The South Side

A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation

St. Martin's Press

Contents

A Legacy Threatened

I am a child of Chatham.

I grew up in black segregated Chicago. Not in a neighborhood decimated by the 1968 riots, blight, poverty, white flight and boarded-up buildings. My South Side black cocoon was a solid black middle-class neighborhood. Judges, teachers, lawyers, doctors and city, postal and social workers live in Chatham. The neighborhood has an assorted housing stock: ranches, Georgians, sturdy bungalows, bi-level chic midcentury moderns. An unusual showstopper mansion, modeled after the White House and built with robin's-egg blue bricks imported from Italy, stood on display around the corner where I grew up. Our family of five lived in a four-bedroom brick Cape Cod with an unfinished basement prone to flooding. The lower level had dark wood paneling, a bar and milk crates crammed with dusty records from my parents' era — from a Redd Foxx comedy album to the Ohio Players to Malcolm X's The Ballot or the Bullet.

When we were growing up, ice cream trucks jingled in the summertime. We girls jumped Double Dutch rope — despite my occasional double-handed turns — on the sidewalks in front of our homes. We rode our ten-speed bikes to buy Jays Salt 'n Vinegar potato chips, Now & Later candy and dill pickles at the nearby Amoco gas station. We rotated having crushes on David, who lived around the corner and rode his bike incessantly up and down the streets. Pajama parties meant Jason and Freddy horror flicks on loop. We avoided the loose Doberman pinschers that would escape the gate of that big blue mansion. We jumped through lawn sprinklers in our swimsuits in backyards while our parents barbecued. We played makeshift baseball in the alley with tennis racquets. We blew out candles on pound cakes at our birthday parties. We had the kind of dramatic childhood fights that resulted in the silent treatment or smack talking. Posters of Michael Jackson, decked out in his yellow "Human Nature" sweater, decorated our bedroom walls. We walked the track and swung on swings at Nat "King" Cole Park, named after the Chicago-born crooner. The park's basketball courts hosted some of the city's best street players in the 1970s and 1980s. Former Illinois U.S. senator Roland Burris lived around the corner from our house (in gospel powerhouse Mahalia Jackson's former residence), and he exemplified the cliché "It takes a village" by cajoling my parents to let me attend his alma mater, Howard University.

In our backyard, before the term "organic" entered the mainstream culinary lexicon, my dad harvested vegetables. On Saturday mornings, my younger brother, sister and I pulled weeds to clear the way for him to plant cucumbers, zucchini, carrots, bell peppers, collard greens, eggplant, tomatoes and radishes. Every year he gently reminded me that Chicago weather wouldn't allow him to grow my favorites — watermelon and strawberries. My mother drove a red Camaro for the better part of the 1980s. Not fire-engine or candy-apple red; more like the color of smeared red lipstick.

It would be years before I realized that I grew up in kind of a cozy racial cocoon of black middle-class vivacity in a city otherwise torn by racial division.

My parents, Joe and Yvonne, were first-generation college graduates and South Side natives. Joe, a Vietnam veteran who worked at Shell Oil Co., first as a marketing manager and later as an area diversity veep, represented the post — civil rights wave of African Americans hired by Corporate America. He never shaved his mustache and liked to say "It's Nation Time, time for all black people to stand up and be counted," in his version of middle-class militancy. Yvonne, with her pageboy hairstyle and freckles sprinkled across the bridge of her nose, taught special education/home economics at a public school two blocks from our home. It sometimes embarrassed me when her students recognized me walking with friends in the neighborhood. "Hey, are you Miz Moore's daughter?" As a child I looked so much like her, she joked that I sprang from her forehead like Zeus's daughter.

My grandparents — one who didn't make it past third grade, another a Pullman Porter turned Playboy Mansion bartender — moved to the South Side during the Great Migration, which lured blacks from the South to the land o' milk and honey up North. They worked hard, bought houses, two flats and later rental properties and sent their children to college.

My own immediate family mirrored The Cosby Show — to a degree. Sitcoms always sanitize life, right? And decades later, we know this television show was an artifact of the times, a fallacy constructed by the eponymous patriarch whose reported sexually predatory offstage life casts a shadow on his art. But our world brimmed with similar middle-class black families rooted in black identity. We were neither special nor an anomaly in Chicago. But the Cosby label stuck. In 1986, at the height of Huxtable fever, the Chicago Sun-Times did a feature story on local black and white families drawn to the transcendent television sitcom. A friend of a friend recommended our family, and a reporter and photographer came to watch the show at our house and afterward peppered us with questions. I was ten, my brother Joey, seven, and sister Megan, five. The article noted that my little sister bubbled like young Rudy Huxtable. But when she disobeyed my mother twice during the interview, Mommy quipped, "What would Clair Huxtable do?" Everyone laughed.

During the interview, my dad wore his corporate work uniform — crisp shirt and patterned, but not too flashy, with a tie. This was unusual; he always changed into sweats when he came home after his long suburban commute. Naturally, we children snickered and questioned him when he only removed the suit jacket that evening. He explained that he had to give a positive image of black people to the news media. The blanket Chicago South Side image in many white minds equals pathological ghetto. Reporters often enable that stereotype by only covering crime when they deign to venture to the South Side. Daddy was a man who went to work every day, provided for his family and wanted to project that image for readers of the newspaper. He was simultaneously routine and radical.

