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Overview
Binga is the definitive full-length biography of Jesse Binga, the first black banker in Chicago. Born into a large family in Detroit, Binga arrived in Chicago in 1892 in his late twenties with virtually nothing. Through his wits and resourcefulness, he rose to wealth and influence as a real estate broker, and in 1908 he founded the Binga Bank, the first black-owned bank in the city. But his achievements were followed by an equally notable downfall. Binga recounts this gripping story about race, history, politics, and finance. The Black Belt, where Binga’s bank was located, was a segregated neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side—a burgeoning city within a city—and its growth can be traced through the arc of Binga’s career. He preached and embodied an American gospel of self-help and accrued wealth while expanding housing options and business opportunities for blacks. Devout Roman Catholics, he and his wife Eudora supported church activities and various cultural and artistic organizations; their annual Christmas party was the Black Belt’s social event of the year. But Binga’s success came at the price of a vicious backlash. After he moved his family into a white neighborhood in 1917, their house was bombed multiple times, his offices were attacked twice, and he became a lightning rod for the worst race riots in Chicago history, which took place in 1919. Binga persevered, but, starting with the stock market crash of October 1929, a string of reversals cost him his bank, his property, and his fortune. A quintessentially Chicago story, Binga tells the history of racial change in one of the most segregated cities in America and how an extraordinary man stood as a symbol of hope in a community isolated by racial animosity.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810140905 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2019 |
| Series: | Second to None: Chicago Stories Series |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Sales rank: | 1,230,931 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
DON HAYNER is the retired editor-in-chief of the Chicago Sun-Times. During his tenure as managing editor and editor, the Sun-Times was awarded multiple national and local awards for investigative reporting and breaking news, including the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting in 2011. Hayner is the co-author, with Tom McNamee, of Streetwise Chicago: A History of Chicago Street Names, The Metro Chicago Almanac: Fascinating Facts and Offbeat Offerings about the Windy City, and The Stadium: 1929–1994, The Official Commemorative History of the Chicago Stadium. Hayner is a graduate of Ripon College and John Marshall Law School.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
"Do You Know Who That Is?"
Timuel D. Black Jr., a revered Chicago historian and civil rights activist, remembered seeing Jesse Binga twice. The first time was in the mid-1920s, when Timuel was a little boy and his father brought him to a narrow building on Chicago's South Side in the heart of the city's crowded neighborhood known as the Black Belt. This building was where many African American fathers and mothers often brought their children; it was part of the ritual.
The gray stone building, near the corner of Thirty-Fifth and State Streets, had tall Ionic columns, large windows, and two heavy front doors of glass and wood. Little Timuel waited while his father pulled a door open, and together they walked inside.
This was a bank building, and although the city had plenty of banks, this one was unique: it was owned by an African American man, and it was the first black-owned bank in Chicago. Thousands of black men and women brought their children here, not just to see the bank but also to point out the man who owned it and to take in the lessons of his ownership.
As Timuel and his father walked past the tall check writing desks with cut glass inkwells and polished brass penholders, they heard only the soft, clicking echoes of their shoe heels on the marble floor. It was the sound of wealth, a sound normally reserved for the lobbies of those massive, well-appointed banks downtown, but this was the Black Belt.
Timuel's father pulled his son to a stop when he spotted a gray-haired man in his late fifties greeting customers in front of the teller cages. The man was brown-skinned and handsome, dressed in a three-piece suit as neat as a ledger sheet. He wore a starched white shirt with a high collar and a tie pulled in a tight knot and fixed in place by a gold stickpin. His sturdy straight physique made him appear taller than his already above-average height and emphasized an already obvious point: he was the man in charge.
Timuel's dad, who had moved his family to Chicago from Alabama, where he had once witnessed a lynching in Birmingham, pointed to the man in the suit and explained that this man owned the bank and was living proof that a black man could accomplish anything.
"That," his father said, "is Jesse Binga."
Binga.
Every man, woman, and child in Chicago's Black Belt knew that name. Jesse Binga was the moneyman of the Black Belt, the king of America's black Wall Street. In the 1920s, just hearing the strange and poetic sound of his name conjured up an image as constant and permanent as the chiseled letters on the front of the bank. The Binga Bank had an unforgettable ring to it, like a cash register.
