Crucibles of Black Empowerment: Chicago's Neighborhood Politics from the New Deal to Harold Washington

JEFFREY HELGESON is assistant professor at Texas State University. He is also a director at Labor Trail, a collaborative project of the Chicago Center for Working Class Studies.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2014 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2014.

Printed in the United States of America

23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14       1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-13069-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-13072-9 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226130729.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Helgeson, Jeffrey, author.

Crucibles of black empowerment : Chicago’s neighborhood politics from the New Deal to Harold Washington / Jeffrey Helgeson.

pages cm — (Historical studies of urban America)

ISBN 978-0-226-13069-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-13072-9 (e-book)

1. African Americans—Political activity—Illinois—Chicago. 2. Chicago (Ill.)—Politics and government—20th century. I. Title. II. Series: Historical studies of urban America.

F548.9.N4H45 2014

323.1196'073077311—dc23

2013043971

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Crucibles of Black Empowerment

Chicago’s Neighborhood Politics from the New Deal to Harold Washington

JEFFREY HELGESON

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

HISTORICAL STUDIES OF URBAN AMERICA

Edited by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, James R. Grossman, and Becky M. Nicolaides

Also in the series:

Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York

by Cindy R. Lobel

The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950–1971

by Christopher Lowen Agee

Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto

by Camilo José Vergara

Planning the Home Front: Building Bombers and Communities at Willow Run

by Sarah Jo Peterson

Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities

by Lawrence J. Vale

Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago

by Lilia Fernandez

Building a Market: The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry, 1914–1960

by Richard Harris

Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities

by Carl H. Nightingale

Sundays at Sinai: A Jewish Congregation in Chicago

by Tobias Brinkmann

In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820–1930

by Peter C. Baldwin

Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse: Social Work and the Story of Poverty in America, Australia, and Britain

by Mark Peel

Additional series titles follow index

This book is dedicated to Mary (Keefe) Helgeson, Roger Helgeson, Anne Halsey, Charles Helgeson, Sadie Helgeson, Jesse Helgeson, and all those who are among the proudly restless Americans working to identify the individuals and institutions that maintain inequality and exclusion in a land of plenty, while never giving up on the potential for seemingly small countermeasures to add up to monumental democratic change.

Contents

List of Figures and Maps

Introduction

1. The Politics of Home in Hard Times

2. Community Development in an Age of Protest, 1935–40

3. Will ‘Our People’ Be Any Better Off after This War?

4. A Decent Place to Live: The Postwar Housing Shortage

5. Capitalism without Capital: Postwar Employment Activism

6. Sources of Black Nationalism from the 1950s to the 1970s

7. Harold Washington: Black Power and the Resilience of Liberalism

Postscript: The Obamas and Black Chicago’s Long Liberal Tradition

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Figures and Maps

FIGURES

1. Rev. Addie L. Wyatt, c. 1950s

2. Looking south from 3800 South Calumet Avenue

3. Blighted housing on South Parkway near the border of Douglas and Grand Boulevard

4. Number of black workers employed in major industry groups expressed as a percentage of total employment in Cook and Du Page Counties, March 1940 and January 1945

5. Length of residency in Chicago of people who applied to the Chicago Urban League’s Social Problems Office between 1946 and 1949

6. Typical Site Dwelling, cleared for the Dearborn Homes

7. Squatters lived here. Houses cleared for the Dearborn Homes

8. Home, Sweet Home and Hotel for Men, cleared for the Dearborn Homes

9. Last family moves from Dearborn Homes clearance site

10. Chicago Urban League, Spotlighting Disorganization Here

11. Chicago Urban League Seeding Party, 4700 South Langley Avenue, April 19, 1952. Includes photograph of Mr. Rector on a house canvas to enlist cooperation

12. Goodwin-built houses, looking west on 91st Place

13. Remodeled Lilydale Cottage, 9128 South Lafayette Street

14. Remodeled Lilydale Cottage, 9427 South LaSalle Street

15. Scale of the Chicago Urban League’s job placement programs, 1946–53

16. Timuel Black speaking at a 1969 meeting of the Englewood Community Congress

17. North Kenwood–Oakland residents’ length of residency at current address and in Chicago in 1956

18. Members of ACT! protest against the Chicago Freedom Movement’s leadership at Soldier Field in 1966

19. Martin Luther King Jr. shaking hands on Chicago’s West Side, 1966

20. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking to a crowd on the West Side, 1966

