Black Chicago's First Century by Christopher Robert Reed

Author:Christopher Robert Reed [Reed, Christopher Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies, History, Modern, 19th Century, United States, State & Local, Midwest (IA; IL; IN; KS; MI; MN; MO; ND; NE; OH; SD; WI)
ISBN: 9780826264602
Google: tQMxDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Published: 2005-07-25T03:54:32+00:00

1. White Philanthropy and Black-White Bonding

For the refined and respectable segments of the black community, interracial relations were marked by the strong ties, sometimes personal, that they maintained in the philanthropic and social welfare spheres with white industrial and commercial magnates such as George M. Pullman, Potter Palmer, Phillip D. Armour, and Marshall Field as well as social workers Jane Addams of Hull House, Graham Taylor of Chicago Commons, and Mary McDowell of the University of Chicago Settlement. Some whites, such as the Unitarian ministers Jenkin Lloyd Jones and Celia Parker Woolley, enjoyed an exalted position because of their commitment to social justice. A variety of organizations routinely carried the names of exalted Caucasians: There was the Charles Sumner Waiters Association, the Albion W. Tourgee Club, the William L. Garrison Waiters’ Unit of the Knights of Labor, the John A. Logan Colored Republican Club, the Prudence Crandall Study Club, and the GAR John Brown Post No. 10.

Of these relationships, the one that developed between former judge Albion W. Tourgee and Chicago’s black elite represented one of the more remarkable linkages of the time. It qualifies, in fact, as being somewhat unique in the annals of race relations because it embraced a mutual awareness of intellectual and ideological dependency of the members of one group on the mind of a sole member of another. It was also illustrative of the complex nature of biracial interaction in the quarter century since Emancipation, and it was a relationship that continued into the 1960s, to the chagrin of some black racial militants.205 Without a doubt, Fannie Barrier and S. Laing Williams, Ferdinand and Ida B. Wells Barnett, Lloyd G. Wheeler, Hale Giddings Parker, and others constituted the vanguard of black social, civic, and intellectual leadership, which by its very existence and composition bespoke of agency, progress, and independence. They were also people in search of powerful, influential, knowledgeable, and sensitive white friends to validate their thinking, behavior, and status. In their dealings with Tourgee, they were overwhelmingly deferential, sometimes to the point of near obsequiousness. This was all the more remarkable because it occurred in the period declared by historians to be the era of Frederick Douglass. The overwhelming influence of the old sage’s utterances and strategies did not end until his death in 1895, and even then most were still considered relevant. Whether defensive, hyperbolic racial posturing or a sincerely felt sentiment, George E. Taylor, president of the National Colored Men’s Protective Association, wrote: “As a race we owe more to Albion W. Tourgee, than to any man living.”206

For his part, Tourgee embodied all of the attributes of an equal-rights advocate par excellence. He was, in effect, a composite of Garrison, Brown, Sumner, and Thaddeus Stevens. Although he lacked abolitionist stripes emanating from the antebellum period, his exemplary level of commitment to racial equality during the Civil War, Reconstruction, and post-Reconstruction periods earned him the respect and admiration of African Americans nationally, and remarkably from all social strata of black Chicagoans. An Albion W.

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