Freedom's Ballot

African American Political Struggles in Chicago from Abolition to the Great Migration

Margaret Garb

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780226135908
• eBook ISBN: 9780226136066
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In the spring of 1915, Chicagoans elected the city's first black alderman, Oscar De Priest. In a city where African Americans made up less than five percent of the voting population, and in a nation that dismissed and denied black political participation, De Priest's victory was astonishing. It did not, however, surprise the unruly group of black activists who had been working for several decades to win representation on the city council.

Freedom's Ballot is the history of three generations of African American activists—the ministers, professionals, labor leaders, clubwomen, and entrepreneurs—who transformed twentieth-century urban politics. This is a complex and important story of how black political power was institutionalized in Chicago in the half-century following the Civil War. Margaret Garb explores the social and political fabric of Chicago, revealing how the physical makeup of the city was shaped by both political corruption and racial empowerment—in ways that can still be seen and felt today.

APPENDIX 1

African American Political Leaders in Chicago, 1870–1920

Sources: Harold Foote Gosnell, Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago (1935; reprint,

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); Charles Russell Branham, “The Transformation of Black Political Leadership in Chicago, 1864–1942,” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1981); Christopher Robert Reed, Black Chicago’s First Century, vol. 1, 1833–1900 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005).

Note: E = elected; A = appointed; R = Republican; D = Democrat

APPENDIX 2

Election Results for Mayoral and Aldermanic Candidates in the First, Second, and Third Wards, 1900–1920

Sources: Chicago Daily News Almanac, 1900–1902; Chicago Daily News Almanac and Yearbook, 1903–1921.

Note: Italicized vote totals indicate election winners.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. In 1900, 17 percent of southern African Americans lived in cities, making up about 31 percent of the region’s urban population. Most studies of the South in this period focus on rural and small-town life. Some work has focused on black community development in southern cities. See, for example, John W. Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 1860–1880 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973); Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); George C. Wright, Life behind a Veil: Blacks in Louisville, Kentucky, 1865–1930 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985); Michael W. Fitzgerald, Urban Emancipation: Popular Politics in Reconstruction Mobile, 1860–1890 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002); David Goldfield, Region, Race, and Cities: Interpreting the Urban South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997).

2. William P. Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005); Jones, “Black Milwaukee, Proletarianism, and the Making of Black Working-Class History,” Journal of Urban History 33 (2007): 544. Jones’s study of southern lumber workers and other recent works have gone a long way toward overturning the traditional narrative. But in much of the literature on African American life influenced by the 1920s and 1930s studies of Howard W. Odum and his students, black Americans were long portrayed, at best, as a prepolitical peasant class. See for example, Lynn Moss Sanders, Howard W. Odum’s Folklore Odyssey: Transformation to Tolerance through African American Folk Studies (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003). Among the important recent challenges to this view are Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses; Leslie Brown, Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community Development in the Jim Crow South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Adele Oltman, Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition: Black Christian Nationalism in the Age of Jim Crow (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008); Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

3. See, for example, Daniel Letwin, The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1878–1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Eric Arnesen, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863–1923 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Tera W. Hunter, To ’joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labor after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Peter J. Rachleff, Black Labor in the South: Richmond, Virginia, 1865–1890 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984).

4. In one of the very few efforts to compare African American life in southern and northern cities, Howard N. Rabinowitz writes, “In general, the differences in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Frontispiece
• Introduction. From Party to Race
• One. History, Memory, and One Man’s Vote
• Two. Setting Agendas, Demanding Rights, and the Black Press
• Three. Women’s Rights, the World’s Fair, and Activists on the National Stage
• Four. Challenging Urban Space, Organizing Labor
• Five. Virtue, Vice, and Building the Machine
• Six. Representation and “Race Men”
• Epilogue. Film, History, and the Birth of a Black Political Culture
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix 1: African American Political Leaders, 1870–1920
• Appendix 2: Election Results for Mayoral and Aldermanic Candidates in the First, Second, and Third Wards, 1900–1920
• Notes
• Index