The Blood of Emmett Till(7)

In 1948 the Chicago Urban League reported that 375,000 black residents of the South Side lived in an area that could legally accommodate 110,000. The overpopulation led to abysmal sanitary and health conditions, and many of the buildings were firetraps. Overcrowding pushed hard against the racial boundaries that encircled the African American areas; between 1946 and 1953 six episodes of riots involving between one thousand and ten thousand people followed efforts of black citizens to move into areas such as Cicero, Englewood, and Park Manor.25 In neighborhood after neighborhood a familiar drama played out along the hard lines of Chicago segregation. An aspiring black family seeking to escape the ghetto agreed to pay an inflated price for a home on a previously all-white block. Alarmed white residents would quickly sell their homes, allowing landlords to gobble them up at bargain prices. The landlords would then subdivide the apartments and houses into kitchenettes and rent them to blacks, substantially increasing the combined rental income for the building. Neglecting repairs and maintenance, the landlords—the entire local real estate industry, really—created the same ghetto conditions that the African American pioneers had fled at the start in the first act of this three-act tragedy. “In Chicago’s ‘bungalow belt,’ where a large number of European ethnic working-class families owned their own homes,” observes the historian and cultural critic Craig Werner, “the first signs of the depressing pattern understandably generated fierce resistance. The result was what one historian called ‘chronic urban guerilla warfare.’?”26

The worst and longest-running of the Chicago housing conflicts lasted from August 4, 1953, until well into the fall of 1955.27 It began when Donald and Betty Howard and their two children moved into Trumbull Park Homes, a 462-unit development in South Deering near the steel mills. The project had been kept all-white since opening in 1939; the light-skinned Betty Howard got in because the Chicago Housing Authority misidentified her during the requisite interview. By August 9 a mob of two thousand angry whites was throwing bricks and firebombs and Donald Howard was guarding his family’s apartment with a rifle. The white vigilantes used fireworks to harass and intimidate the Howards at night. Though police cars shuttled the family in and out of Trumbull Park, once the Howards were in their home the officers did little to ensure their safety, simply yielding the streets to the mob. On August 10 the white mob stoned thirty passing black motorists and attacked a city bus carrying African Americans, nearly tipping it over before police intervened. Throughout it all Mayor Martin Kennelly said nothing about the ongoing violence.

As the number of African American families moving into Trumbull Park increased to ten, the so-called South Deering Improvement Association kept the riots rolling and organized economic reprisals against any neighborhood stores that served African American customers. The city parks became particular battlegrounds; when black youths tried to use a baseball diamond in the neighborhood, the Chicago Police Department had to dispatch four hundred officers to protect them. In protest Willoughby Abner, a trade unionist who was president of the Chicago NAACP, organized a baseball “play-in” at South Deering’s main park; the United Packinghouse Workers of America, an interracial but increasingly black union devoted to civil rights, provided support as Abner mobilized the NAACP and sued the city for inaction. Still conditions in South Deering did not change appreciably; in late 1954 Chicago’s Federal Housing Administration director called Trumbull Park “a running sore in our civic life.”28

White residents believed that this black “incursion” was only the opening gambit of a campaign of racial infiltration: soon African Americans would buy private homes, causing property values to plummet, and start taking “white jobs” in the Wisconsin Steel Works nearby. The heart of the violent white response, however, was more visceral: like many whites in the Deep South, South Deering’s white residents had a horror of interracial sex. The South Deering Bulletin declared, “White people built this area [and] we don’t want no part of this race mixing.” A housing inspector sent to South Deering reported that white residents insisted, “It won’t be long now and Negroes and whites intermarrying will be a common thing and the white race will go downhill.” The South Deering Improvement Association openly rallied whites for the ongoing riots at Trumbull Park by promoting “this fight against forced integration and mongrelization.”29 Walter White of the NAACP saw the sad irony: although African Americans fled Mississippi to escape from racial terror, the violence in Chicago revealed that “Mississippi and the South [followed] them here.”30

But if the battle against integration in Chicago took on some of the same themes as the battle in Mississippi, there was one big difference: African Americans in Chicago could vote. So when Mayor Kennelly ignored complaints about mob violence and housing segregation and forgot that African Americans had considerable force in the Democratic Party, it cost him his job. Kennelly ran afoul of U.S. Representative William Dawson, the most powerful black elected official in America, who headed the black political machine that remained a crucial part of the larger Chicago Democratic machine. Dawson supervised scores of African American ward committee members, precinct captains, and election workers. He swapped black ballots for patronage jobs and for protection of the lucrative South Side numbers rackets and jitney cabs, a major source of his political funds. When Kennelly’s police department targeted the numbers games and jitneys, Dawson declared war. His opposition to Kennelly permitted another Irishman, Richard Daley, head of the Democratic machine, to slide into place.31