MAPS

1. The South Side Black Metropolis, 1939

2. Race percentages and numbers of housing conversions per block in 1939 in the Douglas neighborhood where Eliza Chilton Johnson, Bertha Neighbors, and Lucille Wright lived

3. Race percentages and housing conditions per block in 1939 in the Douglas neighborhood where Eliza Chilton Johnson, Bertha Neighbors, and Lucille Wright lived

4. Geographic distribution of the Chicago Urban League’s Social Problems clients, 1946–49, northern detail of the Near South Side south to Pershing Road (3900 south)

5. Geographic distribution of the Chicago Urban League’s Social Problems clients, 1946–49, southern detail of Grand Boulevard and Washington Park, from Pershing Road (3900 south) to 60th Street

6. Geographic distribution of the Chicago Urban League’s Social Problems clients, 1946–49, showing patterns of movement of the thirty-four clients who reported previous Chicago addresses

7. Race percentages by block in North Kenwood–Oakland, 1939

8. Chicago Urban League’s February 1957 map of Chicago’s Negro residential areas as related to urban renewal

INTRODUCTION

Chicago: City of Destruction and Crucible of Black Power

Addie Wyatt remembered the move to Chicago as a lesson in disappointment. As a child in Brookhaven, Mississippi, she had watched with pride as her mother taught school, her father worked as a skilled tailor, and her grandmother, a midwife, cared for the families in her community. In 1930, when she was six years old, her family packed up and moved to Chicago to join relatives. Many people in the South, she remembered later, thought that the North, especially Chicago, was the land of promise.¹ Addie did not go so far as to say the move was a mistake, but the North was certainly not all it was said to be. We thought surely that our lives would be much better if we moved north, and God only knows how we suffered. Contrary to their dreams, Chicago brought hardship without even the compensation of being close to nature or the familiarity that the South had offered. There were no gardens, no fields, no chickens, no hogs of your own, no fruit trees. In the South they had had fairly decent homes, but in Chicago, we lived wherever we could.²

In many ways, Chicago was a city of destruction for black families like Wyatt’s.³ To make a life in the city required the ability to improvise and hard-nosed persistence. It required taking advantage of whatever support networks newcomers had at their disposal. Wyatt’s family of eight initially moved in with her aunt and her family of four. Twelve people in a single apartment—this was supposed to be temporary, but my parents couldn’t find work.⁴ Her mother could not teach because she was not certified in Illinois, and she had to take domestic service jobs. Her father generally came home empty-handed from daily job searches, walking up and down the long blocks of South Side black Chicago from 43rd Street to 109th Street. When he could find temporary jobs he worked fifty- or sixty-hour weeks doing a little tailoring, a little pressing, a little work here and there.⁵ Addie, the oldest daughter, had to supplement the family income and began to teach music lessons after school at the age of twelve. Without a steady income, they didn’t qualify for a decent place to live, so we had to take places wherever we could and moved from one place to another.⁶ Uprooted, displaced, and surrounded by neighbors going through similar struggles to find jobs and housing, Wyatt’s father, in particular, struggled to keep hope. The trials of life in Depression-era black Chicago could destroy people and Addie watched it happen to her father, whose disappointment pushed him to distance himself from his family and to turn to alcohol as a means of escape.⁷

In retrospect, however, Addie Wyatt’s life history is not, ultimately, a story about despair or escape. It is a story that epitomizes the combination of frustration and hope that defined black Chicago’s long history of community-based activism. During and after the Great Depression, Wyatt and thousands of black Chicagoans in similar circumstances sustained efforts to improve the quality of life in local communities. They worked to improve neighborhoods, secure decent housing, win good jobs, and build the political power to increase individual access to all these measures of the good life in the city. After the World War II economic boom ended the Depression, Chicago turned out to be a place where great suffering mixed with increasing access to economic and political opportunities—at least for some of the city’s black residents. Consequently, thousands of ordinary people like Wyatt found inspiration both to fight against oppression and to foster locally based initiatives for self-help and community development. In the process, black Chicagoans created resilient local bases of power and a long and rich tradition of black liberal politics. Out of struggles to counter racism and economic exclusion day after day, they constructed a political culture in which pragmatic nationalism and a commitment to opening the city for individual opportunity overlapped with the long history of more radical labor and civil rights activism.

