalities we should fight each other. We're going to fool them and fight for a common cause—a square deal for all." thundered J.W. Johnstone, Secretary of the

SLC, at Beutner Park on July 6, "It does me good to see such a checkerboard crowd . . .

You are all standing shoulder to shoulder as men, regardless of whether your face is white or black."60

A significant number of the rank and file accepted union leadership’s message of

inclusion. The Commission interviewed seventy-four African Americans employed at

59 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 406, 428-9. 60 Herbst, Negro in the Slaughtering and Meat-Packing Industry, 42. 184

the stockyards after the race riot. Many of them articulated their dissatisfaction with

treatment by company foremen, but all except one described treatment by white fellow-

workers as “good or ‘O.K.’” “Negro workers inside the ranks of such unions as the Stock

Yards’" wrote the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, "feel, with very few

exceptions, that they are being given a ‘square deal’ by the unions. . . . Many Negro

unionists look to labor organization as one of the most promising solutions of race

problems.” The Race Commission was not alone in its conclusion. A committee of the

Federal Labor Department Division of Negro Economics released a “Report of Work in

Illinois” in 1918, which read, “In Chicago, at the stockyards, we find that conditions are

much improved and better relations created by organization. The colored men and

workers and the white brother in toil have been brought together."61

However, testimony showed that racial accord applied to certain groups of whites

more often than others. The Labor Department’s work report found “friction between

Negro workers and the Irish element at the yards.” However, the tension “did not seem

to have any connection with the union situation but with individual contacts.” In this

case anyway, Irish harassment of African Americans at the stockyards was not rooted in

concerns about employment or union organizing, but individual prejudices brought to

bear at the workplace.62

A majority of the workers that blacks came in contact with at the stockyards were

Poles, many of whom, like African Americans, were common packinghouse laborers.

61 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 389, 429-30; Department of Labor, Negro at Work, 69. 62 Department of Labor, Negro at Work, 27. While investigators interviewed many African Americans at the stockyards to find out how blacks felt about whites, few interviews with whites were done. After interviewing 865 black workers in Chicago after the riot, the Chicago Commission “determined that interviews with whites was unnecessary” (Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 393). 185

The union was careful to put Polish-speaking men in positions of authority within the

union leadership and rank and file, and these workers built a different reputation for

themselves among union advocates in the black community. Joel E. Spingarn, chairman

of the NAACP, said after the riot, "I am told that about 60 per cent of the stockyards

workers are Poles, and that their leader, John Kirkulski [sic], as well as the secretary and

the 500 shop stewards of the organization, are taking a decisive stand against race

prejudice."63

It is not hard to imagine Polish and African American stockyards workers

interacting amicably during the war years. Polish-American historian Thaddeus

Radzialowski called Polish prejudice against blacks in early twentieth century Chicago an

“exaggerated notion.” James R. Barrett has argued that, while turn-of-the-century Irish and German craft union members continued to hold blacks in contempt, new immigrant arrivals in Packingtown “neither shared industrial or social cultural experiences of previous generations.” On the streets surrounding the University of Chicago settlement house at this time, among recent European arrivals, Mary McDowell wrote that, “the occasional antagonism against the ‘Fink,’ as the Irish called the colored workers who came in 1894, was fading away.”64

Nor is it difficult to imagine Polish and African Americans finding some common cultural ground. No group was more systematically discriminated against by native

whites than African Americans, but new immigrant groups in Packingtown lived as

outsiders as well. Poles and blacks shared poverty and social isolation, but also alien

63 Tuttle, Race Riot, 119; Sandburg, Race Riots, 48, the union leader’s name was actually Kikulski. 64 Thaddeus Radzialowski, "The Competition for Jobs and Racial Stereotypes: Poles and Blacks in Chicago," Polish American Studies 33, no. 2 (Autumn, 1976): 5; James R. Barrett, “Unity and Fragmentation: Class, Race, and Ethnicity on Chicago’s South Side, 1900-1922,” Journal of Social History, 18, no. 1 (Autumn, 1984): 38; McDowell, “Prejudice,” 29. 186

status in the dominant culture. For example, Armour & Co.’s combined “race and

nationality” in its 1919 report on employees, listing foreign-born groups such as “2052

Poles,” and “1372 Lithuanians,” along with “2000 negroes,” despite their country of

birth, separately from the “5167 Americans” working at the plant.65

Employers were not alone in their tendency to conflate foreign nationality and racial difference. Social workers did as well. As part of a University of Chicago sociological study in 1918, employees of The Visiting Nurses Association of Chicago wrote a letter “regarding nationalities with whom they work,” in which they included

“COLORED PEOPLE” whom association employees found “In most instances take instructions and advice better from white people than from nurses of their own race.”

Meanwhile, the nurses found “POLES” to be “Very suspicious, non-communicative” and

“particularly gullible.” Their homes were “over-crowded, very dirty,” according to the nurses, who also commented that “The Polish people learn American ways more slowly than almost any other group.” “LITHUANIANS” were "Very uncommunicative people."

“Like the Poles,” the nurses added, “they Americanize slowly, but they are rather more

difficult to handle, even, than the Poles.” In contrast, the nurses found the “IRISH”

“Rapidly Americanized,” even if they did consume “too much strong tea, potatoes and

bread.”66

While Poles and African Americans at the stockyards differed in language,

folkways, history, and social experiences, they shared outsider status as groups that were

neither “American” nor readily “Americanize-able” because of race or custom. The SLC

65 Sandburg, Race Riots, 44. 66 A letter from Miss Edna L. Foley, Superintendent, The Visiting Nurses Association of Chicago to of Ernest W. Burgess, December 4, 1918, E.W. Burgess Papers Box 51, Folder 2, University of Chicago Special Collections. 187 locals provided some recourse against such prejudice. They offered collective pride in one’s work, which at the stockyards directly contributed to the war effort. Meat production was so critical, that the federal government called upon SLC leadership to sign an agreement not to strike for the deration of the war. As patriotic Americans, the rank and file abided.67

However, the success of the SLC organizing drive should not be overstated; racial tensions at the stockyards persisted. While work gangs were mixed, union locals remained segregated, with most black stockyards workers belonging to “miscellaneous”

Local 651 of the Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen’s union at Forty-Third and State

Streets in Chicago’s Black Belt. The number of black workers in the trade unions varied.

SLC estimates were between 6000 and 10,000 and the Negro Year Book of 1918-19 reported that sixty percent of black workers were in the unions. However, it is unlikely that numbers of African-American union members were ever that high.68

For the most part, unions were most successful in organizing black laborers who had lived in Chicago for a few years and held semi-skilled jobs with hog and cattle killing crews at the packinghouses. New migrants from the South, on the other hand, tended to stay loyal to their employers, under the advice of black community leaders. "It is a fact .

. . that sometimes a man who is not in the union is from one part of the country," testified a black man who worked on the Wilson cattle floor, "and that they stand solidly together, and you cannot do anything with them, just whatever the company tells them to do."

This rift created tension among African American workers. "Negro non-union men were

67 "600,000 Profit by Wage Raise at Stockyards: Judge Alschuler Grants Most of the Demands Under Inquiry," Chicago Tribune, Mar 31, 1918, 9. See also “Alschuler Arbitration,” Vivian Harsh Microfilm Collection, Woodson Library Chicago. 68 Sandburg, Race Riots, 32; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 413. 188 as bitter against the Negro Union Men as the whites were against the blacks," reported an

Armour and Co. official. Of course, tensions remained high between Polish union men and black workers who refused to join.. "The colored fellows up there won't get no buttons and we cannot get along with them." griped a Polish floor steward in Wilson's dry salt department.69

The big SLC drive during the war heightened tensions between union and non- union men, which was racialized by the fact that many of the holdouts were recent

African American migrants. But the success of the union in organizing large numbers of

African American stockyards workers helped black and white workers to recognize shared experiences and aspirations that helped them to see beyond race. The results were imperfect and uneven, but also promising, not just for the union—which had negotiated a

133% hourly wage increase for stockyards workers during the three years preceding the race riot—but for racial integration in Chicago.70

"[T]here is more real fraternal feeling among the black and white workers than in any other grade of society," reported the Race Commission. The same Polish floor steward at Wilson & Co. who complained about non-union blacks in his shop, testified that the Polish and African American union men in his dry salt department were “just like brothers.”71 In an interview with a newspaper journalist, one black stockyards union official was adamant:

If you ask me what I think about race prejudice, and whether it's getting better. . . I'll tell you the one place in this town where I feel safest is over at the yards, with

69 “Alschuler Arbitration,” Vivian Harsh Microfilm Collection, Woodson Library Chicago; “Investigation of Riot from Three Govt Special Agents,” Fed Surveillance of Afro-Americans, Harsh Collection, Reel 12 (0168), Woodson Library Chicago. 70 “Hourly Pay at Yards Up 132.9% in Three Years,” Chicago Tribune, August 24, 1919, A6. 71 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 429; “Alschuler Arbitration,” Vivian Harsh Microfilm Collection, Woodson Library Chicago. 189

my union button on. The union is for protection, that's our cry. We put that on our organization wagons and trucks traveling the stockyards district, in signs telling the white and colored men that their interests are identical. . . . Whenever you hear any of that race riot stuff, you can be sure it is not going to start around here. Here they are learning that it pays for white and colored men to call each other brother.72

The incident that sparked the race riot did not occur at the stockyards, on a shop

floor where so many whites and blacks interacted daily, but at the Twenty-Ninth Street

beach, a segregated leisure space. During the race riot, little violence was reported

among stockyards workers or the Polish and Lithuanian residents of Packingtown. On

the Monday following Eugene Williams’ drowning a small percentage of black

packinghouse laborers reported for work as the riot erupted in the neighborhoods to the

east. Numerous police officers and militiaman patrolled the stockyards district during the

rioting. Notably however, the butcher workmen at the Yards employed their sharp

implements without incident until Thursday. In the morning, an African-American man was killed near the sheep pens by a group of stockyards workers led by white men with

Slavic surnames wielding hammers, shovels, and stones. Investigators were unable to determine what motivated the attack, but it was the only “serious case of violence” on record among the army of workers employed by the meat packers.73

In the early days of the rioting, white mobs attacked black workers leaving the

Union Stock Yards, though largely to the east. In Packingtown, west of the stockyards,

fewer attacks occurred. Rumors persisted that white assailants had hid the bodies of riot

victims among the slaughterhouse waste in Bubbly Creek, but an extensive search turned

72 Sandburg, Race Riots, 32. 73 Herbst, Negro in the Slaughtering and Meat-Packing Industry, 46; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 400; Cook County Coroner, The Race Riots: Biennial Report 1918-1919 and Official Record of Inquests on the Victims of the Race Riots of July and August 1919 (Chicago, 1920), 42- 43. 190

up nothing. A packing company official told the Commission that "there wasn't a single

case of violence in what we call Packingtown during the race riot." Official reports of at least a few assaults in Packingtown contradicted this executive’s testimony, but the statement reflects a sentiment shared by many in the community: Poles and other Eastern

European workers did not engage in the violence. Mary McDowell shared in this belief; she even claimed to have witnessed a “brave act of humanity” by “a powerful Slovak, well-known in the community as a professional boxer” to protect a fallen African-

American man from a white mob west of the stockyards at Forty-Seventh Street and

Ashland Avenue.74

Of the problems between black and white workers at the time of the riot,

competition for jobs, perhaps the largest potential danger, was not one of them. After a

hiring slump in April of 1919 following the signing of the armistice, job placement had picked up again. In June of 1919, the Chicago Urban League was on pace to place 1132 unskilled and semi-skilled workers, many of whom were African American servicemen returning from the war. The Tribune reported an “army of 51,895 workers” employed at stockyards in late August, 1919. The Chicago Commission concluded that “that friction in industry was less than might have been expected” and that from the end of the war to

September of 1920, “the general industrial situation was such as to demand all the labor,

both white and Negro, that could be secured.” Walter F. White of the NAACP wrote in

January of 1920, “In spite of the serious rioting of July and August, there is yet a marked

influx into the city and jobs are secured with little difficulty for all who want to work.”75

74 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 570-1, 399-400; McDowell, “Prejudice,” 31. 75 Sandburg, Race Riots, 15-16; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 2-3, 401; “Hourly Pay at Yards Up 132.9% in Three Years,” Chicago Tribune, August 24, 1919, A6; Department of 191

Undoubtedly, high employment rates helped to alleviate potential tensions

between unskilled white and black stockyards workers during the rioting. But so did the

sanguinity between the races garnered by union membership. Both employees and

management told Department of Labor officials that there was no friction at the Yards

when workers returned following the race riot. On the contrary, various public acts of

worker solidarity and “good feeling and cooperation” occurred. “[T]he two classes of

common labor we have are the Slavs and the Negroes, and they met as old friends,”

commented a packing company official, who further testified before the Commission that, when the workers returned to the Yards, a Polish and African-American man rode an elevated truck around the plant “to signify to the rest of the workers that there was a good spirit existing between the two.”76





A notice “For White Union Men to Read” appeared in the Chicago Federation of

Labor’s organ the New Majority during the week of the riot. “It is a critical time for

organized labor,” the CFL declared. Chicago’s largest labor organization implored its

members to stop the “assault on Negroes by white men…not because they had anything to do with starting the present trouble, but because of their advantageous position to help end it.” Recognizing the gains that had been made and what was at stake, the CFL stated plainly: “Right now it is going to be decided whether the colored workers are to continue

Labor, Negro at Work, 72-73; White, “The Success of Negro Migration,” 112-15; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 2-3. 76 Department of Labor, Negro at Work, 72-73, 27-28; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 399-400. 192

to come into the labor movement or whether they are going to feel that they have been abandoned by it and lose confidence in it.”77

The Stockyards Labor Council made good on the CFL mandate. The SLC held a

mass meeting of black and white union members during the rioting and white union

members assisted injured or homeless African American riot victims. The endeavor

brought white and black workers closer together and greater solidarity to the union.

