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Along The Streets of Bronzeville
Black Chicago's Literary Landscape
By Elizabeth Schroeder Schlabach UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09510-8
CHAPTER 1
From Black Belt to Bronzeville
The South Side of Chicago was dubbed the Black Belt during the late teens. Crowds of people milled about day and night. Popular in the late teens and 1920s, the Stroll—South Parkway Avenue (presently Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard)—was the center of Chicago's Black Belt. The Stroll served as inspiration for famed African American musicians, artists, and writers, such as Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Brooks, themselves migrants or the daughters and sons of migrants. This chapter considers these specific sites, even addresses, as geographies of culture production—places where migrants to and residents of Black Chicago experienced the intersection of race, geography, and culture production in early-twentieth-century Chicago. The cultural formations powerfully link the various mappings of the Black Metropolis.
As a prime destination for black migrants from the South, Chicago's "Black Belt" quickly grew into a segregated Black Metropolis where African American entrepreneurship, entertainment culture, and political activity thrived in the face of hostile "native" and ethnic white resistance to Black insurgence and racial integration. Moving to Chicago signified a move into urban industrial modernity, a move and consciousness explored thoroughly in the scholarship of Adam Green, Davarian Baldwin, and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart; as a result, black migrants discovered and contributed to a dynamic, confident Black urban community that traced a third transition from "Black Metropolis" to "Bronzeville." Heralding the community as the locus of shining bronze faces, beautiful bronze faces, the neighborhood's transition through a variety of appellations evidences a complex interplay between hope, reality, and the triumph over the segregation and racial decimation that comprised Black migration—all captured in the dynamic cultural production of the Chicago Black Renaissance. These traditions, beginnings, and movements of black bodies from the Stroll southward to 47th Street and South Parkway map Chicago as the logical hotbed of African American Renaissance activity. Moreover, a careful rendering, geographically and fictionally, of these topographies finds "a city within a city" following the Depression as Bronzeville became the capital of Black America.
Between 1910 and 1950 Chicago was the crossroads of northern urbanity. The first mass movement of black southerners to northern cities occurred during and immediately after World War I. Participants in this "Great Migration" left their southern homes but brought with them, as Richard Wright noted in his 1945 autobiography Black Boy (American Hunger), the "scars, visible and invisible," of southern boyhood. Wright was both fascinated and intimidated. "I was seized by doubt," he recalled of the moment he walked out of the railroad station in Chicago. "Should I have come here? But going back was impossible. I had fled a known terror, and perhaps I could cope with this unknown terror that lay ahead." Along with the unknown terror of the big city came the liberating realization that a white man sitting beside him on the streetcar seemed unconscious of his blackness. "Black people and white people moved about," he noticed, "each seemingly intent upon his private mission. There was no racial fear. Indeed, each person acted as though no one existed but himself." The new rules would require adjustment, but they also promised hope. Despite the fact that he grew disillusioned rather quickly, Richard Wright did not regret coming to Chicago in 1927. For in the South, an ambitious black American could find even less nourishment for hopes and dreams than in the North.
Black southerners "recognized that their future lay in the North." The migrants brought with them experiences, memories, and expectations similar to Richard Wright's. Many had more modest goals—but they likewise had decided that the North was a land of opportunity. During World War I, northern cities were just that, especially compared with the South and within the context of the migrants' short-term expectations and early experiences.
With Northern employers unwilling to hire blacks as long as white immigrants from Europe remained available, northward migration had played little role in southern black life until World War I shut off immigration. Catalyzed in early 1916 by recruiters from northern railroads suffering from the wartime labor shortage, the Great Migration soon generated its own momentum. "Northern fever" permeated the black South, as letters, rumors, gossip, and black newspapers carried word of higher wages and better treatment in the North. Approximately one-half million southerners—both black and white—chose to say farewell to the South and start life anew in northern cities during 1916–1919, and nearly one million more followed in the 1920s, making it, according to Henry Louis Gates Jr., "the largest movement of Black bodies since slavery."
