The Blood of Emmett Till(8)

Chicago insiders expected that African Americans would see major changes along the color line if Daley were elected mayor. So some black voters must have been taken aback when it became clear that Daley’s vision for Chicago rested on his commitment to racial segregation in schools and housing. Others may have been disappointed to discover that Representative Dawson shared that commitment, though for different reasons.32

For Dawson it was simple enough: he did not want to disperse the black voters whose ballots were the source of his power. Packed into the South Side’s State Street Corridor, black voters were manageable. Likewise these ghettoes were where people played the numbers and where the lack of public transportation made unlicensed jitneys an essential part of life; both of these illicit operations poured money into Dawson’s campaign coffers. In exchange for his ability to deliver black votes, Dawson expected that Daley would keep the police away from the numbers runners and jitney drivers. He also expected Daley to allot him a share of the city’s patronage jobs. Thus, as far as Dawson was concerned, the preservation of the racial status quo was a practical necessity and good business.33

Daley, on the other hand, reflected the stony conservatism that prevailed in most white, ethnic, working-class neighborhoods in the 1950s. He believed in racial separation of the kind that marked his own Irish neighborhood of Bridgeport and the various ethnic neighborhoods that bordered it, especially the South Side’s black ghetto. Black people belonged on the other side of Wentworth Avenue, and that was that. He came to power at a time when the black population hit record highs, when Chicago’s white middle class and a good many downtown businesses had begun to flee to the suburbs, aided by cheap FHA loans, lower taxes, and America’s new highways. “White” neighborhoods became “black” neighborhoods as poor African Americans flooded in from the South. Daley intended to rescue Chicago from this dynamic by building a new city on an unarticulated commitment to segregation.

However, the African American vote marshaled by Dawson’s machine was too rich for a machine Democrat like Daley to ignore, so he carefully appealed to both sides on the dicey issues around race. He was solicitous of Dawson and made it clear that the numbers rackets and the unlicensed jitneys would encounter no legal hassles under a Daley administration. He presented himself as a civil rights supporter in the black community, even giving lip service to the notion that everyone had a right to live wherever their talents would take them.

Through the white grapevine, however, he spread the word that he would preserve the color line in housing. He made quiet racial appeals in the white working-class neighborhoods, circulating letters from the nonexistent “American Negro Civic Association” that praised his opponent for supporting open housing. He spoke in favor of public housing but always added, “Let’s not be arguing about where it’s located.” He appointed a committee to study the racial problems at Trumbull Park Homes but made sure the group did nothing.

Daley rode into office on a heavy majority of black votes on April 20, 1955, four months to the day before Emmett Till climbed onto the City of New Orleans with his great-uncle Moses Wright and his cousin Wheeler Parker and set out for Mississippi. In the fall, well after the election, the NAACP’s Willoughby Abner brought five thousand demonstrators to city hall holding signs that protested the city’s ongoing racial segregation: “Trumbull Park—Chicago’s Little Mississippi.”34





4


EMMETT IN CHICAGO AND “LITTLE MISSISSIPPI”


Mamie Carthan, a bright, plump toddler, was born in Webb, Mississippi, “really not much of a town at all,” she remembered, more like a handful of stores “in search of a town.” The main street divided the black and white sides of the dusty little community. “Just about any place else would have been better than Mississippi in the 1920s,” she mused. In 1924 the Great Migration swept Alma and Wiley Nash Carthan and their two-year-old daughter to Argo, Illinois, a town of fewer than three thousand people some twelve miles from Chicago. Wiley had landed a job at Argo’s central enterprise, the Corn Products Refining Company.

It wasn’t long before the Carthans referred to Argo as their own “Little Mississippi.” Other family members had already established a beachhead for relatives, friends, and even strangers who heard there might be work in Chicago or Argo. Mamie’s grandmother founded a church for the migrants. “As I was growing up,” Mamie wrote later, “it really seemed like almost everybody from Mississippi was coming through our house—the Ellis Island of Chicago.”1

Mississippi in memory remained both the ancestral homeplace and a land of ghosts and terror. “All kinds of stories came out of Mississippi with the black people who were running for their lives,” Mamie wrote. There had been talk of a terrible lynching in Greenwood, another young man strung mutilated from a tree, not far from Money, where her uncle Moses and aunt Elizabeth Wright lived. The Greenwood lynching “was the sort of horrible thing you only heard about in the areas nearby.” In the decades before the civil rights era, racial killings in remote corners of the Deep South frequently went unreported by the national or even the local press.2 What the migrants learned by word of mouth has since been established as fact. Mississippi outstripped the rest of the nation in virtually every measure of lynching: the greatest number of lynchings, the most lynchings per capita, the most lynchings without an arrest or conviction, the most female victims, the most multiple lynchings, and on and on.3 Richard Wright, writing of his boyhood in Mississippi in the 1920s, observed, “The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happen to me directly; I needed but to hear about them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness. Indeed, the white brutality that I had not seen was a more effective control of my behavior than that which I knew.”4