However, for all of the SLC’s efforts to maintain unity during the rioting, which were

successful in the short term, the race riot ultimately doomed the SLC organizing drive.78

Suddenly, race, not labor, solidarity was on workers’ minds. The riot had

heightened tensions between white and black laborers, and the latter more than ever

hesitated to take the union pledge. Additionally, ethnic tensions increasingly plagued

union operations. SLC leadership, representing common Eastern European workers, was

at odds with skilled butchers of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters union, made up of native-

born Americans largely of Irish and German decent. The Amalgamated was less tolerant

of the organizing drive, and were more inclined to bargain with the packers, while the

SLC sought direct confrontation with employers.79

Historically, the packers had taken an active role in sustaining racial and ethnic

divisions in the workforce in order to undermine organization efforts. And

unsurprisingly, the packing companies moved swiftly to exploit the race riot and the

union rift. In their public statements, the packers claimed that union agitators were to

blame for the riot. Once order was restored in Chicago, they made arrangements to

march African Americans into the stockyards under the guard of armed troops with

77 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 45. 78 Barrett, Work and Community, 221-22. 79 Barrett, Work and Community, 224-5; Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor, 68-9. 193

machine guns and fixed bayonets. A measure and message that CFL President John

Fitzpatrick argued was unnecessary and entirely disingenuous. “We have worked day

and night to keep this situation in hand,” Fitzpatrick assured the authorities, “not your

police, not your soldiers . . . but the union men and women of the stockyards.”80

The fears of packer conspiracy were well founded, but at times, union leaders overestimated the reach of employers. The labor organ New Majority alleged that packing company officials had ordered the Packingtown fire in an order to promote racial antagonism, but this was highly unlikely. Presented with the more likely scenarios outlined at the beginning of this chapter, I would argue that the fire served some political purpose for Irish Democrats, who recognized the threat of the emerging Polish and

African American alliance at the stockyards. Irish Democrats were split into warring camps in Chicago at this time, but they rallied against the encroachment of outsiders, much like the Irish gangs along the dead line, members of which put aside their group rivalries in a concerted effort to keep out African Americans.

Even when investigators accepted the conclusion that African Americans were not responsible for the Packingtown fire, the Irish bosses held on to the notion, making public claims that the incident would ruin black/white relations at the stockyards. Thomas A.

Doyle, former alderman from the Fifth Ward, which, along with the Twenty-Ninth, had suffered the bulk of the fire damage, told the press that “colored persons” would never again be allowed to set foot in the stockyards. Thirtieth Ward alderman William R.

O’Toole said plainly: "They will not dare let Negroes back in the yards again. Whites of

80 Barrett, Work and Community, 221-4; Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor, 68; “Investigation of Riot from Three Govt Special Agents,” Fed Surveillance of Afro-Americans, Harsh Collection, Reel 12 (0168), Woodson Library Chicago. 194

every nationality employed in the yards will combine against the colored man and he will

need a company of soldiers near him to get anywhere near the stockyards."81

The fire conspirators hoped for rifts between white and black workers at the

yards, whose alliance would upset the status quo. Like most Irish Chicagoans involved in

the rioting, ward politicians were not upset that blacks refused to join stockyards unions,

as William Tuttle argued, but because African Americans were joining unions. Both the

ward bosses and the packing bosses wanted to prevent the coalition of blacks and Poles.

They used similar means to achieve different ends. The packers wanted the profits; the

Irish politicians wanted the city.

And the Irish American young men who took torches to the Back of the Yards

neighborhoods, serving the whims of their “club” benefactors, were willing participants

because of the outright contempt they had for African Americans and Polish immigrants,

both of whom they imagined as inferior and alien. Both were threats to the white, Irish

American establishment on the South Side. Ironically, the actions of these young men

from working-class families, many of them sons of stockyards workers, helped the

packers neutralize organized labor at the Yards by shifting the ideological focus among

unskilled workmen from labor to race.82

Most of the new immigrant stockyard workers were geographically separated

from the Black Belt, and feared traversing the Irish neighborhoods that stood between

them and the worst of the rioting. But more than the physical distance from the violence,

Eastern Europeans were also culturally removed from the historical tensions that motivated the violence. As Mary McDowell explained:

81 “Negroes Didn’t Set Fires, Say Their Aldermen” Chicago Tribune, August 3, 1919, 2. 82 Barrett, Work and Community, 223. 195

It was evident that during the riot our Polish neighbors were not the element that committed the violence; it was I committed by the second and third generations of American born young men from the "Athletic Clubs" which had grown up under the protection of the political leaders of this district, themselves mostly American born. These experiences seem to bear out the conclusion that our home -grown race prejudices have influenced the children of foreigners and that they did not bring with them this American obsession.83

Because Eastern European immigrants lived in relatively isolated ethnic communities, where traditional folkways continued to be valued and practiced, they had not yet adopted the “American obsession” with race. The African Americans who entered the packinghouse workforce shared shop floors with foreign-born Eastern

Europeans, predominantly Polish, who were more open to interracial cooperation. “For a brief moment,” writes Rick Halpern, author of Down on the Killing Floor: Black and

White Workers in Chicago’s Packinghouses, 1904-54, “it appeared that Chicago’s packinghouse workers were ushering in a new era of interracial unionism.”

Unfortunately, the race riot altered the course of labor history; the moment was lost and white and black workers would not again join forces against the packers until the 1930s.84

Interracial labor disputes were not among the root causes of the riot. As growing

numbers of African Americans entered the manufacturing and service industries, more

white workers were learning to tolerate blacks in the workplace, be it at the stockyards,

the foundry, or the precinct house. This is not to say that African Americans were not

discriminated against at work, but whites tolerated their presence in social and private

spaces there. Blacks and whites reportedly ate lunch and smoked together. They used

the same locker rooms, washrooms, showers, and wash basins without incident. In many

83 McDowell, “Prejudice,” 32. 84 Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor, 65. 196

cases, in work environments with high numbers of African American laborers, the Race

Commission found that "There were no separate accommodations and there was no ill-

feeling whatever."85

Yet, in a telling survey done by the Department of Justice of Armour

packinghouse workers following the riot, union and non-union men, “Everyone talked to

was of the opinion that whites and blacks should be segregated and that as long as

residences were along side one another there would be trouble.”86

The race riot was not principally about labor or the workplace following the

influx of African American migrants from the South. It was about social and residential

space. As the maps show, Chicago was ethnically integrated but racially segregated.

Poles lived among other Europeans, but because of prejudice or custom, not among

African Americans. Off-work hours, or leisure hours—spent at saloons, in city parks, or on porches—were racially homogeneous.

Groups like the Poles had not yet learned to fully grasp and embrace their racial identity in America. As opposed to similar, though not entirely analogous, conceptions of race rooted in nationality in Europe, in their new surroundings immigrants required a deeper understanding of the social advantages of white skin in the United States, an understanding that developed slowly, mainly among American-born generations, in relatively isolated Packingtown communities. By the second decade of the twentieth century, there was already a sense among Poles that they were losing many of their

American-born children, as was expressed in a 1911 Dziennik Zwiazkowy editorial:

85 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 117, 396-7. 86 John H. Wigmore ed., The Illinois Crime Survey (Chicago: Illinois Association for Criminal Justice, 1929), 1002. 197

These young people do not know how to speak Polish . . . They do not admit that they are Poles before strangers . . . and when some German or Irishman impudently ridicules the Poles, these young people not only do not defend their nationality, but themselves attack it even more violently . . . Such a young Pole . . . can most frequently be found on some street corner, chewing tobacco, swearing in English, and shamelessly accosting men and women. . . . A creature of this type respects no one—not even his own parents; he goes wild in strange surroundings, and frequently even becomes a criminal, bringing us shame when the American papers reveal his real Polish name.87

It was a type of “Americanization” that differed from the kind immigrants

received by the likes of Mary McDowell at the University of Chicago settlement house,

which sponsored English language and citizenship classes, kindergarten, and women’s clubs. While the stock-yards and other organizing drives failed to build a class-conscious proletariat, and Progressives attempted to impart middle-class values to the women and children of Eastern European immigrants in Packingtown, ethnicity was fading among the next generation of Polish boys, who were adopting the ways of the more assimilated

Irish American youth, driven to violent ends by the “American obsession.”

87 "Two Types of Youth Our Children, They Are Our Future," Dziennik Zwiazkowy, November 16, 1911 (CFLPS). 198

CHAPTER 4 “Reaping the Whirlwind”: Soldiering, Manhood, and First-Class Citizenship in Chicago’s Race Riot

The 8th Illinois Regiment at their armory at 3533 Giles Avenue, Chicago in 1918. The regiment was made up of about three thousand African American men. Source: Digital scan from Olivia Mahoney ed., Douglas/Grand Boulevard: A Chicago Neighborhood (Arcadia Publishing, 2001).

Chicago’s race riot began in the afternoon of Sunday July 27, 1919, but it was not until late in the evening on Wednesday, July 30 that Mayor Thompson acquiesced to public pressure and called in the Illinois Reserve Militia. In the interim, Chicago’s police force was overextended and concentrated in the south side riot zone, between the Union

199

Stock Yards to the west and Chicago’s segregated Black Belt to the east, where the

violence was frequent and ongoing. This left police precincts in other areas of the city

undermanned. Despite this, only small, isolated clashes occurred outside the tumult of

the riot zone; the exception was a riot in Chicago’s commercial district, “the Loop.”

The Chicago Tribune reported that white rioters began moving north toward the

Loop after they faced heavy resistance from armed African Americans in the Black Belt.

Chicago’s downtown district was in a state of confusion and disarray. Following the

street car strike that began at 12:00 a.m. on Tuesday, the streets were crowded with extra

vehicles and pedestrians, and fewer police officers to keep the peace. Bloodthirsty white

ruffians reveled in the disorder. "The loop was theirs to riot in,” read the Tribune, “and they went looking for victims." The Chicago Herald and Examiner proclaimed the Loop mob was 1,500 strong in the early morning on Tuesday. The Tribune described the

assemblage as “at times menacing and at other times playful.” The crazed bunch targeted

downtown hotels and restaurants, drawing out African American employees. Police

found their black victims “beaten into insensibility” and “left . . . for dead.”1

What Chicago’s dailies failed to report, and was later uncovered in the extensive testimony provided to the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, was that the Loop mob was made up primarily of discharged soldiers and sailors in uniform, white men between the ages of 17 and 22. Twice the mob entered LaSalle Street railroad station, where migrants from the South were arriving day and night, to beat and rob black men.

The plunderers smashed and vandalized restaurants along Wabash Avenue frequented by

African Americans. Black patrons were beaten and shot, and two men were killed. The

1 "Riots Spread, Then Wane," Chicago Tribune, July 30, 1919, 1; "Negroes Shot Down and Beaten by Mobs in Heart of Chicago," Chicago Herald and Examiner, July, 30, 1919, 3. 200

soldier mob then rolled the bodies into the gutter, turned the victims’ pockets inside out,

and divided among themselves spoils of cash and adornments. The violence in the Loop

continued until ten o’clock on Tuesday morning, when many business owners arrived

downtown to protect their property.2

The Loop riot was not the only case of whites in military dress, harassing and attacking African Americans. A midweek report out of the Stanton Avenue police station

in the Black Belt stated that the police officers there had on multiple occasions witnessed

white men in army uniforms racing through the street in automobiles, armed with revolvers. Periodically, one of the uniformed men would blow an army sergeants

whistle. Presumably, these actions were meant to terrify black residents in the area. The

Stanton Avenue police force did nothing to dissuade the marauders.3

The brutal actions of the soldier mob in Chicago’s Loop resonated with events in

Washington DC one week earlier, when soldiers, sailors, and marines returning from

tours in Europe clashed with black civilians, in retaliation, allegedly for attacks on white

women near the nation’s capital. Small bands of white men in uniform chased black men

on the streets, and pulled others from streets cars, killing two and beating many others.

Following four days of rioting in Washington DC, James Weldon Johnson of the

NAACP, who would famously dub these months in 1919 America’s “Red Summer,”

warned, “"I am afraid we will have riots elsewhere as a result of those here . . . When

they come they will be serious. The colored men will not run away and hide as they have

2 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), 7, 13, 19, 37-38. The Riot Commission also reported the Loop mob to be significantly smaller than originally reported by the Tribune and Herald. 3 Department of Intelligence Report 02, Federal Surveillance of Afro-Americans (1917-1925): The First World War, The Red Scare & The Garvey Movement (FSAA), Reel 21 (0488), Microfilm Collection, Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, Chicago Public Library. 201

done on previous occasions of that kind. The experience here has demonstrated that the

colored man will no longer submit to being beaten without cause."4



Interracial tensions existed for some time prior to the race riot in the areas

surrounding the growing Black Belt. Members of the white racial community sought to

keep African Americans from entering traditionally white neighborhoods, where

residents complained that blacks adversely affected home values. But contempt for

African Americans went beyond material concerns; many whites believed that blacks

were inferior and alien. White neighborhood protective associations on the South Side

used their political and economic influence to implement racist agendas. And justice

system officials sat on their hands while white bombers terrorized African American

realtors and home owners living and operating in white areas.

Young white ruffians from the lower-class Irish neighborhoods west of the Black

Belt were largely responsible for the violence against blacks. Theirs was the bloodiest

expression of a collective desire to keep blacks segregated and separated. There was

nothing new in this. Irish American gangs had been enforcing the racial boundaries in

this area of the city through intimidation and force for years preceding the riot and they

would continue to patrol the streets west of the dead line in the years following.

William Tuttle argued that the 1919 riot occurred when a growing number of

African Americans in the stockyards refused to join up when white unions sought to

4 “Riots Elsewhere Forecast by Negro,” The Washington Post, July 25, 1919, 4; “More Clashes Between Races in Washington,” Chicago Tribune, July 21, 1919, 1; “Service Men Beat Negroes in Race Riot at Capital,” New York Times, July 21, 1919, 1. 202

organize all stockyard and packinghouse workers. I disagree. In Chapter 3, I argue that

stockyard employees mostly were not rioters. There was some tension between white and black workers, to be sure, but the overall feeling was one of tolerance and opportunity; labor leaders especially recognized the importance of solidarity across racial barriers against the packers, and they tried to impart a culture of racial harmony at the stockyards. The question remains then: If not labor, what was it that escalated the tension and intermittent violence on the South Side into full scale race war in the summer of

1919? Why this moment?