For many migrants, the promise of the "North" and "the city" contained the dream of being liberated from the abuses and restrictions that characterized life in the South, lives once structured so strictly by the rhythms of a slave past. Therefore, from cities, towns, and farms, they poured into northern cities. The lure of higher-paying work and freedom from social and political restrictions drew many southern blacks away from sharecropping and tenant farming toward the northern "land of promise." According to Robin Bachin's study Building the South Side, an addition to these factors fueling the expansion of the Black Belt specifically was the availability of less expensive housing before World War I. This concomitance with job opportunities that would arrive with the war led the black population of Chicago to increase by 148.5 percent between 1910 and 1920 alone. In these early periods, as historical and literary accounts of the Harlem Renaissance attest, Harlem became the mecca of black culture, home to such luminaries as W. E. B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, and Marcus Garvey. But in much of the Deep South, the Midwest—and as the 1930s neared—it was Chicago that captured the attention and imagination of restless and fed-up black Americans. The title of cultural mecca shifted to the Midwest.
Among the many cities offering new employment and opportunities, Chicago represented a logical destination for black men and women preparing to leave homes in southern communities. Meatpacking firms were known even in the rural South, where their storage facilities dotted the countryside. Many black southerners had heard of the "fairyland wonders" of Chicago's spectacular 1893 Columbian Exposition. Others knew of Chicago as the home of the Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Company, maker of High Brown Face Powder. Baseball fans might have seen or heard of Chicago's American Giants, the black team that barnstormed through the South every summer in a private railroad car.
Finally, the city was easily accessible via the Illinois Central Railroad, whose tracks stretched southward from Chicago into rural Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana, with easy access from adjoining states as well. Regardless of where someone "stopped on the way," recalled one migrant from Mississippi, "the mecca was Chicago." From 1916 to 1919, thousands more passed through the city before moving on to other locations in the North.
Chicago became the symbol of the promise of the North for those who stopped there and passed through, and even for those who migrated elsewhere. As trains approached Chicago, the migrants' hope and excitement began to mix with awe, trepidation, and sometimes disappointment. Most railroad routes passed through the steel towns lying south and east of Chicago, offering initial views dominated by the gray pall that usually hung over the mills and the rickety houses of Gary, Indiana, and South Chicago. To those arriving at night, the sight could have been particularly impressive and disorienting; the fiery smokestacks never rested, denying the natural rhythms of night and day that ruled migrants' agricultural pasts. Finally the train rolled into one of Chicago's railroad depots. Migrants fortunate enough to have someone to meet them might have been unsettled by the crowds but were soon reassured by the sight of a familiar face. Those migrants who were not met at the train by a friend were immediately faced with the problem of finding their own way to the South Side. They had to look for assistance; several black institutions met them during their first hours in the city, in effect providing the first connective tissues for a coherent political and artistic renaissance. Black porters and doormen assisted migrants and both white and black Travelers Aid assistants referred people with problems either to the Urban League or the black branch of either the Young Men's Christian Association or Young Women's Christian Association.
Newcomers experienced a series of shocks as they emerged from the railroad station. Many gazed at the immense structures, the concrete and iron materials that seemed to be everywhere, and the swift motion of people, automobiles, and trolleys. Richard Wright was taken aback by the "towering buildings of steel and stone" and by elevated trains that occasionally shook the ground. The screeching of streetcars and honking of horns augmented the awesome sights. Scurrying residents seemed oblivious not only to their environment but to other people as well, and their "clipped speech" was incomprehensible to Wright.
Despite the dissonant urban environment, migrants could expect clarity in Chicago's color line. Shaped by both the circumscribing influences of the white city that surrounded it and the demands of the migrants and "Old Settlers" who inhabited it, by 1920 the emerging Black Metropolis on the South Side divided along lines of class, religion, and even age. But it remained a community nevertheless, unified by the implications of racial taxonomies. Beginning at the edge of an industrial and warehouse district just south of the Loop (Chicago's central business district), black Chicago stretched only a few blocks wide except at its northern end. In 1910, 78 percent of black Chicagoans lived on the South Side in a narrow strip of land known to whites as the Black Belt. From 1916 until 1948, racially restrictive covenants were used to keep Chicago's neighborhoods white. In language suggested by the Chicago Real Estate Board, legally binding covenants attached to parcels of land varying in size from city block to large subdivision prohibited African Americans from using, occupying, buying, leasing, or receiving property in those areas.
