Asked what it was like to photograph everyday life in the storefronts and bars, the alleys and stove-heated flats in 1940s Bronzeville, Wayne Miller replies without hesitation, “It was a love affair.” But when asked to elaborate, the 82-year-old Miller pauses. His eyes dart from the bound galleys of the book of photographs spread on the table before him, to his coffee cup and out his office window to the live oaks tossing against a blue wall of northern California sky. Though words fail Miller at this moment, it doesn’t matter. His newly published “Chicago’s South Side, 1946-1948,” a remarkably intimate portrait of African-Americans in postwar Chicago, speaks for itself, plainly and from the heart.
Stored away for 50 years after two aborted attempts at publication, Miller’s warm, evocative images document a formative era in the city’s history, the great migration of African-Americans from the rural South after World War II. The newcomers found themselves in a neighborhood of rundown storefronts and crowded tenements on a strictly segregated strip of land 7 1/2 miles long and 1 1/2 miles wide south of the Loop. Landlords had carved the neighborhood’s apartment buildings into one- and two-room kitchenettes to house the thousands arriving daily from Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky and Tennessee in search of jobs. Miller was allowed to roam freely through this world, a lanky young white man with a camera, and he returned his subjects’ generosity with a poignant portrayal of their joys and struggles. His lens captures unguarded domestic life amid the barely heated, ramshackle rooms and the lively social scene in Bronzeville’s bars and nightclubs, pool halls, churches and playlots.
A recurring theme that runs though these lush black-and-white images is the newly arrived residents’ sense of connection to the traditions of the rural Southern life they had left behind. “There is a feeling of authenticity in the way he (Miller) caught these people giving themselves to their ritual moments,” says James Alan McPherson, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and professor of literature at the University of Iowa. “For instance, look at the woman sweeping down the steps. That’s a Southern custom, a daily ritual. When you are sweeping down the steps, you’re supposed to be warding off bad spirits. The Greeks had a similar superstition about doorways.”
Former Bronzeville resident Troy Duster, now professor of sociology and director of the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of California at Berkeley, says that the photographs are remarkable for “the way in which they recapture the feeling of the time, when people were much more connected. . . . Part of that had to do with the fact that the new arrivals came from rural backgrounds. This was a first-generation migration of country people from small Southern towns. Miller’s photographs convey that.”
The project was launched when Miller, a combat photographer during the war, approached the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for a fellowship in 1946. “The Way of Life of the Northern Negro” was the ambitious title of his proposal to document the changes taking place on Chicago’s South Side as a result of the postwar Southern migration. For the first few months after receiving the fellowship, Miller kept busy with freelance magazine assignments while he fretted over how to begin unraveling the mysteries of life on the South Side.
“I wondered, What have I done?” he recalls. “I knew nothing about the South Side or the people who lived there. It was all a mystery to me. But I guess if you are foolish enough to propose such a grandiose-sounding project, then of course you are going to be numbed by the prospect of setting out.” But finally Miller, newly married and starting a family, simply “slung my Rollei around my neck and drove down to the South Side and got started.”
A visit early on to the South Parkway Community Center resulted in a chance meeting with author Horace Cayton, who introduced Miller to Ben Burns, the founder of Ebony magazine, whose editorial office was a roll-top desk in the rear of the center. Burns and Cayton became invaluable resources for Miller as he trolled the streets of Bronzeville, watching life unfold in homes, workplaces and nightspots. Burns gave him magazine assignments that took him to places he couldn’t have discovered on his own–and occasionally provided an acceptable reason for a white man to be roaming the streets of Bronzeville with a camera. In a foreword to his book, Miller wrote that he was challenged only a few times by curious residents. “I’d cheat a little and answer, `Oh, I’m with Ebony magazine.’ As a rule though, (people) were gracious and generous.”
As time went on, he says, “I began to see that carrying out the assignment on the South Side was not unlike the work I did during the war as part of (a) combat photo unit. Our orders were to go off on our own and photograph what we thought was important. As a result, I kept working–and working off the tension of being unsure of myself, striving all the time to dig deeper. I learned that the big stuff is always there when you take the time to really look. The photographs I took during the war were photographs of war, just as these are photographs of the people on the South Side, but in another sense they represent the way in which I was digging deep down inside myself at the time for a thing I couldn’t name.”
The images do the naming. “Pool halls, bars, barbershops and beauty parlors were the places where gossip was exchanged, stories were told, styles were compared,” says McPherson. “The communal basis for all of this was rooted in the South. It was a simple life that I prefer to call `drylongso,’ a word black Americans use that means `just average.’ Just plain folks, as the photographs show. People are revealed just as they were, in their most intimate moments. I wonder how this guy got so close to people.”
Miller says he did it by relying on a technique he developed during the war, of circulating among people without being intrusive. “I call it becoming invisible,” he says. “Your heart has to be in the right place to do it, though it’s not at all the relaxed sensation that those words imply. I was on pins and needles all the time during this project, yet I felt that I was in a kind of sympathy with people’s thoughts and feelings. I was simply curious and so people ignored me. I became invisible as far as they were concerned.”
Kerry Tremain, curator of an exhibit of the photographs last year at Berkeley, believes that Miller’s extraordinary access to the interior lives of the people he photographed was due less to any invisibility factor than to his ease in quickly developing a relationship with his subjects. “Obviously, a white guy coming into a pool hall on the South Side in those days was not invisible,” he says. “The invisibility that Wayne talks about isn’t really gained by being a fly on the wall. It occurs because people become comfortable with you. A lot of the warmth you see in the pictures is a reflection of Wayne’s warmth.”
