World War Two and its aftermath transformed Chicago’s African American community. The Great Migration entered a second and more intense phase as black migrants flooded into Northern cities. This massive relocation of Southern blacks resulted in the expansion and reformulation of Chicago’s ghettoes on both the West and South Sides of the city. The question of a response to this Second Ghetto from African Americans themselves presents itself. White politicians, cultural elites and businessmen still controlled the city and could impose their will on its neighborhoods simply redrawing ghetto boundaries to reflect the new realities of the postwar era. The strange case of Joe Smith and Sin Corner sheds some light on black agency in the 1950s. The African American middle class had resources it commanded to try and protect itself from racial injustice. These resources, however, were based on class privileges not enjoyed by most in the African American community.
Joe Smith, Sin Corner and Joe Smith: A Story of Vice and Corruption in Chicago (New York, 1963), 13-23, 30.
2.
St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, 2 vols. (New York, 1970); see vol. 2, chap. 22 for a description of African American middle-class values and attitudes in Chicago.
3.
Arnold Hirsch, The Making of the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 ( Chicago, 1998)
4.
Patrick D. Jones, The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee (Cambridge, 2009); Mathew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 2006); Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Fight for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, 2003); Jeanne Theoharris and Komozi Woodward, eds., Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940 to 1980 (New York, 2001); Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York, 2008); James R. Ralph, Jr., Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement (Cambridge, 1993).
5.
Allan Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago, 1967), 24-25; James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago and London, 1989), 138-39; Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, vol. 2, 658-60.
6.
Charles Branham, "Black Chicago: Accommodationist Politics Before the Great Migration," in Melvin G. Holli and Peter d’A. Jones, eds., Ethnic Chicago: Revised and Expanded (Grand Rapids, 1984), 338-79; Christopher R. Reed, Black Chicago’s First Century: Volume 1, 1833-1900 (Columbia, MO, 2005), 22-27; for Ida B. Wells see Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword among Lions (New York, 2008).
7.
Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America ( New York, 1991), 94-95.
8.
Fay Lee Robertson, "A Study of Some Aspects of Racial Succession in the Woodlawn Community Area of Chicago" (master’s thesis, University of Chicago, 1955), 40-43.
9.
The Woodlawn Booster listed advertisements for most of the businesses east of Cottage Grove Avenue. Also see the Hyde Park-Woodlawn-South Shore Neighborhood Classified Telephone Directory, December 1958 (Chicago, 1958).
10.
Interview with Ed Rooney, Chicago, September 30, 1997; Daily Defender, December 31, 1958.
11.
See Kevin J. Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York, 1997), for the best discussion of these sex districts.
12.
Chicago Daily Defender (City ed.), June 24, 1957, June 25, 1957, and January 19, 1959; Smith, Sin Corner and Joe Smith, 27-28.
13.
Chicago Defender (Weekly City ed.), January 31, 1959.
14.
Smith, Sin Corner and Joe Smith, 31-32.
15.
Quoted in ibid., 34.
16.
Chicago Daily News, January 15, 1959; Chicago Defender (Weekly City ed.), February 7, 1959.
17.
Chicago Sunday Tribune, July 7, 1957; Chicago Defender (Weekly City ed.), July 3, 1957.
18.
On police and court corruption in the late 1950s see Richard C. Lindberg, To Serve and Collect: Chicago Politics and Police Corruption from the Lager Beer Riot to the Summerdale Scandal (New York, 1991), 293-94. On O’Connor’s personal honesty see Mike Royko, Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (New York, 1971), 118-19; interview with Jack Mabley, October 9, 1995.
19.
Chicago Defender (Weekly City ed.), February 28, 1959.
20.
Chicago Defender (Weekly City ed.), March 7, 1959.
21.
Smith, Sin Corner and Joe Smith, p.93
22.
Christopher Robert Reed, The Chicago NAACP and the Rise of Black Professional Leadership, 1910-1966 (Bloomington, IN, 1997), 151-54.
23.
"Announcement of First Brotherhood Tea, Sponsored by the Associated Clubs of Woodlawn, February 26, 1956 at Trianon Ballroom"; "Formal Invitation to Fourth Annual Woodlawn Brotherhood Tea, April 5, 1959 at Jackson Park Fieldhouse," in Associated Clubs of Woodlawn Papers, Neighborhood Research Collection, Special Collections Department, Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago, Illinois (hereafter referred to as ACW Papers), box 2, folder 12.
24.
"Constitution and By-Laws of the Woodlawn Block Club Council, July 1958," in Papers of the Woodlawn Block Club Council, Neighborhood Research Collection, Special Collections Department, Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago (hereafter referred to as WBBC Papers), box 1, folder 1.
25.
Press Release, "Form New Group to Conserve Housing in Woodlawn," in WBBC Papers, box 1, folder 1.
26.
Smith, Sin Corner and Joe Smith, 35-50.
27.
