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
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.