Black people — and some whites too — came from all over the city to tuck away their earnings in the safety of Binga's house of money. Their children were pulled along, with pennies rattling inside tiny tin Binga Banks. If a black man needed a loan to buy a house, he could go see Mr. Binga. If he needed a room, an apartment, a house, or some walking-around money, Mr. Binga was the man for that too.
Binga was a symbol of success in the Black Belt, someone who embodied the possibility of the American Dream. His name, or just his initial B, was an emblem of wealth, as much as the painted dollar signs that formed a big circle around a large advertisement on the side of his building. A swirling letter Bwas sculpted in flowers at his banquets, printed on the front of his bank's passbooks, and painted in twenty-four-karat gold on his family's china plates.
Everybody in the Black Belt knew the name "Binga," but few really knew the man. He didn't have many friends, certainly not many close friends. He mostly kept to himself in that roomy redbrick house on South Park Avenue, the one with the elevator behind the stairs, a second-floor gym, and a rotating clothes dryer the size of a small room in the basement.
"People knew his name," said Timuel D. Black Jr., "but for the most part he was a mystery."
The second time Black saw Binga was about fifteen years later. Black was then working as a clerk at Kaplan's Grocery and Liquor Store at Fifty-Ninth Street and Michigan Avenue. It was around 1940, and Black was handling sales behind the front counter one day when a slightly stooped, elderly man with short-cropped gray hair walked slowly into the store.
The man wore a business suit with a white shirt and a tie. His clothes were neat, but his suit was dated, shiny, and thinned by wear. He made his way through the aisles at a deliberate pace, carefully studying prices; his hands trembled slightly.
Up at the counter, Black was talking to a friend who saw the old man and asked, "Do you know who that is?"
Black looked down the aisle and studied the man making a path through the sawdust on the worn linoleum floor.
"That," his friend said, "is Jesse Binga."
CHAPTER 2The Black Sedan
Shortly after midnight on June 18, 1920, a black sedan slowly pulled up in front of a two-story redbrick house in the middle of the 5900 block of South Park Avenue. A man got out, stepped off the running board and hustled to the front stairs, gingerly placed a package on the porch, and hurried back to the car.
As the sedan sped off, the package exploded in a deafening blast that sent the porch pillars spinning onto the street while shattering windows up and down the block. Neighbors, all of them white and some still in pajamas, quickly gathered in front and tiptoed through the debris to look at the damage. The portico was blown off, half of the porch floor was gone, and the remainder of the roof was left sagging. Remarkably, no one was hurt, and while those who gathered were startled by the blast, they weren't surprised.
This was the fifth time in seven months that Jesse Binga's house at 5922 South Park Avenue (fig. 1) had been bombed (fig. 2). Each bombing was racially motivated. The Bingas were the first black family to move onto the block and were still the only black family, but when they settled there in 1917, nobody bothered them. In fact, neighbors were "very friendly to them, exchanging pleasant greetings whenever they came into contact with them and even unto this day Mr. and Mrs. Binga are on friendly terms with their white neighbors," according to the July 3, 1920, edition of the Broad Ax, one of Chicago's black newspapers.
But as South Side neighborhoods increasingly turned from white to black, racial tensions grew along with threats of violence. By 1920 many whites, particularly in the neighborhoods near the Black Belt, saw Binga as an ominous threat to their daily lives. Binga was a fearless, freewheeling individualist out to make money without bowing to Chicago's racial boundaries and customs. To whites, he was more than just a troublemaker. He was a self-made man who listened to his own counsel as he pulled in buckets of money using his real estate firm and bank to move blacks into white neighborhoods.
Jesse Binga was in the vanguard of a growing group of individuals whom some observers called the "New Negro." By the 1920s most everyone on Chicago's South Side knew his name. In the Black Belt, he was a bright symbol of aspiration and unblinking ambition.
"The difference between savagery and civilization is thrift," one of his bank ads proclaimed. Binga advocated what he called an "economic morality." That morality, as Binga preached it, meant self-sufficiency, which came from spending within your means, paying your bills on time, and working to "save, save, save," preferably in Binga's bank. It meant owning property, such as one's own house. And, perhaps its most important principle, it meant patronizing black-owned businesses.
