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The Pekin
The Rise and Fall of Chicago's First Black-Owned Theater
By THOMAS BAUMAN UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09624-2
CHAPTER 1
The Temple of Music
Here on three streets and within the space of twenty-one blocks, is gathered the whole racial life of one people. Here are their homes and their churches, their hovels and their hospitals, their dives and their clubs. Here their virtues walk the day and their vices crouch in the night. —Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Pilgrim, July 1903
Paul Laurence Dunbar, like many other Americans, had gotten his first glimpse of Chicago in 1893 when he attended the World Columbian Exposition. An obscure young poet fresh out of high school, Dunbar brought with him from Dayton, Ohio, copies of his first book of poems, Oak and Ivy. He was befriended by Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells, and read some of his works on August 25, reluctantly set aside by organizers as Colored American Day at the fair. But even the support of the most respected and distinguished black man and woman in the nation availed his prospects little. At the end of the fair he confessed to Ida Wells: "I guess there is nothing for me to do, Miss Wells, but to go back to Dayton and be an elevator boy again." It was only because a copy of Oak and Ivy fell into the hands of the influential literary critic William Dean Howells that Dunbar soon found himself the subject of a flattering review in the Atlantic Monthly anointing him the poet laureate of his race.
The Black Belt: Class, Status, Respectability
A decade later, Dunbar returned to Chicago on a brief visit. In the interim the city's black population had more than doubled from the 14,000 reported in the 1890 census to more than 35,000. The racial problems created by this influx moved Dunbar to compose an essay for a minor journal called The Pilgrim. His essay was promptly reprinted by the Inter Ocean, one of the city's daily papers most sympathetic to Chicago's small black population. Dunbar set his main points in firm and unaccommodating language. Like other newly arriving ethnic groups, blacks tended to cluster together in certain neighborhoods. The most important was the Black Belt. It stretched along Wentworth, State, and Wabash between Eighteenth and Thirty-ninth Streets (Figure 1). Unlike other ethnic neighborhoods, however, there was no way out of the Black Belt. For the African American, wrote Dunbar,
his lodges, his clubs, his churches, his saloons—whatever he is, whatever he has, whatever he does, is invariably stamped "colored." If he rise to any prominent position, it makes little or no difference, he is "colored." The Swede, the German, the French, the Italian have equal chances for advancement, for they are all white. When they have passed a certain point in the industrial economy, when they have reached a certain state of intellectual development, nobody cares from what nationality they sprang. They live wherever they please and go about as their will directs.
Two years later a well-to-do black social worker, Fannie Barrier Williams, echoed Dunbar's description in a special issue of a New York review of philanthropic activity devoted to "The Negro in the Cities of the North":
The real problem of the social life of the colored people in Chicago, as in all northern cities, lies in the fact of their segregation. While they do not occupy all the worst streets and live in all the unsanitary houses in Chicago, what is known as the "Black Belt" is altogether forbidding and demoralizing. The huddling together of the good and the bad, compelling the decent element of the colored people to witness the brazen display of vice of all kinds in front of their homes and in the faces of their children, are trying conditions under which to remain socially clean and respectable.
Chicago's black population around 1900 could not be called segregated in the modern sense of the term. Although about half lived in the city's three South Side wards, blacks were in fact better distributed around the city than some white ethnic minorities. Even in the Black Belt proper, less than a dozen blocks were all-black. Most of these lay along Dearborn Street and its adjacent alleys. Pinched between the west side of State Street and the Illinois Central tracks, this overcrowded strip included some of the worst housing conditions and some of the seediest dives in the entire city. East of State Street, on the other hand, well-to-do black families had begun moving into the neighborhood south of Thirty-fifth Street as members of the city's white elite abandoned their elegant mansions on Prairie, Calumet, and Vernon Avenues. It was here that "Bob" Motts had purchased a home at Forty-first Street and Calumet Avenue in 1901.
At the time Chicago's black populace was as diffracted socially and culturally as it was geographically. These social divisions were to play an important role in the early history of Motts's theatrical venture, so it is worth pausing to consider how writers have tried to understand them. St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton described three social groups around 1870 that might be called, respectively, low church, high church, and no church:
The "respectables"—church-going, poor or moderately prosperous, and often unrestrained in their worship—were looked down upon somewhat by the "refined" people, who, because of their education and breeding, could not sanction the less decorous behavior of their racial brothers. Both of these groups were censorious of the "riffraff," the "sinners"—unchurched and undisciplined.