War shook the foundations of the established philosophies on race and the “race problem” in the United States. More precisely, the experience of being soldiers and the particular version of manliness that went with it were singularly important. Blacks’ proud service offered validation of their manhood and of their fitness for full rights and citizenship in America. This was doubly true in northern cities like Chicago, even as

African Americans found themselves segregated and neglected with opportunities greatly restricted by race. Black leaders were quick to point out the irony of fighting for democracy abroad when one considered its limited implementation at home. African-

American war veterans, as well as many of those within their racial community who looked up to them, were no longer content to remain “in their place.” A new generation of black men vowed to fight back when and wherever necessary.

Among many native-born, working-class whites, the success of African-American soldiers resulted in confusion, insecurity, and anger. All their lives, they had been taught that the white race was superior and that battles were won by white American soldiers who were braver, stronger, and more cunning than their enemies (often people of color).

203

“War hero” was about as lofty a social height as many of these young working-class white men could aspire; and now, so could black men. Acts of black “impudence” following the war only fueled white ire, and a younger generation of white street toughs, enabled by Irish-American policemen and community leaders, waged a terror campaign against African-Americans the likes of which the South Side had never seen.

The entrance of the United States into World War I initiated changes to migration patterns that altered the social and political landscape of the city. Growing numbers of

African Americans entered Chicago to fill manufacturing jobs when the war cut off emigration from Europe. Meanwhile, thousands of workers shipped out to join the war effort. For the black men who took their place, the change involved more than just a transformation of physical surroundings but a psychological one as well; they had liberated themselves from the Jim Crow South, and made their way to the “Land of

Hope.” Anxious to prove their worth, African American men in Chicago registered for military service with great enthusiasm. And no members of black society embodied black defiance and entitlement more than the troops who served in the war. The bravery shown by black soldiers oversees, together with the racism they faced within the army ranks and as civilians upon their return, fueled feelings of injustice and indignation. The soldiers helped all blacks transcend divisions of region, class and age; they helped rally

African Americans toward a militant response to white provocations.



204

Shortly following the entry of the United States into World War I in April 1917,

Congress passed President Woodrow Wilson’s conscription bill, calling for male citizens between the ages of 21 and 30 to register for the draft. Wilson sought to register ten million men, of which he hoped two million would fill the ranks of the American

Expeditionary Force (AEF).5

To mobilize an army of this size in short order required not only compliance but enthusiasm from America’s male citizenry. The propaganda that came from Washington

D.C. appealed to men’s highest ideals, which were said to be threatened by an enemy with no respect for the progress of civilization or the ethics of war. More pointedly, the

War Department sought to elucidate the threat posed by the Germans to an American way of life characterized by personal independence and Christian morals. On June 5, 1917

Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of the Interior made an impassioned plea in a front page

Chicago Tribune article titled, “Why We Fight”: “America is at war . . . to save herself with the rest of the world from the [German] nation that has linked itself with the Turk and adopted the method of Mahomet, setting itself to make the world bow before policies backed by its organized and scientific military system.” Through shared understandings of genteel manhood, the message sought tacitly to enliven a collective rage toward a

German enemy who had “outraged man’s common sense of fair play and humanity”; who had, through their methods of war, dragged mankind “down to the primitive brute”; and had construed American neutrality as “cowardice.”6

It behooved the state to frame the war in terms of threats to the nation (and call upon its boys to protect her), and to downplay the allure of notoriety gained in battle

5 “All Men Liable to Draft Read This Carefully,” Chicago Tribune, May 16, 1917, 7; “June 5 Made Registry Day for the Draft,” Chicago Tribune, May 19, 1917, 1. 6 “'Why We Fight' Told World by High Official,” Chicago Tribune, June 5, 1917, 1. 205

among servicemen who the state hoped would later return to more sedate lives as

husbands, fathers, and citizens. But while the Wilson administration’s justification for

war—self-defense, the preservation of democracy, the brutishness of the enemy—may

have served them well in garnering public support, the young men who served in Europe had other ambitions. For them, military service was less about principles and more about the glory their “valor” and “mighty deeds” might bring upon their return from war, or the honor bestowed upon them by their comrades in arms, within the fraternity of men that service in war always creates. The army gave instruction on the causes of the war in training camps after questionnaires revealed that recruits knew little about it. As one officer wrote regarding U.S. servicemen overseas, "I can hardly remember a single instance of serious discussion of American policy or larger war issues. They were simply fascinated by the prospect of adventure and heroism."7

In the early years of the war, the Tribune did its part to emphasize the duty of the

nation’s loyal citizenry—a 1917 editorial warned that men should register for service out

of an obligation to “performance of duty” as opposed to “heroic impulses or thirst for

military glory”—but the paper’s editors could not resist indulging in the dramatic

aesthetic of brave soldiers in battle. By 1919 the Tribune was lauding American soldiers

of “grit” and “glory” on battlefields “crowded with heroes.”8

The Tribune’s editorial shift represented not so much a diversion from accepted

meanings of war but a retreat toward popular perceptions of soldiering and masculinity

that had been developed over the last half century. As Richard Slotkin argues, it was

7 Robert Sandels, “The Doughboy: Formation of a Military Folk,” American Studies 24, no. 1 (Spring, 1983): 84-85; See also Robert A. Nye, “Western Masculinities in War and Peace,” The American Historical Review 112, no. 2 (April, 2007): 417-438. 8 “Editorial of the Day,” Chicago Tribune, April 8, 1919, 8. 206

during this period that professional soldiers in battle had gradually displaced “pioneer

hunters and Indian fighters” as typical heroic figures in American popular mythology, coinciding with the nation’s greater dependence on military power in a new era of

imperialism.9

Simultaneously, the masculine ideal among middle-class men was shifting further

from Victorian standards, and proponents of proper manhood lauded the cerebral benefits

of male aggressiveness and physical exertion. Joseph Dana Miller wrote disparagingly in his turn-of-the-century essay “Militarism or Manhood?” that the “heroism exhibited on the battlefield is of the passive sort” requiring “a small individual initiative” because men simply followed orders and confronted enemies at great distances. But by the onset of

World War I, the power of these sentiments had waned. Intellectuals agreed that war tested and improved the depths of a man’s character. "When it comes to enduring the almost unendurable," wrote Dr. W. A. Evans in the Tribune in 1918, ". . . to almost

superhuman exhibitions of muscular strength, the impulse must come from the

emotions." War developed in a man greater immunity to disease, discipline, deference,

persistence in the face of obstacles, and an altruistic interest in his community.10

Additionally, the aversion to male physicality, associated with manual labor and lower-class behaviors, pervasive among genteel women in the late nineteenth century, had given way to a preference for toned muscles by the time of the war. During World

War I, muscular bodies were envied and desired. According to Dr. Evans, military training had a "good effect physically,” which was "shown in the rapid improvement in

9 Richard Slotkin, “Unit Pride: Ethnic Platoons and the Myths of American Nationality,” American Literary History 13, no.3 (Autumn, 2001), 473. 10 See Gail Bederman Manliness and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 10-20; Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press: 1996), 184; W. A. Evans, "How to Keep Well: Biological Aspects of War," Chicago Tribune, April 21, 1918, D4. 207

the physique of recruits.” These manly specimens, with their finely tuned bodies and

quick minds, were “heroes,” according to Evans, who added that “women like to marry

and bear the children of heroes.”11

Soldiering was a performance of masculinity that pervaded the thoughts of the nearly 400,000 young men in Chicago who had registered for the draft by September of

1918. Perhaps author James T. Farrell best captured their collective mood through the

inner-thoughts of his tragic antihero Studs Lonigan, in the popular novel The Young

Manhood of Studs Lonigan, about a wayward Irish-American youth growing up on

Chicago’s south side at this time. Upon hearing the news that the United States had

declared war, Studs daydreamed that he was "a brave and gallant soldier of his country . .

. [who] would make everybody . . . envy him and be proud of him, and recognize he was

somebody all right, and he’d win medals for bravery and have his picture in the papers,

and maybe, years ahead, even in the history books.” Studs fixated upon soldiering, partly

because it seemed the remedy for all that ailed him about life on Chicago’s streets. In

contrast to the ambiguities and contradictions of the world Stud’s knew, the battlefields

would be just, rewarding those who were most deserving. Over there, Studs believed

unequivocally that he would distinguish himself, and thus he “wanted to be a soldier now,

marching away in uniform, and become a hero.”12

African American men might have experienced some of the same vexation as

Studs Lonigan, but the sources of their discontent were distinctive: ideas about black inferiority, pervasive since the Civil War. By the early twentieth century, the

“reconciliationist” view of the war had triumphed in the American imagination; a

11 Evans, "Biological Aspects of War.” 12 James T. Farrell, Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy Comprising Young Lonigan, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, and Judgment Day (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 163, 178. 208

memory of the Civil War that emphasized common experiences and characteristics of

Southern and Northern whites over African American political and social equality. The reconciliationist sentiment was buoyed by Social Darwinism, or the application of

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to human “races” engaged in a struggle for social and political dominance. The science of eugenics, a related enterprise, postulated that culturally acquired characteristics were inherited through blood or race. Such discourses informed scholarly thought, which in turn served to justify white privilege. “The Negro,” explained Dr. Jeffries Wyman, an anatomist at Harvard University in 1870, “is not a man and a brother in the same full sense in which every Western Aryan is a man and a brother. . . . It will take generations, no man can say how many, to bring him to the level of supreme Caucasian man.”13

In this cultural climate, African Americans had endured decades of persecution by

the time of Chicago’s race riot. In the South, white elites returned to power and made

black men second-class citizens. The myth of the Negro rapist emerged in the South in the late nineteenth century, when white husbands and fathers, emasculated by the defeat

of the Confederacy, instigated a reign of terror upon African American men. Reports of

lynching soared, the murders justified by whites convinced that black men were savage

rapists, unable to control their sexual desires in the presence of white women. Historical

revisionism buttressed the Negro rapist trope, most notably in D.W. Griffith’s epic The

Birth of a Nation, which using pioneering film techniques powerfully recounted a tale of

black savage despotism and the reassertion of white righteous authority in the postbellum

13 See David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War In American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 249-50; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 445- 47. 209

South. Liberal whites in the North condemned lynching, but generally assumed that

African American men were rapists. Before the Great Migration, when the population of

African Americans in the North was small and limited to domestic service, northern whites deferred to their Anglo-American brethren in the South in matters concerning race relations; which is to say that they accepted racism prima facie.14

Benedict Anderson and others have considered at length the phenomenon of nations as a means of social organization, characterizing them as “imagined communities” in which members who are not personally familiar with one another draw fictive interpersonal connections through shared customs and experiences. As others before and after them did and would do likewise, people in the early twentieth-century

United States negotiated the characteristics of an American national identity through a variety of discourses, from popular to scientific. Two prominent schools of thought on nationality existed in the U.S. at the time of Chicago’s race riot: a “racialist school,” which contended that nationality was rooted in “blood” or genetic heredity, contrasted somewhat by a cultural theory of nationality, whose proponents posited that a certain set of values and a particular language were the determining factors of a nation; both of which could be learned in the U.S. through a process Progressives called

“Americanization.”15

Race factored in both outlooks, which were rooted in a particular set of assumptions about a true American identity, reinforced by national folklore, rooted in the

14 Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 46-53; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 438. See Chapter Four “The Birth of Two Nations” in Davarian L. Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 121-54. 15 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Slotkin, “Unit Pride,” 470-76. 210 lofty exploits of men of Anglo-Saxon, and to a lesser extent, Teutonic racial heritage.

The Frontier Myth, for example, implicitly characterized the United States as an Anglo-

Protestant nation, rightfully expanding westward, exerting its biological and cultural superiority over non-white Indians and Mexicans. Rooted in the mid-nineteenth school of anthropology, which helped a white majority justify black slavery, the racialist ideology in particular asserted that Anglo-Saxons, through racial evolution, were most fit as warriors and military strategists.

In the United States there existed such a powerful connection between race and nationality that for much of the late nineteenth-century the colonization of emancipated slaves outside of the country seemed the best means to move the nation ahead after the

Civil War. Abraham Lincoln advocated colonization throughout much of his political career. In the early-twentieth century, blacks continued to fit awkwardly into America’s national narrative. Though born in the United States, African Americans were part of a racial group classified in the federal Immigration Commission’s 1911 report as “Negro,

Negroid,” characterized as “inhabiting hot countries” and “belonging to the lowest division of mankind from an evolutionary standpoint.”16

As much as race was a force in American identity, so was gender. Although women won voting rights in many states by the second decade of the twentieth century, signaling the political advancement of women’s suffrage that would lead to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, by custom talk of democratic citizenship implicitly centered on the concept of manhood. Theodore Roosevelt’s

Commission of Immigration reiterated this in its official report in 1907, which defined

16 Slotkin, “Unit Pride,” 470-76, 481; U.S. Immigration Commission, Dictionary of Races or Peoples, Reports of the Immigration Commission, vol. 5 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1911), 100. 211

“the basic qualities which underlie democracy” as “intelligence, manliness, cooperation.”

In essence, manliness, or possessing the proper characteristics of a man, was the basis of

civic respectability and the platform from which men made claims to social privilege in

American society.17

Army life strengthened ties between manhood and citizenship, as AEF officials

quite consciously developed a military society that they hoped would prepare diverse

groups of young men for civic duty and political participation upon their discharge. The

assumption was that men who fought for their country were entitled in some degree to

rights as citizens, even if these could not be immediately realized. According to historian

Robert Nye, this was not unlike other Western nations, for whom, “the conscript army

was to be the ‘school for the nation’ that would erase class, regional, and ethnic

differences and create a ‘national masculinity’ embodied in the individual soldier."

