There was at least one part of town where an editorial attack from the Tribune could be good for your community standing. It was the part known as the “Black Belt,” “Bronzeville” or “the other Chicago.”
A 1959 item by a columnist in the city’s largest black-owned newspaper, the Defender (and cited in the 1960 book “Negro Politics” by James Q. Wilson), offers a good example:
A local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapter was sharply divided over the worthiness of a leading organizer. His critics charged he was too soft on racial affronts by the city’s white establishment. But when the Tribune editorially took the NAACP leader to task for speaking too belligerently at a Board of Education budget hearing, his critics in the black community rallied to his side.
“The Chicago Tribune has inadvertently helped to heal the breach between the warring factions inside the Chicago branch of the NAACP,” a Defender columnist wrote. “. . . Leadership rests upon the kind of enemies you make.”
Enemies? Could that columnist have been referring to the same Chicago Tribune that was a leading voice against slavery in the pre-Civil War years? The same newspaper that helped launch the party and presidential campaign of Abraham Lincoln? The same daily that eagerly boosted the city’s earliest black leadership to citywide prominence?
The Tribune has been many things to black Chicago, depending on whom you asked and when you asked it. In a century and a half as one of the most important institutions in a sometimes hostile downtown establishment, the newspaper reflected the racial ambivalence of other leading city institutions and those of the nation. In its best moments, its powerful voice was a leader in calling for racial reforms. At other times, it would find itself racing to catch up.
Tribune Editor Joseph Medill was a leading abolitionist and racial reformer in an era when editors did little to disguise their political activism. Working closely with his friend John Jones, the city’s first black community leader of note, he crusaded successfully in 1865 to repeal the state’s “Black Laws” that restricted Negro rights and segregated public schools. Medill also persuaded fellow Republicans at the 1869 Illinois Constitutional Convention to grant black Illinoisans the right to vote. The measure was ratified in 1870. The next year, Jones was elected Cook County commissioner, the county’s first black elected public official.
Chicago has had a black population since before there was a Chicago. Its first non-Indian settler was a mixed-race Haitian, Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable, who ran a trading post on the banks of the Chicago River next door to the current location of Tribune Tower. Still, by 1870 the number of Negro property owners in the city, 39, could be listed on a single page.
The Tribune and most black Chicago voters shared loyalties to the party of Lincoln until Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal lured many blacks to the Democratic camp in the 1930s. In the meantime, the newspaper tended to give the same blanket endorsement to black Republicans that it gave to white Republicans. Most prominent, for many years, was Oscar DePriest, Chicago’s first black alderman, who in 1928 became the nation’s first black congressman since Reconstruction.
By then, the first great migration, spurred by industrialists seeking cheap and non-unionized labor, was swelling the ranks of the city’s black population. That population-77 out of a total of 4,170 when Chicago was incorporated as a city in 1837-grew slowly from 30,150 in 1900 to 44,103 in 1910. Then it more than doubled in each of the next two decades, to 109,458 in 1920 and 233,903 in 1930. (The city’s total population doubled from 1.7 million to 3.4 million between 1900 and 1930.)
The Chicago Urban League estimated that in the 18 months following America’s entry into World War I on April 6, 1917, more than 50,000 blacks migrated into the city, mostly to the South Side “Black Belt.”
They were greeted by headlines in the downtown dailies that read:
“Negroes Arrive by Thousands-Peril to Health.”
“Half a Million Darkies from Dixie Swarm to the North to Better Themselves.”
“3,000 Southern Negroes Arrive in Last Two Days.”
Undaunted by race riots in 1919 that left 38 people dead and with at least one newspaper offering to pay for the ticket of any Negro willing to leave Chicago, they kept coming, jamming into overcrowded and segregated neighborhoods, swelling the local labor force and enriching the culture with Chicago-style blues, jazz and gospel.
“Everybody got the Defender, but the Tribune and the other downtown papers had a broader view,” recalled Timuel Black, 78, a retired college professor and longtime civil rights activist. “The Tribune had the most readership, even in the black community, even though it was criticized more.”
Like other downtown media, the Tribune was criticized when it failed to deliver a balanced portrayal of the city’s black neighborhoods. Black community leaders petitioned the downtown newspapers with mixed success for modest reforms such as capitalizing “Colored” and “Negro” and dropping racial references in crime stories when they were not germane. (The names of black suspects were routinely followed parenthetically by “colored” set off by commas.) Yet, the Tribune remained a popular read in black neighborhoods, even among those who read it as they warily viewed the “plantation politics” of white-dominated City Hall machines.
Black, widely credited with coining the term plantation politics, remembered growing up with the newspaper. “I read the Tribune like my mother and father did and we exchanged views,” he recalled. “I remember, with what seemed typical of the Tribune’s attitude, there was a columnist who commented on the fact that blacks did so well in the (1932) Olympics-(Chicago sprinter) Ralph Metcalfe and others. He said the reason `Negroes’ won these short races was because they had a special inherited thing in their feet and heels that gave them a biological advantage.
