The Blood of Emmett Till(6)

The first wave of the Great Migration, from 1910 to 1930, doubled the number of African Americans in Chicago, placing them in competition for jobs and space with earlier generations of migrants, most of them from central and southern Europe. Herded into the South Side, quickly overwhelming its capacity, the descendants of enslaved Southerners overflowed the ghetto’s narrow confines. Housing shortages pushed them over invisible racial boundaries into formerly all-white neighborhoods, where they confronted threats and violence. One 1919 study of race relations in Chicago called these upheavals “a kind of guerilla warfare.” Between July 1917 and March 1921 authorities recorded fifty-eight bombings of buildings bought or rented by African Americans in formerly all-white sections of the city.11

On Sunday, July 27, 1919, a black seventeen-year-old named Eugene Williams drifted across one of those invisible boundaries and set off a small race war. As he and his friends swam at a segregated beach on Lake Michigan, their wooden raft floated into “white” water. A white man threw rocks at them, hitting Williams in the head, causing him to sink and drown. Rather than arrest the assailant, white police officers hauled off a black bystander who objected to their inaction. Soon carloads of white gunmen raced through the African American neighborhoods, spraying bullets. Black snipers returned fire. Mobs of both races roamed the streets, stoning, beating, and stabbing their victims. The riot raged for five days in that notorious Red Summer of 1919; police shot down seven African Americans, white mobs killed sixteen more, and black mobs killed fifteen whites. Thousands became homeless as a result of arson, and more than five hundred citizens, two-thirds of them black, were seriously injured.12

The politics of “the New Negro” were in evidence even before the upheavals but were far more prominent in Chicago afterward, in a direct response to the race riots.13 Though mourning the deaths, African Americans in Chicago were proud that they had risen up to defend their lives and communities. Added to that, pride in the patriotic sacrifices and military achievements of black soldiers in World War I met a new determination to make America itself safe for democracy.14 W. E. B. Du Bois, who had urged African Americans at the outset of the war to lay aside their special grievances and support the war effort wholeheartedly, wrote:

We return.

We return from fighting.

We return fighting.

Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.15

Du Bois’s Crisis magazine, which had a circulation of 385,000 in 1915, sold 560,000 copies in the first six months of 1917.16 Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association had awakened the spirit of black pride and self-assertion on a scale unprecedented, and the charismatic Jamaican black nationalist’s movement swelled across the country, including a flourishing UNIA chapter in Chicago.17 African American parents began to buy dark-skinned dolls for their children and to sing what in 1919 became known as the “Negro National Anthem,” penned years earlier by the NAACP’s James Weldon Johnson:

Lift every voice and sing

Till earth and heaven ring

Ring with the harmonies of liberty. . . .

Facing the rising sun of our new day begun

Let us march on until victory is won.

The circulation of “race” publications skyrocketed.18 The Chicago Defender’s rose from 10,000 to 93,000 in the war years alone, making it the largest-circulation black newspaper in America. The Defender shipped two-thirds of its issues outside Chicago, most of them to Mississippi.19 “On our porches we read the Chicago Defender,” recalled Mississippian Helen O’Neal-McCrary, “the only news that black people in Clarksdale could read and believe.”20

“I did not understand the restrictive soreness imposed by segregation,” wrote a summertime visitor from Mississippi, “until I got off that train and breathed the freer air of Chicago.”21 If he had stayed longer, however, this temporary migrant might have grown disillusioned. In the decades after the bloody conflict of 1919, the color line in Chicago was even more sharply drawn. The South Side became almost totally black and the North Side almost entirely white. The Chicago where Emmett Till grew up became one of the most racially divided of all American cities and would remain so into the twenty-first century.22

By the 1940s Chicago led the nation in the use of racial covenants on real estate; these restrictions on who could buy property and where they could buy it covered roughly half of the city’s neighborhoods. Realtors generally refused to show homes to buyers except in neighborhoods occupied by people of their own race. Many African Americans, regardless of their means, could not get a mortgage and became ensnared in a vicious contract-based buying system that routinely ended up bankrupting them. Federal Housing Authority mortgage insurance policies strengthened Chicago’s racial boundaries by denying mortgage insurance and home improvement loans to any home on a “white” street after even one black family moved in. Later the Chicago activist Saul Alinsky sardonically defined integration as “the period of time between the arrival of the first black and the departure of the last white.”23

Various “neighborhood improvement associations” and street gangs fought to keep their neighborhoods all-white; racially motivated residential bombings were one preferred method in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In 1949 a mob of two thousand whites attacked a small apartment building in Park Manor, a white neighborhood on the South Side, after a black couple had purchased the building. Violence flared again in 1951, when five thousand whites spent several days firebombing and looting a building in suburban Cicero after the owners rented a single unit to a black family. The governor of Illinois dispatched the Illinois National Guard to quell the riot, which injured nineteen people. In 1954 the Chicago Housing Authority acknowledged that “bombings are a nightly occurrence” where African American families had moved into neighborhoods that white people regarded as their own.24