Black Musician and the White City

Front matter

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

Musicians and the Segregated City: Chicago in the Early 19008-19308

From South to South Side: Musicians in 1940s Chicago

Chapter I

Musicians and the Segregated City Chicago in the Early 19008-19308 n 1904, Joe Jordan composed “Pekin Rag,” a work dedicated to the dance hall that would over time become Chicago's Black-owned Pekin Theater. The cover of the sheet music for “Pekin Rag” features a photograph of the crowds inside the theater. Filling the foreground are the musicians, dressed in matching uniforms. The audience stretches out behind the orchestra, filling the floor and the balcony of the theater. All of the men are in dinner jackets and the women are dressed in gowns. Chandeliers hang from the ceiling and mirrors adorn the walls. The sheet-music photo only hints at the early grandeur of the Pekin, which owner Robert Motts remodeled and reopened in 1905 and 1906 as a large-scale theater. Eventually, the Pekin, located on the 2700 block of South State Street, housed a touring company and orchestra capable of supporting operas as well as popular music performances. Its significance as a venue grew as the Black neighborhoods surrounding it grew. It became so important to the community that Black leaders endorsed the Pekin as a shining example of African American art and culture.! Further endorsement of the Pekin, and the music culture that emerged around it, came from Catholic nuns who brought orphaned African American children to the Black theater district to watch the performances so that the children could see their community in the most positive possible light.” A photo of the outside of the Pekin suggests a different perspective on the theater that was a jewel of the Black community. In an era when Chicago was becoming defined by skyscrapers and architectural filigree, externally, the Pekin was a stark brick building with storefront windows. Like nearly every other building on the South Side, the Pekin had only two stories. There were no trees lining the street in front of the theater, nor was there a line of cars. The emptiness of the exterior photo, in contrast to the photo of the interior, reveals that the Pekin’s neighborhood had access to few of the civic services or comforts common on the city’s North Side.

The neighborhoods surrounding the Pekin were home to a growing population of 44,103 African Americans in 1910. By 1920, there were 109,594 African Americans in Chicago. The growth in the Black population represented a significant demographic shift in the city—which had a total of 2,701,705 residents in 1920.° City commissioners concluded in 1922 that the increase in the African American population was staggering, but it was not a citywide phenomenon. Rather, it represented an increase in population density that pushed at the borders of the existing Black neighborhoods south of the downtown business district.*

The two photos of the Pekin captured the dual reality of the South Side. It was an area of the city disregarded by civic leaders in terms of development while simultaneously being a site of civic pride for African Americans. The reason for this contact was that African Americans were slowly building an autonomous cultural sphere on the South Side where they could be the venue owners, the musicians, and the audience—which is the essence of the photo capturing the interior of the Pekin.

The conscious use of self-sufficiency as a way to resist segregation was at the heart of the complex relationship African Americans had with Chicago. The Black cultural sphere ensured the promotion of African American culture, but it ran the risk of legitimizing the city’s racial politics. It also necessitated that the Pekin’s owners, ignored by city leaders and banks, turn to the city’s crime syndicates to underwrite the theater. By the early 1920s, the onetime jewel of the community became infamous as a resister of Prohibition laws and a venue for gang violence. In the minds of many Chicagoans in the 1920s, the Pekin was an example of the connections between crime and African Americans. The Pekin illustrates that it was impossible to resist segregation without being shaped by segregation."

In the forefront of the conflicts and contradictions born of the African American struggle against segregation in Chicago, as the photos of the Pekin demonstrate, were the musicians. African American musicians began to arrive in Chicago in considerable numbers in the early 1910s. They were attracted to Chicago in part because of the Pekin and what it represented. The musician migration collided with a political movement

PEKINR

INTERMEZZO

JOE. JORDAN.

Image 1. “The Pekin Rag,” 1904. Courtesy of the Music Division of the Library of Congress.

Image 2. The Pekin Theater Building. Property of the Chicago History Museum.

in which Chicago leaders were turning more toward using physical segregation as a tool to contain the city’s booming “vice” businesses and the growing African American population within the same area of the city. Rather than ending vice, civic leaders pushed brothels, saloons, dance halls, and gambling establishments into the least politically powerful part of the city: the emerging South Side “black belt.” Because much of Chicago’s popular music was performed in the venues of vice, such as bars and brothels, the majority of the city’s popular music clubs also relocated to the “black belt.” By the end of the 1930s, African American musicians had seen a transformation of Chicago in which the legitimacy of venues, like the Pekin, slowly eroded under the pressure of the vice purge until they, too, were venues of vice.