How did Addie Wyatt turn this city of destruction into a crucible of black power?⁸ Part of her story can be explained by her personal toughness and perseverance. Even in the worst of experiences, she found inspiration to fight for a better life for herself and the people around her. In her father’s struggles, she saw more than anything a reason to act on behalf of others, something that made me very, very determined to do what I could to help poverty stricken people and to help wage earners to earn a decent and livable wage.⁹ And in her work to establish her own family while also giving back to her community, Wyatt ultimately developed a distinguished career as an activist with deep foundations in her neighborhood, her church, and her labor union.

Addie Wyatt met and fell in love with her husband, Claude, when she was just fourteen years old. By the end of her sixteenth year they were married. We thought we could better our own lives, Wyatt explained, by getting married and going on our own.¹⁰ So she dropped out of school while her husband found work at a dry cleaner for eight dollars a week, and then a job at the Armour packing plant for twenty-six dollars a week. Claude and Addie dreamed of going to college and creating the life of a black professional couple. Claude would work, and she saw herself staying home to be a full time housewife . . . to rear children and be a youth leader. They never quite found the way. After she had her first child at age sixteen, she gave birth again eighteen months later. I thought I’d be pregnant the rest of my life, she remembered.¹¹ In the meantime, she applied for a job as a typist at Armour & Company. She got the job, but when she showed up for work they sent me straight to the canning department.¹² A teenage mother who had to work, but who also found that the employment options were limited for black women in Chicago, Wyatt grew up quickly.

To make ends meet, they turned to their family networks and lived with their parents. Soon, though, tragedy struck, disrupting plans again. In 1944, Addie’s mother died at the age of thirty-nine. With her father sick and incapable of caring for children, Addie and Claude took in her five littlest brothers and sisters. Every morning was a child care crisis, Addie remembered, and every day another trial in trying to hold my job. The troubles piled up. We didn’t have a decent place to live. . . . We lived in a terrible rat infested apartment, rats as big as cats. Sometimes we’d have to fight them off the children. But no one would rent to her and Claude, such a young couple with so many children to care for. Then Claude was drafted into the Navy. I had just lost my mother. My husband and I had never been in a war before. . . . It seemed as if our world had come to an end.¹³

But she saw a ray of hope. I applied for an apartment in a housing project, the Altgeld Gardens Project on the far South Side built for defense workers, because I felt that this would be a means of getting some place decent to live. She got a break when she and Claude finally secured a placement interview with the Chicago Housing Authority. To qualify for the apartment, she had to quit her meatpacking job and find a position in a defense plant. She ended up cutting shells for the Army at the Ammunition Container Company in the suburb of Harvey, Illinois. As she worked and hoped for another interview for the public housing apartment, Wyatt kept up an extraordinarily hectic schedule. She was living with her mother-in-law in Robbins, five miles from the plant in Harvey, traveling ten miles north to her father’s apartment in the city to help take care of her brothers and sisters, and visiting Claude as often as possible at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center sixty miles north of Robbins. When she did get another meeting with the CHA, she told the interviewer of her plight and had an apartment the next week. It was a huge relief. I’ve owned two homes since then, she recalled, but I’ve never experienced the pride and excitement I felt when I walked into my Altgeld Gardens apartment consisting of a living room, kitchen, utility room, three bedrooms, and a bath.¹⁴

The kinds of struggles Wyatt lived through in her personal life were commonplace in black Chicago. Struggles to meet the day-to-day needs of work and home life became, for so many people, wrapped up in broader efforts to open the city. Addie’s life story, however, points to something much more than just an extraordinary person rising above the suffering of her neighbors. As a working mother, a union leader, a minister, a civil rights activist, and a powerful political figure, Wyatt tapped into the central institutions of the city that allowed black Chicagoans to continually remake their lives and communities. She may have been extraordinary for her accomplishments, but her commitment to community-based efforts to address the immediate challenges of overlapping systems of race, class, and gender inequality was characteristic of black Chicago’s political culture.

The institutions black Chicagoans used to improve the quality of life in their local communities varied widely. Wyatt, first and foremost, built her efforts on a foundation constructed by women in her family, her schools, and her church. Wyatt’s mother and grandmothers were models of how to simultaneously support the family and the community with their work. She followed the example of black female teachers who were authoritative. And in the Church of God, Wyatt remembered that women and young girls were always encouraged to accept leadership. Women were ministers, choir leaders, ushers, secretaries, and trustees. We were trained to take leadership roles.¹⁵ The leadership skills and capacity for struggle that she took away from the women in her family and church prepared Wyatt to be one of the most effective community builders in Chicago’s history. Wyatt did what thousands of women and men like her have done for generations, she built independent, parallel black institutions that sought to improve the quality of life in their communities and to construct a base for greater economic and political power.

