Like many of his contemporaries, Emmett loved baseball. “He was a nice guy,” said thirteen-year-old Leroy Abbott, a teammate on the Junior Rockets, their neighborhood baseball team. “And a good pitcher—a lot of stuff on the ball.”7 With the White Sox and the Cubs both in Chicago, it may seem odd that Emmett rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers, but for a young black baseball enthusiast they were hard to resist. Brooklyn had not only broken the color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson in 1947 but had also signed the catcher Roy Campanella the next year and in 1949 acquired Don Newcombe, Emmett’s hero. Newcombe soon became the first black pitcher to start a World Series game and the first to win twenty games in a season.8
One night when Emmett was about twelve, Mamie sent him to the store to buy a loaf of bread. He was ordinarily reliable about such things, but on the way home he saw some boys playing baseball in the park. He walked over to the backstop and talked his way into the game. He planned to stay for a short time and then go home with the bread; his mother might not even notice, he told himself. But his passion for the game overcame him; he must have become absorbed in the smell of the grass and the crack of the bat, the solid slap of the ball into leather and the powdery dust of the base paths. “So, I guess he just put down the bread and got in that game,” his mother recalled. “And that’s exactly where I found Bo—Bo and that loaf of bread. Of course, by that time, the bread kind of looked like the kids had been using it for second base.”9
Emmett was a lovable, playful, and somewhat mischievous child but essentially well-behaved. He spent his early years in Argo, less than an hour’s train ride from his eventual home in Chicago, and was unusually close to his mother and other family members. But he grew up in one of the toughest and most segregated cities in America, knowing as virtually every African American in Chicago knew that in Trumbull Park black fathers kept loaded firearms in their home for good reason. Emmett did not have to go to Mississippi to learn that white folks could take offense even at the presence of a black child, let alone one who violated local customs.
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The City of New Orleans was the southbound train of the Illinois Central Railway that would carry Emmett to Mississippi in August 1955. The Illinois Central connected Chicago to Mississippi not merely by its daily arrivals and departures but also by tragedy, hope, and the steel rails of history. Over the six decades from 1910 to 1970 some six million black Southerners departed Dixie for promised lands all over America. Chicago, the poet Carl Sandburg wrote, became a “receiving station and port of refuge” for more than half a million of them, vast numbers of whom hailed from Mississippi. “The world of Mississippi and the world of Chicago were intertwined and interdependent,” writes the historian Isabel Wilkerson, “and what happened in one did not easily escape notice of the other from afar.” Straight up the line of the northbound Illinois Central the carloads of pilgrims from the Delta would rumble, the floors littered with so many empty pasteboard boxes that had been lovingly packed with food from back home that people called it “the chicken bone express.” These migrants brought with them musical, culinary, religious, and community traditions that became a part of Chicago; in fact, the narrow isthmus on the South Side where African Americans were confined was often referred to as “North Mississippi.”10 What they found there, however, was not the Promised Land. Though Chicago offered a welcome breath of free air, the newcomers also faced a relentless battle with the white working class over neighborhood borders and public space.
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.