A Few Red Drops Read online

  The first city census in 1837 put the number of blacks at 77 out of 4,066 residents, though the number of blacks fluctuated from time to time—increasing some when a few new slaves arrived safe from the South, decreasing again when Canada beckoned and Chicago didn’t seem quite far enough north to guarantee safety, or when slave catchers proved those fears right on target, waving the Fugitive Slave Act as legal authority to nab blacks off the streets and drag them back into bondage.

  Those who stayed in Chicago, setting up house and looking for work, found that only the lowest jobs were open to blacks. Most labored as maids and waiters in homes and hotels, making just enough to get by. A few, the most successful, worked for themselves, running a grocery or a barbershop. John Jones joined them, opening a tailor shop to clean and repair elegant suits and dresses for the wealthy whites in town.

  Straight-backed, prim Mary set up a modest but respectable home near the city center, a part of town where blacks and whites lived peaceably together.

  Despite the limits on their freedom, blacks took pleasure in this place where they had some measure of control: they could choose a home, earn wages, decide whom to marry, sign up their children for a public education—a mighty bit better than life on the plantation. Lewis Isbel, a black barber who claimed to have shaved the city’s first mayor and President Abraham Lincoln, talked about his work with pride. As recalled by one of his contemporaries, Isbel was “content with the reflected greatness which shone on the blade of his razor and now settled on him.”

  Still, Illinois had Black Laws that made sure blacks like the Joneses and Isbel understood the reality: They might be free, but they were not equal. They were not allowed to vote, to sit on a jury, or to testify against a white man in court. It seemed particularly unfair to them that white immigrants new to America, born in foreign lands, could vote and could find higher-paying jobs in manufacturing industries—rights that native-born blacks were denied.

  John Jones’s certificate of freedom.

  In 1850, the lives of blacks got harder. A new law roped every citizen of the United States into conspiracy with the slave catchers, requiring everyone to search out and turn in any slaves they knew to be in hiding.

  The Joneses’ white abolitionist friends were outraged. Chicago’s governing council rebelled, issuing its own public resolution that defied the new law as “revolting to our moral sense” and telling Chicagoans, “We do not therefore consider it a part of our duty . . . to aid or assist in the arrest of fugitives from oppression.”

  John and Mary Jones and their fellow black Chicagoans were beyond angry—they had much more at stake than their principles. Now subject to the new law and alert to potential trouble, they could not help but scan their surroundings as they walked to work or made a quick trip to the grocery store or simply stepped out for a sunny Sunday stroll. At any given moment, their freedom could be challenged.

  Mary Richardson Jones, ca. 1865.

  In October 1850, three hundred scared and angry souls, most of them black but joined by some whites, poured into Quinn Chapel to determine what was to be done. John Jones rose before them, joined by a few other leaders of Chicago’s black community, and laid out a plan of defense. They would form seven patrols of six men each to roam the city on the lookout for slave catchers. These patrols would become part of a network of liberty associations that would protect blacks in cities and towns across the North. The national network proved very effective, providing heavyweight support for the brave but legally powerless.

  One act of resistance made the national news. A year after the Quinn Chapel meeting, a posse of slave catchers came up out of Maryland into Christiana, Pennsylvania, acting on information that four slaves were hiding out at a free black farmer’s home. As the group entered the man’s property, a horn was sounded, signaling neighboring black and white abolitionists to converge on the farm armed with guns, pitchforks, and other weapons. In the scuffle that followed, the slaves scattered and were able to reach safety in Canada, but one of the slave catchers was killed, and members of the patrol were arrested. Blacks across the North organized to cover the cost of legal fees. John Jones stepped up to help, leading fundraising efforts in Chicago for what became a successful defense and acquittal. At the so-called Christiana Resistance of 1851, another small victory was notched in the battle for freedom.

  In preparation for future Christianas they felt were sure to come, Chicago’s black leaders explained the singular importance of this freedom fight to the crowd at Quinn Chapel: “As there are times in the affairs of men when forbearance ceases to be a virtue—and since we must abandon the hope of any protection from government, and cannot rely upon protection from the people, we are, therefore, left no other alternative but a resort to selfprotection.” Recalling the words that inspired the American Revolution, they made it clear that the fight for freedom from slavery was, for their people, at this moment in time, the defining reason to live: “Give us liberty or give us death.”

  The schism over slavery finally cracked the country wide open. When the nation came together again after the bitter and bloody four-year Civil War, slaves had become free. The efforts of the Joneses and their abolitionist friends had borne fruit. Yet even as they celebrated, many moderate whites, so recently in their corner, were cooling to the cause. Some Chicagoans who had found slavery repugnant now shuddered at the prospect of free blacks surging in to take up residence in their city. One of Chicago’s founding fathers, William B. Ogden, argued strenuously for expatriation—sending the freed slaves far, far away to countries in Central and South America.

  The Hudluns, one of Chicago’s early black families, standing outside their home.

  Nonetheless, the streams of fleeing slaves became rivers of newly freed southern blacks entering Chicago each day. In 1870, nearly 3,700 blacks called the city their home.