Political rights were at least latent in the body of the male conscript or volunteer, whose

actual or potential sacrifice would then earn him his nation’s gratitude.18

The meanings associated with soldiering contrasted starkly with the pervasive

stereotype of African American men. The Chicago Commission on Race Relations

report devoted a number of pages to a litany of “beliefs, prejudices, and faulty deductions” held by whites, who imagined blacks as shifty; lazy; carefree; half-witted;

improvident; neglectful of others; physically unattractive; boisterous; irrational;

undisciplined; bumptious; lacking in civic consciousness. Debt-ridden and terrorized in

the Jim Crow South, and closed-off from the best jobs and educational opportunities in

17 Slotkin, “Unit Pride,” 475. Martin Summers writes that “manhood and citizenship” were “conflated in the minds of turn-of-the-century Americans” in Martin Summers, Manliness and its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 2. For manliness defined, see Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 17-20. 18 Nye, “Western Masculinities,” 421. See also Sandels, “The Doughboy.” 212

the North, black men lacked ways of refuting the racial libel. Military service

represented a rare opportunity.19

Even before World War I, African American men volunteered in large numbers in

no small part to exploit the implicit connections between fitness for battle and fitness for

citizenship. With continued indignation toward whites, and anger at racial oppression,

Chicago’s black press used military service as a platform from which to demand greater

citizenship rights for African Americans. When black regiments were called upon to

“fight the white man’s battles” in Cuba and Mexico during the years preceding the war,

the Defender, the most widely distributed African American newspaper in the country,

explained the commitment of black soldiers to “Old Glory” in the face of the

discrimination they experienced at home:

Of course we'll fight . . . Were we not to take this stand we would be undeserving of even the limited privileges accorded to us; we would have no right to demand a hearing. Never let it be said of us that we are disloyal or cowards. The white man has some shame even though it be hidden so deep in his bosom that it is constantly unavailable. He cannot fail to see and recognize in time that we are entitled to every privilege and right enjoyed by him, because we have proven ourselves worthy, because we have answered every call where MEN in the fullest sense were needed.20

Although military endeavors required inordinate sacrifice and humility for black

men—African American troops served in segregated black regiments, under the

command of white commissioned officers—for the Defender, nothing exposed white hypocrisy like the valor of African American soldiers on the battlefield. "They are the advanced guard," the Chicago Defender wrote of black regiments of infantry and cavalrymen in Mexico in 1916, "the first to get mowed down by the enemy's bullets, they

19 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 437-51. 20 “The Call to Arms,” Defender, June 24, 1916, 7. 213

are making excellent breastworks and saving the white soldiers that they might return to

their own firesides unscathed."21

Ostensibly, whites limited the rights of African Americans in the early twentieth

century United States because of a shared doubt in the capacity for “intelligence,

manliness, cooperation” in black men required for democratic citizenship. The racial

caste system established after Reconstruction in the South, where an overwhelming

majority of African Americans lived before World War I, only served to reaffirm these

shared beliefs. Economically, blacks worked for whites; socially, they belonged to a

despised caste; culturally, they were expected to play grateful fools. African American sharecroppers lived in state of debt peonage, which made traditional standards of white middle-class manliness (self-reliance, prosperity, family provider) largely unattainable.

Lastly, conventional thinking deemed cooperation an important component of political participation, but it was difficult for African Americans to be cooperative with whites with whom they rarely socialized, who had barred them from public spaces through legal apartheid. And anyone who challenged this racial status quo courted prison, beatings, and lynch mobs.22

In this context of psychological, social and cultural subordination, military service

was a life altering experience for African American men. Individually, the army served

to affirm personal self-worth, a rebirth that was often referred to by black soldiers and

intelligentsia as an “awakening.” Active duty soldiers and veterans became symbols of

pride, power, and entitlement for an embattled black community. "Perhaps the nation is

not awake to the fact that the expedition has caused the Negro to take stock of himself,

21 “For What Are We Fighting?,” Defender, April 29, 1916, 8. 22 Summers, Manliness and its Discontents, 3-4; Norvell Letter to Victor Lawson, August 22, 1919, Julius Rosenwald Papers, Box 6, Folder 3, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. 214 and see what he really has to fight for,” crowed the Defender following the Mexican campaign in 1916. And when the Selective Service Act went into effect in 1917, the

Defender boldly exclaimed, “"THE THEORY that half a loaf is better than no loaf at all has long since been exploded . . . We have put up with the crumbs that have fallen from the white man's table as our portion so long we are considered ungrateful if we even dare to hint it is about time we were eating at the first table."23

Such sentiments were stirring in black communities across the nation when the

U.S. government began registering men for service across the country in 1917. The prospect alarmed politicians and local elites who recognized large-scale black enlistment as a threat to the racial caste system of the South. Senator James K. Vardaman of

Mississippi led a group of legislators whose attempt in congress to block the registration of African-American men failed. When asked about the significance of the Selective

Service Act, Vardaman responded, “It means that millions of Negroes will come under this measure. They will be armed, and I know of no greater menace to the South than this.” Upwards of 400,000 black men served the United States during the war; 200,000 of them were stationed in France, but less than 50,000 served as combat troops. The bulk of African-American enlisted men served in menial positions in sanitary and medical divisions. However, black soldiers would make the most of their limited opportunities on the battlefields.24

23 William M. Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Atheneum Press, 1970), 213-4; “For What Are We Fighting?,” Defender, April 29, 1916, 8; “‘Jim Crow’ Training Camps--No!" Defender, April 28, 1917, 3. 24 W. Allison Sweeney, “Two Strange Voices from the South,” Defender, April 28, 1917, 3; Rufus E. Clement, “Problems of Demobilization and Rehabilitation of the Negro Soldier After World Wars I and II,” The Journal of Negro Education 12, no. 3 (Summer, 1943): 533- 34; Tuttle, Race Riot, 217. 215

In Chicago, draft boards registered a disproportionate number of men of fighting

age living in the Black Belt. Local Draft Board No. 4, headquartered at 3333 South State

Street (three blocks from the Angelus apartment building), registered 9000 men from a

population of 30,000 and 1850 of them were immediately sent to cantonments. In an

August 1918 drive to register men who had recently turned twenty-one years old, the

Tribune noted that, “the young men came to register with the greatest of eagerness. This

was especially true in district No. 4 . . . where the registrants were mostly Negroes." On

November 11, when peace was declared, another 7832 men from this area were ready to

be shipped out. A handful of white commentators grasped the social implications of

black service. Chicago Daily News journalist Carl Sandburg commented: "[I]t is clear

that in one neighborhood are thousands of strong young men who have been talking to

each other on topics more or less intimately related to the questions, ‘What are we ready

to die for? Why do we live? What is democracy? What is the meaning of freedom; of

self-determination?’"25



Black Chicagoans filled the ranks of the 8th Illinois Regiment, which was among

the most distinguished African American outfits in the nation. Soldiers of the 8th Illinois had achieved some local fame for their exploits in Cuba and Mexico, and would gain international notoriety after the Great War. In 1916, the Defender described the 8th

Illinois as "an organization composed of some of the highest types of men the race

25 “3,834 Chicago Youths, Just 21, Sign for War” Chicago Tribune, August 25, 1918, 5; “Figures on Boys of 21 on Rolls,” Chicago Tribune, August 25, 1918, 5; Sandburg, Race Riots, 8; Walter F. White, “Chicago and Its Eight Reasons,” Crisis 18, no.6 (October 1919), 293-97. 216

affords." Commanding the “Old 8th” was Col. Franklin A. Densison, a former assistant

attorney-general and a south side black community leader. Denison commanded the 8th

Illinois in Cuba in 1898-99, becoming the first African American to lead a United States

regiment in wartime, and was the highest ranking black officer of the AEF in France. An

active National Guard unit with combat experience, the 8th was prepared for service

before the implementation of the conscription act; the regiment received its mobilization

orders in March, 1917.26

Officers of the 8th Illinois Regiment at Camp Logan in Houston, Texas. Colonel Franklin A. Denison sits third from the right. Source: Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum.

26 "Race Problems Discussed at Olivet Baptist Church," Whip, August 9, 1919, 1; “The Call to Arms,” Defender, June 24, 1916, 7; "Illinois Colored Soldiers in France," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 11, no. 1, April 1918, 606-8; Catherine Reef, African Americans in the Military (New York: Facts on File, Incorporated, 2010), 89-91. 217

But it was not as if the army was a shelter from the storm. The soldiers of the 8th

Illinois, like other African-American servicemen, faced both German guns and American

racism. In October, the 8th was sent along with the rest of the Illinois National Guard to

Camp Logan in Houston, Texas, the sight of a recent race riot brought on by tensions

between white citizens and black soldiers. The riot left sixteen whites and four blacks

dead; shortly thereafter nineteen African-American soldiers were hanged following an ad

hoc military trail. Chicago's Herald-Examiner assured its readers that there would be no resumption of hostilities in Houston because "the Texans did not know our Chicago blacks," who were, in contrast to their Southern counterparts, "intelligent . . . young men with big town training." The Chicago daily presumed wrong. Members of the unit quarreled with local residents, and the entire 8th Illinois was barred from public transportation for refusing to abide by segregated seating laws. 27

In December, the 8th moved to Newport News, Virginia, a town the regimental

chaplain described as “a place of a thousand prejudices.” Townspeople and white

military personnel knew the regiment’s reputation and were primed for confrontation.

However, by this time France loomed, and the battlefields where members of the black unit might finally prove their worth. At the urging of officers, members of the 8th Illinois swallowed their pride, avoided confrontations with white antagonizers, and shortly after sailed for Europe.28

The 8th Illinois arrived in Brest during April, 1918. Colonel Denison became

sick shortly after their arrival, and though he recovered within a month, the army replaced

him with a white officer and sent Denison back to the States. When Denison passed

27 Reef , African Americans in the Military, 90. Herald-Examiner editorial reprinted in “Editorial Comment on Return of 8th Regiment by Chicago Daily Papers,” Defender, February 22, 1919, 2. 28 Reef , African Americans in the Military, 91. 218

through Chicago en route to Camp Dodge, Des Moines, Iowa where he was to take sick

leave, he was greeted by a suspicious Defender reporter who remarked that, curiously,

"[t]he colonel never looked better in his life." Denison’s illness was a convenient excuse

to relieve him of command. The Chicago lawyer had led the regiment in Cuba, but in a

war as big as this one on a continent as white as Europe, cultural convention would not

allow a black officer to lead his own troops. In fact, all six of the regiment’s African-

American field officers were replaced by whites. Denison’s replacement, Major William

S. Braddan, was despised by the black troops, who claimed that their superior officer had

branded them “a bunch of thieves,” “not fit for a combat unit,” and “nothing but an armed

mob.”29

Despite the misgivings of the U.S. brass, the soldiers of the 8th Illinois gained

international notoriety in France. Their allies and enemies knew them as the “Black

Devils” or “Fighting Devils” for their ferocity on the battlefield; others called them the

“Partridges” for their style and aplomb. U.S. Army officials assigned the 93rd Division to

French military command shortly after it landed in Europe. The troops fought valiantly with the French infantry in the final offensive against the Germans, distinguishing

themselves in the Battles of Lorraine and Oise-Aisne. Members of the 8th were the first allied soldiers to enter the French fortress Laon after four years of German occupation.

95 soldiers were killed and 581 were wounded during their European campaign.

Members of the 8th Illinois won twenty-two service crosses and sixty-eight Croix de

Guerre, making them the U.S. regiment most heavily decorated by the French. Writing

29 Reef , African Americans in the Military, 91; "Illinois Colored Soldiers in France," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 11, no. 1, April 1918, 606-8; Tuttle, Race Riot, 221; Chad L. Williams, "Vanguards of the New Negro: African American Veterans and Post-World War I Racial Militancy," Journal of African American History 92, no. 3 (June, 2007), 351; Cary B. Lewis, "Col. Franklin A. Denison, 370th Infantry, in Chicago for a Few Hours," Defender, September 28, 1918, 11. 219

of the exploits of the Old 8th, Cary B. Lewis of the Defender beamed, “The world knows

of their record in France.”30

Army officials worried about African Americans soldiers lingering in France,

where many black troops claimed to have freely mingled with white men and women.

Preparations began for the return of African American soldiers to the U.S. immediately

after the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918, while many white regiments

remained. Most black combat units returned to the Unites States within ninety days, and

nearly all of the African-American servicemen had been discharged and returned to

civilian life within twelve months following the end of the war. It was during this period

after the fighting but before their discharge that many African-American military

personnel reportedly endured the most extreme acts of discrimination at the hands of

white officers. "[T]he Negro troops were at the mercy of the white American army

without the fear of Germany to hold them in check," wrote W.E.B. Du Bois, "Prejudice

therefore broke out with greater virulence."31

30 Cary B. Lewis, History of the Old 8th Regiment, Defender, February 22, 1919, 2; "Camera's Story of How Chicago Showered Affection on Her Famous 'Black Devils,'" Chicago Tribune, February 18, 1919, 3; Tuttle, Race Riot, 217-18; Reef, African Americans in the Military, 91. Sources differ on the number of service crosses won by the 8th Illinois—numbers range from 22 to 26—but 22 is the number that turns up most often. 31 Clement, “Problems of the Negro Soldier,” 534; United States Department of Labor Division of Negro Economics, The Negro at Work During the World War and During Reconstruction: Statistics, Problems, and Policies Relating to the Greater Inclusion of Negro Wage Earners in American Industry and Agriculture (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1921), 28; W. E. B. DuBois, “The Negro Soldier in Service Abroad During the First World War,” The Journal of Negro Education 12, no. 3 (Summer, 1943): 324. 220

221

[Top] Sergeant John Edmondson, 8th Illinois, in uniform, with wife and two daughters, holding American flag. [Bottom] Edward Pryor, 8th Artillery Regiment, and daughter Elizabeth, standing on his lap. For African-American soldiers the war was about proving their worthiness as men: protectors, providers, and citizens. Source: Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum.

