American Pharaoh by Elizabeth Taylor, Adam Cohen

at the expense of their own. Why beg white stores and offices to rescue
     educated colored girls from service in the white folks’ kitchens and factories? Negroes were learning to support their own
     businesses, and some day colored entrepreneurs would own all the stores and offices in the Black Belt; cash registers and
     comptometers and typewriters would click merrily under lithe brown fingers.” The Black Belt provided Chicago’s blacks with
     a measure of control over their own lives, and some refuge against the unfriendly white city outside its borders. But the
     sad reality was that it remained badly overcrowded and desperately poor, with high illness and mortality rates; a high percentage
     of residents on relief; a high crime rate; inadequate recreational facilities; lack of building repairs; accumulated garbage
     and dirty streets; overcrowded schools; and high rates of police brutality. 34
    In white Chicago, the Great Migration produced a response that ranged from wariness to undisguised panic. The Chicago newspapers
     ran inflammatory headlines such as “Half a Million Darkies from Dixie Swarm to the North to Better Themselves” and “Negroes
     Arrive by Thousands — Peril to Health.” Articles in the city’s three leading papers — the
Tribune,
the
Daily News,
and the
Herald Examiner
— generally overstated the size of the migration, and focused on the new arrivals’ purported sickness, criminality, and vice.
     White Chicagoans worked to prevent the migrants from moving into white neighborhoods. One South Side neighborhood association
     captured the exclusionary spirit sweeping white Chicago when it declared that “there is nothing in the make-up of a Negro,
     physically or mentally, which should induce anyone to welcome him as a neighbor.” In April 1917, the Chicago Real Estate Board
     met and — concerned about what officials described as the “invasion of white residence districts by the Negroes” — appointed
     a Special Committee on Negro Housing to make recommendations. On this committee’s recommendation, the board adopted a policy
     of block-by-block racial segregation, carefully controlled so that “each block shall be filled solidly and . . . further expansion
     shall be confined to contiguous blocks.” Three years later, the board took the further step of voting unanimously to punish
     by “immediate expulsion” any member who sold property to a black on a block where there were only white owners. 35
    If white Chicago as a whole turned a cold shoulder to the new black arrivals, Daley’s Irish kinsmen were particularly unwelcoming.
     The Irish and blacks had much in common. Ireland’s many years of domination at the hands of the British resembled, if not
     slavery, then certainly southern sharecropping — with Irish farmers working the land and sending rent to absentee landlords
     in England. The Irish were dominated, like southern blacks, through violence, and lost many of the same civil rights: to vote,
     to serve on juries, and to marry outside their group. Indeed, after Cromwell’s bloody invasion in the mid-1600s, not only
     were Irish-Catholics massacred in large numbers, but several thousand were sent in chains to the West Indies, where they were
     sold into slavery. But these similar histories of oppression did not bring Chicago’s Irish and blacks together. Much of the
     early difficulty stemmed from rivalry between two groups relegated to the lowest levels of the social order. As early as 1864,
     a mob of four hundred Irish dockworkers went on a bloody rampage against a dozen blacks they regarded as taking jobs from
     unemployed Irishmen. The
Chicago Tribune
— whose WASP management had little affection for Irish-Catholics — argued that this kind of anti-black violence was particularly
     the province of Irish-Americans. “The Germans never mob colored men from working for whoever may employ them,” the
Tribune
declared. “The English, the Scotch, the French,