The history of the growth of segregation in Chicago stands side by side with the history of the growth of African American culture in the city. Black musicians were caught between these two historic forces. To survive, all Black musicians would have to defend their music and their profession from the social stigma resulting from the vice purge that pushed vice into the South Side, which threatened to reduce their music to an element of crime. The Black musicians’ opponents included both white social crusaders, seeking to drive out popular music venues, and African American leaders, striving to build a “respectable” Black cultural sphere on the South Side.

THE PLACE OF VICE AND MUSIC IN CHICAGO

Three forces shaped the musicians’ reality in Chicago in the early twentieth century. The first was the 1912 vice purge. Around the turn of the century, before the creation of the “black belt,” pulp novelists and religious leaders described the places of vice in the city as the Customs House in the Loop, the Chinatown neighborhood south of the Loop, the Levee of the near South Side, and the Little Hell neighborhood north of the Loop. These areas were the “slums of vice,” characterized by dice games, prostitutes, opium, and ragtime that “grated on sensitive ears.” None of the pulp descriptions of these places referred to African Americans. The only descriptions of racial mixing concerned Chinatown and focused on the relationship between opium, Asians, and European Americans. These early descriptions of Chicago suggest that there was a connection between popular music and vice before African Americans started to arrive in Chicago in large numbers.

The process by which African Americans became tied to notions of vice was a historical process rooted in the policing of the Levee. As Chicago’s red-light district, the Levee emerged in the 1870s on Wabash Street close to the downtown business district—the Loop. It was a red-light district notorious for its saloons, dance halls, brothels, and displays of sexuality that were often interracial, cross-class, public, and commercial. It was a place of social experimentation where people from different backgrounds could mix and touch one another without concern for social propriety.

In the early 1900s, the police began to focus on the Levee. The surveillance and prosecution caused the district to begin to creep further and further south, from the downtown commercial area to 18th and 22nd Streets between State and Armour. Though the drift had been underway for awhile, it was not until 1911 that the conscious plan to force vice into the Black neighborhoods began with the Vice Commission’s report.

At the core of its arguments was the Levee. The commission viewed this section of Chicago as a vice bacillus branching out into the city.® In the report, the Vice Commission observed that vice was always “within or near the settlements of colored people. . .. Where ever prostitutes, cadets, and thugs were located among white people and had to be moved for commercial and other reasons, they were driven to undesirable parts of the city, the so-called colored residential sections.” Underlying their words was the growing idea that vice in the Black neighborhoods was natural in an urban space.’

Chicago civic leaders were not alone in the war on vice. In Seattle, the city’s women pushed for the recall of Mayor Hiram Gill, charging him with corruption because he supported a legal vice district in the city.® In the Arizona and the New Mexico territories, the public debate concerned Prohibition, the need to recall corrupt judges, and women’s rights.’ Throughout Ohio, the police and city leaders blamed Black communities for vice and refused to distinguish between criminals and law-abiding African Americans, which resulted in violence and an increase in the incarceration of Blacks.!°

Chicago civic leaders were also not alone in looking to segregation as a way of controlling the ever-increasing African American population in the city. This was the age of Jim Crow. Between 1900 and 1911, there was a marked increase in residential segregation laws throughout the South, and the residents of Atlanta took things a step further by segregating elevators. In Harlem in 1912, white residents were calling for “Jim Crow” cars in the city trains because they disliked the striking growth in the number of Black residents in the neighborhood. Furthermore, large-scale race riots marred each presidential election. The 1912 election reflected the growing tension in the nation when Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party refused to seat duly elected Black delegates, suggesting that the Progressive movement was for whites only.!!