While officers reported that white enlisted men served in World War I without any “serious discussion of American policy or larger war issues,” it is clear that black soldiers obsessed about democracy as a principle, and its limited implementation in the

United States. For African American men, military service became a civic obligation as well as a political act. “Empowering as well as debilitating,” explains Chad L. Williams in the Journal of African American History, “the encounters of black troops with racism

222

in the military challenged their expectations of manliness, civic reciprocity, and the very

meaning of democracy itself, thus laying an ideological foundation for postwar racial militancy and activism.” While African American soldiers distinguish themselves in

France, black officers recognized a growing idealism and accompanying resentment

among the enlisted men. "The American negro boys in the fight over there, are not

complaining now,” Col. Denison announced to a Chicago audience in 1918, “Their complaint will come when it is all over-and then it will be a demand for the equality which they have proven themselves worthy of possessing."32

Willis Brown Godwin, a veteran of Chicago’s 370th Infantry Regiment, wondered

upon his return from the war “[W]hy can’t all the men be treated equally. [sic] What did

we fight for? Democracy. Are we having it?” Godwin wrote that his overseas

experience “made me realize my task which was here for me in America.” Other

members of the Chicago regiment shared these sentiments. For Don Estill, events abroad

had instilled in him “[i]ncreased desire for real democracy in the U.S.A.” And veteran

James Richard Golden claimed his time in France had "accentuated the desire that was

dormant in me to have the full rights of citizenship."33 African American soldiers like

these returned home with a heightened political consciousness; they were worldly men

now, with a powerful sense of purpose: to challenge racial barriers in America. Perhaps

Stanley M. Norvell, 8th Illinois Regiment Lieutenant and French Croix de Guerre winner, put it most eloquently:

32 Sandels, “The Doughboy,” 84. Williams, “Vanguards of the New Negro,” 351; "Illinois Colored Soldiers in France," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 11, no. 1 (April 1918): 606-8. 33 Williams, “Vanguards of the New Negro,” 351. Williams’ analysis is insightful, but he misquotes some of the veterans’ statements—and misspells one name—from the sources. The Library of Virginia’s World War I History Commission Questionnaires are available at http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/guides/opac/wwiqabout.htm (accessed July 26, 2012). 223

The five hundred thousand Negroes who were sent overseas to serve their country were brought into contacts that widens both their perceptions and their perspectives, broadened them, gave them new angles on life, on government, and on what both mean. They are now new men and world men, if you please . . . They have awakened . . .34

Nowhere was the record of the 8th Illinois more celebrated than among black

Chicagoans on the city’s south side. Proprietors of barber shops, cigar stores, and other commercial establishments adorned their windows with helmets, rifles, cartridges, canteens, and haversacks, as well as photographs of the 8th and other black regiments fighting in France. The abundance of these objects reflected the importance of soldiering in the community. For a great number of African American civilians, the service of black soldiers helped call attention to the limits of American democracy and freedom. The obvious fitness of black men for soldiering and their denial of first-class citizenship rights was clearly an injustice.35

The African American soldier, with his manly perseverance, became a symbol and an inspiration in the black community. An advisory committee of the U.S.

Deparment of Labor’s Division of Negro Economics made explicit connections between soldiering and other facets of traditional manliness rooted in hard work and sacrifice. An increasing number of African Americans entered the urban industrial labor force during

World War I, and some employers questioned the diligence of black workers formerly employed in agriculture; other skeptical whites wondered about the African American commitment to the war effort. The Negro Economics advisory committee authored an

34 Norvell Letter to Victor Lawson, Julius Rosenwald Papers, University of Chicago Library. 35 Sandburg, Race Riots, 8. 224 address entitled “Labor and Victory.” Two thousand copies of the speech were printed and distributed on the Fourth of July, 1918 to more than 150 counties and 12 states; an estimated one million African Americans across the country listened to orators declaim:

The Negro has fought like a man . . . He has died to keep the American colors flying. . . .there are hundreds of black boys at the front in France laying down their very lives for their country, for you and for me. Will you, because of your refusal to work six days in every week, or because of your failure to save as much food as you can, or because of any lack of interest whatever on your part, have to answer to our boys on their return, maimed in battle or even to men who never return? We are our brothers' keepers; we, too, are soldiers on duty, and in our hands rests the destiny of our country and our fellow men.36

` Calls for racial equality from the African American community based on the valiant service of the black soldier only increased after the war. “It is becoming increasingly illogical,” wrote Herbert J. Seligmann of the NAACP in the September 1919 edition of Current Opinion, “after the Negro's services in the war . . . to continue to treat the Negro race as a subject race to be exploited . . . [and] patronized in lieu of giving him the rights of citizenship.” And African American speakers used returning black soldiers as metaphors for the change they hoped to inspire in their audience members. W.E.B.

DuBois explained to a packed house at Wendell Phillips High School in Chicago in 1919 that African American servicemen “will never be the same again. You need not ask them to go back to what they were before. They cannot, because they are not the same men anymore.”37

DuBois co-founded the NAACP and served as editor of the progressive black periodical Crisis. He was a leading voice of African American dissent and embodied the

36 Department of Labor, Negro at Work, 18, 137-38. 37 Herbert J. Seligmann, "What Is Behind the Negro Uprisings?," Current Opinion 67, no.3 (September, 1919): 154.; Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, 11. 225

spirit of the New Negro, which served as a rhetorical figure in a wider black advocacy

movement that swept the nation during the war years. DuBois’ rise to prominence was

recent, and he was seen as the young, urban, and more militant counterpart of Booker T.

Washington, the undisputed leader of the black America until his death in 1915.

Washington preached patience, advocated political accommodation and an accumulation

of wealth and property through vocational enterprise. It was a philosophy backed by

many conservative southern ministers and embraced by administrators at Tuskegee

Institute, the leading black educational institution in the South. 38

The war ushered in the Great Migration era, the movement of 450,000 African

Americans from the South to the North. Along with geographical change came a changing mindset; the migration eased the psychological burden to African Americans that came with the caste system in the South, which included large debts to white landowners, limited political rights, peonage, and lynch-mob rule. Accompanying higher wages, better schools, and voting rights in the North were higher self-esteem and a heightened sense of mutual well-being among members of the black community. The

New Negro doctrine and its principals resonated with the new urban black proletariat, which had outstripped Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist outlook.39

The New Negro movement was primarily a manhood movement that served to

counter the emasculating effects of second-class citizenship. In the wake of World War I,

blacks sought uninhibited pursuit of the rights afforded to Americans by the

Constitution—life, liberty, and property. The New Negro also was an empowering

performance of gender, of manhood, harnessing the power of culture to make claims to

38 Tuttle, Race Riot, 211-14. 39 Ibid. 226 social and political power. This is shown clearly in a cartoon (Fig 4.1) printed shortly after the riot in the Whip, the Chicago newspaper whose editors most closely associated with the New Negro movement. The principles of the New Negro were not only ideological but aesthetic, reflected in the way that one dressed and carried himself. On the left, the “Old Negro” vagabond is weighed down by “conservatism, superstition,

Uncle Tomism, ignorance, fanaticism,” and is accompanied by “cowardice” as he inches toward oblivion. The sharply dressed “New Negro” on the right, led by “alertness,” walks swiftly toward “somewhere in America,” carrying with him “courage, radicalism, pride, truth, education, and aggressiveness.” 40

40 Matthew Pratt Guterl, “The New Race Consciousness: Race, Nation, and Empire in American Culture, 1910-1925,” Journal of World History 10, no. 2 (Fall, 1999): 330-31; Summers, Manliness and its Discontents, 2-5; Tuttle, Race Riot, 209-11. 227

Fig. 4.1. A New Negro cartoon publishing in the Chicago Whip following the race riot. Source: Chicago Whip, September 13, 1919.

New Negro periodicals often criticized Booker T. Washington, who the Whip associated with the “old school type of Negro” and claimed possessed “a mediocre mind.” However, the New Negro did not entirely dismiss Washington’s plan of action.

Both doctrines were rooted in traditionally white middle-class ideals of manhood that included thrift, employment in an honest trade, and the acquisition of property. Where the teachings differed was in their approaches to white aggression against African

Americans. While Washington preached patience and deference, the New Negro encouraged resistance; he would not abide submissiveness. 41 The African American

41 Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920, (University of Chicago, 1967), 193-4; "The Black Man's Barrier," Whip, Sept 27, 1919, 12; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 490. 228

magazine The Messenger proclaimed that “the new Negroes are determined to observe

the primal law of self-preservation whenever civil laws break down." Claude McKay’s

protest poem, “If We Must Die,” which appeared in print in several periodicals across the

country following the riots, reflected this burgeoning sense of militancy and race

solidarity:

If we must die—let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot. If we must die—oh, let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe; Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!42

During the war years, receptivity to the New Negro movement grew rapidly, and

by the time of the race riot it had reached fever pitch. The circulation of DuBois’ Crisis increased from 385,000 issues sold in 1915 to 560,000 copies in the first six months of

1919 alone. Chicago’s premier black newspaper the Defender, whose editors advocated many New Negro principles, increased circulation from 10,000 to 93,000 during the war.

The more militant Whip began publication in 1919. As historian William Tuttle points out, more than reflecting the mounting numbers of literate African Americans, the

42 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 489. 229 popularity of these newspapers and periodicals suggested that blacks relished their message.43

It was a dynamic time for black culture. Amidst the changes to African American life brought on by the war and the migration, an ideological shift took place among younger African Americans and a growing black urban middle-class. In northern cities like Chicago, an increasing number of professionals served segregated black neighborhoods, including lawyers, social workers, doctors, dentists, undertakers, but also small business entrepreneurs who ran cinemas, restaurants, hotels, beauty salons, and sports venues. As Davarian Baldwin argues in Chicago’s New Negroes, the bourgeoning

Black Metropolis was more than a place where African American migrants redefined leisure through consumer culture, but the marketplace was a unique site of political dissent and intellectual vibrancy that operated outside of and in opposition to white economic influence.44

Certainly it is true that from the marketplace emerged what Martin Summers describes as “a modern ethos of masculinity” among African American middle class men, who began to deemphasize traditional white notions of manliness rooted in producer values of character, hard work, and temperance, instead defining manhood in terms of consumption: the goods one owned, how one spent his leisure hours, and physical and sexual virility. However, the enthusiasm for soldiering and black servicemen in the

African American community, as well as the popularity of New Negro intellectuals,

43 Tuttle, Race Riot, 212-13 44 Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, 5-8; Summers, Manliness and its Discontents, 7. 230

shows that the tenets of Victorian manliness still remained powerful among young black

men in 1919.45

New Negro discourse emphasized differences between older and younger African

American men not in terms of producer and consumer values, but in terms of submissiveness and defiance. Young black men were not willing to accept subordination.

As one black preacher in Mississippi explained to a Labor Department investigator: “My

father was born and brought up a slave….my own son…says, ‘When a young white man

talks rough to me, I can’t talk rough to him. You can stand that; I can’t. I have some

education, and inside I has the feelings of a white man. I’m going [to Chicago].’”46 !!

The Whip derided the previous generation of African American leaders and their

followers, calling this “old school type of Negro,” the “predominant barrier in the

pathway of the American Black man.” In another editorial the Whip opined, “[t]he time

is now ripe for these Old Black Joe's and Uncle Toms to go to Mississippi and ally

themselves with the cohorts of lynchland . . . The eyes of the world are upon the Negro,

and the new psychology. . . ." While the old politicians, preachers, and race leaders were

corrupt and conforming, young African American men were characterized by action and

intelligence, reflected in the service of the black soldier.47

African American servicemen had a direct impact on the mounting momentum of

the New Negro movement during and immediately following the war. Despite the antiwar stance of many New Negro radicals, they cheered the exploits of black regiments.

DuBois did not support the war, yet he recognized its centrality to claiming black

45 Summers, Manliness and its Discontents, 8. 46 Spear, Black Chicago, 137. 47 "The Black Man's Barrier," Whip, Sept 27, 1919, 12; "The Passing of Uncle Tom," Whip, August 7, 1919, Editorial Page. 231

citizenship. In May, 1919, DuBois wrote an editorial entitled “Returning Soldiers” in

which he famously exclaimed, "We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting."

Returning black soldiers, for Du Bois, embodied “self-assertion, manliness, and resolute

self-defense.” “In the trope of the New Negro male,” writes Chad L. Williams, “the

returning black soldier occupied the central position.”48

Perhaps no one utilized the imagery of the black veteran to greater effect than

Jamaica-born Marcus Garvey, the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement

Association. Garvey borrowed from both DuBois’ Talented Tenth and Washington’s

Tuskegee models for black advancement, but the UNIA leader felt that neither went far enough. Unlike other New Negro radicals who vehemently opposed segregation, Garvey wanted to cut ties from white society and establish a diasporic empire of people of

African descent—a back to Africa movement. Although Garveyism glorified blackness and belittled white culture, its practitioners espoused traditional western European and

Anglo-Saxon discourses of manliness associated with the artisan-producer ideal, self- assertiveness and independence, as well as an Afrocentric adaptation of the frontier ideology espoused by Theodore Roosevelt and other American imperialists.49

Black soldiers not only possessed the training necessary to make Garvey’s black

empire a reality, they were a beacon for others, emblems of black manhood, the very

embodiment of the New Negro, as historian Chad Williams says. Black soldiers as

helped to popularize the UNIA agenda; veterans were active as both leaders and members

in the expansion of the movement. Quite fittingly, when Marcus Garvey made his first

48 Guterl, “The New Race Consciousness,” 330-31; Tuttle, Race Riot, 209; Williams, “Vanguards of the New Negro,” 349. 49 Summers, Manliness and its Discontents, 66-68; Spear, Black Chicago, 193. 232 appearance in Chicago in 1919, he spoke publically outside the 8th Illinois Regiment

Armory.50

Following the war, black servicemen served to unify a divergent African

American revolutionary movement that shared a commitment to militant self-defense.