In a methodological note Drake and Cayton harden this picture into a hierarchic "Negro class order." Yet what they label in retrospect a system of classes was understood at the time as a rather fluid collection of status groups. Willard Gatewood, while clinging to the need to distinguish "the upper, middle, and lower classes" in black communities, nonetheless reports that public discussion after Reconstruction included "few references to factors such as ancestry, education, wealth, or decorous behavior." Yet many writers today persist in using the term "class" as if it were both clear and unproblematic in its application to these communities. Kenneth Kusmer has observed that for African Americans in Cleveland at the time "the terms 'upper class' and 'lower class' do not have the same connotations that they have for whites." Although he admits that "the division of the black community into upper, middle, and lower (or working) classes is somewhat arbitrary," he nevertheless continues to use it "as an analytical convenience." This puts him in good company. As Peter Calvert has pointed out, the confusion between class as a historical descriptor and an analytic tool goes back to Karl Marx, if not farther. The difficulties that the imprecision and misuse of the concept of "class" have engendered led Calvert to the conclusion that we could well do away with the troublesome term altogether and use "status" instead.
"Status" not only sidesteps the connotation that "class" carries of a fixed system of discrete categories, it also harmonizes much better with the notion that black commentators of the day invoked again and again to distinguish gradations of social worth in turn-of-the-century black communities—respectability. Even when not explicitly invoked, it can be read between the lines, for example, in those that Fannie Barrier Williams wrote about Chicago's "aristocrats of color" for readers of the New York Age: "We are trying our best to be the real gentle folks in the highest and best sense of the term."
Respectability figures explicitly as a common denominator in the four social grades that W. E. B. Du Bois identified in Philadelphia's Seventh Ward:
1. "Families of undoubted respectability"—live well, wife doesn't work, children in school, well-kept home.
2. "The respectable working-class"—comfortable, good home, steady work, kids in school.
3. "The poor"—honest, no gross immorality or crime, lack "push." Often "respectable and striving parents weighed down by idle, impudent sons and wayward daughters."
4. The "submerged tenth"—criminals, prostitutes, loafers.
All of these grades were to be found in Chicago, too. The first two were concentrated within an area of the Black Belt known as the Dearborn Street Corridor (Twenty-second to Thirty-ninth Streets, Wentworth to Wabash Avenues). In 1904 this area held about one-fourth of the city's black population. "Life along the Dearborn Street Corridor," writes Christopher Robert Reed, "assumed a unique rhythm for the bulk of the city's respectables as well as for most of the refined elements. The area represented an expanding African American racial enclave that seemed to be in the thick of everything of importance in the city."
State Street was the characteristic thoroughfare of the district and the one Fannie Barrier Williams must have had in mind when she wrote of "the huddling together of the good and the bad" in the Black Belt. By day a busy commercial artery, at night it vibrated with the sounds of social pleasures pursued in countless forms. Motts's saloon stood poised between the good and the bad. To the south lay a stretch soon to become the city's black entertainment district. To its north lay the New Levee, distant enough but slowly oozing its way southward. This northerly stretch was the area of black Chicago most often encountered by whites. In 1905 Will Reed Dunrot, a reporter for the Chicago Chronicle, mingled among the loungers along State Street south of Twelfth. He likened the area to "portions of the Mississippi levee, say, along that stream in St. Louis." It afforded, he thought, "abundant opportunity to study the typical negro as he is in the south":
Some of the negroes who come north are soon imbued with the spirit of the north and become hustlers with the rest of the people, but there are not a few who are too shiftless to do anything but live from hand to mouth, do odd jobs when they must and spend the most of the time loafing, shooting craps or occupying themselves with the arduous task of killing time.
The Little Pekin
"Bob" Motts found himself in 1904 in a strategic position not unlike that of his State Street address, "poised between the good and the bad." He had earned both prestige as a race leader in state and local politics and notoriety as a saloonkeeper involved in gambling operations. By mid-1904, it was clear to him that gambling had become more trouble than it was worth. Rather than decamp with his gains, however, as many before him had done, Motts decided to try something along different lines.
Motts was nothing if not decisive, and once he had determined on his new course of action he embarked on it with astonishing speed. On May 28 the St. Paul Appeal reported that Motts was "erecting on the Twenty-seventh street side of his State street property a modern playhouse." A week later Ross Hendrix gave more details of the project in the Freeman:
Chicago is to have a new vaudeville play house, to be known as, "The Little Pekin," at 27th and State, at a cost of $15,000. From the plans that are drawn, it will be one of the most magnificent play houses in the city. Everything that will be in the interior will be neat and gaudy. The exterior is of press brick. It is opened by first class talent. The owner and proprietor of this beautiful place, is our honorable representative and business man, Robert Motts.