Chicago’s vice crusade and turn toward segregation stands out in this moment of social reform because it was legitimized and endorsed not only by city and civic leaders but also by social scientists at the University of Chicago, which gave the vice purge the auspices of a city-planning measure. Their rationalizations illustrate the divided nature of their plan for the city. On the one hand, they were attempting to apply the progressive ideals for which the city had become famous. On the other, their inconsistencies and the uncertain terms regarding vice and race reveals that in 1912 they were starting down the path of creating two Chicagos dominated by different political and cultural ideas.! In the end, the Chicago commissioners, politicians, and police did not succeed at preventing or eliminating vice. Instead, they pushed vice further into the “black belt.” !3 The physical segregation of vice in the racially segregated “black belt” became the answer only after it was apparent that the reformers could not eradicate vice any more than they could stop the growth of the African American population. Once in the Black neighborhoods, the vice areas would comprise the borderland between the neighborhoods of the Black elites and the areas controlled by poor European American communities.!*

The vice purge resulted in two significant developments. First, the purge designated the South Side as the neighborhood of vice. Following the purge, the majority of the musicians playing jazz and blues in Chicago, and those who would migrate to the city over the next few decades, relocated to the South Side because the music venues were economically tied to the “pleasure palaces,” “resorts,” and “dives” controlled by crime syndicates. Black music—and, by extension, the Black musician—were seen as the accomplice of vice. The purge created a situation in which even the classically trained African American musicians found it difficult to perform beyond the South Side. The type of music the musician played was unimportant. The musician’s physical appearance became the determining factor rather than class, genre, or education. Second, the vice purge was a manifestation of the growing need to control the city through segregation. Civic leaders knew that they could not end vice, and so they turned to segregation as a way of managing the city. !° The choice to physically segregate African Americans and vice from the rest of Chicago, therefore, inextricably linked race and vice in the minds of the majority of Chicagoans.

The vice “crusade” did not so much destroy the Levee as shatter it. Its pieces reassembled in the predominantly African American neighborhood on the South Side, where the vice district gained a new name and a new social significance as the geographic center of African American music and business in Chicago. This area, between 26th and 39th Streets, encompassing South State Street and including the Pekin, came to be known as the Stroll.

Orchestra leader and composer Duke Ellington described the Stroll of the 1920s as a place of racial unity without “hungry negroes” or “uncle Tom negroes.” He described the population by saying:

It was a real us-for-we, we-for-us community. . . . It was a community of men and women who were respected, people of dignity—doctors, lawyers, policy operators, bootleggers, bankers, beauticians, bartenders, saloonkeepers, night clerks, cab owners, cab drivers, stockyard workers, owners of after-hours joints—everything and everybody, but no junkies.'®

While Ellington celebrated the diversity of classes and businesses, the Stroll was a place of concern for the Black business leaders wishing to cultivate a respectable image of the community.!” To the white press of the 1920s “the ghosts of the long gone days of Chicago’s roaring levee” haunted the Stroll, where “the society man, the chorus girl, the gangster, the lawyer, the jazzbo” could all be found.!*

The concepts of community, lawless vice, and respectability were all present on maps of the area. This is because the Stroll was a place where Chicago’s world of vice and crime overlapped with the businesses of the industrious middle class. It was well-known that the city’s crime syndicates, such as that ruled by Al Capone, controlled the nightlife.’ Capone’s neighbors in the Stroll were banks and insurance companies. Further complicating things, the theater and cabaret proprietors of the Stroll, such as the owner of the Pekin, purposefully worked to distinguish themselves from the Levee by attempting to establish a high level of décor and entertainment that rivaled the stylish theaters and halls that served white clientele downtown.”

Despite the furnishings, the area remained a challenge to propriety because owners and visitors to the area mixed vice with amusements by creating a space of racial integration.” Both whites and Blacks took part in the music, dancing, theater, prostitution, and other entertainments available in the area, making the Stroll, just as it had made the Levee, a target of both Black and white reformers. In this way, during the period between World War I (when jazz musicians migrated to the city following the closing of the red-light district in New Orleans) and 1927 (when the Savoy Ballroom, which was the first high-class establishment to not be built on the Stroll, opened), the Stroll quickly became the embodiment of all of the complexities of African American life in Chicago.

