Airport Homes Race Riots of 1946. Whites Protested Negroes Moving Into New Temporary Housing Projects.

---

In historical writing and analysis, PRESENTISM introduces present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. Presentism is a form of cultural bias that creates a distorted understanding of the subject matter. Reading modern notions of morality into the past is committing the error of presentism. Historical accounts are written by people and can be slanted, so I try my hardest to present fact-based and well-researched articles.

Facts don't require one's approval or acceptance.

I present [PG-13] articles without regard to race, color, political party, or religious beliefs, including Atheism, national origin, citizenship status, gender, LGBTQ+ status, disability, military status, or educational level. What I present are facts — NOT Alternative Facts — about the subject. You won't find articles or readers' comments that spread rumors, lies, hateful statements, and people instigating arguments or fights.

FOR HISTORICAL CLARITY

When I write about the INDIGENOUS PEOPLE, I follow this historical terminology:

• The use of old commonly used terms, disrespectful today, i.e., REDMAN or REDMEN, SAVAGES, and HALF-BREED are explained in this article.

Writing about AFRICAN-AMERICAN history, I follow these race terms:

• "NEGRO" was the term used until the mid-1960s.
• "BLACK" started being used in the mid-1960s.
• "AFRICAN-AMERICAN" [Afro-American] began usage in the late 1980s.

— PLEASE PRACTICE HISTORICISM —

THE INTERPRETATION OF THE PAST IN ITS OWN CONTEXT.

 

---

Faced with millions of returning veterans after WWII and the ''baby boomer'' families they were beginning, housing became Chicago's first priority. It was estimated that 375,000 negroes were living in the South Side 'black belt' in housing designed to accommodate only 110,000. They had to move out, and the only place to go was to previously all-white, working-class neighborhoods.

Example of post-WW II prefab aluminum and steel houses.

"Airport Homes" was the name of the site, near Midway Airport, established by the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) to provide temporary housing during the postwar housing shortage. Residents of West Lawn and West Elsdon rioted and succeeded in intimidating negro war veterans from joining white veterans in the homes. The upheaval against negroes happened during the working hours while the white men were at work, which meant that the elderly and the women were the ones who started the riot.

On a cold afternoon on December 5, 1946, Vernon D. Jarrett, a young reporter on his first assignment with the Chicago Defender, one of the most prominent Negro newspapers in the nation, drove across Chicago’s South Side to the mundane residential neighborhood of West Lawn to cover an extraordinary event. That day, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) attempted to move two negro families into the Airport Homes housing project, a collection of temporary shelters erected on an open field at 60th Street and Karlov Avenue for veteran soldiers returning from World War II. For the CHA, Defender reporters, and hundreds of thousands of other negroes inhumanely crammed into a narrow ghetto located farther east, the integration of the project marked a tentative, yet hopeful step in addressing Chicago’s severe racial segregation.

The residents of West Lawn and other white neighborhoods on the Southwest Side, however, had a different reaction. They saw the arrival of the first negro residents as an invasion to be repelled by any means necessary. A large, vicious mob formed around the housing project, shouting “Ni**ers, go home” and “Kill the dirty communists.” They also promised to honor the newcomers with a lynching. The priorities of Jarrett and other members of the media, negro and white alike, quickly changed from covering the chaotic scene to self-preservation when the wild crowd identified them as “white ni**er-lovers” to be punished. Unable to safely retreat to their cars, they ducked into one of the project’s homes. The shoddy construction of the unit spared their lives. The wet, damp unit prevented a group of teenagers from succeeding in their attempt to, in their words, “barbecue all you ni**ers and white ni**er lovers.” Eventually, the Chicago Police Department escorted Jarrett and his trapped companions to safety.

Preying on racial fears, real estate speculators began to turn entire neighborhoods from white to negro virtually overnight. In the bargain, they turned handsome profits for themselves, scaring white families into selling their homes far below market values, and turning around to sell them to negroes at highly inflated prices. It was a situation intolerably inhumane both to negroes and whites.