Exactly two weeks later, on June 18, 1904, the "Little Pekin" opened its doors for the first time.
Late in his life, Motts related to a close acquaintance, Lieutenant James E. Hawkins, how the idea of his new enterprise had come to him, and how he had seen the project through:
I made a visit to Europe in 1901 and while visiting the City of Paris I was much impressed with the "Café Chantants" or as they call them in English "Music Halls," and I wondered if one of them would pay in Chicago. I had the property at 2700 State Street on my hands and had been operating it as a saloon—and I must say that I never fancied being in the saloon business and neither did I like the disfavor that went with it. I came out of a good industrious family and had a good Christian training and the only reason that I ever went into the business was because that it was the only thing left for a colored man to make money out of. In operating the saloon I had to cater to the gambling element and eventually I fitted up the second floor for gaming purposes; the 2700 State Street became famous from end to end of America as one of Chicago's big gambling houses. When I returned from Europe I had my mind made up to change the nature of my business and build up something that would be a credit to the race I was a member of as well as myself. I then had the building on the rear lot demolished and erected instead a two story brick [building] built in such a manner that if my idea of a "Café Chantant" did not prove successful I could convert the building into a flat apartment building. This building was connected with the old structure known as 2700 State Street; when finished it was about seventy-five feet long and fifty feet wide, or, one larger square room with a thirty foot ceiling, a rostrum ten by twelve feet, and furnished with seventy-five round tables with four chairs to a table after the custom of the Paris Music Halls. There was no dressing rooms and the orchestra pit was a number of chairs placed surrounding the rostrum. In the rear of the hall, midway between the floor and ceiling, I had a small balcony that ran straight across the hall; this accommodated about twenty-five people.
This place was finished in 1905 and was a success from the minute that the doors were swung open. I charged no admission but made my profits from the drinks that were sold during the play. The acts were of a vaudeville nature and I took especial care in selecting the performers and saw to it that nothing obscene or vulgar was used—either in song or word. The resort proved a success beyond my fondest expectations and eighteen months later I was forced to rebuild the property into a modern theatre.
These words, those of an older Motts now wreathed in respectability, mix recollection and embellishment. Surely the saloon business was not the only avenue to financial success open to an enterprising young black; nor, having chosen that occupation, was it entirely necessary for him to "cater to the gambling element." But cater Motts did, and continued to do so well after his return from Europe, and even beyond the founding of the Pekin in mid-1904. In December of that year he was indicted along with five other men "on charges of spiriting away witnesses against policy operators and otherwise seeking to defeat justice." Although not a "policy operator" himself, Motts had helped the ones in question funnel money to potential witnesses whom they had sequestered in Toronto, Canada. He pleaded guilty in January 1905 and paid a fine of $1,000.
The $15,000 that Motts sank into his new theater was a considerable sum at the time, well beyond the average capital investment of $4,600 for black businesses reported in a survey undertaken by Atlanta University in 1898. Du Bois, who directed this study, spoke presciently in the published proceedings about the possibilities that the theater held for black entrepreneurs:
There is a large field for development here, and for considerable education and social uplifting. Few people, for instance, have stronger dramatic instincts than Negroes, and yet the theatre is almost unknown among them. Much could be done to elevate and enlighten the masses by a judicious catering to their unsatisfied demand for amusement. Here is a chance for philanthropy and five per cent for black and white capitalists.
At the time Du Bois wrote these words there stood three blocks west of Motts's saloon the barber shop of James L. "Daddy" Love. It was not only a tonsorial parlor but also the "theatrical and sporting headquarters" for black entertainers. Here, amid a profusion of "lithos and photos of many of the leading lights of the Negro profession," Love ran a theatrical exchange, supplying black performers to downtown theaters and wherever else they were needed. Six years later, a few months before construction began on the new building at 2700 State Street, Love moved into the shop next door to Motts's saloon. A report in the Freeman described it in the same terms it was soon to be using to extol the decorum at the Pekin:
Daddy has always aspired to have a place of business that now he has. He conducts his business different from the mass of Negro proprietors, for law and order must prevail or you must get out. Your children and wives can go there and be just as safe from being insulted as much so as if they were attending church.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Pekin by THOMAS BAUMAN. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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