“Well, we took it and laughed, but that was what the Tribune printed. It was almost as if to say blacks didn’t have the endurance to run the long races. It was obviously a racial comment about inherited differences. That was the general tone of the Tribune. So we did not look at the Tribune as even being a fair paper. Still, we felt we had to read it, even if only to see what the enemy was saying.”
Black knows because the Tribune certified his older brother to be a Tribune street salesman, which enabled him to open a newsstand on a South Side corner. “He sold a lot of Tribunes,” Black recalled, “although he usually sold more of the Hearst papers. They tended to go for the sensational, which caught people’s eyes. The Tribune was always more reserved-and more respected.”
The man who most dramatically shaped the Tribune’s growth and image in the first half of this century was Col. Robert R. McCormick, the conservative publisher whose views parted company with the black community over Roosevelt’s New Deal, which he virulently opposed. As a result, many blacks came to share author Studs Terkel’s recollection of the Colonel as “an equal-opportunity Neanderthal” on matters of race and ethnicity.
“The Tribune didn’t care about outspoken movements of any kind,” recalled Vernon Jarrett, a retired Sun-Times columnist and a Tribune columnist in the 1970s. “These were instructions you didn’t have to write down because everybody just knew it. He (McCormick) hated the British almost as much (as FDR and the New Deal). I remember hearing McCormick talk on his WGN radio show one day about how he saved Detroit from the British.”
Dempsey Travis, 77, a South Side real estate broker, civil rights activist and author of 13 books, recalled how important the Tribune was in black households long before today’s media explosion. “As a kid, I remember reading Chicago Tribune funnies,” he said. “The Tribune had the best funnies. I didn’t need the rest of the paper. As I moved along, I saw it at the high school level as the image of the Colonel, obviously conservative. I remember when we fought so hard to get `Colored’ and `Negro’ capitalized. Then there was a breakthrough when they hired Roi Ottley to do a Negro column.”
Among his achievements, Ottley, a New York City native, had been a writer for New York’s black-owned Amsterdam News, a broadcaster for CBS radio and author of four books on black life. In 1953, he became the Tribune’s first black reporter and columnist. For seven years until his death in 1960 at age 50, he wrote popular stories and columns for the Saturday and Sunday editions and briefly conducted an interview program on WGN Radio.
Many of his columns on black community goings-on were tagged with a headline that sounds astoundingly impolite today: “Negro News.” But, after years of near invisibility, many Negroes viewed Ottley as a welcome change, a modest but important platform for displaying the leaders and achievements of black Chicago to a wider audience.
Travis recalled how, despite the newspaper’s controversial image among many blacks, he was delighted with the support that Ottley’s column and at least one Tribune editorial gave to a campaign to reform discriminatory lending practices and other racial injustices. “It was an effort, a significant effort,” Travis said. “His (Ottley’s) column only appeared once or twice a week, but we always would get that paper to see what he had. The perception was that the Tribune was changing.”
For some, that perception took a big leap backward in the days after Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton, 21, and Mark Clark, 22, were killed in December 1969 in a predawn police raid on a West Side apartment.
The Tribune ran exclusive photos that purported to show bullet holes made by Panther gunfire at police from inside the apartment. This would have contradicted witnesses who said everyone in the apartment was asleep and that the only gunfire came from the police.
On closer examination, the holes turned out to be nail holes.
Later, investigations concluded police had fired about 100 rounds into the apartment, that the Panthers might have fired one, if any, and that Hampton apparently died in his bed.
The raid unleashed a storm of protests that led in 1972 to the electoral defeat of Cook County State’s Atty. Edward Hanrahan, who directed the raid.
Critics called the “nail holes” photo the Tribune’s biggest embarrassment since a headline in some editions in 1948 declared that Thomas Dewey had defeated President Harry Truman.
The Panther photo flap obscured a more encouraging reality behind the scenes in the Tribune’s newsroom. On the heels of the civil rights movement’s advances in the early 1960s, the Tribune and other major news media accelerated efforts to recruit more non-whites and improve their coverage of all communities in the city and suburbs.
Former Chicago police officer Joseph Boyce, now an editor at the Wall Street Journal, became the newspaper’s first full-time African-American newsroom reporter in 1967. More, including me in 1969, would follow. Many have won awards, including Pulitzer Prizes, while in service for the Tribune, either alone or as part of team efforts.
The past informs the future. Like other major media of its times, the Tribune has good reason to look back with pride on much of its racial history and chagrin at some of the rest. As the influence of the newspaper has grown, so has the awareness by its editors that all communities should be covered with an eye finely tuned to fairness and balance.
With that in mind, it is possible to look back at earlier times with a new appreciation for how far the newspaper and the communities it covers have come and for how far each still has to go.