Wyatt followed in the footsteps of the women around her as a church and neighborhood leader. In the decade after World War II, Wyatt and her husband directed a community choir and Bible study group out of Altgeld Gardens, a group that many former members credit with saving their lives and giving them direction.¹⁶ The Wyatts remembered, for example, taking in a young homeless kid who turned his life around and became a seminary professor at North Park College. They also remembered finding a young man asleep on the street, drunk, and taking him into the chorus. With their help, he went back to school, eventually earning a PhD and becoming executive director of the Wyatts’ Vernon Park Church of God.¹⁷ For years, the Wyatts stayed in touch with former choir members, who would write letters thanking them for their help. Had it not been for this channel, this citadel, one former member wrote, we don’t know what would have happened to many of our young people.¹⁸

When they moved out of Altgeld Gardens in 1955, the Wyatts built a new home for their community work, founding the Vernon Park Church of God. By the 1970s, their church had over one thousand members and it had become a significant site in the city’s community organizing efforts, civil rights movement, and black independent political movement.¹⁹ Like many other community-minded church leaders in the city, the Wyatts routinely worked across denominational boundaries, with Baptist churches and even the Nation of Islam, to fight crime and bring resources into their community. The Wyatts also played a key role in organizing support for Harold Washington’s run to become the first black mayor of Chicago, with Addie Wyatt, in particular, reaching out to the neighborhood, labor, and church networks she had built among women in the city.²⁰

As she established herself in the communities where she would become a leader in local organizing and, eventually, city politics, Wyatt found another institution that would complement her efforts to improve her own career prospects as well as the overall quality of life in black Chicago. Just a few months after starting the defense industry job in Harvey, she was laid off and returned to Armour & Company, where she was able to work while holding onto the defense housing apartment because it was not her choice to leave the munitions plant.²¹ In 1944, she thus settled for good in meatpacking, where she found the benefits of union membership.²² Just before Wyatt began working in meatpacking, the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) had won its first contract.²³ The Great Depression in Chicago, as in other major manufacturing cities, coincided with the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), an interracial industrial union movement that opened doors for working-class people to higher wages, better working conditions, and new outlets to engage in politics.²⁴ For years, Wyatt recounted a story about her first encounter with the union, describing it as an institution that facilitated her work to benefit her immediate family and her larger community.

I wanted to make money, but most importantly I wanted to make life better for myself, and for my family, and for all of the other families. It was in the organized labor movement when I first started that I got the clue that I needed: that life can be better, but you’ll have to make it so. I learned that alone I could not do it. But I learned the great lesson that if I united with other workers who were also trying to make their lives better that together we could do much to make a difference in our lives. And that’s why I joined the union.²⁵

Just a few months after joining the union, she took a leave of absence because she was pregnant. She was worried because she did not believe that she would be able to get her job back after her baby was born. But the union helped her win a grievance and she did, indeed, return to work after a one-year of leave of absence, without losing seniority. I cannot tell you how moving this was to me. . . . That turned my clock on. Because I decided workers needed to have a union if they were going to make life better for themselves and their families.²⁶

Initially, Wyatt was a rank-and-file union worker focusing her activism on the community in Altgeld Gardens. In 1953, things changed dramatically. As part of the UPWA’s push to recruit more female leaders, Wyatt ran for, and won, the vice-presidency of her local union.²⁷ She then jumped headlong into union activism, becoming what historian Dorothy Sue Cobble has referred to as a key twentieth-century labor feminist, helping to build the other women’s movement that provided an alternative to the more individualistic, middle-class second wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1954, she became the first woman to serve as the president of a local union in the UPWA. In 1961, Eleanor Roosevelt appointed Wyatt to serve on the Labor Legislation Committee of President John F. Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women. In the 1970s, she was one of the founders of the Coalition of Labor Union Women and became a nationally recognized figure in the battle for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Time named her as one of the magazine’s Women of the Year in 1975. By the late twentieth century, few women could claim more public renown, more experience in labor organizing, or a more deeply informed perspective on the challenges women faced as workers and family members. Wyatt helped foster a self-consciously working-class feminism that saw labor unions as a primary institutional base for political and economic progress.²⁸ While rising on the national stage, she did as much as anyone to sustain the labor movement as a force in black Chicago’s political culture.

