In the tattered photo they look like they are on their way to church: the women in long dresses, coats, and hats; the men in suits, coats, and ties. They seem tight-lipped, stiff, almost comically incongruous as they pose in a Michigan wood. Lined up on a sandy dirt road in front of a rented bus that brought them 270 miles from Chicago, they look formal, serious, as if posing for history.
Some of the biggest names in black entertainment begged to come to Idlewild. They performed as many as three shows a night, seven nights a week at the three nightclubs. Veteran Idlewilders recall visits by the Basie and Ellington bands, Josephine Baker and Louis Armstrong–whose wife Lil Hardin retired in Idlewild–Sammy Davis Jr., “Little” Stevie Wonder, Jackie Wilson, Della Reese, and the Four Tops–three of whom met and married Idlewild showgirls. After the shows, the entertainers, the show people, and the Idlewild regulars partied until dawn at after-hours roadhouses. They dressed in furs and sequined gowns; they danced, they partied, they clowned, said Mary Ellen Wilson, an Evanston schoolteacher and Idlewild veteran who still summers there. “Those nights we reached that point of complete loss of inhibition–what we call ‘the breakdown.’”
Using ads and articles in black newspapers, a promotional film and brochures, bus and train tours, and a corps of black salespeople, they managed to sell 19,000 parcels of land to urbane northern blacks.
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In 1915 the Idlewild Company brought the first excursion of Chicago blacks to Idlewild. One of them, Lela Wilson, who was to become the leading black landowner and developer, would recall that the rustic retreat looked so inviting “we all became natural boosters” of the area. Wilson and many other visitors were recruited to sell 125-by-20-foot residential lots for $35 each–$6 down and $1 a month, with no interest. Their black salespeople were paid either in cash ($2 per lot sold) or its equivalent in Idlewild property.
By far the most important of Idlewild’s early buyers and summer residents was Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, the socially prominent heart surgeon who founded Provident Hospital for Chicago blacks. Historian Ben Wilson said the beloved “Dr. Dan,” then in his 60s, bought several lots, became a full-time resident and Idlewild’s most prominent retiree, and persuaded many of his peers to buy land–including “Madam” C.J. Walker, a millionaire cosmetologist and patron of the arts; novelist Charles Chestnutt; Lemuel Foster, a Fisk University administrator; and an assortment of black politicians and club people.
The early promotional film shows a clubhouse meeting led by William Pickens, the principal northern recruiter for the NAACP. But hanging prominently on the fieldstone fireplace was a portrait of Booker T. Washington. Wilson said his philosophy and spirit guided the Idlewild pioneers, who sought to advance the race not by agitating for change but by absorbing mainstream American values.
By the time the original white investors sold the last of the land in the 1930s, the white promotional rhetoric had been eagerly transformed into a black American dream. One early lot buyer said, “When you stand in Idlewild, breathe the fresh air and note the freedom from prejudice, ostracism, and hatred, you can feel yourself truly an American citizen.”