African Americans returned from service with dreams that, having helped make the world safe for democracy, equal rights and social justice might also come to places like

Chicago and Mississippi. They reentered American society with a newborn sense of pride and entitlement, and more, a willingness to fight for freedom. They became the

“advanced guard” of the New Negro movement. "The returned soldier, by reason of his military training, can do more to stop lynch-law and discrimination in the United States than many Americans want to see,” wrote William N. Colson, who had served in France in the 367th Infantry Unit. “He is accomplishing it, by a resolute demonstration of self- defense and a growing desire to lose his life in a good cause." Another African American veteran put it even more plainly upon his return to Chicago, “I ain’t looking for trouble, but if it comes my way I ain’t dodging.”51



White reception of returning African American servicemen did not meet the expectations of black Chicagoans. The euphoria of homecoming faded quickly, and these were not, on balance, good times. The federal government gave little more than a handshake and a check for sixty dollars to veterans. Some white business owners opened

50 Williams, “Vanguards of the New Negro,” 361-65; Spear, , Black Chicago, 194. 51 Williams, “Vanguards of the New Negro,” 354-55; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 481. 233 new employment opportunities to African-Americans, including jobs as molders, tanners, shipping clerks, automobile mechanics, and various factory jobs. The Chicago Urban

League, and placement agencies like the Colored Soldiers and Sailors bureau, helped returning black soldiers find civilian jobs. But most begrudgingly returned to menial jobs in industries previously designated for African Americans. “After having served, as an officer in the army of my country, with the French army where color prejudice did not exist,” wrote Lieut. Stanley Norvell, “I found that upon my return to my country and to civil life that I was somewhat loathe to take up life where I had left off. Blackening boots, running elevators, waiting tables, chauffeuring and the like seemed rather incongruous to me, and I found the readjustment very difficult indeed.” Rufus E.

Clement observed in The Journal of Negro Education, "With the glamour which had previously surrounded them now having disappeared with the discarded uniform," black men found themselves, "discouraged and psychologically out of step." What was worse, despite black men proving to themselves through manly deeds, most whites were happy to return to the status quo ante.52

Chicago’s white neighborhood protective agencies were as adamant as ever about keeping African Americans out of their communities, and they clung to their white supremacist agendas. The Hyde Park and Kenwood residents’ Property Owners Journal warned that, “The Negro is unwilling to resume his status of other years; he is exalting himself with idiotic ideas on social equality." The remedy, according to the journal?

“Keep the Negro in his place, amongst his people, and he is healthy and loyal.”

Moreover, while black leaders called upon whites to make good on Wilsonian rhetoric of

52 Norvell Letter to Victor Lawson, Julius Rosenwald Papers, University of Chicago Library; Sandburg, Race Riots, 18-19; Clement, “Problems of the Negro Soldier,” 535. 234 democracy and self-determination in America, Hyde Park property owners drew upon the words of Abraham Lincoln, "that wonderful, Godlike man, the liberator of the slaves," who the Journal quoted as uttering: "I am not nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and the black race."53

On January 15, 1919, a white woman named Alice Hogge—a teacher at a racially integrated elementary school in the Black Belt and a resident of the Hyde Park community known for its staunch segregationist politics—entered the local Department of Intelligence office unsolicited to make a statement. Her school, she explained, was in the vicinity of the 8th Illinois Armory. Miss Hogge wished to complain of the unruly and immoral behavior of the black soldiers stationed there in recent years, stating explicitly that she believed that the presence of the Illinois 7th Regiment in Chicago, made up of white soldiers, was “the only thing keeping the 8th in check.” Further, Hogge believed a great amount of “race feeling” existed between the members of the 7th and the 8th, and that she “feared for the peace of the community” upon the return of the black troops. "I believe that conditions are such now that the return of the negro soldiers in large numbers would be dangerous." For good measure, the schoolteacher added, "the blacks are heavy drinkers and what would happen would depend largely upon how much liquor they drink; at any rate, I think their return in large numbers would foment disorder."54

Apparently, this white woman’s testimony alone was enough to spur federal government officials into action. Hogge’s statement was passed on to the War

Department in Washington D.C., where a colonel of the general staff wrote a memo to his superiors acknowledging that, "there may be some grounds for expecting trouble when

53 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 590-91, Lincoln quote, 119. 54 "Intercepted letter from Miss Alice Hogge," 021-Fed Surveillance-Woodson Library Reel 21-0220 235

what was formerly known as the 8th ILLINOIS NATIONAL GUARDS returns, if they

are sent to Chicago as an organization." The memo was ushered up to an Adjunct

General, who assured the Colonel that, "[The 8th] will not, in any circumstances, be sent

for discharge to Chicago, but instead will be sent to a demobilization camp."55

But Chicago’s African-American community would not be denied a public

reception for the 8th Illinois, and neither would its mayor William Thompson, a white

Republican who had been swept into office in part by the black vote. On February 17,

1919, before the final demobilization of the regiment, “The Fighting Devils” paraded

down Michigan Avenue, and city officials and thousands of spectators attended the

precession. "A halo of glory and honor covers every mother's son of them," wrote Cary

B. Lewis of the Defender. "The 8th hit the line and passed it. . . . France will write the

name of this regiment and its bravery and heroism in their history." Lewis then asked the

inevitable question "What will America do?” How, in other words, would the heroism of

these men be honored?56

Chicago’s dailies responded to the return of the 8th Illinois with a peculiar mix of

reverence and parody. The Riot Commission acknowledged that black soldiers during

the war, “especially from Illinois, were given unstinted praise by the public and the

newspapers.” Prior to the parade a Chicago American editorial concerning black soldiers

read, “Their war record as a race is enviable,” and conceded that, “Their soldiers went out

to fight the fight of men; they died the death of heroes; they were Americans to the core.”

“Negro fighters as a rule have made good in this greatest of all struggles,” echoed the

55 Department of Intelligence "Intercepted letter from Miss Alice Hogge," Federal Surveillance of Afro- Americans, Vivian Harsh Collection, Reel 21 (0220), Woodson Library Chicago. 56 Cary B. Lewis, History of the Old 8th Regiment, Defender, February 22, 1919, 2; "8th to March to Armory," Defender, February 22, 1919, 3. 236

Chicago Tribune, “They are brave men of whom it may be said that they did their duty as

citizens of America.” The possibility that the war record of the 8th had altered the

perceptions of white skeptics seemed real. A columnist who wrote for the Tribune under

the moniker “Eye Witness” explained to readers that “colored soldiers . . . have been

under discipline and the effect of discipline is dual. It both tames and makes a man, and

it has done both for thousands of these once irresponsible lads.”57

Yet whites’ ability to overcome their age-old prejudices had severe limits. While commending the praise black soldiers received in the press, the Riot Commission simultaneously faulted Chicago’s white dailies of perpetuating “[t]he beliefs handed down through tradition concerning the weak moral character of Negroes and their emotional nature."58

The commission report was right. In covering the city's celebration along

Michigan Avenue, for example, the Tribune couldn't resist mocking the black soldiers

(Img 4.2). According to the daily, the parade prompted “riotous scenes,” so much so that,

"At times on the line of march the formation could hardly be distinguished." According

to the Tribune a black soldier was overheard saying, "They left us with a Thirty-fifth

street dialect and came back talking French. . . . 'Boss, we-all been Frenchised,' roared a

strapping big buck. 'Polly vou Frawnce, Brownskin?' he queried of a deep brunette who

approached to finger the croix de guerre on his blouse. . . . They didn't mind the absence

of fried chicken from the dinner provided at the Coliseum. Wasn't there roast beef au

jus?" The paper questioned black soldiers’ honor and resolve, insinuating that they

57 Editorials reprinted in "Editorial Comment on Return of 8th Regiment by Chicago Daily Papers," Defender, February 22, 1919, 2; Eye Witness, “Negro’s Mental Growth Is Issue in Race Problem,” Chicago Tribune, May 9, 1919, 11. 58 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 546, 526; Spear, Black Chicago, 202. 237 sought speedy exits from service: “what ah wan is mah discharge, hon’ble, dis’hon’ble, or anything, jes’ long as it’s a discharge.” The Tribune even included a report of an outrageous incident during which a sergeant in the regiment shot a private with a revolver for falling out of line with "a girl admirer on each arm, his rifle slung over his shoulder."59

Photographs accompanying the Tribune piece included swarms of people overtaking Michigan Avenue, a soldier grinning widely with a young woman on his side, and a giddy young man in uniform, eating from a tin pan exclaiming, "It's great to be a hero, but O, 'reg'lar Chicago feed!" The images contrasted sharply the order depicted in other archival evidence of the parade.60

59 "Camera's Story of How Chicago Showered Affection on Her Famous 'Black Devils,'" Chicago Tribune, February 18, 1919, 3. 60 Ibid. 238

Img 4.2. Chicago Tribune coverage of the 8th Illinois Regiment Parade Source: Chicago Tribune, February 18, 1919, 3.

239

Img 4.3. The 8th Illinois Regiment Parade from a Chicago History Museum archival photograph. Source: Digital scan from Olivia Mahoney ed., Douglas/Grand Boulevard: A Chicago Neighborhood (Arcadia Publishing, 2001).

Of course whites primarily “knew” African Americans through parody and satire, most

notably for decades through that most popular form of popular culture, black-face

minstrelsy, still popular even at this late date. "In amusement parks, saloons, baseball

parks, and movie palaces-all of them segregated-'the Negro' was overrepresented in

parodic form," writes Matthew Guterl of wartime consumerism. Because of the greater

presence of African-Americans in the North, as well as the fame they achieved during the

war, there was a renewed opportunity to at once imitate and satirize them. America’s burgeoning consumer culture offered new chances for that odd play of fascination and

240

farce that whites experienced when thinking about African Americans, a need to observe

them mixed with a refusal to take them seriously.61

While few whites considered the ill-effects that stereotyped depictions of “Negroes” in

American popular culture might have on African American, the Riot Commission found

that black Chicagoans, “almost without exception point to the Chicago press as the

responsible agent for many of their present difficulties.” For the commission, popular

parodies were no laughing matter; they resulted in “accumulated resentments,

unchallenged mutual beliefs and resultant friction” between the races, which “culminated

in a surprising calamity and wholesale bloodshed.” In other words, the race riot was a

result of the “isolation and misunderstanding” in news cycles following the war. “When

the Negro ponders the situation” black veteran Stanley Norvell explained, “it is with a feeling of poignant resentment that he sees his alleged inferiority constantly and blatantly advertised at every hand, by the press, the pulpit, the stage and by the glaring and hideous sign-boards [of] segregation.”62

Following the war, with shared anger at having been denied their rights as men

and citizens following their devoted service to world democracy, black soldiers and those

they inspired were less patient than ever. Rollin Lynde Hartt, a journalist and

Congregational minister, summed up the new spirit in the New Negro: “Hit, he hits

back.” Besides the Houston riot in 1917, where one hundred black soldiers took up arms

against locals after repeated incidents of white harassment and police brutality, examples

of black soldiers and others “hitting back” increased dramatically leading up to the

Chicago race riot. In June, 1918, George Clayton was hanged for murdering his white

61 Guterl, “The New Race Consciousness,” 319. 62 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 436, 520; Norvell Letter to Victor Lawson, Julius Rosenwald Papers, University of Chicago Library. 241 employer in Manghan, Louisiana, but not before he wounded six men fighting off the posse. Others struck back in Philadelphia in July 1918 when whites killed four in a riot that began after a black woman purchased a home in a white neighborhood. In Camp

Merritt, New Jersey that September, one black soldier was killed and five others wounded when they refused white soldiers’ demand that they leave the YMCA hut. In

November, three black men were killed preventing a lynch mob from storming a Winston

Salem, North Carolina jail to hang a black criminal. One African American and four whites were killed during an attempted lynching in Berkeley, Georgia in February 1919.

At Buckland Church in Millen, Georgia in April, 1919, five African Americans and two white police officers made up the death toll following a melee surrounding a lynching.

And of course, a week before the riot in Chicago, African Americans battled white sailors, policemen, and others on the streets of Washington DC.63

In his enduring book From Race Riot to Sit In: 1919 and the 1960s, Arthur

Waskow argues that the interracial violence in 1919 Chicago was the first true large scale race riot in the history of the United States. The so-called “race riots” that proceeded

Chicago were more accurately characterized as pogroms, or the massacre of a passive

African American minority by surrounding whites. In essence, “race riot” was a euphemism in American culture; suggesting equal injury and fault in violent hate crimes committed by white mobs and the white state against African Americans. Chicago was the first exception. “In American history," concluded Waskow, "perhaps the event that most nearly approximated the 'ideal type' of a riot was the Chicago riot of 1919” because

63 Rollin Lynde Hartt, “The New Negro. When He’s Hit, He Hits Back!” The Independent, January 15, 1921, 59–60, 76; See Paul A. Gilje’s spreadsheet “Riots in the United States,” Criminal Justice Research Center, The Ohio State University, accessed August 26, 2012, http://cjrc.osu.edu/researchprojects/hvd/usa/riots/. 242

of more even black/white death toll and the fact that “many observers noted the

wholehearted commitment of the Negro community to ‘fighting back’ when attacked.”64

“Fighting back” was the operative phrase. For the most part, whites were the aggressors during the rioting. Despite making up roughly 4% of Chicago’s population,

African Americans represented 342 of the 537 wounded, and 23 of the 38 killed.

According to the Riot Commission report, few blacks looked for trouble, but protected their homes and neighborhoods. The commission’s “Chicago Riot” map revealed that

66% of whites wounded or killed during the riot sustained their injuries within or in the direct vicinity of the Black Belt (Map 4.1), where the vast majority of African Americans in Chicago resided. However, among the 122 injured whites for which the Riot

Commission had known addresses, only 49, or 40%, lived in the Black Belt (Map 4.2).

