The Black Musician and the White City: Race and Music in Chicago, 1900-1967
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The Black Musician and the White City: Race and Music in Chicago, 1900-1967
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Overview
Absher’s work diverges from existing studies in three ways: First, she takes the history beyond the study of jazz and blues by examining the significant role that classically trained black musicians played in building the Chicago South Side community. By acknowledging the presence and importance of classical musicians, Absher argues that black migrants in Chicago had diverse education and economic backgrounds but found common cause in the city’s music community. Second, Absher brings numerous maps to the history, illustrating the relationship between Chicago’s physical lines of segregation and the geography of black music in the city over the years. Third, Absher’s use of archival sources is both extensive and original, drawing on manuscript and oral history collections at the Center for Black Music Research in Chicago, Columbia University, Rutgers’s Institute of Jazz Studies, and Tulane’s Hogan Jazz Archive. By approaching the Chicago black musical community from these previously untapped angles, Absher offers a history that goes beyond the retelling of the achievements of the famous musicians by discussing musicians as a group. In The Black Musician and the White City, black musicians are the leading actors, thinkers, organizers, and critics of their own story.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472119172 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 06/16/2014 |
| Pages: | 216 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.90(w) x 6.20(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Black Musician and the White City
Race and Music in Chicago, 1900-1967
By Amy Absher
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2014 the University of MichiganAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11917-2
CHAPTER 1
Musicians and the Segregated City
Chicago in the Early 1900s-1930s
In 1904, Joe Jordan composed "Pekin Rag," a work dedicated to the dance hall that would over time become Chicago's Black-owned Pekin Theater. The cover of the sheet music for "Pekin Rag" features a photograph of the crowds inside the theater. Filling the foreground are the musicians, dressed in matching uniforms. The audience stretches out behind the orchestra, filling the floor and the balcony of the theater. All of the men are in dinner jackets and the women are dressed in gowns. Chandeliers hang from the ceiling and mirrors adorn the walls.
The sheet-music photo only hints at the early grandeur of the Pekin, which owner Robert Motts remodeled and reopened in 1905 and 1906 as a large-scale theater. Eventually, the Pekin, located on the 2700 block of South State Street, housed a touring company and orchestra capable of supporting operas as well as popular music performances. Its significance as a venue grew as the Black neighborhoods surrounding it grew. It became so important to the community that Black leaders endorsed the Pekin as a shining example of African American art and culture. Further endorsement of the Pekin, and the music culture that emerged around it, came from Catholic nuns who brought orphaned African American children to the Black theater district to watch the performances so that the children could see their community in the most positive possible light.
A photo of the outside of the Pekin suggests a different perspective on the theater that was a jewel of the Black community. In an era when Chicago was becoming defined by skyscrapers and architectural filigree, externally, the Pekin was a stark brick building with storefront windows. Like nearly every other building on the South Side, the Pekin had only two stories. There were no trees lining the street in front of the theater, nor was there a line of cars. The emptiness of the exterior photo, in contrast to the photo of the interior, reveals that the Pekin's neighborhood had access to few of the civic services or comforts common on the city's North Side.
The neighborhoods surrounding the Pekin were home to a growing population of 44,103 African Americans in 1910. By 1920, there were 109,594 African Americans in Chicago. The growth in the Black population represented a significant demographic shift in the city — which had a total of 2,701,705 residents in 1920. City commissioners concluded in 1922 that the increase in the African American population was staggering, but it was not a citywide phenomenon. Rather, it represented an increase in population density that pushed at the borders of the existing Black neighborhoods south of the downtown business district.
The two photos of the Pekin captured the dual reality of the South Side. It was an area of the city disregarded by civic leaders in terms of development while simultaneously being a site of civic pride for African Americans. The reason for this contact was that African Americans were slowly building an autonomous cultural sphere on the South Side where they could be the venue owners, the musicians, and the audience — which is the essence of the photo capturing the interior of the Pekin.
The conscious use of self-sufficiency as a way to resist segregation was at the heart of the complex relationship African Americans had with Chicago. The Black cultural sphere ensured the promotion of African American culture, but it ran the risk of legitimizing the city's racial politics. It also necessitated that the Pekin's owners, ignored by city leaders and banks, turn to the city's crime syndicates to underwrite the theater. By the early 1920s, the onetime jewel of the community became infamous as a resister of Prohibition laws and a venue for gang violence. In the minds of many Chicagoans in the 1920s, the Pekin was an example of the connections between crime and African Americans. The Pekin illustrates that it was impossible to resist segregation without being shaped by segregation.
In the forefront of the conflicts and contradictions born of the African American struggle against segregation in Chicago, as the photos of the Pekin demonstrate, were the musicians. African American musicians began to arrive in Chicago in considerable numbers in the early 1910s. They were attracted to Chicago in part because of the Pekin and what it represented. The musician migration collided with a political movement in which Chicago leaders were turning more toward using physical segregation as a tool to contain the city's booming "vice" businesses and the growing African American population within the same area of the city. Rather than ending vice, civic leaders pushed brothels, saloons, dance halls, and gambling establishments into the least politically powerful part of the city: the emerging South Side "black belt." Because much of Chicago's popular music was performed in the venues of vice, such as bars and brothels, the majority of the city's popular music clubs also relocated to the "black belt." By the end of the 1930s, African American musicians had seen a transformation of Chicago in which the legitimacy of venues, like the Pekin, slowly eroded under the pressure of the vice purge until they, too, were venues of vice.
