The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (70 page)

Talk about the atmosphere of Chicago in 1919.

Chicago during that time was home to upwardly mobile blacks, relatively speaking, who had limited success in challenging the norms, the ethos, the very superior self-understanding that even average whites possessed. As a result, blacks suffered violence as reprisal for their “uppity behavior.” So the de jure segregation of the South was replaced by the de facto segregation of the North. A lot of the violence blacks suffered was not simply of the top-down sort—violence regulated and mediated through political structures in an ostensibly democratic society. The violence had largely to do with the politics of resentment from white working-class folk who frowned on the even limited success of this burgeoning black working class. Tensions between the races were exacerbated when black scab workers were brought in to bust the unions, most of which barred black workers. In effect, the white power structure was playing musical chairs with nonunionized black workers and exploited white unionized workers, pitting the latter against the former. All this means that around 1919, the second great fire razed Chicago. The first fire happened in 1871, when Mrs. O’Leary’s legendary cow kicked the lantern that started the fire that nearly burned down Chicago.

The second fire was more redemptive, ignited when some blacks joined the working and middle classes, turning Chicago into one of the great centers of black culture in the modern West, similar to what would happen later in Los Angeles when the booming war industry drew blacks in record numbers during World War II. In Chicago, circa 1919, the stockyards were the huge attraction that helped spark Chicago’s great black migration. The stockyards and the sometimes apocryphal stories that transplanted black Southerners in Chicago sent back home that exaggerated their standard of living in the big city, as if they were, in the parlance of hip-hop, “living large.” Maybe in comparison to their old southern haunts they were living large, but they were hardly living in the lap of luxury up
North; and there were virtues to the old southern geographies that formerly dominated black life. In the South, even if they were poor, they had open spaces in fields, but in the North, their enhanced economic status confined them in tenements that stretched upward several stories and choked the landscapes and skylines of ghettoes and slums.

The North had its own variety of Jim Crow, except that it was Jim Crow, Esquire, or James Crow III. Northern racism was more subtle but no less vicious. Twenty years after 1919, during the 1940s, Chicago exploded with black aesthetic creativity, with jazz, blues, gospel, and later its own variety of soul music, making it very difficult for white Americans—especially the recently arrived white ethnic immigrants, including Poles, Italians, Lithuanians, and Irish, who populated Chicago’s burgeoning lumpen proletariat—to accept even marginal black mainstream success. The battle was classic: recently migrated southern blacks and recently immigrated white European ethnics—in Michael Novak’s famous book title (at least during his radical phase)
The Unmeltable Ethnics
, something I’m sure he’d disavow now as a leading conservative and advocate of the melting pot. In short order, tensions mounted and eventually led to race rioting in Chicago.

Were the objections concentrated on the influx of people or was it reaction to what the people brought with them, the culture?

It was both. They were indivisible because the greatest thing the people brought was themselves and their itinerant, mobile cultural meanings. According to many conservative social scientists, the urban situation was messed up because black people reshaped industrial urbanity in the first half of the twentieth century in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, and so on. Blacks brought their culture with them, a culture pervaded by blues and jazz and gospel music and spiritual sensibilities. They brought a particular understanding of what their place was, both geographically and racially, but they had to adjust as well, because transitioning from agrarian, rural life to urbanity’s more regimented, geometric living (R. Buckminster Fuller gone ghetto, so to speak, in cloistered, crabbed cubicles, geodesic domes writ small) was very difficult. The geopolitics of industrial urban space didn’t necessarily bode well for some blacks who brought cultural habits and lifestyles more suited to the South. Many blacks brought the cultural norms of creative collectivity and communal sharing with them, which were healthy and productive; black Southerners helped each other out with the meager resources they had. They also brought the habit of having a lot of family members, relatives, and friends live in one room, in the shotgun shacks that were common in parts of the South, a habit that proved to be counterproductive in some instances. Thus cultural adaptability worked for and against blacks. You usually only hear the negative side in books that detail the effect of the black migration on family structure, cultural thriving, and social cohesion and stability. But you rarely hear of the vital social and cultural habits (such as adaptable familial structures and flexible gender roles, since black women have always worked outside the home) that allowed black urbanity to flourish.