FIG. 1. Rev. Addie L. Wyatt, c. 1950s. CULR-04–189-2136-001, Chicago Urban League Records, Department of Special Collections, Richard J. Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago.

Wyatt always combined labor and community-based activism. Her political career, like the broader narrative of black Chicago’s political history, exemplified the cross-fertilization of radicalism and liberalism, and of labor and community-based politics. Her story shows how an era of protest politics and creativity could provide people with powerful new organizations—like the CIO—to promote their vision of social justice and community welfare. Wyatt’s story shows how community-based institutions, and a politics focused on pragmatic solutions to community problems, always overlapped with workplace and political organizing in black Chicago.

For Wyatt, the struggle at work could never be separated from the struggle in her community. Better pay, seniority rights, a meaningful grievance system, and safe and healthy working conditions were all important in their own rights, but they also helped workers improve the quality of life for their families and their communities. Not coincidentally, as ministers, Addie and Claude Wyatt preached a holistic gospel, calling on followers to develop a faith that was based in a concern for individual, family, and community welfare, and which required involvement in those institutions that can make this a reality, including not just the church but also labor and community-based organizations.²⁹ Wyatt would later insist that her work with her community was the priority. I told my union’s leaders that I would never renege on my responsibility to my union, but I would never give up my church work. My family and my church work . . . are the foundation on which I am able to survive.³⁰

Wyatt and her fellow black Chicagoans developed a broad understanding of community, a vision that connected the home to the people and conditions in the neighborhood and beyond. As activists, they fought for improving access to opportunity and power in what historian Earl Lewis calls the home sphere, where home meant both the household and the community and where the environment affecting the home sphere included the household, the neighborhood, the black community, the city, the state, and beyond. With this vision of the world, black activists saw the connections between work and community, politics and everyday life, and individual opportunity and collective well-being.³¹

The question is not whether community- or workplace-based organizing was more important, but how concerns for the quality of life in one’s community shaped one’s engagement with the broader political battles over race, class, gender, and economic opportunity. People like Addie Wyatt have continually found new outlets for their preexisting political concerns. In the context of persistent unemployment, struggling neighborhoods, and the long-term growth of potential government resources, residents of segregated black communities, suffering disproportionately because of institutional racism and economic inequality, found a wide variety of ways to engage in their local communities. The driving vision was that people could improve their own lives and the prospects of their community by engaging with something bigger than themselves. The continuous struggle to advance the race thus created tensions between individual and collective interests. As St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton noted in Black Metropolis, such tensions could be destructive, as service became a cover for the desire for power and prestige, even for fraud, graft, and chicanery.³² But the tensions between individual striving and racial advancement were also constructive, as in the case of Addie and Claude Wyatt, who turned their desires for a stable life in the city into a lifetime of community, religious, labor, and political activism.

By the 1970s, Reverend Addie Wyatt, Vice President of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, was one of the most powerful women in the American labor and feminist movements, as well as a grassroots community leader in black Chicago. Wyatt resisted with equal passion the racial inequalities inside the labor movement and the attacks upon the nation’s workers mounted by an ascendant New Right conservative movement. She took the CIO to task for failing to place black workers in leadership positions between the 1930s and 1950s. She called attention to the persistence of "a dual labor market and discrimination on the job, despite the ban on such discrimination in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And in 1982, at the National Summit Conference on Black Economic Development and Survival in Gary, Indiana, she spotlighted the race and class consequences of President Ronald Reagan’s policies, which fostered a high-unemployment, low-inflation economy. Reaganomics, she argued, amounted to devices to set one group of workers against another, to the detriment of all workers in an economic depression!"³³ Wyatt was quite capable of incisive commentary on the challenges workers faced as workers.

Yet Wyatt was also deeply influenced by beliefs in the importance of self-help, individual responsibility, and black solidarity. This was an enduring vision, famously rooted in the politics of Booker T. Washington as well as in generations of day-to-day struggles for survival in black America.³⁴ It was also a vision that Wyatt thought could be translated meaningfully into her career as a labor and community activist. She applied the lessons of self-help to people facing even the most difficult circumstances. As Wyatt said of the women living in Chicago’s Cabrini Green Housing Project—notorious for its crumbling buildings, crime, unemployment, and gangs—they had a choice. They could either succumb to their disheartening conditions. . . . Or they can come to grips with themselves and decide, first, ‘I am somebody and I refuse to be treated like I am nobody.’ Reach out beyond the boundaries of Cabrini Green, as difficult as it might be. Become a part of the church. . . . Become a part of other organizations and movements geared to improve their lives. Be an active participant in the political life of the community and the nation. Never stop reading and learning and struggling. Let this be an example to be to our young.³⁵ Wyatt’s vision was based on the idea that there were significant resources for people in difficult straits, resources that could be accessed both within black Chicago and across racial lines. In such a context, individual resilience could be a crucial part of building stronger communities.