Chicago's major newspapers published very few details about the riots at the recommendation of the city's Commission on Human Relations (CHR), who feared that excessive coverage would make the riots worse. As a result, there is very little information available on the riots. 

The riots were large-scale, with thousands of whites attacking negro-owned or rented homes in their neighborhoods, stoning police, and beating hapless negro and white passersby. After the Airport Homes riot other riots occurred in the Fernwood Park area on the Southwest Side in 1947, and in Englewood, Park Manor, and Trumbull Park areas on the South Side in 1949 and 1953, also spilling over into suburban Cicero in 1951. Those were the big riots, but the Human Relations Commission reported a total of 357 serious racial incidents between 1945 and 1950 over negroes moving into previously white enclaves.

With the power to veto placement of public housing in white neighborhoods, the city council effectively defeated any integration efforts attempted by the CHA. If an alderman in a white ward thought the CHA was going to try to bring blacks into one of his neighborhoods with a proposed project, he simply had the council deny the CHA permission to acquire the site.

Given the council's veto power, the whole CHA policy quickly shifted to contain the city's black population in its already overcrowded ghetto neighborhoods. Land in the ghettoes was at a premium, and it soon became apparent that the only way to build the numbers of cheap rental units that were needed was to build up — to go into high-rise construction.

The 1946 riots were the worst episode of racially inspired violence that the city faced since the 1919 Chicago Race Riots.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

---

ADDITIONAL READING: 

Forgetting How to Hate: The Evolution of White Responses to Integration in Chicago, 1946-1987 — From my Digital Research Library of Illinois History Journal™ 

The Great Epizootic; an equine influenza in 1872-1873 starting in Canada, and killed horses all over North America.

Bloomington, Illinois' streets were eerily quiet for several weeks in late November and early December 1872. Horses were missing from the normally bustling downtown and surrounding neighborhoods. In the age before the internal combustion engine and the automobile, it was challenging to get from here to there without flesh-and-blood horsepower.

The Great Epizootic, which had already ravaged the East Coast and major inland cities such as Chicago, had finally reached Bloomington. Nearly every horse, mule, or donkey for miles around was sick or dying, relegated to barn or stable until the highly virulent strain of equine influenza burned through the area.

It was over, and it was challenging to shuttle passengers and goods from railroad depot to factory, store, or home since dray and omnibus lines (respectively, delivery trucks and taxis of the day) had no healthy animals. Public transportation also halted, given that horses in Bloomington-Normal and hundreds of other communities were needed to pull street railway cars. (This was before the electric era.)

The equine influenza was known as the horse flu or, more popularly, the horse epizootic (a word for a non-human epidemic). Symptoms included fever and shivering, a nasty cough, and a yellowish discharge dripping from their nostrils and mouths. For several days or more, infected horses would be listless, with heads cast down and little interest in either food or water, unable to pull or carry loads.

The 1872 North American epizootic was its most recorded outbreak in history.

Equine influenza first appeared in late September in horses pastured outside of Toronto. Within days most animals in the city's crowded stables caught the virus. The U.S. government tried to ban Canadian horses but acted too late. Within a month, border towns were infected, and the "Canadian horse disease" became a North American epidemic. By December, the virus reached the U.S. Gulf Coast, and in early 1873 outbreaks occurred in West Coast cities. It was still sweeping through Arizona Territory settlements as late as March 1873. The epizootic eventually reached Cuba, Mexico, and Central America.

At this time, the germ theory of disease was still controversial, and scientists were 20 years away from identifying viruses. Horse owners had few good options for staving off infection, and they disinfected their stables, improved the animals' feed, and covered them in new blankets. One wag wrote in the Chicago Tribune that the nation's many abused and overworked horses were bound to die of shock from this sudden outpouring of kindness. At a time when veterinary care was still primitive, others promoted more dubious remedies: gin and ginger, tinctures of arsenic, and even a bit of faith healing.