There were also music venues in Chicago outside of the Levee and the Stroll, including downtown clubs like the Royal Gardens, which welcomed a mixed audience in the late r910s. This situation would change quickly.” At the time, it was becoming more and more common that

The Stroll 1914-1928

26th

Elite Cafe #1

The Pekin Unknown Cabaret Savoy Saloon

Columbia Hotel 31st

Phoenix Theater Big Grand Theater

Lincoln Theater

Mecca Flat Fiume Cafe Washington Theater

35th

Dreamland Cafe

Oriental Cafe (later the Panama Cafe)

Rose Garden Cafe 39th Musicians Union Local 208

Buckner’s Dance hall 45th Clar. Wm. Music Store Edelweiss Gardens Owl Theater 47th 29 Club moe?>ra on

«mM HOA

Jackson’s Music Shop #1

Elite #1 Vendome Theater

Chicago Defender (1st Location)

Elite Cafe #2 MonoGram Babe’s

New Orleans Babe’s

State Theatre, The Stop Off De Luxe Cafe

Theater

Ed. Bunche Music Store

Clar. Wms Music Store

Open Air Gardens

New Dreamland Cafe

Atlas Theater Little Edelweiss

Map 1. The map is based on a hand-drawn representation of the Chicago Black music scene from 1914 through 1928, created by critic Eduard Miller and musician Richard M. Jones. Esquire’s Jazz Book, 1946 (New York: A. S. Barnes and Company, 1946), from the Paul Eduard Miller Papers, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago. Created by the author.

The Stroll 35th and State Street Business District: 1918-1929 Mecca Flat g§ Restaurant Barber Shop Coleman’s Restaurant Flume Cafe T Victor’s Barber Shop Barber Shop Hamburger Wagon Dry Goods Store A Bert’s Shoe Store Restaurant : Washington Theater T Elite Cafe #2 Jake’s Pawn Shop E MonoGram Theater Dry Goods Store Tailor Shop, Cigar Store Drug Store New Orleans Babe’s 35th Ss Restaurant T Drug Store Haberdashery Store State Theatre (1st floor), Jewelry Store R The Stop Off (Behind) Unknown Business Store De Luxe Cafe (2nd floor) Dreamland Cafe E Poolroom Dry Goods Store Theater Oriental Cafe E Dry Cleaning Store (later the Panama Cafe) T Restaurant

Map 2. The Stroll at 35th and State Street, based on Miller’s map. Miller’s map is an invaluable source because as a music critic he knew the locations of the illegal after-hours clubs—such as the Fiume, where Louis Armstrong played— as well as the clubs that advertised in the newspapers. Also, Miller was careful to preserve in his map the fact that banks, insurance companies, and all manner of legitimate businesses surrounded the entertainment venues. Miller's map is one of the best illustrations of the importance of this area of the South Side to the Black community. Created by the author.

African American audience members were refused tickets or sold tickets for the balcony. It was also increasingly customary for African Americans to be sold tickets only to have ushers refuse to seat them. Often, African Americans sued the theaters for damages on the grounds that such treatment violated the state’s antidiscrimination laws. In the 1910s, African Americans were successful in court, but by 1925 these kinds of suits were struck down, signaling a change under way in the city.” These court cases represented the growing contradiction between Illinois state laws banning discrimination in public spaces and the lived experience of African Americans in Chicago.

THE PROBLEMS OF VICE AND RACE

The second force that shaped the Black musicians’ experience in Chicago was the rise of the “social myth” conflating race and vice, which was solidified by the vice purge and fed by the increasing racial tensions in the city. African Americans came to Chicago during World War I to work in the growing number of industrial jobs created by war demand. Throughout the war, there were few new buildings constructed in Chicago,” which resulted in African Americans living in conditions “lacking” in the “conveniences, considered necessities by the average white citizen.” The housing disparities included the absence of bathrooms. If there was plumbing, then there was no hot water. Also, Black families had gaslights rather than electricity and wood stoves rather than furnaces.”

As the numbers of African Americans increased they pushed at the boundaries of the “black belt” and moved into areas along the periphery of the segregated zone that at the time ran from the southern end of the Loop to the edge of the Kenwood neighborhood north of the University of Chicago.” Purchasing a house in the Woodlawn neighborhood, south of the University of Chicago, for example, meant that families could live in homes free from rat infestations in conditions “much as whites do.”?’ However, the expansion of the “black belt” put African American migrants in direct conflict with the whites in those areas.