Wyatt, indeed, saw personal responsibility as part of a larger vision of community solidarity. When she stepped to the pulpit on Mother’s Day 1984 to speak on the subject, Black Women Mothers—The Solution to the Crisis, Wyatt called on the black women in her audience to take personal responsibility to improve the quality of life in their communities, and to use their individual action to strengthen the ties binding their communities together. Black folks need to come together and deal with the problems that face us as a community, Wyatt declared. We can no longer afford the luxury of staying apart. The giant redwood trees in California have surprisingly shallow roots, she explained. The secret of the redwoods is that each tree links its roots with its fellow redwoods. Linkage is the key. . . . This is a powerful lesson that we as a black community cannot forget, that to be able to stand tall and proud as individuals we must link ourselves together as a community. Yet she feared her generation was failing to heed the lesson. "For the first time we have bought into the myth that one person alone cannot make a difference. To buy into this myth is to be defeated before we have even started. Each of you here today has a responsibility to try and make a difference, for if you don’t . . . we are all doomed. . . . You can’t give up."³⁶ This was not the hidden conservatism of an otherwise radical labor feminist. Rather, Wyatt’s self-help and community-oriented politics grew out of a pragmatic response to the challenges of life in the city, as well as values deeply opposed to any vision of radical individualism. The key was to balance individual opportunity with collective responsibility, as she had seen the women in her life strive to do in even the most desperate situations.

Wyatt’s story spans the chronology of this book, and she, more than anyone else, connects the long history of black liberalism in Chicago to the city’s episodic narrative of civil rights and black power unionism. There is no stronger or more inspiring exemplar of the potential power of combining a critique of racism, sexism, and class inequality with a persistent struggle to improve the quality of life and increase individual opportunity in the home sphere. Wyatt’s story stands out because her efforts to strive for individual and collective opportunity took on powerful new dimensions through the interracial industrial union movement. But her story is far from unique and points to the evolution of what I call African American women’s politics of home—the diverse efforts of black women to engage with the institutions of the city in order to improve the quality of life in their local communities.

Wyatt’s life story provides a fitting entry into the distinct but intertwined histories of the radical and liberal strains of the broad black freedom struggle. The two strains were both internally complex, and their proponents often conflicted with each other, yet their efforts always connected in the pragmatic concern with ordinary people’s everyday lives, and over the long run they deeply influenced each other. Wyatt brought a vibrant neighborhood network and a prophetic religious voice of support to Harold Washington’s mayoral campaign, and an uncompromising critique of gender inequality and what we might call today the politics of austerity to the planning of his administration’s programs. Her career indicates the long arc and deep significance of the interplay between community development and electoral political organizing, as well as between liberal individualist notions of fair play and more radical critiques of racial and economic inequality.

Finally, as a migrant who made it in Chicago, Wyatt highlights why it is particularly important to tell a Chicago story. By paying close attention to Wyatt’s life, and the lives of many others like hers, we can see that Chicago was indeed both a city of destruction and a crucible of black power. Together, those stories confound decades of scholarly and popular arguments regarding black Chicagoans, especially black migrants, as the sources of social problems rather than the agents for their solution.³⁷ And they force us to recognize that black urban political culture has been fundamental to the development of American liberalism.

The Structure of the Book

To the existing narratives of black migration and urban history—the making of American Apartheid on the one hand and the northern freedom struggle on the other—I seek to add the narrative of black Chicagoans whose everyday struggles for individual opportunity and radical advancement shaped a broader political culture.³⁸ In theoretical terms, a historical reconstruction of black Chicago’s political culture at the ground level sheds light on the construction of black Chicagoans’ race, class, and gender identities, and their changing relationships to their local communities and the state as institutions, with at least the potential to improve their individual lives and contribute to the welfare of black Chicago as a whole. As political scientist Michael Hanchard has recently suggested, students of the black diaspora must describe the relationships between the individual and the state, between collective and individual modes of political identification, and between material conditions and political agency (the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’).³⁹ In concrete terms, this history of black Chicago uncovers how a diverse black population accommodated to the city—how they found housing; how they related to their neighbors; what kinds of values about work, family, and religion they developed; and what kinds of formal politics they pursued or avoided. Through the sometimes prosaic work of everyday life, black Chicagoans struggled to better their condition and to make their lives more closely match the dreams they had brought with them to the city.