The percentage of horses infected in the continental U.S. is placed anywhere from 80 percent to the high 90s. Mortality rates were highest in urban environments, reaching 10 percent in some cities. However, more often than not, the 1872 outbreak killed between 1 and 2 percent of the horse population in any given community.

In the absence of horses and vehicles, the streets of Chicago were saved from utter desertion by vehicles drawn by hardy humans or oxen.

Every aspect of life was disrupted. Saloons ran dry without beer deliveries, and postmen relied on "wheelbarrow express" to carry the mail. Forced to travel on foot, fewer people attended weddings and funerals. Desperate companies hired human crews to pull their wagons to market. Worst of all, firemen could no longer rely on horses to pull their heavy pump wagons.

Post-fire, Field, Leiter & Co. Store in the Singer Building, Northeast Corner of State and Washington Streets, Chicago, 1873.

When equine influenza decimated Chicago's horses in 1872, Field, Leiter & Co. (Marshall Field and Levi Ziegler Leiter) used oxen. "All orders filled promptly and shipped the same day!" they boasted.

The epizootic reached Bloomington the third full week of November. The Daily Leader, a long-defunct Bloomington newspaper, reported on November 22nd that nearly all the horses in the downtown Ashley House stable had a "suspicious cough." There were other ominous signs as well. "One of General [Asahel] Gridley's horses is down and is pronounced a clear case [of the epizootic]," added the paper. "Dr. [Asa P.] Tenney also has a horse that is not expected to live."

The Pantagraph agreed with its competitor that the epizootic was here. "It is now estimated that about 200 horses have been attacked in this city within three days," announced the paper's November 23rd edition.

Oxen unaffected by the epizootic were drafted into service, and human muscle often supplanted horsepower for two long weeks. "Many of the grocery merchants are delivering groceries with wheelbarrows and handcarts," commented the November 29th Leader, "and in some instances, wagons are hauled through the streets by men." Marion Chuse, the chief engineer of the Bloomington Fire Department, announced that horses of engine company No. 1 were out of commission, and in the event of a fire, he called for volunteers to "man the ropes."

Clover Lawn, the residence of David and Sarah Davis on the city's east side (now the David Davis Mansion state historic site), was completed in the year of the Great Epizootic. On November 29th, Sarah Davis mentioned the outbreak in a letter to her husband David, then a U.S. Supreme Court justice. "The sickness of the horses makes it inconvenient to get coal hauled — and to save the coal we have on hand — we burn large logs in the furnace," she wrote.

Yet within a week of that letter, influenza's grip on the local horse population began to loosen. Street railway service was up and running by December 7th, and once again, the horse enjoyed dominion over Bloomington's thoroughfares. Thankfully, local fatalities were few, probably numbering fewer than a few dozen in the city.

During the early days of the outbreak, the Daily Leader Newspaper commented on the prospect of life — if only for a week or two — without horses. "The people of this city," the paper stated, "will have an opportunity to learn the value of the noble horse and how much we depend upon 'man's best friend' among the brute creation for comfort and convenience."

MARSHALL FIELD AND COMPANY ARTICLES

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

Lincoln test-fired muskets and repeating rifles on the grassy expanses around the White House, now known as the Ellipse and the National Mall.

Abraham Lincoln's log cabin “rail-splitter” provenance was well known, and it helped make him hugely popular with average voters hungry for a new political hero. Despite his lack of family pedigree, fortune, or schooling, Lincoln made a career of being underestimated, overcompensating with a brilliant, active intellect. The farmboy turned president especially loved innovations and inventions. Lincoln is the only U.S. president to win a patent – No. 6469, issued in May 1849 for a “Method of Buoying Vessels Over Shoals.”

Lincoln’s natural interest in things mechanical would come to be tested — and celebrated — in the Civil War. The North’s huge advantage in men and technology was only as good as the tools of war that Lincoln’s Bureau of Ordnance was able to place into those men’s hands.