  The end of slavery broke the dam, and the rights of citizenship began to roll in. In early 1865, Illinois struck down its Black Laws and became the first state to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which enshrined in the Constitution the end of slavery. Three years later, the Fourteenth Amendment granted blacks full citizenship. Another two years on, the Fifteenth Amendment extended to black men the right to vote. Jones organized his people into the Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, which Jones referred to as the “great party of freedom,” to make them a political force. In 1871, John Jones became the first black Chicagoan elected to political office. By the time he died, eight years later, the next generation of black leaders was hard at work, eager to claim for their people the bounty of that freedom John Jones had spent his life fighting for.

  FOUR

  Self-Reliance

  WHEN BLACKS GOT CLOSE UP on it, the gleam of full citizenship failed to shine as brightly as they had hoped. They began the 1870s with optimism, buoyed by their new constitutional rights. But through the end of the nineteenth century and into the beginning of the twentieth, black men and women setting out to work where they wanted, live where they wanted, and play where they wanted found that most white employers, apartment owners, and restaurant hostesses firmly turned them away.

  Whites who had fought so valiantly for the end of slavery now focused on their self-interest, patching things up with white southerners and courting northern businessmen. Blacks would have to do for themselves. Ferdinand Barnett was among those determined to lead his people toward equality. He had been born in the South in 1858 to a slave father and a free mother. During the Civil War, the Barnett family fled to free Canada, then resettled in Chicago when the end of slavery made it safe. Barnett excelled, attending Northwestern University and opening his own law office right there in Chicago when he was just twenty years old. As he walked past the rundown homes in the black neighborhood where many of his people now lived, and heard stories of “No Negroes Need Apply,” it was clear to Barnett that the engine of progress had stalled for most blacks. He felt compelled to take a stand. In 1878, he started Chicago’s first black n
ewspaper, the Conservator, and called blacks to action: “We are no longer slaves. We intend to act the part of free men.”

  Like Barnett, Ida B. Wells started out with optimism for a bright future. Born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Wells was just one year old when she was freed from slavery. She grew up with a fierce will to help her people move successfully into the new day. Her plan was to stay in her native South, teaching school and writing for the local newspaper, because she believed that “the people who had little or no school training should have something coming into their homes weekly which dealt with their problems in a simple, helpful way.”

  Ferdinand Barnett.

  Her articles were a hit, reprinted in other papers, making a name for Ida as “Princess of the Press.” As she later remembered, for a time she was “happy in the thought that our influence was helpful and that I was doing the work I loved and had proved that I could make a living out of it.” But in 1892, when Wells was thirty years old, her world was shattered. One of her closest friends, the father of her godchild, was lynched. Along with two other men, he was seized and brutally murdered by a mob of white men. Ida recalled, “The lynching . . . changed the whole course of my life.”

  Wells’s stories now turned to exposing the gruesome wave of murder rolling across the South—as Ida called it, “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property.” This tide of hate threatened to roll right over Ida. While she was on a trip to New York, a group of leading citizens back home ransacked her print shop and left a note warning that her return to the paper would be “punished with death.” This was enough to keep Wells away, but she was not to be shut down. As one of her admirers observed, “She has plenty of nerve and is as sharp as a steel trap.” She moved her base up north and continued speaking out in cities around the country. “I, too,” she said, “could tell of much segregation that was going on in the North—in school, in church, in hotels, to say nothing of social affairs.”

  On a trip to Chicago in 1893, short, round fireball Ida Wells got to know tall, debonair, easygoing Ferdinand Barnett as they worked together on a pamphlet calling out racial inequities. They became admirers of each other’s passion for justice, and then they found a deeper connection, fell in love, and got married. The whole of Chicago’s black community and a few white friends turned out to celebrate. “The interest of the public in the affair,” Ida recalled, “seemed to be so great that not only the church filled to overflowing, but the streets surrounding the church were so packed with humanity that it was almost impossible for the carriage bearing the bridal party to reach the church door.” The two became joined, as family and as leaders, in what Ferdinand called the “continued warfare for our rights.” They worked with other leaders nationally, but their home was in Chicago’s black community, which, by their fifth wedding anniversary, in 1900, was over 30,000 strong.

  Ida Wells-Barnett.

  The Barnetts belonged to a small elite group referred to by the esteemed black sociologist St. Clair Drake as “the Refined.” These men and women were college educated and had careers as lawyers, doctors, journalists, businesspeople, and politicians. But they amounted to only a tiny fraction of Chicago’s blacks, and their ranks were slow to grow.

  At the other end of the economic scale was a small group of ne’er-do-wells whom Drake called “the Riffraff.” These were the penny-ante gamblers, the prostitutes, the petty criminals, who could be found, day or night, playing the numbers in poolrooms, drinking in bars, or roaming the streets, looking for trouble. They shared their part of town with the group referred to by another black historian as the “Economically Dispossessed”—freed slaves and Civil War veterans who eked out the barest of livings on sporadic day labor or fell back on the charitable donations of the more fortunate in their community.

