Almost any schoolchild knows that the first non-Indian resident of Chicago was a black man.
But in many people`s minds, the contribution of black people to the city`s early history seems to begin and end with this man, Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable.
Shattering this unenlightened view has become the mission of Michele Madison and her older sister, Grace Mason. The two women are intent on raising public awareness of the rich role that blacks have played in Chicago`s development over the last two centuries. It is a task that the sisters are well suited for. Their great-grandparents, Isaac and Emma Atkinson, were the 13th black family to settle in Chicago, arriving here in 1847, only 10 years after the city`s incorporation.
Their most potent educational tool, in fact, is their own family history, compressed into a single, large, leatherbound album. A companion book, compiled from material collected by a late uncle, illustrates the
accomplishments great and small of 19th and early 20th Century black Chicagoans. Together the two albums speak volumes.
Grace and Michele`s campaign is a quiet one, reflecting what Michele calls her ”Victorian” sensibilities. (”I was born in the wrong century,”
she laments, betraying her passion for the past.) But the sisters` effort is no less ambitious for its emphasis on the soft sell. In the three years that they have been trying to get out the message, they have attempted to reach a considerable audience. The originals of the two albums have been donated to the Chicago Historical Society, where they are on reserve. Michele, meanwhile, uses the opportunity afforded each year by Black History Month to take her material on the road, carting her personal copies of the heavy albums to hospitals and other places where she can deliver a presentation. While she has not yet visited schools, she is exploring the possibility.
Her aim is to reach not just whites but blacks as well. ”There is no question,” she says, ”that white people need to know more about the long and productive history of Negroes in Chicago. But Negroes need to know about it as well. I want to renew black pride. Pride is something our young people have lost. They no longer have the sense that they have a chance to be somebody. They need to be told they don`t have to hang out on the corner and kill each other.”
Michele also wants to dispel the myth that all blacks come from the same background. ”It may be hard to believe, but we are all different,” she says. ”For example, not all black people eat soul food-whatever that is. I never knew how to cook greens in my life. We always ate meat and potatoes growing up.”
Michele uses the term ”Negro” without abashment. ”I`m tired of changing my labels,” she says. ”First it was `blacks.` Now it`s `African-Americans.` I don`t even feel that that Africa is part of my heritage. Negro is the word I grew up with; it`s what I relate to.”
The progenitor of the Atkinson clan came to America in the early 1800s. He was a Caucasian, a blond, blue-eyed Scotsman named Richard Atkinson, who settled near Richmond, Va., and married a full-blooded Cherokee named Cecelia. Together, they had four children, including Isaac, who was born in 1817.
Isaac married Emma Jane, who was half black and half Cherokee and was born in 1820 in Suffield, Conn., of free parentage. It was Emma who infused black blood into the family.
The couple settled in Chicago in 1847, taking up residence at State and Quincy Streets downtown. Isaac soon began operating his own bus line in the city, making a good living in the era before streetcars. Later he went to work for the Chicago and North Western Railroad and was reputedly the first person to be pensioned by the line.
Emma, a stout and sober-looking woman, spent much of her time in a dangerous enterprise, helping fugitive black slaves to escape the South via the fabled underground railroad. Chicago`s way station on this flight to freedom was then located in one of Chicago`s oldest black churches, Quinn Chapel, A.M.S., which is still standing at 2401 S. Wabash Ave.
Of Isaac and Emma`s nine children, two died in early childhood. Five of the remaining six daughters came to be called ”the long-haired sisters”
because of their unusually long coiffures-they were said to be able to sit on their hair. There was Josephine, an enthusiastic amateur thespian, clubwoman and reluctant businesswoman-it fell to her to negotiate the sale of some of the family properties. The album contains correspondence between her and her brokers, who urge her to reduce her price for a quick sale.
Frances, who was born during a family stay in Geneva, N.Y., and her sister Emma both remained unmarried. Little is known about either, but Emma, a striking woman whose album photograph depicts her in a Civil War-style gown with de rigueur fan, died at the relatively young age of 47. Then there was Nellie, whom Grace describes as ”the liberated woman of her day.” She was employed as one of the first dental assistants in Chicago in the days when women were not supposed to work, and she did not marry until she was 40.
”She (Nellie) was a real character,” Grace says. ”She was quite the belle and very opinionated.”
Nellie lived a long time, so long she spanned the generations. Grace, who is 66 years old-19 years Michele`s senior-remembers being in Nellie`s company as a girl. ”She would take me shopping when I was small. She was the kind of person who would taste the butter to see if it was fresh. If it wasn`t, the shopkeepers would get a tongue-lashing from her. She was what you would call
`spirited.` ”
When Nellie died in 1948, she was buried, as were 16 other members of the Atkinson family, in the family plot in the city`s renowned Graceland Cemetery, ”in the company,” as Michele has written in her family album, ”of Potter Palmer, the merchant prince who built State Street, and retailer Marshall Field.”
Nellie`s sister, Mary Elizabeth, was Grace and Michele`s grandmother. She was a world-class homemaker who, using only a woodburning stove that she would arise at 5 in the morning to light, made homemade doughnuts so good they make Grace`s mouth water half a century later. She also made her own root beer and mincemeat.
Mary had two children-Franklyn, nicknamed ”Petey,” who was later to become the family historian, and Essie Vivian, who would give birth to Grace and Michele. Essie married the girls` father, Ira Adolphus Scott, in 1924. He had been a doughboy in World War I and later became a postal clerk and captain in the Illinois National Guard. Essie, meanwhile, was a state official in the National P.T.A. Their marriage is the last event recorded in the huge and dogeared family bible that has endured for more than 150 years and that provided considerable source material for Michele and Grace.
Through the years, the family has owned a number of properties. Isaac and Emma raised their brood first at 420 W. Oak St. (the house, which was located near what is today the Cabrini-Green public housing project, was burned in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871) and later at 191 E. 31st Street. Still later the family moved to a home at 33rd Street and Vernon Avenue. The latter property was within sight of the lake and was an impressive Victorian structure with dressing rooms, four fireplaces and a charming winding staircase. Grace remembers deceased relatives lying in state in the old house. In 1950 the family was forced to move to make way for the huge Lake Meadows housing development. Grace and Michele`s parents, Ira and Essie, sold the house for a profit before condemnation proceedings would have sent them summarily packing. Grace says that before World War I the family was considered quite affluent and traveled easily in the upper echelons of Chicago`s social circles. ”Things were based on class more than race in those days, so wealthy blacks and whites frequently intermingled,” she says. Sadly, the Depression caused the family`s financial fortunes to wane, as did the early deaths of so Atkinson males, a circumstance that forced their widows to sell property at a loss.