Nowhere was the racial conflict more evident than in the Kenwood and Hyde Park neighborhoods nestled between two predominantly African American neighborhoods—what would become known as Bronzeville to the north and Woodlawn to the south—and the University of Chicago. In r910, Blacks comprised only 11 percent of the Bronzeville population and 6 percent of Woodlawn. However, by 1920, African Americans comprised 25 percent of Bronzeville and 14 percent of Woodlawn.” The growth of the African American population frightened the non-Black residents of Kenwood and Hyde Park. Simply put, they felt surrounded by the racial other whom they believed were synonymous with moral declension.

Motivated by fear, white residents looked to homeowners’ associations to guarantee that Kenwood and Hyde Park remain “white-only.”” Indeed, one homeowners’ association declared that “Any property owner who sells property anywhere in our district to undesirables is an enemy to the white owner and should be discovered and punished.”*°

Dozens of African American homes in the former white neighbor-

Black Population

! |] ni seea-d-==4 ROOSEVELT “Black Belt” c. 1920 | E333 80-90% s=- 22 STREET HB 40-30% i=- i \ 47 STREET University of hicago ----- ii X Ha ----n--% 55 STREET

63 STREET

COTTAGE GROVE F,

A

Map 3. The Black Belt, c. 1920. Based on 1920 census data and the Race Commission’s Report. Created by the author.

Map 4. This map indicates the geographic relationship of the “black belt” and the ethnic neighborhoods. For a young Black man, such as Langston Hughes, drifting beyond the boundaries of the “black belt” was an action fraught with danger, as large numbers of white street gangs patrolled the perimeters of the neighborhood. For the music venues, running a business meant negotiating the political landscape that arose from the crime and vice of the city. The above is based on maps that appeared in Frederick M. Thrasher’s The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936). From the Map Library, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago. Created by the author.

hoods were bombed in 1919 and 1920 in response to the breaking of the segregated housing lines.*! In addition, white street gangs patrolled the borderlands between the Back of the Yards neighborhood—home to the meatpacking plants and a large number of immigrant families—and the western edge of the “black belt.” These gangs frequently attacked and brutalized African Americans in this area. One of the victims of the attacks was young Langston Hughes. In his autobiography, The Big Sea, the leading African American writer recalled accidentally walking beyond the boundary of the “black belt” in the spring of 1918. A white street gang attacked him. He returned home with “both eyes blackened and a swollen jaw.”*2 Hughes was one of the lucky ones because a year later, during the spring of 1919, the gang attacks on Blacks climaxed with two murders. This led the chief of police to send several hundred extra officers into the area to prevent racial violence.’

The increase in the African American population had consequences for the political system as well. Mayor “Big Bill” Thompson worked with African American politicians to ensure that Black Chicagoans were part of the ward system. The result was a reelection victory for Thompson and the Republican Party in 1919. Black support for Thompson was conspicuous and contributed to whites’ fear that African Americans had gained too much political power in the city’s patronage system. It did not help matters that Thompson accepted payments from vice operators and was a frequent patron of the very clubs that the Vice Commission had decried. The mayor’s corruption further stigmatized African Americans.**

White fear of the increase in the African American population, political power, and physical territory in the city was a contributing cause of the 1919 race riot. The riot began when an African American youth swimming in Lake Michigan drifted to the white side of the swimming area. Whites on the beach began to throw stones at the youth, and they did not stop until they had drowned him. A beat cop at the scene allowed whites to throw the stones and prevented anyone from entering the water to aid the boy. Word of the murder spread quickly. A group of African Americans marched toward the line of segregation. They converged on the beat cop, who summoned other police officers. A group of angry whites joined the police. These events set off thirteen days of violence, which included seven days of rioting and nearly an additional week of police raids and mass arrests, in which nearly all elements of civil society were abandoned. There had not been a riot in Chicago since the Haymarket Riot of 1886.35

If civic leaders wished to forestall future race riots, they would need to know what caused this violence and how to control racial tensions. Immediately following the 1919 violence, the city government created the Chicago Commission on Race Relations. Its study, published in 1922 as The Negro in Chicago, concluded that there existed a powerful “social myth” that confused being African American with being a supporter of vice.