In other words, most of the whites wounded during the rioting had come from neighborhoods outside of the Black Belt looking for trouble.65

64 Arthur I. Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-In: 1919 and the 1960s (New York: Doubleday and Company Inc., 1966), 10, 58-59. 65 “Direct vicinity” means that I included the white injuries and residences along Wentworth Avenue south of Thiry-Ninth Street, which were just outside of the Riot Commission’s “Black Belt,” but along the “dead line” recognized as the black/white residential boundary line. I also included white injuries and residences in census tract 383, just south of Thirty-Ninth Street and east on Michigan Avenue. See Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 8 [map]. There were many reported incidents of whites “raiding” the Black Belt and other areas of the city that black home owners had “invaded.” See, for example, Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 6. 243

244

Map 4.1. Whites injured or killed in Riot Commission riot districts. Data from “The Chicago Riot” map in Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago (1922).

245

246

Map 4.2. Residences of white persons injured or killed in Riot Commission riot districts. Data from “The Chicago Riot” map in Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago (1922).

Although not all African Americans involved in the rioting were veterans, black leaders and commentators used the plight of the black soldier to justify armed resistance in Chicago. "If the negro had not been sent to camp . . . if he had not gone across the

seas. . . and made good; and if he had not expected better treatment on his return to his

native land at the hands of those who drafted him and sent him to the trenches,” wrote

W.S. Scarborough, president of Wilberforce University, in response to race riots in

Washington DC and Chicago, “I am sure that he would not be so exasperated over the

situation." Chicago’s New Negro press shared these sentiments. In an editorial titled

“Reaping the Whirlwind” in the Defender on August 2, 1919, the author warned, "The

Black worm has turned. A Race that has furnished hundreds of thousands of the best

soldiers that the world has ever seen is no longer content to turn the left cheek when

smitten upon the right." “IF HE HAS TO NIP THE BITTER BUD OF WAR, HE IS

ENTITLED TO THE SACCHARINE FROM THE FLOWER OF PEACE,” declared the

Whip of the black veteran on August 7, 1919. And in an open letter to Illinois Governor

Frank O. Lowden on August 9, Whip editors reminded Lowden that "Some three hundred thousand black men have just returned from the battle fields of Europe.” These soldiers, the editors declared, had an implicit contract with America which stated, “democracy means equality of opportunity for all men without regard to race or color.” More, the

247

contract made it clear “that equality of opportunity and racial segregation cannot stand

together in any free republic."66



With the notable exception of Marcus Garvey, most New Negro leaders opposed

racial segregation at the time of the race riot, and urged black and white workers to

organize against capitalist exploiters and corrupt political bosses. Along the Stroll, by

which State Street as it ran through the Black Belt was known, white and black workers

mingled in the cabarets “that offered promising contact within the working class across

the color line without the inclusion of the wealthy who encouraged antagonisms,” writes

Davarian Baldwin, author of Chicago’s New Negroes. But race pride and a heightened

race consciousness following the war conflicted with calls for a group identity based on

shared experiences as laborers and consumers.67

Paradoxically, as young African Americans fought in the war, and justified their

grievances based on traditional notions of manliness that had emerged out of western

European and Anglo-American culture, a new generation of African Americans were

redefining masculinity in ways that had less to do with work and more with race

consciousness. Out of Harlem, art and literature celebrated black beauty and courage,

reflecting what William Tuttle describes as "a poetic interest in being black . . . reversing

the prewar art with its imitation of white values and customs and its suppression of black

66 W.S. Scarborough, "Race Riots and Their Remedy," The Independent, August 16, 1919, 223; "Reaping the Whirlwind," Defender, August 2, 1919, 16; "A Dangerous Experiment," Whip, August 7, 1919, Editorial Page; “An open Letter to the Hon. Frank O. Lowden, Governor of Illinois," Whip, August 9, 1919, 7; Spear, Black Chicago, 194 67 Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, 8, 16; Tuttle, Race Riot, 222, 228; Spear, Black Chicago, 193. 248

individuality.” Businesses and amusements along the Stroll in the emerging Black

Metropolis shared by a politically conscious African American consumer base reflected

what Baldwin calls a “separate economic institutional worldview” in Chicago. And as

the twentieth century wore on, Martin Summers argues, the “exuberant body” (more

consumption and leisure oriented) supplanted the “disciplined body” (reflective of

Victorian ideals and military education) as the way young black men thought about and

performed their gender.68

At the time of the race riot, both white and black men in Chicago experienced a

shift in dominant gender paradigms, moving away from work-centered conceptions of

manhood; in both cases “race,” or expressions of “whiteness” or “blackness,” became a

more critical facet of one’s manly identity. Still, before 1920, and especially during the war, the drilled and disciplined soldier remained a shared ideal manly type. Partly this was because of the powerful association between soldiering and citizenship, and jingoistic notions of protecting one’s nation and associated freedoms from the evils of

tyranny.

Patriotism loomed large among the prevailing sentiments that unified the boys’ gangs and athletic clubs that were so active in the violence against African Americans; some clubs even had nationalistic names like “Our Flag.” A report on Illinois crime

labeled patriotism “a potent sentiment” among the notorious “Ragen’s Colts” club, which

was heavily involved in the rioting and perhaps the most dangerous to black Chicagoans.

Reportedly, many Ragen’s Colts served in the armed forces during the war. Because of

the close association of soldiering, citizenship, and Americanness, armed service caused

68 Tuttle, Race Riot, 224; Davarian L. Baldwin, "Chicago's New Negroes: Consumer Culture and Intellectual Life Reconsidered," American Studies 44, no. 1-2 (Spring/Summer, 2003): 123; Summers, Manliness and its Discontents, 244. 249

more bitterness than empathy between black and white lower-class men. And the uproar caused by Chicago’s “Black Devils” in France and their triumphant return undoubtedly

piqued the ire of white boys already motivated toward racial violence. The young white men in uniform who killed blacks and pillaged the Loop during the race riot, shared this animosity.69

Among the white lower classes the resistance to black uplift was more visceral, and more overtly violent than among other whites in Chicago. Many of them, native-

born though poor with European parents or grandparents, had learned that they could make claims to privilege based on their race. Irish-Americans in particular had made social and cultural advancements by invoking their whiteness. At one time, Irish-

American inclusion in the white race had been tentative; it required overt displays of both their vigorous Americaness, and their collective social-cultural distance from blackness and slavery. A generation of Irish-American young men in Chicago in 1919 had been raised to believe that they were Americans and they were better than blacks. Other

American-born boys of European parents followed this line of thinking. These young men became the protectors of the racial hierarchy upon which they depended socially and psychologically; despite their poverty, they staked their claim to being political leaders,

even neighborhood patriarchs, on their whiteness.70

But this mentality, and the brutal beatings of African Americans that came with it,

was not new. And before 1919 it went on unabated. It was the enlistment and service of

hundreds of thousands of African Americans in the war that deepened a collective spirit

69 John H. Wigmore ed., The Illinois Crime Survey (Chicago: Illinois Association for Criminal Justice, 1929), 1003. 70 Guterl 316-7, David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working- Class (London: Verso, 2007), 133-53. 250

of rebellion against white supremacy in the nation’s black community. Southern whites

reacted to the symbol of the black soldier with trepidation and murderous contempt.

Whites lynched a returning black soldier in Pickens, Mississippi in May, 1919. In towns across Georgia, whites targeted black servicemen. In April, a black man was beaten to death for wearing his military uniform too long. And in August one black soldier was lynched for discharging a gun, another was shot for refusing to yield the road to whites.

Locals in a third Georgia town hanged a black veteran for discussing the racial violence in Chicago.71

On Monday July 28, the second day of Chicago’s race riot, two African-American

men, Lieutenant Louis C. Washington and Lieutenant Michael V. Browning,

accompanied by four African American women including Washington’s wife, were

returning home after attending a theater performance. A mob of white men and boys set

upon the party walking along Forty-Third Street near Indiana Avenue. In the ensuing

fracas one of the servicemen stabbed and killed a 17 year old boy named Clarence Metz.

In his report, the Cook County Coroner exonerated the black veterans following a jury

investigation, finding that the men “were justified in their acts and conduct during [the]

affray.”72

For African Americans, meeting violence with violence was more than act of self-

defense, it was an act of repudiation. Upon their return from war, black soldiers in

Chicago experienced the antagonisms of whites in the form of prejudice, parody, and

outward violence. The bitter disappointment that came with the realization that their

71 Gilje, “Riots in the United States,” accessed August 26, 2012, http://cjrc.osu.edu/researchprojects/hvd/usa/riots/. 72 ; Cook County Coroner, The Race Riots: Biennial Report 1918-1919 and Official Record of Inquests on the Victims of the Race Riots of July and August 1919 (Chicago, 1920), 40. 251 service to their country had meant nothing to whites who continued to deny them opportunities in America, also justified the militant response to their mistreatment. In his letter to Victor Lawson of the Riot Commission, 8th Illinois veteran Stanley Novell explained the mentality of the African American veteran following the war:

Try to imagine, if you can, the feelings of a Negro army officer, who clothed in the full panoply of his profession and wearing the decorations for valor of three governments, is forced to the indignity of a jim-crow car and who is refused a seat in a theatre and a bed in a hotel. . . . Try to imagine the smoldering hatred within the breast of an overseas veteran who is set upon and mercilessly beaten by a gang of young hoodlums simply because he is colored.73

"When you think of these things," continued Norvell, "it is easy to see the underlying, contributory causes of the friction that led up to the recent racial troubles."74

73 Norvell Letter to Victor Lawson, Julius Rosenwald Papers, University of Chicago Library. 74 Ibid. 252

CONCLUSION

A James T. Farrell short story titled “For White Men Only” appeared in The

American Spectator literary magazine in June, 1935. The narrative was not set in the Jim

Crow South, as its title may have suggested, but on the south side of Chicago, like so many of Farrell’s stories. It begins with a conversation between two African American boys named Alfred and Booker. Alfred is the larger, more assertive of the two boys, determined to swim at the Sixty-Third Street beach, “whether there’s white men there or not.” This stretch of lakefront was “the regular beach,” while the swimming area near

Thirty-Ninth Street, designated for African Americans, was “just a measly, overcrowded pile of stones.”

Booker begins to tremble as the boys approach the white beach. He tries to convince Alfred to change his mind, suggesting that his unyielding companion only

wants to impress a girlfriend. “Shut up, black boy!” shouts Alfred indignantly. When

they arrive at the beach they draw stares from white beachgoers. A few irritated bathers

exit the water, walk down the beach away from the unwelcome arrivals and re-enter the

surf. Alfred defiantly makes his way to the lake, accompanied reluctantly by Booker.

Alfred “was not going to whine and beg the white man”; someone had to confront this

situation, and it might as well be him. Despite Alfred’s confident assurances, Booker

“wished that he had never come.” The smaller boy is overtaken by thoughts of the

“many who had been beaten and mobbed in the Chicago race riots of 1919.”

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Meanwhile, members of a white gang nearby, led by a “fat” Irish boy and a “big

Swede,” are smoking cigarettes and telling stories. These boys like to drink, fight, and survey the beach for female “pickups.” Before long, they notice Alfred and Booker.

“Bad enough having Polacks driving up the lake without diseased shines,” complains one of the boys in the group. Another suggests the gang do the same to these boys as they had to another “coal black bastard,” and use “a little persuasion” so that they “know their place.” “[T]his is a white man’s park, and a white man’s beach,” says the boy. “Just think!” exclaims another, “Look at all these white girls bathing around here. With niggers on the beach, it ain’t safe for them.”

When the group of white boys confronts the transgressors in the water, Alfred meets the gang with “unmistakable fearlessness.” However, Booker, consumed by fright, makes a run for it. A white bather trips him, and four others proceed to curse, punch, and kick Booker amid the boy’s “shrill and helpless cries.” Meanwhile, Alfred holds his own against multiple opponents, ducking and countering with great skill and precision. As more join the group against him however, Alfred is overtaken. “Spectators shouted and encouraged the white lads,” writes Farrell, “females screamed, and Alfred was quickly and severely punished.” A “baldheaded Jewish man” protests the beating, but a “small, pretty blond girl screamed hatred at him, calling him a nigger-lover.” Finally, a police officer breaks up the fight, and tells the battered pair, “You fellows better go home, do your swimming down at Thirty-Ninth if you don’t want to be starting riots. Now move along!” As Alfred and Booker make their way from the beach, the white boys proclaim their adversaries weak and shifty. “Like all niggers,” says one boy, “they were yellow.”

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Before long though, the white boys’ attention is back on girls “coquetting on the sand.”

“Looking covertly at legs and breasts,” writes Farrell, “they leered.”1

“For White Men Only,” written a decade and a half after the murder of Eugene

Williams that sparked the Chicago riot, suggests more continuity than change. The

“white beach” had moved from Twenty-Ninth Street to Sixty-Third Street, the “black beach” from Twenty-Fifth Street to Thirty-Ninth Street, as the segregated Black Belt continued to expand during the interwar years and African Americans poured into

Chicago in even greater numbers. And women played a more explicit role in this violent interracial encounter. The actions of white men were justified in part by their desire to

“protect” and impress potential sexual partners was more explicit here than in most tellings of the 1919 riot.

But there are important underlying similarities between Farrell’s tale and stories surrounding the Eugene Williams murder and the Chicago riot. White men remained intent on keeping blacks “in their place,” and black men were still out to prove themselves “as good as white men.” On Farrell’s imagined lakefront, white

“hoodlums”—American-born boys of Irish heritage and other “old immigrant” backgrounds, who spent their time loafing, drinking, fighting, and chasing girls— continued to affirm their manly superiority through violent ritual; namely, the public thrashing of men of an “inferior race.” Young black men still proved their manhood by defying and challenging this white supremacist ideology. And police officers restored order, which is to say, they reinforced the racial status quo.