The history of the growth of segregation in Chicago stands side by side with the history of the growth of African American culture in the city. Black musicians were caught between these two historic forces. To survive, all Black musicians would have to defend their music and their profession from the social stigma resulting from the vice purge that pushed vice into the South Side, which threatened to reduce their music to an element of crime. The Black musicians' opponents included both white social crusaders, seeking to drive out popular music venues, and African American leaders, striving to build a "respectable" Black cultural sphere on the South Side.
THE PLACE OF VICE AND MUSIC IN CHICAGO
Three forces shaped the musicians' reality in Chicago in the early twentieth century. The first was the 1912 vice purge. Around the turn of the century, before the creation of the "black belt," pulp novelists and religious leaders described the places of vice in the city as the Customs House in the Loop, the Chinatown neighborhood south of the Loop, the Levee of the near South Side, and the Little Hell neighborhood north of the Loop. These areas were the "slums of vice," characterized by dice games, prostitutes, opium, and ragtime that "grated on sensitive ears." None of the pulp descriptions of these places referred to African Americans. The only descriptions of racial mixing concerned Chinatown and focused on the relationship between opium, Asians, and European Americans. These early descriptions of Chicago suggest that there was a connection between popular music and vice before African Americans started to arrive in Chicago in large numbers.
The process by which African Americans became tied to notions of vice was a historical process rooted in the policing of the Levee. As Chicago's red-light district, the Levee emerged in the 1870s on Wabash Street close to the downtown business district — the Loop. It was a red-light district notorious for its saloons, dance halls, brothels, and displays of sexuality that were often interracial, cross-class, public, and commercial. It was a place of social experimentation where people from different backgrounds could mix and touch one another without concern for social propriety.
In the early 1900s, the police began to focus on the Levee. The surveillance and prosecution caused the district to begin to creep further and further south, from the downtown commercial area to 18th and 22nd Streets between State and Armour. Though the drift had been underway for awhile, it was not until 1911 that the conscious plan to force vice into the Black neighborhoods began with the Vice Commission's report. At the core of its arguments was the Levee. The commission viewed this section of Chicago as a vice bacillus branching out into the city. In the report, the Vice Commission observed that vice was always "within or near the settlements of colored people. ... Where ever prostitutes, cadets, and thugs were located among white people and had to be moved for commercial and other reasons, they were driven to undesirable parts of the city, the so-called colored residential sections." Underlying their words was the growing idea that vice in the Black neighborhoods was natural in an urban space.
Chicago civic leaders were not alone in the war on vice. In Seattle, the city's women pushed for the recall of Mayor Hiram Gill, charging him with corruption because he supported a legal vice district in the city. In the Arizona and the New Mexico territories, the public debate concerned Prohibition, the need to recall corrupt judges, and women's rights. Throughout Ohio, the police and city leaders blamed Black communities for vice and refused to distinguish between criminals and law-abiding African Americans, which resulted in violence and an increase in the incarceration of Blacks.
Chicago civic leaders were also not alone in looking to segregation as a way of controlling the ever-increasing African American population in the city. This was the age of Jim Crow. Between 1900 and 1911, there was a marked increase in residential segregation laws throughout the South, and the residents of Atlanta took things a step further by segregating elevators. In Harlem in 1912, white residents were calling for "Jim Crow" cars in the city trains because they disliked the striking growth in the number of Black residents in the neighborhood. Furthermore, large-scale race riots marred each presidential election. The 1912 election reflected the growing tension in the nation when Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party refused to seat duly elected Black delegates, suggesting that the Progressive movement was for whites only.
Chicago's vice crusade and turn toward segregation stands out in this moment of social reform because it was legitimized and endorsed not only by city and civic leaders but also by social scientists at the University of Chicago, which gave the vice purge the auspices of a city-planning measure. Their rationalizations illustrate the divided nature of their plan for the city. On the one hand, they were attempting to apply the progressive ideals for which the city had become famous. On the other, their inconsistencies and the uncertain terms regarding vice and race reveals that in 1912 they were starting down the path of creating two Chicagos dominated by different political and cultural ideas. In the end, the Chicago commissioners, politicians, and police did not succeed at preventing or eliminating vice. Instead, they pushed vice further into the "black belt." The physical segregation of vice in the racially segregated "black belt" became the answer only after it was apparent that the reformers could not eradicate vice any more than they could stop the growth of the African American population. Once in the Black neighborhoods, the vice areas would comprise the borderland between the neighborhoods of the Black elites and the areas controlled by poor European American communities.