McPherson agrees. “The eye that took these pictures is a compassionate yet realistic eye. There is no prejudice in it. It sees the simple humanity in people. I was surprised that a white man could capture black people in their most private moments in the late ’40s in Chicago.”
Just as surprising, perhaps, is the time it took for Miller’s work to be published, though it did get early attention from some literary lions of the time. In 1949, Nelson Algren expressed an interest in doing a book around the photos, but Miller declined. “I didn’t like his politics. He was carrying a torch that went against what I was trying to say in the photographs.” Langston Hughes then offered to write a book incorporating the photographs, but Miller was put off by his lack of enthusiasm. “He wanted me to tell him what the book should say. That indicated to me that his heart wasn’t in the project, so I just put the photographs away in a box in my files.”
That’s where they stayed until five years ago, when Ken Light, curator of the Center for Photography at the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley and Miller’s neighbor, suggested an exhibit of the work. The opportunity to have the photographs published by the University of California Press came about as a result of that show. “Right away, we knew that the South Side work was just wonderful,” says Light. “It’s a very important story and knowing that it was unseen made it all the more important to get it out into the world.”
When Miller arrived, Chicago’s South Side was enjoying a kind of renaissance as the capital of black America. Newcomers were arriving daily in record numbers at the Illinois Central station on 12th Street and South Michigan Avenue, lured by the promise of steady employment in the city’s stockyards, steel mills and auto factories. Bronzeville had quickly become the largest contiguous settlement of African-Americans in the United States and, with a population in 1946 of more than 375,000 and counting, was straining against its racially drawn boundaries.
“The South Side may have been crowded, but it was a real neighborhood in those days,” says Duster, the University of California professor, who grew up at 21st Street and Prairie Avenue. “Not many of us owned cars, so the streets were relatively quiet. You walked everywhere within a five- or six-block radius of your home, and you tended to know most of the people living in your neighborhood.
“For someone who was not part of that scene, well-made photographs of the iceman and people sitting on stoops and outside storefronts talking might seem like an artistic achievement, but for me they evoke a set of memories of a whole way of living that I used to know.”
Bronzeville’s South Parkway Community House, run by Cayton, was an important center of local activity, as popular among residents of the area as the civic leaders, sports figures, musicians and artists who lent it a pride of place unrivaled to this day. Joe Louis, world heavyweight boxing champion, called Bronzeville home, as did Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks, singer Mahalia Jackson and Rep. William Dawson, one of the first African-American members of Congress. Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, Muddy Waters and Cab Calloway appeared regularly in neighborhood nightclubs such as the Rhumboogie, the Savoy, the DeLisa and El Grotto.
“The black middle class at that time didn’t want to have much to do with people at the Rhumboogie, because they were too busy trying to prove themselves capable of being white,” observes McPherson, whose recent book “A Region Not Home: Reflections From Exile” describes the conflicting feelings African-Americans often felt in establishing a cultural identity. “They looked down on the blues and jazz clubs because they thought that that was just a stereotype. But the truth is, the black Americans in those clubs were giving Chicago a cultural identity. Many were illiterate people, but now, thanks to them, Chicago is the blues capital of the world.”
Tremain, who interviewed Miller for the book “Witness in Our Time: Social Documentary Photography,” was “fascinated and moved” when Miller first showed him his South Side photographs two years ago. Tremain believes they are a profound piece of American history that until now has not been adequately represented in the photographic record. “The migration of black Americans from the South to the North during the Second World War and the ’50s was the biggest internal migration in the history of the United States. It had an impact on almost every important domestic political issue that this country has faced since then. Inner cities, poverty, welfare, civil rights–all are a byproduct of this enormous shift in our population. . . .
“But Wayne wasn’t particularly interested in politics. That’s the beauty of it. The pictures are not agenda pictures. They simply document what he saw when he entered this community day after day to photograph the lives of people making the transition from a rural, agricultural way of life to life in a more crowded, urban setting.”
Duster cautions that though Miller’s photographs are beautiful, people should remember that it was an era of extreme racism and that for most people life was harsh. “You don’t want to exceptionalize the life depicted in these photographs and have people going away from it saying, ‘Well, this was a bygone era and wasn’t it wonderful,’ ” says Duster. “You want to see them in context. You want to make it clear that the photographs are a manifestation of a sociohistorical economic situation and that people responded to the circumstances they found themselves in differently than they would now.”
McPherson, on the other hand, believes that the generation of African-Americans who came North during this period had a heroic sense that gave them a strength and vitality that people today still hunger for. “You know, Booker T. Washington used to preach, ‘Stay South, cast down your buckets where you are. Don’t leave this house.’ But these people did leave. They went up to Chicago and they found places to live and even though it was tough, they stayed. In a way they were like the Greeks. The Greeks viewed agon, or strife, as central to their self-conception . . . that strife was there to make you stronger and to help you overcome.
“This book is a window on a communal way of life that, although impoverished, was optimistic. It provides new visual insights into a past that was not as bleak as many people think. A certain optimism that people still hunger for today shines through all of the pictures. Looking at them, older people will feel nostalgia for the communal way of life that we had, our rituals and folk traditions. Young kids don’t know anything about that. So this will be good for them too.”