This existence embodied what being a child of Chatham was like. The ideals and values of the civil rights generation found a place to live. In the tradition of being a good, upstanding Negro, my dad wanted to present a positive image in the news media by showing how we lived accordingly in black middle-class-dom.

Blacks started moving into Chatham after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down racially restrictive housing covenants in the 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer decision. Once confined to the city's "Black Belt," African Americans finally could choose where they wanted to lay claim to the American Dream. Upwardly mobile blacks started moving into Chatham in the 1950s with their own aspirations after white families fled, faced with the specter of so-called outsiders.

The founders of the Luster hair care company lived in Chatham. The Johnson Products Company plant — makers of Afro Sheen — operated on the outskirts, as did the iconic Soft Sheen. The black-owned Baldwin Ice Cream had a shop near our house. Black- owned banks operated in the neighborhood. Catholic, Baptist, Presbyterian and A.M.E. churches boasted strong memberships. I didn't know "Ay-rab" wasn't a word until I attended college. Some Arab merchants, who lived outside of Chatham, owned stores in the neighborhood and had unsavory reputations of bad business practices and poor service. An Arab-owned, full-service grocery store that opened a few blocks from our house went out of business because the community refused to support it. Shoppers complained about the service and low-quality food. In my household, my father drilled into us not to shop at that store or patronize non-black-owned small businesses in Chatham. Honestly, it wasn't that hard; we had black dry cleaners, hair salons, barbecue joints, barbershops and soul food restaurants.

Everyone on our block knew each other and looked out for one another. Mr. and Mrs. Strong's granddaughter Aisha and I met at age seven. She lived in Philadelphia but spent every summer in Chicago. Aisha introduced me to Prince's first album, For You, and told of the bombing of the black liberation group MOVE in her hometown. Each spring I counted on Mrs. Lee to order a box of Thin Mints to support my Girl Scout troop. Mr. Henderson's family owned a popular shoe store. Mr. Montgomery retired from the Chicago Police Department. Mrs. Smith always kept her long silver hair knotted in a bun and tended to a sweet dog named Chug who rarely barked. Her son Brian went to school with actress Jennifer Beals. Three doors down, the Nolans owned an auto body shop, and every Fourth of July fireworks erupted during their backyard parties. Mrs. Peterson's daughter Pam and her bestie, Zenobia, gave me and my friends makeup lessons. A few blocks over I met Brandi at a young age; our fathers attended college together. She and I devoured books and discussed the likes of Gloria Naylor and the insipid Sweet Valley High series around her kitchen table.

Lest I construct Chatham as a black urban Mayberry, my father also instilled in us his self-efficacy. He volunteered with the Chatham Avalon Park Community Council. At his behest, my siblings and I canvassed the neighborhood putting flyers for community meetings in mailboxes. This level of activity protected Chatham's legacy. Residents attended block meetings and police community gatherings and knocked on the city council member's door. The neighborhood endured its share of crimes: robberies, break-ins, muggings and assaults. When I was in high school, an ominous "Chatham rapist" haunted the neighborhood. On more than one occasion, thieves broke into our garage and stole the tires off of my dad's 1984 brown Chevy Bonneville company car. In 1981, just days before Megan was born, my mother discovered our Great Dane, Caesar, dead in the basement laundry room. Blood dripped from his mouth as a result of rat poisoning. To this day, my father believes Chicago police officers did the deed in retaliation for him reporting them sleeping on the job nearby in a squad car. Daddy and his nephew loaded the dog's body in a wheelbarrow to be picked up in an alley by whomever you call to dispose of animal carcasses. A thief stole the empty wheelbarrow.

Chicago boasts miles upon miles of black neighborhoods with high rates of home ownership. In South Shore, the Jackson Park Highlands district is a designated Chicago landmark, home to gorgeous architecture, the stately houses displayed on oversized grassy lots. Over in Pill Hill, the lawns are all so perfectly manicured it appears as if all the homeowners use the same landscaping company. Roseland may be one of the most troubled neighborhoods in the city, but a tiny affluent section has Tudor homes with Mercedes-Benzes in the driveways. Burnside, Avalon Park and Washington Heights are examples of uneventful, middle-class communities with single-family bungalows, ranches and frame homes.

Black middle-class neighborhoods are not immune from urban ills. As Chicago sociologist Mary Pattillo writes in Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class, the black middle class is not the same as the white middle class. Black middle-class neighborhoods are characterized by "more poverty, higher crime, worse schools and fewer services than white middle-class neighborhoods."

At a time when the number of annual murders in Chicago was notably high, my parents fretted that Joey would fall into the hands of gang recruiters. Parental love and opportunity don't always protect black boys. A mile from our house, national high school basketball phenom and Chatham native Ben Wilson was gunned down across the street from his school in 1984; then age eight, that's my first memory of violence.

