Spatializing Blackness

Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago

Rashad Shabazz

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780252097737
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Over 277, 000 African Americans migrated to Chicago between 1900 and 1940, an influx unsurpassed in any other northern city. From the start, carceral powers literally and figuratively created a prison-like environment to contain these African Americans within the so-called Black Belt on the city's South Side.

A geographic study of race and gender, Spatializing Blackness casts light upon the ubiquitous--and ordinary--ways carceral power functions in places where African Americans live. Moving from the kitchenette to the prison cell, and mining forgotten facts from sources as diverse as maps and memoirs, Rashad Shabazz explores the myriad architectures of confinement, policing, surveillance, urban planning, and incarceration. In particular, he investigates how the ongoing carceral effort oriented and imbued black male bodies and gender performance from the Progressive Era to the present. The result is an essential interdisciplinary study that highlights the racialization of space, the role of containment in subordinating African Americans, the politics of mobility under conditions of alleged freedom, and the ways black men cope with--and resist--spacial containment.

A timely response to the massive upswing in carceral forms within society, Spatializing Blackness examines how these mechanisms came to exist, why society aimed them against African Americans, and the consequences for black communities and black masculinity both historically and today.

1

Policing Interracial Sex

Mapping Black Male Location in Chicago
during the Progressive Era

The persistence of the Black Belt, whose inhabitants can neither scatter as individuals nor expand as a group, is no accident.

—St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis

The sexual question and the racial question have always been intertwined, you know.

—James Baldwin, Conversations with James Baldwin

Introduction

To tell the story about how carceral power became a permanent fixture in Black Chicago requires explaining the obsession over Black/white sex and the multiple ways it was used to organize social and spatial (henceforth: sociospatial) life during the early part of the twentieth century. I analyze this story through a close examination of police officers, police practices, and race theorists.

Carceral power—in the form of policing—entered the Black Belt in Chicago vis-à-vis attempts to control interracial sex and socializing in the Black/white sex districts. And in doing so it became a permanent fixture. Policing the Black Belt did more than install carceral power into the Black community. Policing was also a mechanism to access and consolidate whiteness, organize the racial geography of the city, and regulate Black men’s sexuality and that of the poor. Policing, however, was not simply about white repression of Black people; Blacks used police power to obviate claims of Black pathology. Using police power in Black Chicago gave the Black middle class legitimacy, making them look like moral crusaders against crime and indecency. Police power was also used to place limits on poor Blacks. I demonstrate this by interrogating the role racial and sexual politics played in the South Side vice district. I contend that policing was a dynamic exercise of power that profoundly shaped the geography of the Black Belt and social lives of whites.

This chapter also examines the role interracial sex districts played in shaping Chicago’s response to Black migration and the subsequent measures it took to control Black sexuality. Black/white sex districts had a significant influence on modernizing the city’s police force, making it possible to reorganize itself and to create new methods of policing. Finally, this chapter interrogates the role race scholars and Reconstruction discourses from the South played in framing and mobilizing the hysteria around interracial socializing and sex in Chicago.

“The Lid on the Black Belt”

Between 1890 and 1913 a shift took place regarding the tolerance over vice districts. During that period, vice went from being tolerated and even celebrated to being heavily policed and driven underground. Overnight it went from tourist craze to moral scourge. What happened during these twenty-three years to change how people in the city felt about vice? How did this change affect the lives of Black Chicagoans? What consequences did these changes have on the lives of white ethnics? And how did they transform policing?

Chicago, like many Northern cities at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, had a robust vice district called the Levee, a twenty-square-block area between Halsted Street and LaSalle Drive on the city’s South Side. Bulging with pool halls, saloons, and numerous houses of prostitution, the Levee was the city’s best-known district for vice.1 Against the backdrop of reformers’ efforts, and ultimate success, to close down districts like the Levee, vice—particularly prostitution—ballooned in new areas. The Black Belt was the primary place it migrated. In the Black Belt a new form of vice emerged: Black/white dancehalls and cafés called “Black and Tans.”

Black and Tans were nightclubs that serviced interracial socializing. This combustible mixture was seen as an indication of immorality and sexual deviance. A Chicago Daily Tribune reporter described a Black and Tan scene in this way: “All the tables were filled at 2 o’clock [A.M.], black men with white girls, white men with yellow girls, old, young, all filled with the abandonment brought about by illicit whiskey and liquor music.”2 Made popular at the beginning of the twentieth century by young whites attracted to popular dancehalls that tolerated interracial socializing, Black and Tans quickly became emblematic of racial sexual deviance. The young, middle-class whites who visited Black and Tans found that the “primitive,” lascivious, and libidinous atmosphere of these establishments allowed them to express sexuality in ways incongruent with middle-class values.

Of all the cities in the Midwest at the turn of the century, “Chicago was known for race mixing.”3 Because of the fame the city gained from it, interracial sex created much consternation and fascination among the public. The ultimate expulsion of spaces of interracial socializing from the public arena and the sequestering of them inside Black communities tells us much about the impact race and sexuality had on the construction of Chicago’s geography; most important, however, it highlights the entry point for the exercise of carceral power within Black Chicago.

