Drawing the "color line": Race and real estate in early twentieth-century Chicago

Journal of Urban History

Volumn 32, Issue 5, 2006, Pages 773-787

  Garb, Margaret ^a  

^a WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Chicago; Housing; Neighborhood; Property values; Racial exclusion

Indexed keywords

HOUSING; NEIGHBORHOOD; RACIAL SEGREGATION; SOCIAL HISTORY; URBAN AREA;

CHICAGO; ILLINOIS; NORTH AMERICA; UNITED STATES;

EID: 33744780484     PISSN: 00961442     EISSN: 15526771     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0096144206287099     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. Chicago Defender, November 1, 1919; Chicago Inter-Ocean, August 18, 1900, cited in Thomas Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and Middle Class Reform in Chicago, 1880-1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 150. Philpott provides a full description of the realtors' assault on Vernon Avenue.
2. Richard T. Wright, "The Economic Condition of Negroes in the North," The Southern Workman (November 1908): 608.
3. A recent study of "racial attitudes" in Kansas City suggests a similar process there. See Sherry Lamb Schirmer, A City Divided: The Racial Landscape of Kansas City, 1900-1960 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 42-3. While arguing that the "pattern of Negro housing...was shaped by white hostility and indifference," she suggests that real estate entrepreneurs were actively encouraging that hostility. Allan H. Spear also shows that white hostility was fueled by real estate operators. Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967), 26, 20-3.
4. There is a vast literature on the processes of racial segregation of American cities. Among the most insightful are the following: William M. Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Athenaeum, 1985); James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989); Ronald Baylor, Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); John Bodnar, Roger Simon, and Michael Weber, Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900-1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982); Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto, Negro New York, 1890-1930 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963); Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); Kenneth L. Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978); Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1864-1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Elliot Rudwick, Race Riot in East St. Louis, July 2, 1917 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964); Joe William Trotter, Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto.
5. Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919, 243.
6. Carter G. Woodson, A Century of Negro Migration (Washington, DC: The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1918); St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 53.
7. U.S. Manuscript Census 1900, Newberry Library Collection; Monroe Nathan Work, "Negro Real Estate Holders of Chicago" (master's dissertation, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, 1903), 25; Louise De Koven Bowen, "The Colored People of Chicago" (Chicago: Juvenile Protective Association, 1913), 13-16.
8. Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago, 1922), 107-8.
9. Richard T. Wright, "Recent Improvement in Housing among Negroes in the North," 602.
10. Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto, 146, 121; U.S. Census of 1900; Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 57.
11. Chicago Property Tract Records, Recorder of Deeds/Registrar of Torrens Titles, Cook County Building, Chicago.
12. Alazada P. Comstock, "Housing Conditions in Chicago: The Problem of the Negro" (Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, 1912), 246, passim; Charles S. Duke, The Housing Situation and the Colored People of Chicago (Chicago, 1919), 7-9; Sophonisba Breckinridge,"The Color Line in the Housing Problem," The Survey 29 (February 1, 1913), 575-6.
13. Duke, "The Housing Situation," 12. One prominent exception to this pattern was the African American real estate entrepreneur and banker, Jesse Binga, whose successful businesses, located at the corner of State Street and Thirty-Sixty Place, marketed housing directly to black Chicagoans with advertisements in the Broad Ax, an African American-owned newspaper, provided loans to buyers and represented several south-side rental properties. Binga sold houses priced from $2, 000 to $9, 000, illustrating the ability of at least some black Chicagoans to purchase houses aimed at middle- and upper-class buyers. See Binga's ads in the Broad Ax, for example: September 19, 1908, 4; "Occupies New Building," Broad Ax, September 26, 1908, 2.
14. Duke, "The Housing Situation," 8.
15. Work, "Negro Real Estate Holders," 29-31; Bowen, "The Colored People of Chicago," 11.
16. Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago, 116; Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto, 149.
17. "White Aristocrats? On Forestville Ave. Display Envy, " Chicago Defender, May 8, 1915, 2.
18. Ibid.
19. Wright, "The Economic Condition of Negroes in the North," 608; Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto, 150-2. Philpott describes the strategy of the white-owned realty firm, Wason and Bartlett's, which bought up thousands of parcels east of State Street. He quotes a rival realtor saying that the firm "paid about twenty-two hundred dollars on average for these dwellings and then they would sell them to the negroes for about four thousand dollars, a hundred dollars down and about forty dollars a month. The hundred dollars secured them against non-payment and forty dollars a month netted them a good profit."
20. In 1900, Work found that while 24 percent of all families in the city owned their homes, just 5 percent of black families owned their homes. Work, "Negro Real Estate Holders," 19, 14-15; Broad Ax, September 19, 1908, 4. As early as the 1920s, there also were some African American suburbs edging American cities, including Chicago. See, for example: Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto, 107-8, 181-2; Thomas Jackson Woofter Jr., Negro Problems in Cities (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1928), 106-10; Reynolds Farley, "The Changing Distribution of Negroes within Metropolitan Areas: The Emergence of Black Suburbs," American Journal of Sociology 75 (January 1970): 333-51; Andrew Wiese, "The Other Suburbanites: African American Suburbanization in the North before 1950," The Journal of American History 85 (March 1999): 1495-1524.
21. Duke, "The Housing Situation," 15.
