IBO - Brian R. Lundin (100 books to read in a lifetime .txt) 📗

they could get a place of their own. Grandparents, parents, children, aunts, uncles, and cousins all lived together in a rented house or an apartment. By combining, their resources they could pay the rent and buy food. The grandmother usually did the cooking, which consisted of “pots.” These pots were usually beans, rice and cornbread, or greens, salt pork and cornbread. The pots were cheap to cook and they usually lasted a couple of days. Sunday after church was the big day for food, fried chicken, rice and gravy, macaroni and cheese and biscuits.
After World War II, blacks from the rural south begin the “Great Migration.” They came in large numbers to northern big cities like Chicago, Illinois and Detroit, Michigan. Northern companies searching for cheap laborers ran advertisements in southern newspapers promising good jobs and wages. The Chicago Defender a black owned newspaper ran ads encouraging blacks to leave the discrimination and low wages in the South to come north. Many blacks hitch hiked or hoboed north to the “Promise Land” which they thought was filled with streets made of gold, but most of the blacks borrowed or saved enough money for a Greyhound bus ticket to Chicago.
They packed their meager belonging into an old suitcase, put some chicken wings into a shoebox and headed north, but to them home was still in the south, especially Mississippi. Shortly after arriving in Chicago, Tom and Naomi, whom he affectionately called Fatmama got married, and like most black people from the south, Tom and Fatmama, moved in with Tom's cousin, Bob Waters. When Tom and Fatmama arrived in Chicago they found the poverty was almost as bad as that from which they were fleeing from in the south, but there were jobs, menial, low paying jobs, but jobs. Tom received a disability check for the wounds he had received in the war and performed odd jobs around town, but it barely supported them.
This black Migration intensified from 1940 to 1962 when the black population of Chicago increased from approximately two hundred eighty thousand to nearly one million people. Most black migrants from the south didn’t find jobs at the stockyards or other advertised in the southern papers, so many became day laborers or did domestic work; cleaning white folks houses or baby-sitting their kids. Some became entrepreneurs, opening taverns and restaurants, but not many. Most of these people were concentrated in the area between 3100 South to 5100 South, from Federal Street on the West to Cottage Grove Avenue on the East; this area known as the “Black Belt,” or “Bronzeville.”
“Bronzeville,” became the Black Metropolis of Chicago. It developed as an institutional, social, cultural and economic center for black urban life and it ran east from 47th South Parkway, now King Drive to 47th South Cottage Grove Avenue. Blacks very seldom crossed Cottage Grove Avenue an area bounding the prestigious University Of Chicago. There were clothing and grocery stores that catered to black customers. The Regal Theater was located in the 4700 block of South Parkway. The theater highlighted all the famous black entertainers: Miles Davis, Count Basie and many others performed at the theater. The upscale restaurants and blues and jazz clubs provided a musical signature for both the South Side and Chicago as a whole. Many other blacks leaving the south that took the Greyhound Bus often wound up on the West Side of the city. The Greyhound bus terminal was located in downtown Chicago, on Randolph and Wabash Street. Randolph Street was one way west, so many of the new immigrants to the city walked out of the station and boarded the first bus that came along, a Westbound bus, the West Side was a thriving but equally poor black community. In the “Black Belt” on the West and South sides of the city housing was a major concern, many greedy, mostly white; but some black landlords, sub-divided their apartment buildings into “kitchenettes” to get more rent. The property owners would rent a single-family apartment for forty-five dollars a month, but if he remodeled that one family six-room apartment into six family kitchenettes, he could charge each family $15.00 a week. Each family would have one large room, they shared the kitchen, and bathroom and the proprietor would usually provide a bed, an icebox, and an electric hot plate. Some also furnished each apartment with a folding card table and four broken down chairs; the family used mayonnaise jars for glasses. Tension between the families was high because of these close living conditions and often resulted in fights and sometimes killings. Accusations of stealing another family’s food or other items were usually the causes. Diseases were rampant and many of the people, especially the children and the elderly often got sick and died. Real estate agents, banks, and property owners all conspired to discourage blacks from moving out of the area, which resulting in overpopulation.
Bob got Tom a job as a laborer at the Armor meatpacking house at the stockyards located at 4700 South Halsted Street, the work was hard and the hours long, but the pay was good. Tom and Naomi stayed with Bob and his family for two years; finally, the Jackson’s were able to afford their own kitchenette apartment.
The building was cold in winter and hot in the summer, rats were everywhere and no matter how hard Naomi tried to keep the apartment clean the cockroaches seemed to be in an all out race whenever the lights were turned on. Tom and Naomi got married in 1949.