Interview with Ed Rooney, September 30, 1997.
28.
Smith, Sin Corner and Joe Smith, 46-48.
29.
Ibid., 49-67.
30.
For an interesting overview of Chicago’s newspaper history, and the role of the Chicago Daily News in it see Gary Wills, "The Front Page," New York Review of Books, September 25, 1997. Also see Dick Griffin and Rob Warden, eds., Done in a Day: 100 Years of Great Writing from the Chicago Daily News (Chicago, 1977).
31.
Interview with Ed Rooney, September 30, 1997. For the City News Bureau see A. A. Dornfield, Behind the Front Page: The Story of the City News Bureau of Chicago (Chicago, 1983).
32.
Interview with Ed Rooney, September 30, 1997.
33.
Interview with Jack Mabley, October 9, 1995.
34.
Chicago Daily News, January 7, 1959, January 8, 1959, January 22, 1959; Chicago Defender (Weekly City ed.), January 3, 1959, January 17, 1959, February 28, 1959; Chicago Daily Defender, December 29, 1959, January 7, 1959; Smith, Sin Corner and Joe Smith, 56-57.
35.
Chicago Daily Defender, December 31, 1958, January 5, 1959; Chicago Defender (Weekly City ed.), January 3, 1959.
36.
Chicago Daily Defender, January 6, 1959; Smith, Sin Corner and Joe Smith, 76-77; Letter to Police Commissioner Timothy O’Connor from the Joseph R. Smith Defense Committee, December 1958, in Despres Collection, box 154, file 3; Handbill from Joseph R. Smith Committee, November 31, 1958, in Despres Collection, box 203, file 9.
37.
Chicago Daily Defender, January 7, 1959.
38.
Chicago Daily Defender, January 8, 1959.
39.
Chicago Daily News, January 12, 1959, January 13, 1959.
40.
Chicago Defender ( Weekly City ed.), January 31, 1959; Chicago Daily Defender, January 12, 1959.
41.
Daily Defender, January 15 1959; Smith, Sin Corner and Joe Smith, 81.
42.
Daily Defender, February 19, 1959.
43.
Smith, Sin Corner and Joe Smith, 91-92.
44.
Chicago Daily Defender, February 2, 1959; Smith, Sin Corner and Joe Smith, 92-94.
45.
Chicago Defender ( Weekly City ed.), January 10, 1959; Chicago Daily News, February 19, 1959; Daily Defender , February 19, 1959; Smith, Sin Corner and Joe Smith, 95-96.
46.
Smith, Sin Corner and Joe Smith, 95-110; Chicago Daily News, February 19, 1959.
47.
Chicago Daily News, February 21, 1959. Stamos reported the remark to the author in a telephone conversation on April 14, 2009.
48.
Chicago Daily News, April 23, 1958; Woodlawn Booster, July 1, 1958, July 23, 1958.
49.
For a discussion of the growth of middle-class black leadership, see Reed, Chicago NAACP. On the Alvin Palmer murder see Dominic A. Pacyga, "Assimilation and Its Discontents: Polish Americans and the Murder of Alvin Palmer," Przegląd Polonynich (Krakow, Poland) 4 (2005): 129-40.
50.
Minutes of the United Woodlawn Conference Directors’ Meeting, November 17, 1959, in Despres Collection, box 203, file 9; Letter to Captain Joseph Healy from Leon Despres, July 12, 1961, in Despres Collection, box 154, folder 3; Chicago Daily News, October 11, 1961.
51.
Len O’Connor, Clout: Mayor Daley and His City (New York, 1975), 86.
52.
Letter to Leon Despres from Esther Davis, president, United Woodlawn Conference, October 27, 1958.
53.
Letter to Mayor Richard J. Daley from Alderman Leon Despres, February 10, 1961, in Despres Collection, box 154, file 3. Despres does not deal with Joe Smith or Sin Corner but he does discuss Woodlawn in his autobiography, Challenging the Daley Machine: A Chicago Alderman’s Memoir (Evanston, IL, 2005).
54.
Letter to Mr. J. Ross Humphreys, Chicago Land Clearance Commission from Lorenzo Smith, president of the United Woodlawn Conference, January 21, 1961, in Despres Collection, box 203, file 9; Letter from David W. Bary, executive director, New York City Mission Society to Dr. Marshall Scott, McCormick Theological Seminary, September 21, 1959 (marked confidential), in ACW Papers, box 3, file 25; Arthur M. Brazier, Black Self-Determination: The Story of the Woodlawn Organization (Grand Rapids, MI, 1969), 24-30. For middle-class flight see Lemann, Promised Land, 103. Perhaps the best overall look at the creation and early years of the Woodlawn Organization is John Hall Fish, "From Conflict to Survival: A Narrative Study of the Woodlawn Organization" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1971).
55.
Squire J. Lance, "Community on the Move in Woodlawn," undated, no source listed, clipping, in Despres Collection, box 203, file 5.