At the same time, though, the aesthetic cultures that black Southerners brought—and the joy, the frivolity, the edifying frenzy, the passionate investment in bodily expressions and syncopated rhythms and cultural significations that were important to sustaining their lives and nurturing their strong sense of self—was crucial to black survival. It also clashed with certain elements of the white mainstream, not the least of which was the perception by older whites that this black culture was ruining their children. When Louis Armstrong left New Orleans and headed to Chicago, one of his great fans was a high school–aged cat named Bix Beiderbecke. As a result, the great black migration, with its southern roots, influences the northern white populace, especially youth who are fumbling toward maturity while experiencing alienation from their parents’ world. A major way many white youth articulated their alienation, and affirmed their sanity, authenticity, and legitimacy, was by latching hold of the mores mediated through the artistic values of black culture as expressed in the imaginations and visions of its great artists. What happens is predictable: Bix becomes better known than his mentor in many artistic circles and gets the opportunity to make more money than Armstrong. Or think about Benny Goodman, who reaped huge aesthetic and financial benefit from his association with (read: appropriation) and downright ripping off of black musicians. But at least Goodman had enough sense to bring Fletcher Henderson along as his musical director, even though Goodman became famous in the first place because he had purchased twenty-four of Fletcher Henderson’s songs to make him the “King of Swing.” Damned, Duke, my sincere apologies!

So urban migration meant much more than black bodies occupying the menial workforce. It also meant the widening influence of black cultural sensibilities, even if, as was the case with Bix and Benny, they were appropriated and diluted. Black cultural influence caused great tension in the industrialized North because it meant that blackness was just so present. Its proximity was a problem. It was one thing for whites to minstrel blackness, to appropriate it for pecuniary and performative gain. Hence you had the Cotton Club in Harlem controlled by white mobsters, catering to a white clientele in the fabled bosom of blackness with a public face that was colored by its black entertainers. But it was another thing for Negroes to show up in the North looking to benefit from their own culture. Thus the aesthetic demands of Negro art caused a quake in racial and economic relations, shifting the plates along the fault lines of race that underlay the social geography.

But what was really trying for even white liberals was the actual, embodied presence of the blacks they had spoken for by proxy. When those black folk took the boat up the Mississippi to speak for themselves, it was mutiny on the white bounty! When other folk speak for you, no matter how informed or impassioned, it’s just not the same as you speaking for yourself. And part of the problem with black migration was the aesthetic encounters it forged in the public square, in the clubs and joints, and the churches and houses of worship that dotted the black
urban landscape. The emotional sweep of black experience, which was largely abstract even for white sympathizers, became flesh and dwelt among the white world up North. That experience included the pain and pathos of black life; the utter despair and the defiant hopefulness of black existence; the anguished love that strode through the rhythms of black music; the sweat and strain and aspiration of black bodies in worship or erotic wooing or work or play; the murmurs, the shrieks, the barely suppressed guffaws, the edifying laughter, the comic sensibility that confronted the doom or tragedy or evil that blacks fought, elements that they refused to make their ultimate home, their ultimate reality. All of these moods and modes of blackness were indivisible from the great black migration. While the cultural rituals that mediated the normative beliefs of the black cosmos were appealing to some whites, they were to many more a source of horror, of pity, of condescending tolerance, or of grave misunderstanding, more often outright hostility, but rarely fair engagement. Often black culture alienated whites who sought to keep blacks at arm’s length. White liberals didn’t mind fighting for black freedom, but they didn’t want blacks living next door. T.S. Eliot, the great modernist poet, said, “Between the ideal and the reality falls the shadow.” This is what Chicago was grappling with, the shadow, the dark rim of black urban existence as black bodies and beliefs challenged American notions of democracy, cityhood, and industrial civilization.

Speak to the black embrace, or not, of the migration.