Mom was the first born, in 1950, then the twin boys, Billy and Johnny, in 1952, Diana came next, in 1953 and finally Elizabeth, in 1955. Even in these crowded conditions, the family was happy, they attended church every Sunday and the people in the community liked them. Many times Naomi would share her meager groceries with some of the less fortunate families in the building, a cup of sugar here, a couple of pieces of bacon there.
As the family grew, Tom found a house for rent; it had three bedrooms, a front room, a dining room and a kitchen and toilet. The rent was more than they were paying at the kitchenette, but Tom was working a lot of overtime at the yards and Naomi had found a part time job working as a barmaid at Theresa Lounge, a popular blues club located in the basement at 48th South Indiana Ave.
In 1960, while unloading boxes of meat a few of the boxes fell and killed him. Tom's friends told Naomi that the truck wasn't loaded correctly and as Tom was unloading one box off the truck, about five other boxes which weighted about two hundred pounds each fell on him, by the time the boxes had been removed he was dead. The meatpacking company Tom worked for offered Naomi Tom's salary for a month and agreed to pay for the funeral if Naomi signed a paper saying she would not sue the company, Naomi did not know how to go about suing someone, and she signed the paper.
Fatmama applied for and received monthly checks from the Aid to Dependent Children Welfare Agency after Tom's death and she continued to work at Theresa Lounge. She also received a percentage of Tom’s army disability check. In June, 1962, Fatmama and her five children moved into the Robert Taylor Homes, a just opened public housing project named after Robert Taylor the first black appointed to the Chicago Housing Authority Commission in 1938. The development occupied a two-mile stretch of South State Street. The development was a linear series of twenty-eight sixteen story high rises.”
“When did they build all the projects in the city?” Malik asked.
“As far as I know there much political maneuvering, congress authorized loans and subsidies to build eight hundred ten thousand apartment units nationwide. At the time, the politicians viewed it as an answer to the post war-housing crisis and a way to provide safe and decent housing for poor people. In Chicago, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) administered public housing developments and the mayor appointed the Executive Director with the approval of the City Council, who was responsible for implementing policies initiated by a board of directors, also appointed by the mayor. The mainly white alderman in the City Council did not want public housing developments in their wards; they feared an influx of poor black people would lower the property value, So they had the law changed by the State Legislatures to give the City Council the authority to select public housing sites in the city; consequently most of the public housing sites were built in the “Black Belt,” on the West and South Sides of the city.
The politicians defended their decision by arguing that public housing buildings would be better than the tenement buildings and kitchenette apartments which were fire and health hazard, what was not made public was the fact that public housing developments would isolate the poor blacks and their votes could be controlled by the black politicians and ministers, and the land they were on had been designated to be replaced by a major interstate highway, the Dan Ryan Expressway, Interstate I-94.
The entrances of the buildings determined the address. If the entrance faced State Street, it had a State Street address; if it faced Federal Street it had a Federal Street address. Play lots and basketball courts were in every block. A fire lane used for emergency vehicles ran through the center of the development. The parking lots were located on Federal Street, usually two to a block. Family income and composition determined rent. Most of the families consist of a single mother less than twenty years of age, receiving some type of welfare with four children or a grandmother raising her grandchildren.
Way back then the average rent was ten dollars a month. Ninety percent of these young single mothers or their daughters were raped at least once. In the beginning, Robert Taylor Homes being the largest public housing development in the world was always on the itinerary for any visiting official or politician coming to Chicago. It was a model for solving the post-war housing problem. The buildings, grounds, and properties were well-kept and social agencies like the Boys Scouts, Boys Clubs, and the YMCA had opened up facilities in the development. A Robert Taylor Drum and Burgle Corp was organized by the Urban League and they marched in the Bud Billikin Day parade, one of the largest black parades in the country usually held in early August. There was a public school located in the development, which meant the children did not have to risk crossing State Street, a very busy street to get to school. From 1962 to 1968, living in Robert Taylor Homes was not bad at all. The housing authority performed regular maintenance on the buildings and conducted periodic inspections of the apartments to ensure everything was working and only the people on the lease lived in the apartment, everyone, that lived in the apartment had to be on the lease. The new tenants received the authority guidelines when they moved in and if they violated these guidelines, the authority evicted them.”
“Tell us some more about Fatmama,” Joyce said.
“Fatmama and her family was one of the first families to move into the newly opened Robert Taylor Homes. Their apartment was freshly painted and clean. There were no rats or roaches and it was clean and warm. A friend of Fatmama's who had a truck moved the family into their new apartment; they did not have much to move. Fatmama