There are two parallel narratives playing out here. The first is about the tensions between individual and collective interests that shaped everyday life, as people struggled with the balance between their individual success and their commitment to a broader community. The second is about tensions between the fundamentally radical desire to overthrow the structures of racial and economic exclusion black Chicagoans faced and the essentially liberal struggle to use the institutions of the city to reform the quality of life in local communities and open those institutions to broader democratic participation. With few exceptions, most histories of black activism tend to focus on a relatively narrow range of radical labor and civil rights struggles and protest politics. What has been left out, and what I hope to recover, is a complementary history of community building and largely neighborhood-based politics that reinforced longstanding traditions of self-help, racial uplift, and race-conscious liberal pragmatism that, together, represent perhaps the most durable political tradition in African American history.

To tell this history of black political culture, I examine how African Americans from a wide variety of backgrounds used civil rights organizations, social work centers, social and block clubs, churches, trade unions, and political parties to strive for individual success and, at the same time, to promote the cause of racial progress. I draw upon a wide range of sources, including interviews completed with black Chicagoans in the 1930s, a block-by-block land-use survey of Chicago, newspapers, photographs, and archival records of reform organizations. Unlike many other historians of black urban politics, my goal is not to recover models for radical democratic struggles against racism. Nor is this primarily a history of racial oppression (although systems of exclusion based on race, class, and gender form the necessary and always present context for this history). Instead, I mine the historical record for evidence of how the residents of black Chicago creatively adapted their community-building efforts in the face of constant challenges, from the Great Depression and World War II to the postwar housing shortage, slum clearance and urban renewal, ongoing employment discrimination exacerbated by the disappearance of jobs, the rise of civil rights and Black Power politics in the 1960s and 1970s, and the making of an independent black electoral politics that triumphed in the election of Mayor Harold Washington.

In the first chapter, I examine community-based politics in Depression-era black Chicago, showing how African American women acted through churches, social clubs, and New Deal agencies to improve the quality of life in their local communities during the late 1930s. Black women’s politics of home in the 1930s took the forms of individual and collective responses to the impulse to work to find opportunity for local neighborhoods in the midst of crisis that extended into the formal political sphere as well, taking advantage of the more self-consciously radical and militant organizing of the time.

As the second chapter shows, black Chicagoans in a variety of political, labor, and social organizations rallied around an effort to ensure the construction of the first public housing project for African Americans in the city, which culminated in the opening of the Ida B. Wells Homes in 1941. I argue that the efforts to bring the benefits of the New Deal to black Chicagoans and the battle for the Wells Homes not only energized the new protest politics of the 1930s but also helped create a foundation for a heterogeneous new generation of black Chicagoans primarily interested in community-based politics.

The narrative then turns to community-building efforts during and after World War II. In Chicago, wartime jobs and the development of a federal employment bureaucracy reinforced the influence and status of the very groups that had benefited from the struggle for the Ida B. Wells Homes, including skilled black construction trades workers, white-collar workers, and the members of race-conscious economic boycott organizations with deep ties to black politicians. In chapter 3, I examine the array of wartime relationships individual black Chicagoans forged with employers and the growing federal employment bureaucracy. The local office of the United States Employment Service (USES), located in the heart of black Chicago and run by local black residents, provided white-collar job openings to a select few African Americans, served as the conduit for black workers into defense industry jobs, and even helped local employment activists to fight discrimination in wartime industry. By following the Local USES Office #8 through the war and into the reconversion to a peacetime economy, I demonstrate how local residents differed in their ability to grab a piece of the wartime boom.⁴⁰