The president took a particular interest in rifles and ammunition as well. Infantry warfare was quickly making the transition from the smoothbore muskets that won the Revolutionary War to “rifled” weapons that were more accurate, with greater range and firepower. While the smoothbores could still be effective in close quarters, inventors and arms manufacturers sought ways to increase the distance and speed with which soldiers could fight more effectively.

One such inventor was Christopher Miner Spence of Connecticut. Spencer learned the machinist’s trade as a 14-year-old apprentice at a silk manufacturing company and later worked at the Samuel Colt factory in Hartford, where he learned how to make fire-arms. The Colt factory was famous for pistols and other sidearms, but Spencer became convinced of the feasibility of designing a breech-loaded repeating rifle that could be reloaded easily and rapidly.

Christopher Miner Spencer, Magazine Gun, U.S. patent number 27,393, March 6, 1860

A Spencer Model 1860 repeating rifle.

At the time, a single-shot, muzzle-loaded gun could be fired perhaps three times a minute by an experienced rifleman. Spencer conceived of loading the weapon instead through the rifle breech (thus eliminating the need for ramming the round down the barrel), and created a magazine capable of storing seven shells, which could be sequentially spring-loaded and fired by simply cocking and replacing the trigger-guard lever. The “Spencer Repeating Rifle” was capable of firing 15 to 20 rounds a minute. Though his was not the first breech-loaded weapon, his improvements to the existing art justified a government patent, which he received in 1860.

Christopher Miner Spencer

Spencer’s first government order, in mid-1861, was 700 rifles to the Union Navy. His financial partner Charles Cheney was able to secure for Spencer an audience with the Navy’s director of ordnance, John Dahlgren, in June 1861, through the assistance of Cheney’s friend Gideon Welles, the secretary of the Navy. During two days of rigorous testing (including burying the rifle in sand, and immersing it overnight in saltwater), the Spencer rifle fired successfully over 250 times, reportedly with only one misfire.

Spencer’s company had early production and financing problems — he was, after all, an inventor and not a businessman — and was unable to meet even the modest Navy Department order in a timely fashion. But the real roadblock to wider military acceptance and development of the Spencer rifle was the Department of War Chief of Ordnance, Gen. James Ripley, who dismissed the Spencer and similar breechloaders as just “newfangled gimcracks,” and he refused to authorize their purchase.

After two years of personally demonstrating the Spencer to Army and Navy commanders in the field, including General Ulysses S. Grant (who reportedly pronounced it “the best breechloading arms available”), Spencer finally decided to take his case to the top. Again with Cheney’s aid, Spencer was able to secure a meeting with President Lincoln.

Security not being quite what it is today, Spencer recalled in his memoirs that:

on August 17, 1863, I arrived at the White House with the rifle in hand, and was immediately ushered into the executive room, where I found the President alone. After a brief introduction, I took the rifle from its cloth case and handed it to him. Examining it carefully, and handling it as one familiar with firearms, Mr. Lincoln requested me to take it apart ‘and show the inwardness of the thing.’ The separate parts were soon laid on the table before him. It was the simplicity of the gun which appealed to President Lincoln, and he was greatly impressed with the fact that all that was needed to take it apart was a screw driver. With this implement he bared the vitals of the gun and replaced them so that the gun was ready to shoot in a few minutes.

Impressed with its design, the president invited Spencer to meet him the next day to test the weapon himself.

Lincoln’s personal participation in the procurement process was not always supported by his appointees. Even Welles, one of the president’s fiercest and most loyal defenders, complained in his personal diary that the president was too involved in ordnance procurement. When Lincoln championed a new type of gunpowder to Dahlgren, Welles confided in his diary that he “cautioned [Dahlgren], as I have had occasion to do repeatedly, against encouraging the President in these well-intentioned but irregular proceedings. He assures me he does restrain the President as far as respect will permit, but his ‘restraints’ are impotent, valueless. He is no check on the President, who has a propensity to engage in matters of this kind and is liable to be constantly imposed upon by sharpers and adventurers. Finding the heads of Departments opposed to these schemes, the President goes often behind them, as in this instance; and subordinates, flattered by his notice, encourage him.”