For the first thirty years of the twentieth century, Binga was an outspoken champion of self-help in Chicago's black community. This was a time when blacks were continually under siege as the Black Belt grew and struggled to define itself. Their ambitions swelled to include jobs they never before had and homes they never before owned. And for that they were under attack. Binga preached an American gospel of hard work, self-reliance, and disciplined savings, yet he was arguably the most hated man in Chicago, at least in white Chicago.
To some whites, Binga was an American success story. To most others, he was a symbol of unwanted change as he resisted every move to control his life and business. The pressure was building for years. Every time he walked out of his house, his bank, his office, or while looking at a building to buy, everywhere Binga went, he likely had to be on guard, look over his shoulder, and size up any approaching stranger. Threatened by anonymous phone calls and unsigned letters, he had to be ever mindful of his surroundings. A trusted aide chauffeured him around town, and his wife stationed armed guards on the sidewalk, gangway, and alley around his house. By 1919, Binga was a lightning rod for the worst race riot in Chicago history.
From July 1, 1917, to March 1, 1921, a black-occupied residence in Chicago was bombed every twenty-three days. There were fifty-eight bombings in that span, and while most left only property damage, two people were killed, including a six-year-old girl who was catapulted out of her bed by one blast and slammed into a ceiling.
Binga's business and home were hit eight or nine times, including the bombing of his house in the late summer of 1921. Other properties he leased or sold were also bombed, and Binga was routinely threatened.
Certainly many bombs were set at the properties of white and other black realtors, including the home of Chicago's first black alderman, Oscar DePriest. But no one in Chicago was targeted more than Jesse Binga.
CHAPTER 3"In the Name of the Bingas"
One early February day in 1889, a newspaper reporter arrived at a small, two-story frame house on Indiana Avenue, in St. Paul, Minnesota. The house had a stone foundation built in such a way that it was about three feet below the sidewalk, which forced the reporter to jump down and then go up the steps leading to the front door.
An old woman with "dark brilliant eyes" peering from behind gold spectacles and who wore a black dress and a knit wool cap greeted the St. Paul Daily Globe reporter. "She is pleasant-looking, stout and inclined to be talkative," the reporter wrote. Beneath her cap, "which comes down over her neck and ears," protruded wavy steel-gray hair. In the reporter's view, "When she smiles the wrinkles at the corners of her mouth shape themselves into deep dimples, giving her a very pleasant and good-natured appearance." Her face, the reporter said, "could not fail to strike the observer as one of considerable intelligence."
The woman led the reporter down to the basement kitchen, where they were surrounded by steaming pots, kettles, and cauldrons that bubbled and popped and fogged the windows. Glass tubing was connected to a few of the pots, along with some strange-looking paraphernalia, which the woman explained helped her make her "panacea," her miracle cure, "the greatest medicine in the world": the "Balm of Gilead, the Great Blood Purifier."
This woman was Adelphia Binga, Jesse Binga's mother (fig 3).
About a quarter century earlier, when Jesse Binga was born, the name Binga meant something on the east side of Detroit, not far from the river near or in what is now downtown Detroit. The Bingas were used to people knowing their name. With ten children, a bustling barbershop, a thriving real estate business, and a reputation for making curative elixirs, they were hard to miss. The successful black family with an exotic name stood out.
The explanations for the origins of the Binga name are varied and vague. A mountain peak in Mozambique, a rural commune in Mali, and a town in the Democratic Republic of the Congo all carry the name Binga. And there's a Binga village on the southeastern shore of Lake Kariba in the Republic of Zimbabwe. Some relatives said the name had Middle Eastern roots; others said Binga was the name of an African chieftain.
To those who knew the Bingas in Detroit, the name meant success. It also conjured up the image of a hardworking family, albeit a somewhat eccentric one.