The commissioners noted the prominence of this “social myth” in the Chicago newspapers’ reporting on vice. Examples included the exaggeration of arrest rates of African Americans and the promotion of the belief that riots began in dance halls and other venues of racial mixing. The press fed the public outrage with provocative descriptions of the clubs.

The crowd began to arrive. In came a mighty black man with two white girls. A scarred white man entered with three girls, two young and painted, the other merely painted... .

Seven young men—they looked like back o’ the Yards—came with two women....

Two fur-coated “high yeller” girls romped up with a slender white man. An Attorney gazed happily on the party through horn-rimmed glass- CS ccs

At one o’clock the place was crowded . . . a syncopated colored man had been vamping cotton fields blues on the piano. A brown girl sang... . All the tables were filled at two o’clock, black men, with white girls, white men with yellow girls, old, young, all filled with abandon brought about by illicit whisky and liquor music. . . .*° meu

Terms such as “brown girl,” “high yellers,” “yellow girls,” and “syncopated colored man” were phrases used by the papers to characterize African Americans in the club by their shade of skin color, which was an indication of racial mixing in their genetic past. The description of the African American patrons, paired with the descriptions of the “slender white man” and the seven men who looked like “Back O’ the Yards,” suggests many of the couples were racially mixed and that the club was mixed in terms of class. From musicians’ memoirs, it is also known that the bands were mixed racially and that young European Americans constantly traveled to the South Side to watch the African American musicians in hopes of learning to play.*’

The dance halls, known as “black and tans” because of the racial mixing, presented a variety of social problems, according to the commission. They sold liquor, offered liquor as prizes, encouraged women to drink to excess, and kept windows closed to create a hot environment to encourage drinking. The customers expressed themselves with “coarse and vulgar dancing.” All of this, according to the commissioners, made the clubs “highly dangerous to morals and established law and order, and a nuisance to the neighborhoods in which they are located.”** The commission was very clear that the public, and not the commissioners, saw the “black and tans” as dangerous because of racial mixing, rather than the sundry other activities that went on in the clubs.

The existence of the racial mixing in the “black and tan” cabarets, where musicians such as Louis Armstrong played, caused “frequent and heated protests,” according to the commission. “Although mixed couples constitute somewhat less than to per cent of the patronage,” the study reported, “this mingling is used” by critics “to characterize all of the association there.” Both whites and Blacks frequented the clubs and the commission reported that members of these groups would leave their local areas and travel throughout the city to visit the establishments. The public encouraged the police to arrest customers engaged in racial mixing. Unable to raid clubs to arrest interracial couples, because mixed couples were not breaking the law, the police used liquor violations instead to shut down the cabarets.*? When police raided the clubs, they arrested the mixed couples and allowed white-only groups to go free. The injustice of the arrests incensed African Americans in the city.”

White Chicago believed that African Americans condoned the racial mixing and eagerly accepted “vice” clubs in their neighborhoods. However, the commission study concluded that African Americans lived near vice districts not by “choice” or because of “low standards,” as the Vice Commission had contended in 1911, but because of being unwelcome in the “white residence localities.” The low-income levels among African Americans forced them, according to the commissioners, to seek out inexpensive housing that had been reduced in quality and price because of its proximity to vice. Contributing to this perceived problem was the insufficient political and social power held by African Americans, which left them unable to combat the “encroachments of vice” and the “gradual drift” of prostitution southward into the “black belt.” Furthermore, the commission offered evidence that the proprietors of the brothels, cabarets, and gambling halls were not African American. The proprietors chose to live among African Americans, the commissioners argued, not because they believed this was the customer demographic; rather, the proprietors knew that living in the “black belt” provided protection from police and public authorities.“

The vice industry also took advantage of the reality of African American life in the city. Having been denied benefits by unions, victimized by the police, and crowded into unsuitable jobs and housing, African American men found that the one area where they were able to work freely was in the vice establishments. It was estimated in the 1920s that 12 percent of African American men ran bars, pool halls, and gambling rooms. The reason for the large number of African American-run venues of vice was that liquor and ice distributors were willing to front the money for the businesses. It was easy for the vice industry to bribe the city government for business licenses and protection from raids. Without equal treatment by unions or support from banks, the vice industry offered African American men the best chance at being entrepreneurs. Their businesses had a high rate of failure, contributing to family and economic issues in the larger community.”