Illinois View Establishments by Illinois Cities
Illinois: Tracing the Path of the Great Migration
The Green Book in Illinois tracks the well-worn path of the Great Migration, the twentieth-century exodus of African Americans from the South who were pulled by the promise of industrial jobs and pushed by the strictures of Jim Crow. The fifteen cities included in The Green Book’s Illinois section were principally clustered along two main roadways: Route 66, which connected Chicago to St. Louis, and Route 51, which led south to Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana, the native states of many of Chicago’s Great Migration transplants.
Between World War I and 1970, six million African Americans fled the South for new opportunities in the north or west. More than half a million of those migrants were drawn to Chicago’s vibrant African American community, which was well-publicized in the Chicago Defender, the city’s weekly African American newspaper. The Chicago Defender was distributed throughout the South by the African American Pullman porters, who themselves testified to the availability of stable, respected careers for African Americans in Chicago.
Yet, although the list is dominated by Chicago’s 142 entries, 39 businesses from the large African American communities in East St. Louis and nearby Lovejoy were represented in the guide, and the 25 businesses in Springfield attest to that community’s size and economic vitality. Mid-sized Peoria (population 111,856 in 1950) had seven business on the list, including a purpose-built hotel. Danville (population 37,864 in 1950) hosted eight Green Book establishments, including five tourist homes and three restaurants.
Conveniently located along Route 51, near the intersection with Route 50 leading west to St. Louis, and a long day’s drive from Chicago, the African American community of Centralia capitalized on their advantageous location to create a well-known, profitable waystation between the southern states and Chicago and St. Louis. With its much smaller population (13,863 in 1950), Centralia had nine businesses listings— six tourist homes, a barber shop, a beauty shop, and an auto service station. Overall, Illinois’ Green Book listings document the vibrance of African American life in big cities and small towns alike.
Chicago
Chicago promised recent African American arrivals greater freedom and a vibrant, independent African American community. But, the city was hardly an unmitigated haven. In the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, Chicago’s small African American population, (which numbered 40,000 in 1910) was settled in loosely composed neighborhoods on the south and west sides. World War I transformed these areas from friendly communities to tightly-bounded ghettos. During the war, northern industrial interests, desperate to increase their output to support the war effort while simultaneously losing much of their workforce to military service, opened jobs to African Americans and recruited southern agricultural workers. The African American population of the Chicago more than doubled during the war.
After the Armistice, white soldiers returned home, expecting to resume their old jobs, but found their African American counterparts disinclined to vacate. These tensions came to a head in the summer of 1919, when 38 people died in a week-long race riot. The most enduring consequence of this violence was the hardening of the boundaries of Chicago’s south side Black Belt, and the smaller west-side ghetto. For the next thirty years, the African American population grew steadily while the invisible walls of the ghetto stood firm, enforced by a campaign of vigilante violence waged by white neighbors. The edges of these neighborhoods became block by block real estate battle zones, where African Americans desperate to escape overcrowded, overpriced slum homes, sought to acquire property from working-class white families terrified that African American neighbors would cause significant property losses.
Chicago’s Green Book entries, therefore, must be cast against this background of violence and overcrowding. While a few business in the downtown Loop and north side advertised in the volume, the vast majority were located within the boundaries of the south and west sides. The businesses within these bounded districts catered chiefly to African Americans, satisfying nearly all of their commercial needs and creating a community that was both isolated and proudly self-sufficient.
Space, which was at a premium, was used flexibly and intensively. Apartments became hotels, stores moved into ground floor apartments, and basements were converted to apartments or businesses. Beginning in the 1960s, as suburbanization weakened Chicago’s regional preeminence, the invisible walls of the Black Belt weakened, and the city began an ambitious campaign of urban renewal, which principally targeted African American districts. Some buildings were demolished for new roads, or for the construction of large public housing projects, but others fell vacant as crime rates rose and populations fell in these districts. Many of the Green Book’s Chicago businesses were in the path of the new campus for the Illinois Institute of Technology. Of Chicago’s 150 entries on the list, 71% have been demolished since The Green Book ceased publication in 1964.
Chicago Hotels
The 62 hotels listed in The Green Book in Chicago primarily fall into two categories; purpose-built hotels constructed prior to 1930 and apartment buildings, flats or houses converted to a hotel use. Many purpose-built hotels were constructed in preparation for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, which took place in Jackson Park, seven miles south of downtown Chicago. The Hotel Hayes (6345 S. University) is a good example of the purpose-built hotel. It was built in 1884 by businessman John Hayes and designed in the eclectic Queen Anne style by N. Max Dunning.
