was surely surprised, impressed, or overwhelmed by what she encountered in Chicago’s “Black Metropolis,” which had emerged during the early decades of the 1900s as a burgeoning cultural, religious, and political center of Black American life. As the terminus of the Illinois Central Railroad, writes Allan Spear in his 1967 text, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, “Chicago was the most accessible northern city for Negroes in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas,” attracting more Black migrants than any other northern city.16 Indeed, while the city had long boasted a sizeable Black population, including a strong Black elite and bourgeoisie class, following the start of World War I in 1914, Black American Southerners began arriving in the city in record-breaking numbers; between 1916 and 1919, an estimated 50,000–75,000 new Black residents relocated to Chicago. In 1910, the census recorded 44,108 Blacks in the city; by 1920, the number had risen to 109,458. By midcentury, the city’s black population had reached almost half a million (comparatively, the total in New York City was 340,000; in Philadelphia, 370,000; and in Detroit, 335,000).17
In addition to its accessibility by train from the South, other factors contributed to Chicago’s popularity as a destination for migrants, in particular its reputation as a place of limitless Black opportunity, a notion that was advanced in the pages of the Chicago Defender. The paper, being widely circulated across the South, frequently trumpeted the city’s advantages and actively encouraged Southern Blacks to migrate with the promise of plentiful employment, freedom from racial violence, and general prosperity. The city’s promise was also conveyed through the pages of the Sears & Roebuck catalogues (which were also widely distributed in the South), in which the Chicago-based retailer enticed consumers with its images of stylish clothing, elegant home furnishings, and the latest appliances, such as phonographs and nickel-plated stoves. On a more personal note, Blacks across the South heard exciting tales of Chicago nightlife, culture, and money making from the tens of thousands of Black men who had found work as Pullman porters on the Illinois Central Railroad line.
This new Black population from the South fundamentally shifted Chicago’s racial dynamics. Unlike Florence Sullivan, many of those who arrived with this massive influx between 1914 and 1920 were unused to, and unfamiliar with, city life and were upset to be met with inadequate wages and substandard housing. Further, the city’s racial and economic realities produced new (and exacerbated existing) racial tensions between white and Black Chicagoans. New Black migrants resented the intense anti-Black sentiment they encountered (which they had hoped they had left behind in the South), while white Chicagoans feared and racially antagonized the Black “migrant mob.” Such tensions contributed directly to the “Red Summer” race riots of 1919, which left fifteen whites and twenty-three Blacks dead and more than five hundred injured.18 The riots occurred toward the end of an era that scholars of Black history have called the “nadir of American race relations” in the United States, with riots also occurring in two dozen other towns across the United States that summer. The “nadir” refers to the period following Reconstruction from roughly 1880 to 1920—four decades in which anti-Black violence, lynchings, segregation, and legal racial discrimination reached their height both in the South and beyond, as Jim Crow spread and new and virulent forms of racism emerged in the North.
Through the close of the 1800s, many of Chicago’s Black elite had pushed toward integrationist and assimilationist goals. Yet the rise of anti-Black violence in the North, exemplified through the riots, led many to change their course, as the city’s Black leaders instead chose to veer toward a “self-help” approach—as opposed to a social justice one—such as building Black owned and operated community institutions, businesses, and political organizations and creating an internal power structure that stood apart from the city’s white leadership. In some ways, one might characterize the strategy of Chicago’s established Black bourgeoisie as akin to Black nationalism, yet it differed in that the goal of their efforts was not collective Black liberation or freedom but the promotion and cultivation of the Black respectability among middle- and upper-class Blacks, that is, the desire to prove that they were “as good as” whites. The logic went: If respectable Black Chicagoans could not look to whites to support their businesses and communities, they would build respectable and well-to-do businesses and communities of their own. These efforts would at once make de facto racial segregation the norm in twentieth-century Chicago through the hardening of racial boundaries within the city, as well as producing the neighborhood of Bronzeville as the nation’s most vibrant Black cultural hub outside of Harlem.
“A City within a City”
By the mid-1910s, the South Side of Chicago, once home to significant numbers of white ethnic Germans, Scandinavians, Poles, Irish, and Italians, was predominately Black. According to Spear, “Chicago’s Negro leaders built a complex of community organizations, institutions, and enterprises that made the South Side not simply an area of Negro concentration but a city within a city.”19 At the heart of the South Side was Bronzeville, which stretched between 22nd and 63rd Streets between State Street and Cottage Grove Avenue. From the mid-1910s through the 1950s, Bronzeville was the heartbeat of Black life, business, and culture in Chicago, a pulsing urban center that boasted a population of more than 300,000 residents in its seven-mile radius, which was filled with activity both night and day. The neighborhood was home to the leading Black institutions in Chicago, including Provident Hospital (the first Black hospital in country), the George Cleveland Hall Library, and the Wabash Avenue YMCA, as well as celebrities and political figures through the years such as Ida B. Wells, Louis Armstrong, Katherine Dunham, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, and Gwendolyn Brooks. When the sun went down, Bronzeville was well known for its nightclubs and dance halls, which featured the top stars of the day, including blues singers like Bessie Smith and Ida Cox (who also recorded a version of “Chicago Bound Blues”), as well as Prohibition-era speakeasies, gambling dens, and prostitution houses.
Yet despite this vibrancy, Chicago’s South Side was also a harsh, isolating, and difficult place for most Southern transplants. While the lure of well-paying jobs, comfortable accommodations, and leisure and entertainment opportunities characterized the dream of Chicago for migrants prior to their arrival, the reality of what met them there was markedly different, consisting of ramshackle rowhouses, overcrowded living conditions, trash-strewn streets, and so forth. At the Illinois Central train station on Twelfth Street, it was common to see “men in worn, outmoded suits carrying battered luggage, and women clutching ragged, barefooted children, looking hopefully for a familiar face.”20 Whether or not these new arrivals had contacts or relations in the city, most somehow wound up in the South Side Black Belt, where they found “festering slums.… Two-story frame houses, devoid of paint … in drab, dingy rows, surrounded by litters of garbage and ashes.”21 While many of the Black middle- and upper-class residents, such as Wells, Carter G. Woodson (whose famed Association for the Study of Negro Life and History was established in Bronzeville), and the gospel music pioneer Thomas A. Dorsey, still kept respectable homes in the area, much of the grandeur that had marked the neighborhood had eroded by 1920, a result of a variety of factors, including race riots, increasing housing restrictions, job scarcity, and the decline of the Black Church as a community and cultural center.
In Bronzeville, Florence Sullivan would find an environment that was not only vibrant and dynamic but also fraught with danger, violence, and racial unease. Bronzeville posed specific hardships and dangers for Black women, whose job opportunities were strictly limited to domestic or service work or low-paying wage work in factories, professions in which they were constantly subjected to the sexual advances of male supervisors and in which they had to spend long hours away from their husbands and children.22 This was difficult not only because of the desire to be with their families but because they had believed the going North would provide the opportunities to do so. As Jacqueline Jones notes, most black female migrants chose to relocate not only for economic opportunities but also out of deep commitment to family kinship and racial collectivism—that is, to seek out better lives for their families and children and to construct family ties that had been broken by slavery.23 Although Black women had difficulty finding jobs outside of domestic service, Chicago generally offered a “more diversified female occupational structure” than other Northern cities and thus attracted more single women and wives seeking to work