Up to 1947, restrictive racial covenants covered large parts of the city and, in combination with zones of nonresidential use, almost wholly surrounded the African American residential districts of the period, cutting off corridors of extension. Davarian Baldwin, in his study Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life, defines restrictive covenants as legally binding documents, usually between white real estate agents and owners, to prevent the renting or sale of housing to nonwhites, with threat of civil action. The rationale was to protect property values by keeping areas all white. For example, the University of Chicago grew concerned over the growing fear of declining property values around their South Side campus just east of the Black Belt neighborhood that was rapidly expanding during and after World War I. It has already been mentioned that Chicago's black population skyrocketed 148.5 percentage points between 1910 and 1920; its white population increased only 21 percent. Bachin charts the settlement patterns of migrants decade by decade alongside whites' response: "Before 1900, African Americans lived primarily on the South Side but were scattered in various neighborhoods. After 1900, and clearly by 1915, the narrow Black Belt south of the central business district, bounded by 12th and 39th Streets, State Street and Lake Michigan, solidified. White residents from these areas, fearing the 'Negro Invasion,' moved southward into neighborhoods around the University of Chicago." The University supported neighborhood organizations pushing for racial restrictions in their homeowners' associations such as the Hyde Park Protective Association (HPPA). These associations worked with the Chicago Real Estate Board to ensure that African Americans could not "invade" white areas of the city. Bachin cites a 1920 formal scheme of racial segregation where the Board voted to expel "any member who sells a Negro property in a block where there are only white members." These covenants with redlining tactics and virulent protests in white neighborhoods would exacerbate conditions brought on later during the Great Depression, as competition increased for jobs, decent housing, and social and health services. The housing left to black residents was in some of the city's most dilapidated neighborhoods. With the restrictive covenants, landlords could extract the highest rents for the worst housing from the most economically disenfranchised population.
Many of the neighborhoods encumbered with racially restrictive covenants were subsequently settled by a second wave of the Great Migration during and after World War II, only by this time the covenants had been declared unconstitutional. As part of the budding civil rights movement in the North, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) put their focus on the covenants. On a local level, Chicago's branch of the NAACP assisted Carl Hansberry in a challenge to restrictive covenants on the South Side in a court battle his daughter Lorraine would fictionalize in her play A Raisin in the Sun. The young and intrepid Hansberry serves as a model of the aestheticism of the Chicago Black Renaissance: the lived experiences of authors, artists, and musicians translated well into fictional renditions of the South Side's ugliness and chaos that would have powerful nonfictive consequences. In fact, on a nationwide scale, NAACP lawyers crafted what historian Thomas J. Sugrue called a "social scientific case—drawing from cutting-edge work in urban sociology and economics—about the negative consequences of restrictive covenants." Emphasizing chaotic overcrowding, poor health conditions, and crime as results of the covenants, lawyers were successfully able to convince the Supreme Court to reconsider racial restrictions in the 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer case involving covenants in Detroit, St. Louis, and Washington.
As troubling and disorienting as navigating the urban landscape was, it was thrilling as well. Upon initial arrival, migrants generally headed straight for Chicago's famous South Side ghetto where the bright lights and commotion introduced them to the rhythms of their new home. Langston Hughes recalled the thrill of his arrival in Chicago in 1918, before he became influential in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s: "South State Street was in its glory then, a teeming Negro street with crowded theaters, restaurants, and cabarets. And excitement from noon to noon. Midnight was like day. The street was full of workers and gamblers, prostitutes, and pimps, church folks and sinners." The Chicago Whip, a black newspaper, agreed with Hughes's assessment, describing the Stroll as a cosmopolitan "Bohemia of the Colored folks," where "lights sparkled, glasses tinkled," and one could find bootblacks and bankers dressed in finery. Looking east from the busy corner, a newcomer with an eye for the symbolic might have compared past and future, because five blocks away the Plantation Cafés bright neon sign suggested dissonant images of the rural South and urban North. At the turn of the century, Black Chicagoans enjoyed a whole range of leisure activities—a world of things to see and do—that were available or highly restricted in other parts of the country, particularly the South. Migrants to Chicago frequently cited increases in leisure time and disposable income and the wider choice of recreational activities as major improvements in their daily lives, alongside better educational opportunities and greater political participation that this northern city afforded.
Public space such as the Stroll showed African Americans as laborers as well as leisure seekers in the urban landscape. In the 1910s and 1920s, thanks to the publicity efforts of the Chicago Defender, it was the best-known street in African America, rivaled only by Seventh and Lenox Avenues in Harlem. The Stroll was where the action was. In the evening the lights blazed and the sidewalks were crowded with patrons attending the jazz clubs and those just gazing at all the activity. During daylight hours it was a place to loiter, gossip, and watch the street life. Black Chicagoans were on show, and they dressed up and acted accordingly.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Along The Streets of Bronzeville by Elizabeth Schroeder Schlabach. Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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