Black people were greatly affected by the mainstream culture’s perceptions of their bodies, beliefs, value systems, and social visions: the baggage, metaphorically speaking, of migrating from South to North, as well as the virtues and vices that characterize black culture. Many black people accepted what white Americans believed about black culture: that it was barbaric and savage when it centered in jazz and blues, which meant that black culture at its best must move to embrace the transcendental traditions of spirituality that coursed through gospel music and evangelical, revivalist preaching. A huge problem occurred when Chicago-based musician Thomas Dorsey, the father of contemporary gospel music, introduced jazz and blues riffs in his music. Beyond the aesthetic dimensions of racial propriety, there were the social divisions of black society that were magnified in the great black migration. So the internal contradictions of black culture proved transportable as well. For instance, up North, blacks updated a habit they had practiced in places like New Orleans, known as the “paper bag” test—blacks who were darker than a plain paper bag were prevented by lighter blacks from participating in social clubs, civic organizations, or, informally, from marrying above their color-driven caste.

A hierarchy of sorts was generated among blacks when relocated Southerners who had been in place for even a year looked down on and teased their more recently arrived compatriots. It was pretty hilarious for barely seasoned former
Southerners to view their kindred as hicks or “Bamas”—the sometimes affectionate catchall term for a country bumpkin or hayseed that derives from a shortened form of Alabama. Like some second-generation Mexican immigrants who were among the most visible and articulate opponents of further immigration because it challenged their own space and security, as well as their ability to smoothly assimilate, many black migrants expressed the most vocal outrage at newly arrived hicks, when they were barely “unhicked” themselves. Chicago was little more than a suburb of Mississippi, and you can trace that genealogy all the way from blues icon Howling Wolf to the stable of stars on Chess Records and the blues lounges along 43 Street, most famously, perhaps, the Checkerboard Lounge. So these racial contretemps within black culture were part of the black modernist experience as blacks negotiated between the margins and the mainstream.

Talk about the musical establishment and their criticism of this new music, jazz.

As already noted, the first jazz record was made in 1917 by an all-white group, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, led by Paul Whiteman. How suggestive can that be, if you break down and parse Paul and white man, which is both Freudian and Jungian, since the symbol and the archetype converge? Paul, we remember, was the first great missionary of Christianity into the gentile world, and so Paul Whiteman as a missionary of sorts, acclaimed by whites as the first great king of jazz, is just too much of a signification to overlook. And “white man” as the acceptable ambassador of this music to the white world was surely glimpsed in Paul Whiteman’s Aeolian Hall concert, which marked the aesthetic mediation and economic commercialization of a black music harshly demonized by dominant society. The first jazz record and Whiteman’s Aeolian Hall concert tell us that part of the music establishment wanted to commodify and control this music—to package, market, and distribute jazz to consumers in the marketplace, benefiting its white distributors, appropriators, and dilutors. Even as the music was being dissed in elite white circles, the white musical establishment still wanted to make a buck off of jazz. The artists weren’t making the biggest money; it was the producers who were cleaning up. If you were a songwriter, you might sell your music, but you weren’t going to accumulate enough capital to really make a living from that. So the white record producers, executives, and owners who were interested in jazz reaped enormous financial remuneration from black creativity and genius, a pattern, by the way, that continues to this day in some artistic circles.

Still, there were huge debates about whether this was real music, in the European sense. Moreover, conservative elements of the musical establishment railed against jazz because they couldn’t control the music. Jazz just wasn’t the conservative music establishment’s ideal of good music. It was similar to what happened later on when ASCAP got caught with its pants down, so to speak, and was unable to control rock ‘n’ roll music because it was exclusively promoting the music of Tin Pan Alley,
with artists like Cole Porter and later Frank Sinatra. As a result, ASCAP missed a huge cultural moment and overwhelming financial opportunity. Since the conservative elements of the music industry hadn’t anticipated the degree to which jazz would invade white youth subcultures and become influential in significant white circles, it settled on curtailing the music’s circulation. Louis Armstrong made a very good living because he appealed to blacks and whites. The same was true for Duke Ellington and Count Basie and the swing movement. In one sense, mainstream white swing music was the attempt to domesticate the hot beats of ragtime in early jazz into lightly syncopated orchestral riffing. But again, it wasn’t Jimmy Lunceford or Count Basie or Duke Ellington who got the biggest advantage from the swing they helped invent. Rather, it was Paul Whiteman, Guy Lombardo, Woody Herman, the Dorsey Brothers, and Gene Krupa. Harry James, who was Benny Goodman’s trumpet player, was routinely favored over Louis Armstrong in jazz polls. What’s up with that?