Jesse came from a long line of strong-willed, independent people. Bingas were known and respected for their self-reliance. Binga's family had various addresses in Detroit, many of them on or near Beaubien Street and some a mile or two from the shore of the Detroit River, just across the water from Canada, where the Binga name first took on a ring of importance. In the late 1830s one relative, Rev. Anthony Binga Sr., who escaped from his enslavement in Kentucky, founded a Baptist church in Amherstburg, Ontario, about sixteen miles south of Detroit, near the mouth of the Detroit River. Amherstburg was one of the last stops for fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad and often their first stop in Canada. Some of those who had escaped their enslavement sat in the pews of Reverend Binga's church.
"Must have been about two centuries ago that the Bingas came up from the islands to Montreal," Jesse Binga would later tell a newspaper reporter, adding some complications to the family history. "As long ago as 1780 there was a farm near Amherstburg, in the province of Ontario, in the name of Binga," he said.
Jesse's father's background is something of a puzzle, although not as mysterious as that of his diligent and energetic mother. The answers to these questions of the Bingas' identity in America are both hidden and revealed in several decades of census reports and one death certificate.
William Binga gave his birthplace as Canada in the 1850 census. Since he was likely born into slavery in Kentucky, he certainly couldn't have said so in 1850 because he could have been captured as a runaway. His block's census was taken on September 21, 1850, just a few days after a tougher Fugitive Slave Act was passed by the U.S. Congress. After the Civil War, however, he reported his birthplace as Kentucky in the 1870 and 1880 censuses. Later, Jesse said his dad was born in the West Indies, adding a bit more confusion.
And then there's the question of race. William and his wife, Adelphia, are both listed as "black" in the 1850 census and "mulatto" in the 1880 census. Yet in the 1870 census, William is listed as "black" and Adelphia and her children are listed as "mulatto." Adelphia, whose maiden name was Powers (according to death records) or Seymour (according to her 1844 marriage record), told Jesse she was white and "descended from an Eastern socially prominent family." In fact, Jesse once called himself an Irishman during his days of prominence, which may have been a reference to his mother's background or just a comment made in a moment of pique. A family photo of Adelphia shows her to be a dark-haired woman with light skin. It seems she listed herself as black or mulatto for the census because interracial marriages were banned in Michigan until 1883. Adelphia also once made this cryptic remark in 1889: "I was left with the Indians when I was two weeks old, and did not find out who I was until after I had been married and had two children of my own. I wouldn't tell you who I am as I am related to some of the finest families in America, and they don't want to know where I am or anything about me." When she died in Michigan in 1897, her death certificate listed her "color" as "white."
Only two years before Jesse was born, Detroit had the only major race riot in the Midwest during the Civil War. Thomas Faulkner, a mixed-race saloon owner, was accused of raping a nine-year-old white girl. The accusation inflamed whites and prompted a vicious attack on the city's black population. Two black people were killed, and more than thirty-five black families' homes were leveled. It was later determined that the witnesses against him lied; Faulkner was innocent and eventually pardoned in 1870 after serving seven years in prison.
While Detroit was home to several black abolitionists, it was also a city where many whites looked at blacks as if they were a subspecies. Before the Civil War, stories in the Detroit Free Press often treated the black community in a mocking and dismissive tone. Typical of that sentiment were the words of the white alderman John Bagg, who referred to blacks as "dark bipeds — a species not equal to ourselves."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Binga"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Donald A. Hayner.
Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction Chapter 1:“Do you know who that is?”Chapter 2: Black SedanChapter 3: Painted SignsChapter 4:“In the name of the Bingas”Chapter 5: “Jesse C. Binga”Chapter 6-:… a man of low and vicious habits”Chapter 7:--Vernon AvenueChapter 8: Dream BookChapter 9: -PinkChapter 10: State StreetChapter 11: 5922 South ParkwayChapter 12: “Barefooted and Bareheaded”Chapter 13: Distant ThunderChapter 14: RiotChapter 15: “I will not run”Chapter 16: Stacking CashChapter 17: Trust and DevotionChapter 18: “…they seem like one.”Chapter 19: 1929Chapter 20: 1930Chapter 21: Two White Men in FedorasChapter 22: Blank Pieces of PaperChapter 23: “You killed my wife.”Chapter 24: Waiting and HopingChapter 25: The Giant With A Hundred EyesChapter 26: The Footsteps of GodChapter 27: “old age and sorrow”Afterword Bibliography Index
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