The vice purge resulted in two significant developments. First, the purge designated the South Side as the neighborhood of vice. Following the purge, the majority of the musicians playing jazz and blues in Chicago, and those who would migrate to the city over the next few decades, relocated to the South Side because the music venues were economically tied to the "pleasure palaces," "resorts," and "dives" controlled by crime syndicates. Black music — and, by extension, the Black musician — were seen as the accomplice of vice. The purge created a situation in which even the classically trained African American musicians found it difficult to perform beyond the South Side. The type of music the musician played was unimportant. The musician's physical appearance became the determining factor rather than class, genre, or education. Second, the vice purge was a manifestation of the growing need to control the city through segregation. Civic leaders knew that they could not end vice, and so they turned to segregation as a way of managing the city. The choice to physically segregate African Americans and vice from the rest of Chicago, therefore, inextricably linked race and vice in the minds of the majority of Chicagoans.
The vice "crusade" did not so much destroy the Levee as shatter it. Its pieces reassembled in the predominantly African American neighborhood on the South Side, where the vice district gained a new name and a new social significance as the geographic center of African American music and business in Chicago. This area, between 26th and 39th Streets, encompassing South State Street and including the Pekin, came to be known as the Stroll.
Orchestra leader and composer Duke Ellington described the Stroll of the 1920s as a place of racial unity without "hungry negroes" or "uncle Tom negroes." He described the population by saying:
It was a real us-for-we, we-for-us community. ... It was a community of men and women who were respected, people of dignity — doctors, lawyers, policy operators, bootleggers, bankers, beauticians, bartenders, saloonkeepers, night clerks, cab owners, cab drivers, stockyard workers, owners of after-hours joints — everything and everybody, but no junkies.
While Ellington celebrated the diversity of classes and businesses, the Stroll was a place of concern for the Black business leaders wishing to cultivate a respectable image of the community. To the white press of the 1920s "the ghosts of the long gone days of Chicago's roaring levee" haunted the Stroll, where "the society man, the chorus girl, the gangster, the lawyer, the jazzbo" could all be found.
The concepts of community, lawless vice, and respectability were all present on maps of the area. This is because the Stroll was a place where Chicago's world of vice and crime overlapped with the businesses of the industrious middle class. It was well-known that the city's crime syndicates, such as that ruled by Al Capone, controlled the nightlife. Capone's neighbors in the Stroll were banks and insurance companies. Further complicating things, the theater and cabaret proprietors of the Stroll, such as the owner of the Pekin, purposefully worked to distinguish themselves from the Levee by attempting to establish a high level of décor and entertainment that rivaled the stylish theaters and halls that served white clientele downtown.
Despite the furnishings, the area remained a challenge to propriety because owners and visitors to the area mixed vice with amusements by creating a space of racial integration. Both whites and Blacks took part in the music, dancing, theater, prostitution, and other entertainments available in the area, making the Stroll, just as it had made the Levee, a target of both Black and white reformers. In this way, during the period between World War I (when jazz musicians migrated to the city following the closing of the red-light district in New Orleans) and 1927 (when the Savoy Ballroom, which was the first high-class establishment to not be built on the Stroll, opened), the Stroll quickly became the embodiment of all of the complexities of African American life in Chicago.
There were also music venues in Chicago outside of the Levee and the Stroll, including downtown clubs like the Royal Gardens, which welcomed a mixed audience in the late 1910s. This situation would change quickly. At the time, it was becoming more and more common that African American audience members were refused tickets or sold tickets for the balcony. It was also increasingly customary for African Americans to be sold tickets only to have ushers refuse to seat them. Often, African Americans sued the theaters for damages on the grounds that such treatment violated the state's antidiscrimination laws. In the 1910s, African Americans were successful in court, but by 1925 these kinds of suits were struck down, signaling a change under way in the city. These court cases represented the growing contradiction between Illinois state laws banning discrimination in public spaces and the lived experience of African Americans in Chicago.
THE PROBLEMS OF VICE AND RACE
The second force that shaped the Black musicians' experience in Chicago was the rise of the "social myth" conflating race and vice, which was solidified by the vice purge and fed by the increasing racial tensions in the city. African Americans came to Chicago during World War I to work in the growing number of industrial jobs created by war demand. Throughout the war, there were few new buildings constructed in Chicago, which resulted in African Americans living in conditions "lacking" in the "conveniences, considered necessities by the average white citizen." The housing disparities included the absence of bathrooms. If there was plumbing, then there was no hot water. Also, Black families had gaslights rather than electricity and wood stoves rather than furnaces.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Black Musician and the White City by Amy Absher. Copyright © 2014 the University of Michigan. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 Musicians and the Segregated City: Chicago in the Early 1900s-1930s 16
Chapter 2 From South to South Side: Musicians in 1940s Chicago 48
Chapter 3 Redefining the Music Industry: Independent Music in Chicago, 1948-1953 82
Chapter 4 From South Side to the South and the Nation, 1954-1963 98
Chapter 5 Dissonance and the Desegregation of Chicago's Musicians' Union, 1963-1967 139
Coda 147
Notes 149
Bibliography 187
Index 199