Chapters 4 and 5 reveal that the uneven benefits of economic growth became all too apparent during the postwar era. It became clear not only that many black Chicagoans would not get access to better jobs, but also that a severe housing shortage and persistent employment discrimination affected African Americans differently depending upon their social status and physical location in the city. Black Chicagoans pursued a range of community and employment activism not accounted for in standard treatments dominated by either machine politics or the rise and fall of civil rights liberalism. Broad alliances working together for the shared goal of greater individual access to economic opportunity remained a critical part of black activists’ arsenal throughout the postwar period. Such alliances would be most effective between the late 1930s and the late 1940s and again from the mid-1960s to early 1970s. During the 1930s and 1940s, activists used mass protest tactics to pressure policymakers relatively effectively. In the postwar period, policymakers who thought of themselves as racial liberals worked to defuse political tensions and to prevent the recurrence of racial violence that had rocked American cities during World War II by rhetorically calling for racial understanding and, in some cases, moving in limited ways toward greater opportunities for black residents in housing, employment, education, and access to established political networks. By the end of the 1940s and especially in 1950s, however, the political calculus changed. The threat of racial violence provided less leverage as the concrete possibility of violence seemed to have receded. And American cities saw a drop in the use of protest politics in the late 1940s and 1950s. The reasons for the decline of militant protest are complex, and, in part, are the subject of the second half of this book. It is clear that a combination of factors were involved, including the feeling among many black Chicagoans that things were actually getting better, the consolidation of a powerful Democratic political machine that sought to destroy black militancy, the influence of liberal foundations on black-led civil rights organizations, the broader context of McCarthyism and antiradicalism, and the need of the masses of black Chicagoans to concentrate on their immediate problems during a housing crisis of unprecedented proportions. Nonetheless, even in a period historians have described in terms of the repression of the long radical black tradition, everyday struggles to improve the quality of life in black communities created new arenas of friction that would give rise to renewed political activism in succeeding years.

Chapter 4 examines the central challenge black Chicagoans faced in the years immediately after World War II, namely, the crisis of housing. The chapter tells stories of black Chicagoans who turned their energy and attention to the struggle to improve the quality of life within black communities. These are stories of self-help and community building in the second ghetto.⁴¹ Those efforts reflected a dynamic mix of desperation and individual ambition. They grew out of a defensive response to the violence and political repression that dominated housing politics in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as a positive commitment to building a strong self-consciously black community. And they illustrate the limits of liberal institutions such as the Chicago Urban League and the Chicago Housing Authority as allies for black Chicagoans, as well as how and why black residents, even in the most difficult of situations, maintained their commitment to local communities and sustained the networks that made those communities viable.

Between the 1950s and the 1970s, a shift in employment opportunities for black workers exacerbated the growing physical and social distances between classes in northern urban African American communities like Chicago’s. As automation spread and industries moved away from the central city or closed down altogether, jobs for unskilled or semiskilled workers became increasingly rare. At the same time, new opportunities for black workers—especially black women—in the clerical and retail sectors began to emerge. Most black reformers in Chicago, however, continued to focus on trying to train and place black men in the remaining industries, the building trades, and in wholesale and retail service work. Chapter 5 reveals the persistence of these efforts, and their limits, even as new activists began challenging the traditional modes of polite negotiations with a revived focus on protest politics. Without allies in the city government committed to industrial development that would create or save jobs for black workers, the employment activists detailed here managed to help secure steady work for thousands of individuals, but they could not reverse a process by which black workers already suffering from individual and structural discrimination in the labor market saw the disappearance of jobs that had provided at least a toehold in the city for previous generations of black workers. The resulting frustration spurred two often conflicting responses: a new and more radical black power unionism, as well as a redoubled effort to work with the federal government to train and place black (male) workers on an ever increasing scale.

The final two chapters reveal the growing tensions between liberalism and nationalism in black Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s. Although chapter 5 deals with the history of the Nation of Islam (NOI), I generally do not use the term black nationalism in the way that the NOI did. I mean not an ideological commitment to black separatism per se but what Wahneema Lubiano describes as a common sense ideology that emerges from African Americans’ daily experience with white racial privilege.⁴² Chapter 6 seeks to explain why a popular, pragmatic black nationalism became increasingly influential between the late 1950s and the early 1980s. Of course, part of the answer is that a Black Power movement arose with a new generation of activists arguing that liberalism had failed and that what was required was a total reconstruction of economic and political structures. But the Black Power era in Chicago was the product of a diverse set of individuals and institutions not necessarily sharing Black Power activists’ commitment to forging an alternative to capitalism or the vision of the development of a separate black political community. Chapter 6 argues that three institutions—Roosevelt University, the Nation of Islam, and the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO)—exemplified the varied institutions that gave rise to and popularized diverse forms of black nationalist politics while sustaining the older vision of black Chicagoans’ political goals between the late 1940s and early 1970s. In particular, and in different ways, they all fostered the desire to create a truly open city in which local residents would have real power