22. "A New Phase in Negro Housing," Chicago Record-Herald, April 5, 1911, 8; Work, "Negro Real Estate Holders," 31; Joseph Kirkland, "Among the Poor in Chicago," in The Poor in Great Cities (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1896), 198.
23. Bowen, "The Colored People of Chicago," 12.
24. "Negro 'Stronghold' Shelled by 'Bricks', " Chicago Record-Herald, February 7, 1911, 1.
25. Duke, "The Housing Situation," 14; Spear, Black Chicago, 21; Chicago Defender, May 10, 1913, cited in Spear, Black Chicago, 21; "White Aristocrats? On Forestville Ave. Display Envy," 2.
26. Spear notes that the African American class structure did not always correspond with the white class structure. Some "occupational groups that would belong to the upper lower class among whites have traditionally formed the core of the Negro middle class." See Spear, Black Chicago, 23. Well-to-do African American tenants were targeted as well. See for example, "Color Line on Homes, " Chicago Record-Herald, March 9, 1905, 1; "Facts to Show We Came Here First and Are Here to Stay," Chicago Defender, February 7, 1920.
27. "Would Bar Negroes from White District," Chicago Record-Herald, August 21, 1909, 1; "Exile of Negro is Aim," Chicago Record-Herald, September 10, 1909, 4; "Real Estate Men Hit Hard," Chicago Record-Herald, April 16, 1909, 3; Spear, Black Chicago, 22.
28. Fannie Barrier Williams, "A Negro's View of Housing Segregation in Hyde Park," letter to editor, Chicago Record-Herald, September 15, 1906, quoted in Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto, 155-6.
29. "Blame Put on Whites," Chicago Record-Herald, August 23, 1909, 2; "Would Bar Negroes from White District," Chicago Record-Herald, August 21, 1909, 1, 4; On African Americans' pursuit of home ownership in the early twentieth century see Wiese, "The Other Suburbanites," 1496.
30. Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago, 117-18. The entire episode is described in Spear, Black Chicago, 22-3. In 1919, the Hyde Park Protective Association included African American members. "Records of the Joining Meeting of the Directors of the Hyde Park Protective Association," dated April 11, 1919, Chicago Historical Society Special Collections, Chicago, IL.
31. Chicago Record-Herald, August 21, 1909, cited in Spear, Black Chicago, 22; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago, 114.
32. Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago, 3.
33. The white Hyde Parkers provided an illustration of a concept that the courts had only recently begun to recognize: Property was defined both by its "use-value" and its "exchange-value." Neither the courts nor contemporary scholars acknowledged the racial component of exchange value in residential property. See for example: John R. Commons, Legal Foundations of Capitalism (New York: Macmillan, 1924), 11-21; Kenneth Vandevelde, "The New Property of the Nineteenth Century: The Development of the Modern Concept of Property, " Buffalo Law Review 29 (1980): 325; Gregory S. Alexander, Commodity and Propriety: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought, 1776-1970 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 259-61.
34. Alexander, Commodity and Propriety, 1; see also Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 145-51. For other similarly organized neighborhood associations in Chicago see, for example: "North Central Improvement Association" (pamphlet, 1906); and "The Near North Side Property Owners Association," letter dated February 18, 1936, Chicago Historical Society Special Collections, Chicago, IL.
35. See, for example, the arguments made for the Louisville, Kentucky, ordinance requiring racial segregation of residential neighborhoods. The Kentucky Court of Appeals upheld the law, calling it "a reasonable and expedient measure for the public welfare, directed to the prevention of outbreaks of violence resulting from racial antipathies, and the preservation of racial solidarity." Harris v. City of Louisville, Buchanan v. Warley, Court of Appeals of Kentucky, 165 Ky. 559; 177 S.W. 472; 1915 KY. In an appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Kentucky court ruling. Buchanan v. Warley, no. 33, Supreme Court of the United States, 245 U.S. 60; 38 S. Ct. 16; 62 L. Ed. 149, 1917.
36. There is a vast literature on progressive reform and more particularly on Chicago's settlement house movement - certainly too much to list here. See, for example: Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: Penguin Books, 1961); Allen F. Davis, Spearhead for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Lela B. Costing, Two Sisters for Social Justice: A Biography of Grace and Edith Abbott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Maureen A. Flanagan, Seeing With Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871-1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Women's Political Culture, 1830-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in the Progressive Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Lizabeth Cohen suggests that settlement workers sought to dilute ethnic differences to organize neighborhood groups. Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 55.
37. Work, "Negro Real Estate Holders," 31; Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Afreda M. Duster (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970), 250. See also Patricia Ann Schechter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Wanda A. Hendricks, Gender, Race and Politics in the Midwest: Black Club Women in Illinois (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1998). Maureen A. Flanagan argues that black and white club women worked together in a variety of cooperative reform enterprises. Flanagan, Seeing With Their Hearts, 181-2, 47-51, 167-9.
38. For more on Ely's life and influence on American thought and market relations see Benjamin G. Rader, The Academic Mind and Reform: The Influence of Richard T. Ely in American Life (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1966); Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 102-5, 192-3; Richard Ely, Ground Under Our Feet (New York: Macmillan, 1938); Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 166-72; Alexander, Commodity and Propriety, 323-5.
39. Richard T. Ely, "The City Housing Corporation and 'Sunnyside'," Land Economics II 2 (April 1926): 81.
40. Marc A. Weiss, Richard T. Ely and the Contribution of Economic Research to Home Ownership and Housing Policy (Boston: MIT Center For Real Estate Development, 1989), 6.
41. Marc A. Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders: The American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land Planning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 147-59. Here, Weiss describes the evolution of FHA loan policies. For the point about racial barriers to FHA loans, see Weiss, Richard T. Ely, 18.