By St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Clayton

First Published in 1945. 1962 edition

PART III, CHAPTER 14, p. 379 - 381

STAND IN THE CENTER OF THE BLACK BELT - AT CHICAGO's 47TH ST. AND South Parkway. Around you swirls a continuous eddy of faces-black, brown, olive, yellow, and white. Soon you will realize that this is not "just another neighborhood" of Midwest Metropolis. Glance at the newsstand on the corner. You will see the Chicago dailies - the Tribune, the Times, the Herald-American, the News, the Sun. But you will also find a number of weeklies headlining the activities of Negroes - Chicago's Defender, Bee, New-Ledger, and Metropolitan News, the Pittsburgh Courier, and a number of others. In the nearby drugstore colored clerks are bustling about. (They are seldom seen in other neighborhoods.) In most of the other stores, too, there are colored salespeople, although a white proprietor or manager usually looms in the offing. In the offices around you, colored doctors, dentists, and lawyers go about their duties. And a brown-skinned policeman saunters along swinging his club and glaring sternly at the urchins who dodge in and out among the shoppers.

Two large theaters will catch your eye with their billboards featuring Negro orchestras and vaudeville troupes, and the Negro great and near-great of Hollywood - Lena Horne, Rochester, Hattie McDaniels.

On a spring or summer day this spot, "47th and South Park," is the urban equivalent of a village square. In fact, Black Metropolis has a saying, "If you're trying to find a certain Negro in Chicago, stand on the corner of 47th and South Park long enough and you're bound to see him." There is continuous and colorful movement here - shoppers streaming in and out of stores; insurance agents turning in their collections at a funeral parlor; club reporters rushing into a newspaper office with their social notes; irate tenants filing complaints with the Office of Price Administration; job-seekers moving in and out of the United States Employment Office. Today a picket line may be calling attention to the "unfair labor practices" of a merchant. Tomorrow a girl may be selling tags on the corner for a hospital or community house. The next day you will find a group of boys soliciting signatures to place a Negro on the All-Star football team. And always a beggar or two will be in the background-a blind man, cup in hand, tapping his way along, or a legless veteran propped up against the side of a building. This is Bronzeville's central shopping district, where rents are highest and Negro merchants compete fiercely with whites for the choicest commercial spots. A few steps away from the intersection is the "largest Negro-owned department store in America," attempting to challenge the older and more experienced white retail establishments across the street. At an exclusive "Eat Shoppe" just off the boulevard, you may find a Negro Congressman or ex-Congressman dining at your elbow, or former heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, beret pushed back on his head, chuckling at the next table; in the private dining room there may be a party of civic leaders, black and white, planning reforms. A few doors away, behind the Venetian blinds of a well appointed tavern [reference to the Palm Tavern], the "big shots" of the sporting world crowd the bar on one side of the house, while the respectable "elite" takes its beers and "sizzling steaks" in the booths on the other side.

Within a half-mile radius of "47th and South Park" are clustered the major community institutions: the Negro-staffed Provident Hospital; the George Cleveland Hall Library (named for a colored physician); the YWCA; the "largest colored Catholic church in the country"; the "largest Protestant congregation in America"; the Black Belt's Hotel Grand; Parkway Community House; and the imposing Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments for middle-income families.

As important as any of these is the large four-square-mile green, Washington Park-playground of the South Side. Here in the summer thousands of Negroes of all ages congregate to play softball and tennis, to swim, or just lounge around. Here during the Depression, stormy crowds met to listen to leaders of the unemployed.

Within Black Metropolis, there are neighborhood centers of activity having their own drugstores, grocery stores, theaters, poolrooms, taverns, and churches, but " 47th and South Park" overshadows all other business areas in size and importance.

If you wander about a bit in Black Metropolis you will note that one of the most striking features of the area is the prevalence of churches, numbering some 500. Many of these edifices still bear the marks of previous ownership - six-pointed Stars of David, Hebrew and Swedish inscriptions, or names chiseled on old cornerstones which do not tally with those on new bulletin boards. On many of the business streets in the more run-down areas there are scores of "storefront" churches. To the uninitiated, this plethora of churches is no less baffling than the bewildering variety and the colorful extravagance of the names. Nowhere else in Midwest Metropolis could one find, within a stone's throw of one another, a Hebrew Baptist Church, a Baptized Believers' Holiness Church, a Universal Union Independent, a Church of Love and Faith, Spiritual, a Holy Mt. Zion Methodist Episcopal Independent, and a United Pentecostal Holiness Church. Or a cluster such as St. John's Christian Spiritual, Park Mission African Methodist Episcopal, Philadelphia Baptist, Little Rock Baptist, and the Aryan Full Gospel Mission, Spiritualist.

