Abstract
It is always hard to believe that there are things about Chicago that have not been written, but Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis succeeds in filling a void in the historical record on housing policy in Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s. Preston Smith focuses on the stances and actions taken by Chicago’s black political, business, and civic elites regarding issues such as public housing, “slum clearance,” urban renewal, homeownership, and racial integration. In many respects, Smith fills in spaces which had been left unexplored in Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (1998), historian Arnold Hirsch’s classic book about the same era. Indeed, the amount of primary source material that Smith marshals shows those spaces to be more like big gaps. Smith mines the papers of the Chicago Urban League, the Chicago Defender, and the Housing and Home Finance Agency, and of bureaucrat Robert Weaver, publisher Claude A. Barnett, and scholar and civic leader Horace Cayton, among many others, to present an impressively comprehensive narrative of the role that black elites played in the transformation of Chicago’s South Side.
Using these data, Smith argues that black elites began a steady retreat from a politics of “social democracy” and moved to embrace “racial democracy” as the ideology and strategy that would best ensure access to particular social goods (in this case housing) for African Americans. Social democracy argued for people’s “access to decent housing regardless of their ability to pay for it” (p. xiii); it inspired the activism of social reformers and “public housers” and infused much of black politics in the 1930s. After World War II, however, national reactionary anti-communist politics significantly hampered such movements, creating the need for a new rhetoric for framing the fight for racial justice. Hence, racial democracy, Smith contends, aspired to rid the United States of its original sin of racism, thereby being a beacon of racial equality and a model of triumphant U.S. democratic capitalism during this important moment of Cold War competition.
Yet while the world stage was an always present referent for Chicago’s black activists, their concerns were nonetheless quite local, and Smith offers numerous concrete controversies in which black leaders were involved. Some of these examples will be familiar to readers who know the literature on Chicago housing battles, such as those in Lake Meadows, Kenwood-Oakland, Cicero, and the Trumbull Park Homes, although for each of these Smith gives a black perspective that has often been left out of other accounts. More importantly, Smith explores new topics that have received very little, if any, attention in the existing scholarship, including the work of the Champions, a group comprised mainly of black women who protested slum clearance in the core of Chicago’s black community; the Committee to End Mob Violence, an interracial group with heavy union involvement that worked to protect and support black families under attack for moving to white neighborhoods; and the East Central Douglass [sic] Neighborhood Redevelopment Corporation, a group of black elites that chose an area from 35th to 37th Streets east of South Parkway (now King Drive) for a (failed) redevelopment effort that would be led and financed by African Americans.
In analyzing these and numerous other cases, Smith illustrates the centrality of a racial democratic frame among black elite leadership. For example, Smith’s most original intervention, which actually goes well beyond Chicago, is his chapter on the “black real estate industry.” These professionals from black-owned banks and savings and loans, insurance companies, builders, and real estate firms formed trade organizations that collected market data and coordinated business activities across the country. They also implored the white real estate industry and housing policymakers to treat black homebuyers and renters as rational and serious consumers like any other. Their aim was not a free-ride or a handout. Instead, they wanted access to the inside information, networks, and mechanisms of the capitalist housing market. In particular, they sought to “fully participate in the government-subsidized, private housing market in the way that white firms could” (p. 256). When the black National Association of Real Estate Brokers won their battle for membership in a particularly important federal government committee, President Eisenhower wrote to them, “I believe that through the partnership of government and private enterprise we are moving with ever-increasing speed toward [equal opportunity in housing’s] realization, and I am confident that the principles to which your Association is dedicated will prove to be a substantial contribution to this end” (p. 264). Smith shows that this kind of inclusion marked a substantial victory under the frame of racial democracy.
However, Smith complicates this notion of victory. He argues that while racial democracy foregrounds breaking down racial barriers and getting in the door, its silence on matters of class should not be misinterpreted to mean that class does not matter. Smith writes, “As much as racial democracy constituted a racial politics, it also represented a class politics masked by the equation of racial progress with normative middle-class achievement” (p. 9). In other words, racial democracy assumes that if some black people get access and get ahead—as did the elite members of the real estate organization in the above example—then that is progress worth celebrating. This contrasts with social democracy, which prioritizes universal provisions and participation over minority access that nonetheless maintains severe social stratification.
The contours of racial democracy that Smith elucidates empirically are well-known in the study of black politics, and attention to class schisms within the black polity has matured considerably. Hence, it is surprising that Smith engages very little with scholars who have elaborated concepts such as linked fate, secondary and advanced marginalization, middlemen and middlewomen, and black urban regimes. Smith’s work can be situated within these existing critiques of black elite leadership as propagating a rhetoric that does not challenge the political-economic core of inequality but instead legitimizes the system by demanding access to it. To be sure, Smith contributes rich new historical data. For example the aspirations to achieve a brand of black capitalism are on full display in the words of Claude Barnett, board member of Chicago’s black-owned Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company, who writes: “Let’s get our people in the habit of piling up real money for the future, building estates, saving, putting their money to work. Let’s get them WANTING homes and help them to finance them” (p. 130). Such gems from the archives are what make this book an important addition to the rich corpus of scholarship on black politics in Chicago, a literature that illuminates core concerns of U.S. politics, economics, and public policy more generally.