  By far the largest group of blacks was working class, a layer of society Drake sometimes referred to as “the Respectables.” Though the Respectables had steady work, their wages were consistently low, as they found themselves shut out of higher-paying factory jobs in Chicago’s fast-growing industrial base. Black men worked as butlers in the homes of the rich, shining shoes, polishing silverware, serving guests at parties. Or they took up positions in the glitzy new downtown hotels and restaurants, waiting on tables and cleaning floors. The luckiest ones worked for the post office or as porters on the railroads. Many black women among the Respectables were also up and out of the house early, serving as maids or laundresses all day, then returning home to cook and clean for their husbands and children before dropping into bed.

  Searching for a way to get ahead, some blacks stuck in service jobs thought that joining forces in an organized way, black and white laborers together, might be their ticket to something better. The hundreds of black men working as waiters were tired of putting in long hours for little pay. One on one, the lowly worker was no match for the powerful restaurant owner who could fire and replace him in an instant. Black waiters were cautiously optimistic that by banding together with white waiters, they might bring their employers to the bargaining table.

  In 1890, Chicago’s black waiters joined the German-led Culinary Alliance and walked out on strike. Ferdinand Barnett did what he could to aid the strikers, publishing an open letter in a Chicago newspaper to rouse community support. The waiters stood strong. And it worked. Soon blacks were gathered at Quinn Chapel, celebrating the first-ever wage scale in Chicago that gave equal pay to black and white waiters. Enthusiasm for the union was sky-high.

  A server waits for a man’s teacup.

  A little more than a decade later, the rosy picture was fraying around the edges. On the first Monday in May 1903, black waiters arrived to begin work at a popular lunch counter only to be told to go home, as the manager had abruptly declared them “incompetent.” White waitresses were standing by, ready to take their place. Once again, white and black waiters went out on strike together. But this time, in the settlement that followed, black rights to equal wages were left on the cutting-room floor. It was a stinging slap to all of the black workers who had hitched their fortunes to the white man’s union. White restaurant owners followed up with the knockout punch of firing black men and replacing them with white women. It was a lesson blacks would not forget.

  While the Respectables were putting most of their energies into making ends meet, the Refined were mapping out plans to make the heart of the black residential area a vibrant place to live. Huddling at their exclusive clubs, the patriarchs steered construction of important institutions to serve their black brothers and sisters. The Colored Men’s Library Association was built in 1887, a gathering place for black men to read and listen to lectures. Provident Hospital and nursing school for black women opened in 1891, providing high-quality medical care for the growing black community. The new facility included black doctors and nurses on staff at a time when many white hospitals turned them away. In 1914, the five-story redbrick Young Men’s Christian Association on the south end of Wabash Avenue welcomed blacks who were turned away by whites at the YMCA downtown. Donations from wealthy white businessmen were essential to getting these projects off the ground, but the guiding force was the black elite.

  The ladies of the Refined led their own efforts to fill their community’s needs. In 1893, Ida Wells-Barnett launched the first black women’s club in Chicago, recruiting an aging Mary Richardson Jones to join as honorary chairperson. The Ida B. Wells Club served as a model for the organization of the city’s black women who had time to spare. Some engaged primarily in planning parties and charity balls. Others took up the mantle of “social motherhood,” focused on care of black children and the poor.

  In 1896, Ida Wells-Barnett became a mother herself. Shortly after that, she resigned from her job as a journalist, finding that “the duties of wife and mother were a profession in themselves.” But she remained a force in the community until her death more than three decades later. To jump-start the youngest children into a better life, she sponsored a kindergart
en. Moved, as she recounted, by “the story of numbers of unfortunate young men [she] had visited at the Joliet prison,” she opened the Negro Fellowship League, calling it “an ounce of prevention” to save as many as she could from the tragedy of the streets. She provided the safe space of a reading room on the first floor, low-rent lodging upstairs, and an employment bureau to provide leads on jobs.

  Blacks also exercised their recently gained voting rights to boost their fortunes. In John Jones’s day, before blacks could vote, they had cast their lot with Republicans, their best hope for freedom. But in Ferdinand and Ida’s day, blacks did not feel bound to vote along party lines, and did not hesitate to get behind any candidate—Republican or Democrat—who was most likely to support their people. It was no surprise that, in 1900, the black patriarchs organized their community in support of a Democratic mayor who included them when passing out jobs and a Republican alderman who funded improvements, including the black community’s first neighborhood playground.

  Men were not the only ones to recognize the power of the ballot. In 1913, though women had not yet achieved the right to vote in federal elections, Illinois extended local suffrage to women. Ida Wells-Barnett organized the Alpha Suffrage Club to conduct door-to-door registration and sign up legions of new women voters. This raised some eyebrows among men of the black community, but there was no arguing with success. Adding women voters made the black vote a force to be reckoned with, and important candidates came to call. Like her husband, Ida preached neither Democrat nor Republican but encouraged blacks to “vote for the advantage of ourselves and our race.”