Were I to choose a date for the emergence and cementing of carceral power within the Black Belt, I would choose July 17, 1914. On that day Sgt. Stanley J. Birns was killed in a shootout in Chicago’s South Side Black vice district. The violent altercation began when a gunman, intent on killing the police inspector of morals (a member of Chicago’s anti-vice morals committee), began shooting. When the bullets stopped, Sargeant Birns lay dead, and three others were wounded. In the immediate aftermath, German-born Captain Max Nootbaar was appointed head of the Twenty-Second Precinct—which housed both the Levee district and the Black Belt.4 Nootbaar had a unique assignment in the wake of the violence: “clean up the old Levee.”5 To do this Nootbaar used police power, in the form of arrests, surveillance, and police orders.6 Nicknamed “the human lid,” Nootbaar worked to put a stranglehold on vice by closing down well-known establishments, increasing the number of police in the precinct, and expanding arrests of people suspected of being involved with vice.7 “From now on,” said the captain, “the lid on the old red light district is nailed down tight. It’s going to stay nailed down tight as long as I am in command here.”8

Nootbaar’s use of police power to suppress vice was a new tactic. Since the late nineteenth century, police gave license to vice districts, rather than shut them down; this benefited the political establishment and was quite lucrative. By regulating illicit businesses in cities like Chicago, police enabled political machines to extend their power into the underground, and police provided protection in exchange for a fee. The police were also responsible for ensuring that vice did not spread beyond established districts. In Chicago, the Levee district was made up primarily of European immigrants, with a small Black community nearby. Vice was allowed to exist here as long as it did not transgress neighborhood boundaries.9

Nootbaar, however, would use police power not to protect vice but rather to stamp it out. In his first act as captain, Nootbaar ordered one of his sergeants to close the club where the police shootout had occurred—the Onion Café.10 What separated Nootbaar from other commanders who policed vice, tolerated it, even profited from it, was that Nootbaar did not: he viewed it as a moral affront to the standards of decency. His entire objective was to close all such establishments once and for all. So rather than tacit acceptance and soft policing, Nootbaar’s tactics were aggressive. For example, during his tenure as commander, Nootbaar expanded the size of the police force in his district, closed hotels and dancehalls that shielded prostitution, raided bars suspected of gambling and disobeying the 1:00 A.M. liquor law; he arrested “immoral women,” chased out panhandlers, sequestered johns, and had police officers canvas the homes of thousands of residents of the Black Belt.11 Aided by new powers granted by the anti-vice Committee of Fifteen, Nootbaar helped to transform policing in Chicago.

He did not, however, have equal revulsion for all vice; some activities were more intolerable than others. The form of vice that disgusted him more than any other was interracial socializing, dancing, and sex, which took place in the Black and Tan cabarets inside the Black Belt. For Nootbaar, Black and Tans were an affront to the morality of white women and a sign of the impending destruction of whiteness. This is illustrated in a controversy he was embroiled in regarding a Black and Tan.

In fall of 1917, three years after his promotion, the celebrated captain stood before the police board on charges of having violated state law by issuing an order to forbid social intermingling between whites and Blacks in a South Side Black and Tan café. Captain Nootbaar had shut down the café and issued a police order against Black/white socializing, drinking, and dancing. According to Nootbaar, the order was issued “to clean up vice conditions in the cafés and cabarets.” When asked about the charges the Captain argued:

I believe I had a legitimate right, when young white girls were found dancing and drinking with Negro men, to issue an order to stop this on the grounds that places which permitted such things were disorderly. No such place is reputable when young white girls are allowed to drink and dance with Negro men. I maintain that no white woman is respectable who goes to places like the Onion Café.12

The Captain punctuated his comments by saying, “I would shoot my wife and daughter if I found them in such a place.”13

Captain Nootbaar’s use of police power to interrupt social interaction between Black men and white women at a South Side café is a portal into the complex uses of carceral power in Chicago. On the surface, Nootbaar’s use of policing seems solely about denying interracial socializing and sex, but more was at stake. Issuing the order criminalized Black male–white female socializing and sex, reinforcing the sociospatial boundaries between Blacks and whites. Issuing the order also shored up or consolidated European ethnic identity into the expanding racial configuration of whiteness. Policing helped Nootbaar, a first-generation immigrant from Germany, shore up his own racial identity through reinforcing racist heteronormative masculinity. By placing boundaries around white women’s sexuality and using policing as a tool to do so, Nootbaar was able to shed his ethnic identity and enter whiteness. This point is painfully demonstrated in the use of police power to separate Blacks and whites in public.

Nootbaar’s police order also tells the paradoxical story of the different ways Black Chicago confronted policing. Many Blacks vigorously opposed the policing of their community. It was seen by most as a nuisance at best and a signifier of racial discrimination at worse. However, for others, particularly the Black middle class, supporting the efforts of police represented an opportunity to demonstrate to the world that Black people were not prone to crime, proving to white Chicago that Black people were concerned about crime, law, and order. Before telling that part of the story, I want to paint a picture of the underworld Nootbaar fought against.

The Geography of Interracial Social Space in Chicago

In the early part of the twentieth century Black/white interracial sexual relations carved out spaces of libidinal pleasure within the Black Belt. Forced there after successful campaigns to close down vice in the segregated Levee district, these spaces of Black/white pleasure, what Kevin Mumford terms “interzones,” operated outside the larger legal, racial, and sexual framework that guided the early-twentieth-century racial and sexual politics.14 Against the backdrop of the Mann Act,15 which effectively made interracial socializing, sex, and marriage illegal, the interzones changed the nature of sex work in Chicago by creating an underworld for such activities to take place.16 Progressive social reformers significantly influenced the political debates about interzones. Their response to vice—reforming the wayward habits of women and men—was influenced by the increasing demographic changes taking place in the city and the implications that held for vice districts.17 Threatened by the interracial sexual dynamics of vice in the Black Belt and emboldened by the Progressives’ reform initiatives, Chicago city officials took a stance against the interzones.

City officials, particularly Progressive reformers, had deep reservations about vice in the Black Belt and were at odds with what they called the “deviant” sex happening within the interzones. However, they were unable to eliminate it. Part of the difficulty was its location in the Black community. Black and Tans ...