True to form, Lincoln prepared to personally test the Spencer. At the appointed time on August 18, Spencer arrived at the White House and accompanied the president, his son Robert and an official from the Navy Department, who carried the rifle, target, and ammunition, for a short walk to the Mall, near the site of the unfinished Washington Monument. Lincoln stopped by the War Department on the way and his son Robert invited War Secretary Edwin M. Stanton to accompany the party for the test, but the secretary declined due to the press of business. “They do pretty much as they have a mind to over there,” mused the president philosophically. So, minus the hard-working secretary of war, the president’s party proceeded to the Mall to try out the Spencer Repeater.

This was not Lincoln’s only trip to the makeshift shooting range near the White House. One of his private secretaries, William O. Stoddard, recalled accompanying Lincoln on similar occasions: “On the grounds near the Potomac, south of the White House, was a huge pile of old lumber, not to be damaged by balls, and a good many mornings I have been out there with the President, by the previous appointment, to try such rifles as were sent in. There was no danger of hitting anyone, and the President, who was a very good shot, enjoyed the relaxation very much.” Another secretary, John Hay, reported that on these excursions Lincoln “used to quote with much merriment the solemn dictum of one rural inventor that ‘a gun ought not to rekyle; if it rekyled at all, it ought to rekyle a little forrid.’”

On this occasion though, the President was all business. Spencer recalled:

The target was a board about six inches wide and three feet high, with a black spot on each end, about forty yards away. The rifle contained seven cartridges. Mr. Lincoln’s first shot was about five inches low, but the next shot hit the bull’s-eye and the other five were close around it. ‘Now,’ said Mr. Lincoln, ‘we will see the inventor try it.’ The board was reversed and I fired at the other bull’s-eye, beating the President a little. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘you are younger than I am and have a better eye and a steadier nerve.’

At the conclusion of the day’s shooting, Spencer was presented with the half of the target used by the president as a souvenir of his visit, which many years later he donated to the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Illinois. The president meanwhile must have enjoyed the outing, and the uncommonly pleasant August weather, as he went out again the next day with his “Spencer” for another hour’s shooting with Hay.

Inscription on Lincoln Target Board. 7 consecutive shots made by the President of the United States with Spencer at a distance of forty yards, Washington D.C. August 18, 1863.

For Christopher Spencer and his fledgling company, the time spent at target practice with the president was well worth it. Less than a month after their meeting, the incorrigible and aging General Ripley was forcibly retired from active duty by Secretary Stanton, and assigned to be inspector of forts in New England. The Bureau of Ordnance soon after placed additional orders for the Spencer Repeaters, and by the end of the Civil War, some 85,000 of them (both rifles and carbines) had been put in service. (Rifle-like weapons with a barrel length of less than 20 inches are typically considered to be carbines. Weapons with barrels greater than 20 inches are usually called rifles unless specifically called carbines by the manufacturer.)

Spencer Model 1863 Carbine repeating rifle.

And only a month after Spencer’s outing with Lincoln, the Spencers proved their mettle. At the Battle of Chickamauga, a Union brigade under Col. John Wilder, all equipped with Spencers, held off and virtually destroyed a much larger Confederate regiment of Gen. John Bell Hood as it breached the Union lines and threatened to collapse the entire northern flank of the Union line’s southern branch.

The Spencer Repeater had only one stain on its record. In April 1865, less than two weeks after Lincoln’s assassination, Union soldiers searched for and surrounded a fugitive from justice in the Virginia countryside. As he lay dying in a barn on Garrett’s Farm, John Wilkes Booth was found armed with a large bowie knife, two pistols – and a Spencer carbine.

Jed Morrison, New York Times

Edited by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.