Crack may not have choked Chatham, but one neighbor on our block became addicted. I learned my first street lesson bike riding solo on 83rd Street. I was 11 years old and about to roll past a group of unfamiliar teen boys. The worry rumpled my face like a piece of wrinkled clothing. I was scared of getting jumped. As my wheels squeaked by, one of the teens said to me, "If you look scared, you get jumped."

Chatham may have been the beginning of my world, but it never confined me. On the heels of integration, a yellow school bus ferried Joey, Megan, and me to a public elementary school in another South Side neighborhood called Beverly. Little did we know we were part of desegregated busing. By age 11, my neighborhood friends Donna, Brandi, Aisha and I ignored the closest mall on 95th Street and ventured downtown or to swanky North Michigan Avenue via public transportation. In high school, we ambled about in North Side malls and eclectic pre-gentrified neighborhoods, such as Wicker Park, to browse clothing, book and record stores. I unconsciously knew that Chicago's blacks, whites, Latinos and Asians generally didn't live together. I certainly never saw any non-blacks living in Chatham. But growing up in segregation felt like air and water — a constant, but something I never pondered until a small incident upended my detachment.

* * *

It was a hot summer day in 1990. Donna, Brandi, Aisha and I boarded the Chicago Transit Authority "L" train from downtown and headed back to the South Side to get dressed for an evening of dreamboat loveliness. We were 14 years old with tickets to see R&B crooner and New Edition front man Johnny Gill at the New Regal Theatre on 79th Street. I seriously crushed on him and had made my own fan button.

An easy visual clue to Chicago's segregation is watching who boards and exits the "L." Back then white people emptied off by downtown. A few intrepid riders may have stayed on until the Chinatown stop at 22nd and Cermak. But on this particular day, the white folk stayed on and packed the train shoulder to shoulder past 22nd Street. Talk about baffling. Yes, the South Side is synonymous with blacks, and yes, whites and Latinos live in ethnic enclaves in the city's largest geographic swath. But no way did this throng of white Chicagoans live off of my "L" line. Why was I so shocked? I felt my world pivot. I wasn't scared or angry, just disoriented.

Then, at 35th Street, all of the white riders unloaded from the train cars: the stop for Comiskey Park, the White Sox baseball stadium. Crisis averted! Mystery solved. Absolute relief. My little world was pieced back together, but that's when segregation became real to me.

* * *

I celebrate my upbringing. Chatham molded me. The environment nurtured me. A rhapsody in blackness. It's such a delicious reversal of privilege and entitlement that caused me to feel territorial in a space like public transportation.

But I understood the racial lines and demarcations of Chicago. I knew something was amiss in my neighborhood. There were fewer places to shop, and crime and poverty were closer. In my adult years, I realized that for all of their uplift and efficacy, black middle-class neighborhoods are by nature precarious. They aren't ghettos, but they exist because of segregationist housing policies designed to create ghettos. When housing opened up across the city and redlining wasn't as prevalent, white flight ensued. Black middle-class neighborhoods do their best to thrive in impossible, ugly circumstances. But like black ghettos, the black middle class, too, complains about policing, city services, investment and amenities.

By definition, the black middle class equates to the white lower middle class in America. Many white Chicagoans have no idea that a place such as Chatham exists and couldn't pinpoint it on a map. Everyday black middle-class life is invisible in America. People going to work, sending their children to school, living their lives, minding their business. When studying segregation, researchers typically concentrate on the urban black poor underclass. The black elite are more visible with the election of Barack Obama and his inner circle of friends coupled with familiar faces like Oprah. In a graduate school journalism policy class I took at Northwestern University, a professor rented a bus to give students a tour of different parts of the city. She let me narrate part of the South Side, and when we drove around Chatham my white peers gaped, remarking how the neighborhood looked better than some white areas. They were shocked and awed.

Chatham has long enjoyed an independent streak — namely by not voting for Mayor Richard M. Daley — and mightily protecting its black cocoon. The economic crisis and housing collapse that began in 2008 tested the limits of black efficacy and excellence, and Chatham continues to fight for its legacy. Although white flight is in the past, home values and investment reveal current fragilities. Research indicates that black wealth barely exists and black middle-class kids are downwardly mobile.

The term "middle class" is hard to define in the United States. It's aspirational and nebulous, and people in a range of incomes, from low to upper, consider themselves in that social stratum. Social scientists measure income, occupation, education and wealth. Northwestern University sociologist Mary Pattillo told me, "Given those somewhat objective measures, basically what we find is on any one of those measures, the black middle class is smaller and somewhat more disadvantaged than the white middle class." For example, about 37 percent of whites have a college education, compared to 18 percent of blacks. Further, middle-class blacks are clustered in lower-class occupations, such as sales and administrative work, while whites are clustered more in higher-earning white-collar occupations. Meanwhile, the backbone of the black middle class has been in the public sector — teachers, social workers and municipal jobs.

"Black middle-class neighborhoods across the country and surely in Chicago have two faces to them," Pattillo said. "I call this the privilege and the peril of the black middle class. The privilege comes with these being homeowners. Some of those perils are the result of racial segregation. We're thinking about Chatham situated within the larger South Side." That means higher crime and poverty rates and proximity to underperforming schools.