Forty years later, in preparation for the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair, the Hayes family built a large, Art Deco-inspired addition, which doubled the number of rooms to 500. Unfortunately, the addition overextended the business and, with growing racial transition in the neighborhood, the hotel soon fell into financial trouble. Cook County took title of the property in 1933, but the Hayes family managed it until 1953. In his memoir From the Cotton Field to the Computer Field, John Robert Finch remembered visiting an aunt who lived at the Hayes upon his arrival in Chicago. The bartender called up for his aunt, while Finch, dressed in his best suit, waited at the elegant, wood-paneled bar, eagerly hoping to spot some of the Black Belt’s most famous residents: Joe Lewis, Sarah Vaughn or Dinah Washington. These large hotels and their accompanying bars, restaurants and lounges, were important neighborhood fixtures for African American Chicagoans and visitors alike.
As expected amenities, the bars, restaurants and lounges of large hotels were often more durable than independent entertainment venues, and many became revered musical institutions. The Pershing Hotel (6400 Cottage Grove Ave) accommodated a lounge, a ballroom, and Cadillac Bob’s Birdland (later Budland), one of the city’s foremost jazz venues. In the 1940s and 1950s, Budland hosted Charlie Parker (who recorded an album on the site), Miles Davis, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, and Sun Ra. In the late 1950s, Budland became known as a doo-wop, then rhythm and blues club, and then it transformed itself into one of the city’s most serious dance venues during the soul-infused late 1960s and 1970s.
In contrast to the Hayes or the Pershing, the Manor House Hotel (4635 South Parkway, now Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive) operated out of a converted single family house. Built along South Parkway, the wide, pastoral Olmsted and Vaux-designed boulevard between downtown and Jackson Park, this large Italianate house was permanently converted into the Manor House Hotel in the Black Belt era. In addition to being listed in The Green Book from 1949 to 1964, Ebony (published in Chicago) also included the Manor House Hotel in its annual vacation guide throughout the 1960s. Advertising comfort and air conditioning, the Manor House Hotel was an unusually successful and long-lived converted hotel in Chicago’s Black Belt.
Poro College
Poro College (4415 South Parkway), located just two blocks north of the Manor House Hotel, was also a converted mansion, but likely provided simpler accommodations. Poro College was a beauty school, founded in St. Louis by entrepreneur Annie Malone. Malone was a hair-care entrepreneur who catapulted door-to-door sales of her “Wonderful Hair Grower” into a successful company. In 1902, she opened her first shop in St. Louis, and trained many women to both use and sell her products (Sarah Breedlove Davis, the future Madam C.J. Walker, began her career as Malone’s Denver agent).
In 1910, Malone built a large new manufacturing plant in St. Louis, which included a beauty college, with classrooms, dormitories, dining facilities, an auditorium, roof garden and chapel. Christened Poro College, the institution aimed to train students to use Malone’s products, but also to be confident, stylish businesswomen. Malone’s success continued until her marriage ended in 1927, and the divorce settlement sent the school into receivership. Malone then relocated to Chicago, bought the 4400 block of South Parkway, and reopened her school to continued success. Poro College was listed as a tourist home in The Green Book in 1942, and from 1947 until 1962, likely offering vacant dormitory beds to travelers seeking affordable accommodations.
Springfield
In Springfield, the Brown Hotel was built in 1914 specifically to accommodate African Americans, both visitors and locals. Just six years earlier, the Springfield Race Riot had killed seven and caused the destruction of many businesses in the small African American commercial area. The event shocked the nation with its viciousness and ultimately inspired the formation of the NAACP. The Brown Hotel, with its rooms, café and meeting rooms, must have seemed a particularly important institution to a community so aware of its vulnerability. In 1936, a new owner renamed it The Dudley, or Dudley’s Tourist Rest, advertising in The Green Book from 1938 until 1959. Over time, this community institution communicated the stability and success of Springfield’s African American community.
In addition to The Dudley, thirteen Springfield families advertised tourist homes in The Green Book. Typically, tourist homes were simply enterprising women homemakers offering accommodations within their own homes as a means of extra income. Mrs. M. Rollins appeared particularly serious about her tourist home, listing rooms in three different residences in The Green Book between 1939 and 1958. Initially running her business from an apartment in the John Jay Homes public housing project in 1939, from 1947 until 1950, she rented accommodations in her apartment in a 2-story flat building and from 1951 to 1958, she ran her tourist home from a one and a half story house. Her continued listing in The Green Book, as well as the steady expansion of her living quarters, from a public housing apartment to a free standing house, suggests the tourist home business contributed significantly to Mrs. Rollins improved fortunes.
—Elizabeth Milnarik
