American Pharaoh by Elizabeth Taylor, Adam Cohen Read Free Book Online Page B

blacks were still living in virtually every part
     of Chicago. 31
    Daley’s childhood coincided with one of the nation’s most far-reaching social transformations: the Great Migration of blacks
     from the rural South to the urban North. With the start of World War I, the booming wartime economy in the North faced a severe
     labor shortage, as the war cut off the flow of European immigrants. Realizing that there was a ready supply of workers in
     the rural South, where agricultural automation was fast reducing the need for black farm laborers, northern recruiters spread
     out across the Deep South. Many northern cities were competing for these black workers, but Chicago had a unique advantage.
     The
Chicago Defender,
the nation’s leading black newspaper, was widely read throughout the South, and it painted an especially rosy picture of
     the high-paying jobs and good life that awaited black migrants in Chicago’s factories and slaughterhouses. “MILLIONS TO LEAVE
     SOUTH,” a banner headline in the January 6, 1917,
Chicago Defender
declared. “Northern Invasion Will Start in Spring — Bound for the Promised Land.” To many southern blacks living in conditions
     of extreme poverty and chafing under the oppression of Jim Crow, Chicago and the other large northern cities became a “glorious
     symbol of hope.” Even blues singers from the era got caught up in the spirit:
    I used to have a woman that lived up on a hill
    I used to have a woman that lived up on a hill
    She was crazy ’bout me, ooh well, well, cause
    I worked at the Chicago Mill. 32
    The trip itself was not difficult. The Illinois Central Railroad, dubbed the “Fried Chicken Special” for the homemade lunches
     carried by the migrants, provided easy passage from New Orleans through the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta and on
     up to Chicago. A half-million southern blacks made the journey north between 1916 and 1919 alone, and another million followed
     in the 1920s. Large numbers of blacks headed to New York, Detroit, and Cleveland, but as one Mississippi migrant recalled,
     “the mecca was Chicago.” 33
    As the city’s black population soared, blacks were increasingly concentrated in a distinct ghetto — the South Side’s Black
     Belt. Many of the southern migrants pouring into the Illinois Central Railroad Station clutched the addresses of friends and
     family who lived in the Black Belt, and those who arrived with no plans were generally steered in that direction. By 1920,
     the Black Belt — an area roughly bounded by 26th Street to the north, 55th Street to the south, State Street to the west,
     and Lake Michigan to the east — was home to about 85 percent of the city’s blacks. “[S]egregation has been increasing,” Swedish
     sociologist Gunnar Myrdal wrote of Chicago in
An American Dilemma,
his classic survey of American race relations. “[E]ven the upper class Negroes whose ancestors lived in Chicago on terms
     of almost complete social equality with their white neighbors are now forced into Negro ghettos and are hardly differentiated
     from the impoverished Negro just arrived from the South.” The upside of this racial segregation was that a remarkable African-American
     world began to take shape on the South Side. The stone-front houses and apartment buildings along once-white avenues like
     South Parkway and Michigan Boulevard now housed black teachers, lawyers, and other pillars of the black middle class. And
     the Black Belt’s business districts were filled with black-owned stores and black doctors’ and lawyers’ offices. “Why should
     Negro doctors and dentists give a damn that most white folks would rather die than let skilled black fingers repair their
     vital organs?” St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton wrote in
Black Metropolis,
their 1945 study of Chicago’s “Bronzeville.” “The Negro masses were gradually learning to trust their own professional men
     and would some day scorn to enrich white physicians