Read Online Never a City So Real by Alex Kotlowitz - Free Book Online

line Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard, ten to twenty deep in places, and some spend the night in sleeping bags to secure a good viewing spot. Virtually everyone who attends the parade is African-American. In fact, an out-of-towner stumbling upon this hopping celebration might think that it was one of black Chicago’s best-kept secrets, except that it’s televised on two local stations. The truth is that the city’s imaginary borders can be as impenetrable as the Berlin Wall had been. A visiting friend once arrived at O’Hare airport and received a city map from a rental car agency; the map didn’t include the South Side.
    The parade, which is held the second Saturday in August, originated in 1928 as a salute by the
Chicago Defender
to its paperboys. The
Defender
is one of the country’s oldest African-American newspapers, and though it’s lost much of its vigor, in the 1930s and 1940s it was considered essential reading in the black community. Pullman porters would distribute the paper in southern towns, where it helped lure victims of segregation northward. The parade’s name derived from a small statue—a “Billiken”—which sat on the editor’s desk and which parade organizers claim was a Chinese god who watched over children. But Billiken, it turns out, was neither a deity nor Chinese. Around 1910, a small Chicago firm, the Billiken company, produced small figurines—sometimes in the form of penny banks—of a bullet-headed creature with pixie ears, a grinning mouth, and a rotund belly. It was the Cabbage Patch Doll of its day, a passing craze, and undoubtedly one of these figurines made its way to the desk of the
Defender
’s editor, Lucius Harper, whose nickname was “Buddy.”
    The parade’s path winds through a part of the South Side long known as Bronzeville, a neighborhood whose ups and downs have inversely reflected the nation’s mood on race. It was a thriving hub of black-owned businesses through the 1940s, the destination for blacks who fled the South in what has been hailed as one of the largest internal migrations in history. Bronzeville, where such writers as Ida B. Wells, Richard Wright, and Gwendolyn Brooks settled, was also home to Liberty Life Insurance, the first black-owned insurance company in the North, and Overton Hygienic Company, one of the foremost suppliers of African-American cosmetics. The nation’s first black-commanded regiment, the 8th, was stationed at the Armory on Giles Avenue, which was named after the regiment’s highest ranking officer, Lieutenant George L. Giles, who was killed in World War I. (The regiment’s members held off white hoodlums during the race riots of 1919, stationing themselves on the fire escape of a nearby YMCA with their weapons.)
    There’s much history here. The Pilgrim Baptist Church, formerly a synagogue (in this city of ever-changing neighborhoods, churches adorned with stars of David are a common sight), was designed by Dankmar Adler, whose father was the synagogue’s rabbi, and Louis Sullivan, with a helping hand from a young Frank Lloyd Wright (who worked for Adler and Sullivan’s firm at the time). Some consider it one of the most beautiful Sullivan interiors. The peaked-ceiling structure boasts exquisite ornamentation, organic forms juxtaposed with geometric designs. It’s also here at this church where the blues musician Thomas Dorsey pioneered modern-day black gospel music. (Dorsey authored “Precious Lord,” which has been recorded by a divergent cast, from Elvis Presley to Johnny Cash.) A mile south was the old Chess Records’ storefront where the Chess Brothers, Leonard and Phil, played a Little Walter recording, “Juke,” and conducted an early version of test marketing, placing a speaker in the corner doorway to see if people at the adjacent bus stop responded. And there’s Meyers Ace Hardware, once the site of the Sunset