The neighborhoods along Chicago’s southern lakefront have been so thoroughly studied that sociologists sometimes confront each other, notebooks and tape recorders in hand, as if they were competing for choice territory.
While researching her new book “Black on the Block,” about North Kenwood-Oakland, sociology professor Mary Pattillo went to a community meeting only to find another academic present.
“I said, ‘Hey, back off. This is my beat-cop meeting,'” recalled Pattillo, who teaches at Northwestern University.
Chicago’s South Side is “the most studied place in the world,” according to Howard Becker, one of the most influential of American sociologists. Pattillo’s book, published this year, is the latest to explore the Black Belt, the area’s historic name.
Not only do scholars trip over each other in the community, the titles of their books echo each other. Allan Spear’s “Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920” released in 1967, was followed by Arnold Hirsch’s “Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960,” published in 1998.
Those and similar books collectively paint a portrait of Chicago’s black community over a century — from when African-Americans came to the city hoping to escape Jim Crow to the present-day gentrification described in Pattillo’s book.
Becker, who long taught at Northwestern University, says it was the South Side’s geographic destiny to be the nation’s premier human laboratory because of its proximity to the University of Chicago. Midway along the city’s southern lakefront, the university is where sociology was born as an academic discipline in 1892.
Nearby were neighborhoods that bear undeniable witness to a prescient observation of W.E.B. Du Bois, a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
“The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line,” Du Bois wrote in his 1903 book, “The Souls of Black Folk.”
Exploring beyond U. of C.
In Chicago, that color line ran down streets like Cottage Grove Avenue. To the east, lay neighborhoods such as Hyde Park, the U. of C.’s home grounds, and North Kenwood-Oakland, considered a fashionable address when blacks were barred from living there. They were kept west of Cottage Grove by restrictive covenants that prohibited land sales to non-whites until the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the practice in the 1940s. That juxtaposition between the best and worst in American life — a stately Gothic campus that looked liked it had been brought whole from the English countryside and nearby street-scenes of poverty and despair — tempted the U. of C.’s early faculty members to explore the city beyond the campus, noted James Grossman, editor of the “Encyclopedia of Chicago.”
“They had their graduate students running around the South Side studying everything” said Grossman, author of “Land of Hope,” which recounts the origins of the Black Belt in a mass movement of African-Americans from Mississippi and Alabama to Chicago during World War I.
Pattillo notes that the U. of C., from which she got her PhD, is not the only university adjoining a major black community. Columbia University, where she was an undergraduate, has a similar proximity to Harlem. Columbia was also a pioneer of sociology. Yet that didn’t inspire a flood of books about Harlem.
But Robert Park, the formative figure in what was dubbed the Chicago School of Sociology, believed that looking came before theorizing.
“Park was a journalist before becoming a sociologist,” said Pattillo. “He inspired his students with the idea that it’s all about going out and getting the story.”
But Mitchell Duneier felt the impulse to get the story when he came to the U. of C. in the 1980s. One day, he walked into Valois, a steam-table restaurant on 53rd Street shared by students and neighborhood residents.
“I met a group of working-class black men, something I hadn’t found in any of the books I’d been reading about the city for my classes,” said Duneier, a professor at Princeton University. “We read about the black underclass and the black middle class. But the vast majority of South Siders who weren’t either weren’t part of the discussion.”
He went back, time after time, fascinated by characters, including Pink Suit Willie and Harry the Hat, who made the restaurant seem like Noah’s Ark to the suburban-bred Duneier. The result was the 1992 book “Slim’s Table,” named in honor of Nate “Slim” Douglas, a Valois regular. It’s considered a modern classic by sociologists.
Duneier saw in Slim, a 65-year-old mechanic, living evidence that the work ethic hadn’t vanished in the ghetto, then a popular thesis among urbanologists and policymakers.
Arguing with accepted wisdom is a particularly fruitful style of scholarship in the Black Belt, noted Becker, who was a graduate student at the U. of C. Because it has been studied for so long, and by so many, Chicago’s black community attracts generation after generation of scholars who scrutinize what their predecessors did.
A decade before Duneier pulled up a chair to Slim’s table on 53rd Street, Elijah Anderson sat on a bar stool in a tavern he dubbed “Jelly’s.”
“On the streets near Jelly’s, one can’t help noticing the sidewalks and gutters littered with tin cans, old newspapers, paper sacks and whatever,” Anderson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in “A Place on the Corner.”
“Most people who use this general area have come to accept their deteriorated physical world as it is. They simply make the best of it.”
Upon coming to the U. of C. for graduate school, Anderson recalled being intrigued by the suggestion of professor Gerald Suttles that slums, no less than suburbs, have a social order. To test that thesis, he spent three years at Jelly’s.
“I had two communities,” Anderson said, “the university and Jelly’s.”
The difference between what Anderson reported and Duneier found doesn’t mean one was right and the other wrong, noted William Julius Wilson, author of the 2006 book “There Goes The Neighborhood.” Life is complicated, so should sociology.
Chicago hammered that truth home, recalled Wilson, now professor at Harvard University and formerly a U. of C. faculty member. When he came to the U. of C. in the early ’70s, he’d already formulated the thesis of his influential 1978 book, “The Declining Significance of Race.” The black community was bounded by class as well as skin color, he thought.
“My first days driving around the South Side I saw ghettos and, very nearby, middle-class areas,” Wilson said. “The gap between the haves and have-nots couldn’t be missed.”
He added that the hallmark of the Chicago School of Sociology has always been straightforward reporting of differences, and a sensitivity to “nuances of attitude and behavior.”
‘Community of stark contrasts’
That quality is precisely what struck St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton when they studied the Black Belt for the classic book “Black Metropolis.” Published in 1945, the book contains insights for today.
“Stand in the center of the Black Belt — at Chicago’s 47th St. and South Park Way. Around you swirls a continuous eddy of face — black, brown, olive, yellow and white. Soon you will realize that this is not ‘just another neighborhood,'” Drake and Cayton wrote. “This is a community of stark contrasts, the facets of its life as varied as the colors of its people’s skins.”
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South Side stories
More than 30 books have been written by sociologists, historians and others about areas within the black community known as the Black Belt on Chicago’s South Side. The books offer historical perspectives on issues from segregation to gentrification.
“Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration,’ James Grossman, (1989)
“Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago,” Harold Gosnell, (1935)
“Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904-1930,” William H. Kenney, (1993)
“Black on the Block,” Mary Pattillo, (2007)
“American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto,” Sudhir Venkatesh, (2000)
“Black Metropolis,” St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, (1945)
“Slim’s Table,” Mitchell Duneier, (1992)
“Call Me Neighbor, Call Me Friend: The Case Study of the Integration of a Neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side,” Philip Johnson, (1965)
“There Goes The Neighborhood,” William Julius Wilson, (2006)
“The South Side: The Racial Transformation of an American Neighborhood,” Louis Rosen, (1998)
The story of a man who grew up in a South Side neighborhood as it changed from white to black.
Sources: Tribune research, “The Chicago School of Sociology” by Martin Bulmer, Amazon.com
Chicago Tribune/Gentry Sleets and Phil Geib
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rgrossman@tribune.com
