Winthrop Avenue Family

Segregation of African Americans on the south side of Chicago, through such tactics as racial restrictive covenants, is well-known and has been widely documented (Coates 2014; Hirsch 1998; Moore 2019; Spear 1967; cf. St. Clair Drake and Cayton 1945; Grossman 1989, among several others). Less well-known is the fact that these same tactics were used on the northside of the city as well, on one of the first blocks that was settled by Blacks—the 4600 block of Winthrop Avenue in Uptown. This is the story of how and when that occurred, and more importantly, the ways in which the Winthrop Avenue Family, as they referred to themselves, responded. 

At the turn of the 20th century, the extension of the Northwestern elevated train line from Downtown to Wilson Avenue inaugurated the ostensible “Golden Age” of Uptown as a wealthy business and entertainment district.

This was consolidated in 1922 when a grand new Uptown Station was built at Wilson Avenue, modeled after the recently built Grand Central Station in New York City. This led to the area’s rapid urbanization, increased population density, and the construction of multiple homes, luxury apartment buildings, and residential hotels by corporate elites.

A commercial boom coincided with this transformation and the heart of Uptown—the area bounded by Montrose, Clark, Lawrence, and Broadway—became a playground for the rich as a high-end retail and entertainment district anchored by Loren Miller’s department store, the Aragon Ballroom (1926), the Riviera Theater (1919), the Uptown Theater (1925), and Essanay Studios (1907), an early motion picture studio which made Uptown a center for the American film industry. 

All of these businesses and wealthy homes required a laboring class to service them. The extension of the rail lines facilitated this, and a number of service-related workers migrated to Uptown to take on these jobs. As a result, numerous one-room rentals and tenement buildings were being built in the neighborhood, largely by partitioning some of the larger houses, to rent out to these workers at affordable rates. This brought numerous service workers to Uptown, including recent immigrants from Europe as well as African Americans fleeing the Jim Crow south and heading to cities like Chicago as part of the Great Migration, and in some instances, trying to find housing outside the crowded “Black Belt.” There is evidence of at least two households of “black” or “mulatto” individuals in the vicinity of Wilson Avenue in the 1910 U.S. Census, one with upwards of thirteen “family” members living in a one-room basement. By 1920, there were dozens more, with at least eighteen families and additional “lodgers” living on Winthrop Avenue alone (see census records on the right).

Not surprisingly, the corporate elites were deeply invested in sustaining the image of Uptown as a white, wealthy, business and shopping district, and they fought hard to maintain it (Rai, 2016; Siegel 2002). They established multiple organizations toward this end, establishing new laws to restrict the “colored invasion” (Uptown News, 1931). One such organization was the Chicago Uptown Association (CUA), which started a campaign in 1928 for the “restriction of the Negro population in Uptown,” not because they were “opposed to colored people” as J.C. Bowers, the then President declared, but because he felt they might be “happier in a section by themselves” (Uptown News, 1931). They spent at least $8000 to circulate a petition that got property owners to agree that “no part of their property could be sold, given, conveyed, or leased to any negro for a period of 20 years.” They got signatures from 1500 property owners in support of this agreement.

Apparently, 90% of the property owners in the area bounded by Montrose, Argyle, Clark, and Sheridan signed the agreement. Henceforth, the only block in Uptown where African Americans could safely live or open establishments to serve their community was the block of 4600 Winthrop Avenue.

Partly as a result of this racism and outright segregation, the families who lived on Winthrop Avenue developed a tight-knit bond. They referred to each other as the “Winthrop Avenue Family,” and grew up surrounded by love and care by the members of their family on “the Avenue.” Oral history narratives with contemporary members of the family, almost none of whom live on the Avenue anymore, reveal only the fondest memories of life on the block, their home.

Capturing what Saidiya Hartman (2012: 30) refers to as the “secondary rhythms” of these other lives, we hear stories not of segregation and racism, but of the “elders” Mama Sophie, Aunt Ladybird, Aunt Ruthie, Aunt Earline, who always made everyone feel safe and loved, of the annual block parties where everyone danced the night away on the street, of the playground where the children of the block played every evening until they were called into dinner, of large, welcoming family dinners on the weekends and the holidays where everyone was invited, of the local pool hall owned by “Big Daddy” that boys from the block sneaked into every weekend, of restaurants on the block like the Divine Slum Clearance and later Collier’s Chicken where you got the “best-fried chicken in the city.” As one of the descendants, Leondra Price stated, “Everyone knew everyone. The sense of family, the connection…There was no one on that block who made you feel unwelcome. I could go sit with any number of people… and feel loved. We were never without love,” a sentiment that was echoed by all those we interviewed. The stories of the Winthrop Avenue family reveal a different narrative of African American life on the northside of Chicago – stories of segregation in Uptown, but not only stories of social death, racism, and loss. Instead, they all invoked love, joy, laughter, caring… sentiments and practices that have continued long after members of the Winthrop family left the 4600 block of Winthrop. Their memories were given a fitting memorial in the form of a community garden on the 4600 block; a garden that was inaugurated in 2009 by then alderwoman Helen Shiller, with the help of current members of the Winthrop Family.

References

• Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2014. “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June.

• Drake, St. Clair, and Horace R. Cayton. 1945. Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. New York: Harcourt.

• Grossman, James R. 1989. Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners and the Great Migration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

• Hartman, Saidiya. 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls,Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. New York: W.W. Norton and Co.

• Hirsch, Arnold. 1998. Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

• Moore, Natalie. Y. South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation. New York: Picador.

• Rai, Candace. 2016. Democracy’s Lot: Rhetoric, Publics, and the Places of Invention. Birmingham: University of Alabama Press.

• Siegel, Paul. 2002. Uptown Chicago: The Origins and Emergence of a Movement against Displacement, 1947-1972. University of Illinois, History Department.

• Spear, Allen H. 1967. Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920.

• Staff Writer. 1931. “1500 Uptown Owners Sign to Draw Color Line,” Uptown News, January 16.

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