When the lords of gangland gathered here last fall under the benevolent gaze of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Minister Louis Farrakhan, and Dr. Benjamin Chavis, executive director of the NAACP, their vows of peace and love found few takers. To those who have to pass through metal detectors every day as they attend school or make their way into the housing projects where they live, the promises sounded fatuous, if highminded; to anyone else with a good memory, they were simply absurd. Twenty-six years ago, in the midst of another gang truce, guerrillas in the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty dished out nearly a million dollars to Jeff Fort, the petulant Achilles of the Blackstone Rangers, to run an “antipoverty program” in Woodlawn. The results of that brief experiment with local leadership were not impressive. Since Fort and his myrmidons were accustomed to marching openly with their guns down the streets of the south side, a hail of money from Washington did little to slow them down: Fort eventually did time for fraud, emerged from jail as Imam Malik, then went back to prison on a murder charge. There he remains, still, they say, running his gang, now called the El Rukns. So the good citizens of Chicago may be forgiven their failure to cheer when the Reverend Jackson told the assembled chieftains of the Black Disciples, the Four Corner Hustlers, and the Almighty Conservative Vice Lords Nation, among others at Operation PUSH last October, “This ain’t no gang meeting. We’re having an urban-policy meeting.”
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The parallels are not exact, of course, even if the gangsters do manage somehow to habilitate themselves as community leaders. I don’t mean just that the drug trade is given to brainless and violent vendettas, where policy was overseen without any hooliganism. Nor is it simply that the gangs themselves seem to be unschooled in the basic decencies of crime, like knowing how to shoot straight. The whole style of the thing has been debased. Instead of Cadillacs gliding up to jazz clubs, BMWs now race down the street booming rap; instead of an elegant display of diamond stickpins and cuff links, we have the militant ostentation of thick ropes of gold; instead of the tailored suit, the camel-hair topcoat, and the shaggy borsalino, it’s the hooded sweatshirt, the Raiders jacket, and the black knit skullcap pulled right down to the eyeballs. Well, so be it. The gangs are at least, true to the current, melancholy epoch of culture–no doubt because they’ve done so much to create it. But as we hand them awards for not shooting up the streets (in the very schools, by the way, where prizes are given out for not skipping class), let’s not forget that their forefathers’ policy racket was so intrinsically American that it has since been taken over by nearly every state in the union. Can the same be said for the drug business? It might turn into a public monopoly one day too, and with the same happy results, but don’t look for that anytime soon. “Urban policy” is against it.
The book has a simple aim: to paint the panorama of black life in Chicago clearly, honestly, and with a minimum of jargon. Such directness ought to be unremarkable, but across half a century since Black Metropolis was first published that approach looks almost quaint. Today it would be inconceivable to present a major piece of sociology so naked of hypotheses and grand theory, so unadorned by the baubles of fancy statistics. Yet it was not always so: in the years following World War I researchers at the University of Chicago produced a steady stream of such reports, mostly about their own city. The work of this group, known collectively as the Chicago School, has never been surpassed in vividness, in direct human interest, or in sheer volume of information presented. The tradition was both objective and humane, and its capstone may well be Drake and Cayton’s study of black culture in Chicago. Their canvas is larger and more variegated than anything else in the Chicago School, and they produced it at a time, just at the end of World War II, when the vigorous current of Chicago sociology was about to run into the sands of postwar social science.
You might expect a book that has been sitting on the shelf for 50 years to show its age, especially when it takes on problems that are, if anything, even more incorrigible now. Obviously a lot has changed in Chicago since the days when most residential property outside the Black Belt was bound by restrictive covenants and when even well-educated blacks had to work for tips as Pullman porters. But racial animosity and mistrust have hardly disappeared, and not every change has been for the good: the areas inhabited by the poorest blacks today–a mix of well-kept and derelict housing, abandoned buildings, torch jobs, public projects, and a lot of open space–are larger, more isolated, and vastly more dangerous than the old slums used to be. Drake and Cayton could not have foreseen either the disintegration of the ghetto after the war or the metastasis of the “inner city” during the 60s and 70s, but they do offer a way to understand what happened by giving a precise point of reference: their book is a benchmark for both the facts on the ground and the way core issues like segregation, assimilation, crime, and family were being talked about in the 40s. They’re still hotly contested, and Black Metropolis, old as it is, is still remarkably robust.
All that is lost now. The ghetto described in Black Metropolis is defunct, like a farm hamlet given up for dead in the dust bowl. Nobody is going to miss the slums left over from the turn of the century, the kitchenettes jammed into old basements, the hard words from police that fell on young men who strayed east over Cottage Grove, or the brickbats that met them if they went the other way, past Wentworth. But those who deny that the exit of the middle class and its values has been a disaster for the people left behind (“Segregation, not middle-class out-migration, is the key factor responsible for the creation and perpetuation of communities characterized by persistent and spatially concentrated poverty,” write the authors of American Apartheid) will need more than rhetoric to undo this portrait of a bygone city within a city. It is too richly drawn and too lucid.