A familiar contrast exists between Farrell’s two main characters, couched in oppositional literary paradigms. Alfred does not fear confrontation, resists furiously, and

1 James T. Farrell, “For White Men Only,” The American Spectator 3, no.30 (June, 1935): 9-10. 255

goes down swinging; militant Alfred is the “New Negro.” Booker cowers, succumbs

easily, and begs for mercy; submissive Booker is the “Old Negro.” “For White Men

Only” suggests that New Negro ideology influenced socially conscious white writers like

James T. Farrell in the 1930s, after Alain Locke popularized the movement in wider literary circles in the mid-1920s. It also suggests that the New Negro trope remained meaningful, pertinent, and continued to circulate in Chicago in 1935.2

As Farrell’s short story suggests, the 1919 riot marked the beginning of a new set of racial relations in Chicago, informed by an almost universal recognition of the violent opposition between working-class, American-born whites and African Americans. This is the story of an evolving race consciousness in urban America, emerging out of changing notions of masculinity and new performances of gender, less tied to work and more to social conceptions of race. De facto segregation in Chicago, which serves as a

backdrop to Farrell’s “For White Men Only,” was not inevitable, but contingent upon the

hardening of racial identities as African Americans entered the industrial workforce. The

race riot helped enforce residential apartheid; as more African Americans arrived in the

city, they would join others in an expanding all-black ghetto rather than occupying homes

with other migrants in ethnically mixed lower-income neighborhoods.

Shortly before the riot, the unions under the direction of the Stockyards Labor

Council had enjoyed modest success organizing white workers and a small but significant number of African Americans in a relatively short time. And in an effort to keep wages suppressed, industrialists worked to discredit these efforts. But all of it was cut short at the end of July when newspaper dailies inundated Chicagoans with sensationalized stories of the race riot and its horrors. More than ever, whites now accepted segregation

2 See Alain Locke ed., The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Touchstone, 1999). 256

as the only peaceful solution to racial antagonism, and the pressing need for black and

white leaders to reach some kind of geographical accord. Besides the violence

attributable to black and white “hoodlums,” Chicagoans recognized both the concerns of white homeowners over the adverse effect of African American neighbors on home values, as well as the bombing of black homes and real estate offices in white neighborhoods, the primary means by which white home owners “voiced” these concerns. For many whites, the violence was unfortunate but understandable, because it

was only “natural” for whites not to want black neighbors.

African American attitudes toward segregated living districts were more varied and nuanced. City inhabitants have a tendency to want to live where their lives are not threatened and their homes are not bombed, or at the very least where they feel comfortable and welcome in their communities. For blacks, this was only possible in all- black neighborhoods. Many thought separating whites and blacks would be a short term solution, and that, as African Americans proved their fitness for citizenship, gained equal political rights, and became wealthier, residential integration would follow. Others believed that fighting for integrated neighborhoods was a feeble endeavor given prevailing ideologies among majority whites. They fought instead for better conditions and more space within segregated black districts, in no small part so that members of the more influential black middle class could at least live apart from the poorer elements of

African American society.

African American community leaders insisted that separation be of blacks’ own free will. With good reason, they would not stand for any kind of legislated measures of racial segregation; even the word disgusted them. They preferred “race solidarity,” and

257

described it as a defensive measure taken by the minority group in order to “strengthen

itself,” “resist discrimination,” and “to attack . . . proponents of racial segregation.”3

Black leaders would not sanction separate housing, but many of them believed that, left

to their own devises, African Americans would choose to live together. As the prominent

Olivet Baptist Minister L. K. Williams explained on August 9, 1919:

Putting laws on the statute books and drawing the color line officially will only intensify antagonism and make matters worse. . . . the negroes, if given the chance to do it, will flock to themselves naturally and instinctively just the same as white people do. . . . [give them] the opportunity to find good homes and not be crowded into the slums of the city. The colored people are not seeking social contact with the whites. . . . When they talk about 'equality' and 'being as good as the white man,' they mean merely that they feel they have the right to equality of opportunity and as good a chance to advance as any American citizen, regardless of color.4

Following the riot, many black leaders were willing to accept separate residential

accommodations, as long as they were equal to housing options in white neighborhoods and the was no “official color line.” For the most part, whites had no desire to institute

“Jim Crow” laws either; racial separation by mutual agreement (or at least imagined as such) was required to ease their collective conscience. Ironically, one of the reasons segregation was so assuredly established in Chicago was because no one actually called it what it was. In the Riot Commission’s study of all 534 “news items on racial matters” in

Chicago’s top daily newspapers in 1918, only four dealt with “Segregation” as a subject,

totaling fifteen inches of column space. Two years later, half of all black Chicagoans

were living in census tracts where African Americans represented at least half of the total

3 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), 510-11. 4 "Race Problems Discussed at Olivet Baptist Church," Chicago Whip, August 9, 1919, 1. 258

tract population. 35% of the black population lived in tracts where African Americans

represented at least 75% of tract residents. All of this, despite the fact that African

Americans were only 4% of Chicago’s total population at the time.5

Such was the cultural climate surrounding the “race problem” when Governor

Frank Lowden convened the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, “composed of the

best representatives of both races,” to investigate the riot and its causes, in the months

immediately following the riot. The politics of the Riot Commission were complex, as

historians Thomas Philpott and Arthur Waskow illustrate. Black leaders with more

radical leanings like W. E. B. DuBois feared that Lowden’s “Interracial Commission”

would push “insidiously but unswervingly a program of racial segregation.” The Riot

Commission did not promote any such program in its recommendations, but neither did

the report advocate unfettered residential freedom for black families. Mainly, the

commission report urged city officials to protect black citizens, and to provide African

Americans better housing, schools, and equal employment opportunities. In the end,

what the Riot Commission produced was a sociological classic but not a manifesto of

new public policy or urban reform.6

The principal contributor to the commission report was Charles S. Johnson. A

Robert Park student trained at University of Chicago, Johnson was hired as the director of

research and investigations at the National Urban League in New York City in 1921, and

twenty-six years later became the first black president of Fisk University. The Negro in

5 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 531; Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920, (University of Chicago, 1967), 16. 6 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, xiii-xiv, 640-51. See Chapter 9, “The Riot Commission and the Dual Solution,” in Thomas Lee Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Immigrants, Blacks, and Reformers in Chicago, 1880-1930 (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1991), 210-28 and Chapter 5, “Chicago: The Riot Studied,” in Arthur I. Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-In: 1919 and the 1960s (New York: Doubleday and Company Inc., 1966). 259

Chicago would become the model for many similar studies led by Johnson in the decades

that followed the riot, which relied on “research, facts, education, and persuasion to

improve race relations,” according to historian Ralph L. Pearson in the Illinois Historical

Journal. Ultimately, Johnson’s method proved controversial. "Blacks condemned his

approach as too slow and ultimately ineffectual in changing white attitudes and

behavior,” writes Pearson, “while whites tended to view sociological studies of race

relations not as guidelines for the transformation of cultural attitudes and practices that

kept the races apart but as tools for taking minimal action that would not threaten existing

social, economic, and political structures."7

In the case of the commission report, however, even the most ardent reformer

would have faced major obstacles, as it was clear from the start that the Riot Commission

would not endorse any radical plans to break up the Black Belt. The commission was

made up mostly of prominent white and black lawyers and businessmen, a few of them

had connections to segregationist groups and material stakes in the redevelopment of the

Black Belt. Real estate dealer William Scott Bond reportedly had ties to the “whites

only” Hyde Park-Kenwood Property Owners’ Association. Colonel Abel Davis was fundraiser and treasurer for the Riot Commission and also a director of the “Civic Real

Estate Improvement Corporation,” organized to carry out a multi-million dollar rebuilding of the Black Belt following the riot. Eugene Kelly, another commissioner, was the Black Belt development corporation’s vice president. One of the Riot

Commission’s African American appointees, George H. Jackson, was the president of the

7 Ralph L. Pearson, "Charles S. Johnson and the Chicago Commission on Race Relations," Illinois Historical Journal 81, no.3 (Autumn, 1988): 211-20. Quote, 220. 260

Pyramid Building and Loan Association, founded in February, 1919, for the purpose of financing black-only housing developments.8

So while commission members like Johnson, or African American civil rights lawyer Edward H. Morris, may have sought a more pointed anti-segregationist position from the Riot Commission, this was not going to happen. Prefacing their recommendations, the commission wrote that they recognized “[n]o one, white or Negro, is wholly free from an inheritance of prejudice,” and that “harmony and co-operation . . . can come completely only after the disappearance of prejudice.” Encouragingly, the authors reported that each member of the biracial group that had been working together and interacting socially for two years “feels that he has more understanding and less prejudice than before its work began.” However, the authors chose to focus on the ends rather than the means, recommending to their readers not a similar kind of interracial experience, but "the thoughtful examination of the body of this report,” or knowledge of

“the basic facts in the problem of race relations and the conclusions from a careful study of the various phases of these relations in Chicago.”9

The data and insights contained in the seven-hundred page commission report have informed countless scholarly studies in nearly a century following its publication, but as Thomas Philpott makes clear:

Given the desperate need for more and better housing, on the one hand, and the pervasiveness of white hostility to Negro neighbors, on the other—two conditions that the report documented definitively—the black commissioners were in no position to get any biracial group to come out unequivocally for the freedom of black families to live wherever they chose. No local group with white membership, including the NAACP and the Urban League, had ever demanded

8 Philpott, Slum and the Ghetto, 215, 222-23. 9 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 640. 261

more on behalf of Chicago’s Negroes than the Riot Commission did. That was enough to make the commission’s recommendations, if not altogether satisfactory, at least acceptable to most blacks.10

Arthur Waskow agrees that, because it represented a compromise between

African American business leaders and powerful representatives of the white

establishment, the analysis within commission report “stopped short of looking hard at the power structure of Chicago.” At the highest levels of Chicago’s socio-political hierarchy, idealistic appeals for equal rights by “New Negro” militants, black veterans,

and others was not enough to bring down the system of race antagonism and residential

segregation that benefitted Chicago’s wealthy and influential elites. As we have seen in

preceding chapters, real estate speculators profited from racial tension because it

depressed the market for fleeing white home sellers and inflated rents for African

Americans in the Black Belt. Irish political bosses, who took kickbacks and bribes from

legitimate and illicit neighborhood businesses, controlled their territories and populations

by providing protection from black encroachment. Industrialists like the meat packers

stifled unionization efforts by placing African Americans under their employ in mixed-

race shops to hinder organizing efforts.

Residential segregation in Chicago did not begin with the race riot. The pattern

that characterized the history of the Angelus apartment building was already well

established. But any hope of mixed living was lost with the race riot. “Segregation by

agreement” became the most reasonable means of keeping the peace between lower-class

blacks and whites. “[I]t is time for both races to refuse the domination of hoodlums,

black or white,” wrote one jury member in the Cook County Coroner’s official record of

10 Philpott, Slum and the Ghetto, 228. 262

the riot, “Let the leaders of both peoples come together and agree for the general good to dwell apart.” Of course, wealthier whites had no desire to live among African Americans

either. Another juror offered that, “[t]he leaders of the colored class . . . should form a

syndicate, raise money to purchase vacant property and build homes where the colored

men can live and thus prevent the intermingling of the races.” Racial separation was the

obvious remedy, questions surrounded only the means.11

The riot resulted in a vigorous reaffirmation of racial segregation as de facto

public policy in Chicago. In the decades following, African American segregation developed its own very complex, and deeply troubling history, whereby at the turn-of- the-twenty-first-century the distribution of African Americans in Chicago looked like

this:

11 Cook County Coroner, The Race Riots: Biennial Report 1918-1919 and Official Record of Inquests on the Victims of the Race Riots of July and August 1919 (Chicago, 1920), 60. See Philpott, Slum and the Ghetto, 210-28. 263

Unpublished Map prepared by Sean Dinces.

264

In response to a prompt posed in a questionnaire by the Riot Commission to

notable black intellectuals, an anonymous respondent defined segregation as “the forcing

apart [sic] of any group into a less favorable environment in order that advantage or

position may accrue to those in authority.”12 African Americans opposed to segregation recognized its greatest underlying dangers: the creation of a permanent black underclass, subordinate to a wealthier white majority. In the years following the riot, these terrible

fears were realized. In 1968, another year of considerable racial violence in America, the

National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders warned that the nation was "moving

toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal." Many would argue

that this was already the case.13

For members of the expanding black middle class in the twenty-first century,

discrimination in employment and politics has been greatly reduced. But African

Americans today are more likely than any other group to live in segregated communities

and concentrated poverty. Chicago’s black ghettos suffer from high rates of joblessness, violent crime, and drug and alcohol addiction. Law enforcement agencies target

segregated urban areas with greater enthusiasm as part of their “war on drugs,” the effect

of which has been the arrest and conviction of a hugely disproportionate number of

underprivileged African Americans for possession of drugs and other non-violent crimes.

Underfunded schools in neglected communities with high dropout rates have resulted in

generations of African Americans without the skill-set or technical know-how required to

12 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 510. 13 Steve Bogira, “Separate, Unequal, and Ignored,” Chicago Reader, accessed September 1, 2012, http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/chicago-politics-segregation-african-american-black-white- hispanic-latino-population-census-community/Content?oid=3221712. 265 procure decent jobs. And predatory lending has led to ever increasing numbers of abandoned homes in deteriorated neighborhoods.14

If history teaches us anything, it is that separate is unequal. The forms and conditions of social inequality have changed as segregation has been challenged and reconstituted. The race riot in Chicago is part of this history. Disaster in Chicago was preceded by great possibility: black and white laborers “standing shoulder to shoulder as men” at Beutner Park; children interacting amicably in integrated school yards; white journalists celebrating black soldiers as “heroes,” and “Americans to the core.” But the race riot slammed the door on racial tolerance and cooperation, and instead ushered in an era of renewed commitment to segregation; a social arrangement not “natural” or inevitable, but invented based on historically contingent circumstances. The race riot reminds us that nothing in the world is timeless. Yet in hindsight, the things most difficult to find a way to change are the “way things have always been.”

14 Ibid. 266

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