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
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.