Churches are conspicuous, but to those who have eyes to see they arc rivaled in number by another community institution, the policy station, which is to the Negro community what the race-horse bookie is to white neighborhoods. In these mysterious little shops, tucked away in basements or behind stores, one may place a dime bet and hope to win $20 if the numbers "fall right." Definitely illegal, but tolerated by the law, the policy station is a ubiquitous institution, absent only from the more exclusive residential neighborhoods.

In addition to these more or less legitimate institutions, "tea pads" and "reefer dens," "buffet flats" and "call houses" also flourish, known only to the habitues of the underworld and to those respectable patrons, white and colored, without whose faithful support they could not exist. (Since 1912, when Chicago's Red-light District was abolished, prostitution has become a clandestine affair, though open "street-walking" does occur in isolated areas.) An occasional feature story or news article in the daily press or in a Negro weekly throws a sudden light on one of these spots - a police raid or some unexpected tragedy; and then, as in all communities, it is forgotten.

PART III, CHAPTER 17, p. 488 - 489

To open a successful business in Bronzeville makes any man something of a hero. For a policy king to do so also sets him on the road to respectability.

Most famous of these legitimate enterprises is the so-called "Jones Boys' Store." Situated on the main business street, in an area that Negro businessmen have found it difficult to enter, the store has become a master symbol of successful Negro enterprise. Its opening in 1937 was a major community event. Thousands of people filled the strict, and a special police detail was necessary to keep the traffic moving. Participants on the program appeared at a second-story window.

A popular theatrical editor was master of ceremonies and a loud speaker carried the program through the streets. First upon the program was Joe Louis who, when he appeared at the window, sent the crowd into a noisy demonstration. His wife commented to a reporter:

"I am just as thrilled over this opening as I was the night my husband won the championship." Bill (Bojangles) Robinson, the Negro dancer, stepped to the mike and kept up a stream of jokes. "Really, I don't know what you, my people, want," he said.

"You have everything. You have Jesse Owens, the fastest track man of all times; Joe Louis, the greatest fighter in the world. You even have God - Father Divine - Peace, it's wonderful! Now, you have the Jones Brothers with one of the finest stores in the world. Patronize them and do everything you can to be satisfied." Mrs. Bojangles sent her greetings: "The store is a marvelous project and is something we really need. We hope the public will patronize it today, tomorrow, and forever." From time to time the owners spoke to the audience. Even a police lieutenant was on the program, flattering the crowd with a statement to the effect that "this has been one of the best-behaved crowd I have ever witnessed in my life, and I want to tell you all I thank you." A white civil service commissioner insisted that he had advised "the boys" to open the store despite the opposition of Negro leaders. "I told the I thought it would bc on of the greatest things that ever happened in history. . . . I am indeed glad to have had a part in this celebration." Two other syndicate members' wives felicitated the owners on their "realization of a dream." One of the most prominent lawyers in the city dubbed the opening of the store "a milestone in the progress of our business," and expressed his faith that "with their excellent equipment and fine stock of merchandise I am sure they will be successful." The ceremony over, the crowds streamed through the store for hours admiring what in actuality was a medium-sized variety store. To them, however, it was the Negroes' first significant challenge to the large white department stores that dominate Bronzeville's shopping district.

One or two popular preachers were there to grace the event. They prayed and spoke. One prominent Baptist minister, though not present, later claimed the credit for persuading the policy kings to open the store:

"I was severely criticized for my contact with them. It was said that I was catering to racketeers and gambling. . . . I told them [the policy men] they were men of families - men who could stand for something in the community. My next step was to interest them in a legitimate business. They knew I disapproved of policy."

One successful Negro entrepreneur on 47th Street, who had several times been threatened with the loss of his lease, offered the following comment:

"The people who represent the policy barons have done something that none of our race has done before. By buying the building here on 47th Street and opening a store, they are showing that we must have good established places of business to compete with the white people. There are many others of our race that have large sums of money but seem to think that it should be used for pleasure and will never risk it in some business venture that will give employment to our own group. I contend that we are in the condition that we are in simply because we are not in the position to supply anything for ourselves. Everything must be obtained from white people."

A restaurant owner who is among their admirers has summed up the general attitude of Negroes toward the "Jones Boys":

"They have established a store that would do credit to any race; even the building they have was purchased by them. They may come under the head of racketeers, but as long as they have done something that no other one of our group has done, they should be given a lot of credit and are entitled to the support of our people."