Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story

1. Central Avenue Breakdown

1 The period in which Johnny Otis grew up in his Greek immigrant family, the 1920s, was one of the most anti-immigrant decades in U.S. history. In the wake of vigilante attacks on the businesses and homes of German Americans by “patriotic” citizens during World War I, a wave of nativist hysteria spread over the nation , terrorizing immigrants and their families. Throughout the country, local school boards banned foreign-language instruction in high schools. City officials removed foreign-language books from libraries. Some state legislatures tried to make it illegal to speak on the telephone in languages other than English. U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer ordered the mass roundup and deportation of some ten thousand immigrants suspected (without due process of law) of holding anarchist or communist beliefs. The Justice Department subsequently deported thousands of immigrants active in the labor movement every year for the next decade. The Ku Klux Klan experienced a dramatic increase in membership during the 1920s, more in the Midwest and West than the South, fueled largely by anti-immigrant and especially anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish sentiment. Even the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting the manufacture , transportation, sale, and consumption of alcohol, was seen by most nativists as a measure necessary to correct the alleged bad behavior of immigrants , whom they believed drank too much.1 Immigrants and their children faced repression from the smallest local municipalities to the entire federal government, from armed vigilantes to respectable opinion molders. In the culture and politics of the 1920s, the One CENTRAL AVENUE BREAKDOWN foreign born and their offspring found themselves defined as unwanted aliens whose entry into the country had been deemed in retrospect to have been a mistake. Congress passed the Johnson–Reed Act in 1924, the most drastic and restrictive immigration law in the nation’s history. The new law allocated quotas for future immigration based on preferences for immigrants from northern and western Europe. It permitted only miniscule numbers of people from southern and eastern Europe to enter the United States. Of all the despised immigrant groups from Europe, Greeks received the smallest quota: only one hundred immigrants per year—a sign indicating that they were the least desirable group of all in the eyes of some of the defenders of Anglo-Protestant “100 per cent Americanism.” Immigration officials frequently refused to classify Greeks as Europeans at all, designating them as “Orientals.” In some states, local application of Jim Crow segregation laws required Greeks to use facilities designated for Blacks. A 1933 real estate appraisal of land values in Chicago advised property owners that the least desirable European immigrant neighbors were Greeks, Russian Jews, and southern Italians.2 Even before World War I, Greek Americans had suffered from especially vicious nativist prejudice and violence. In Omaha, Nebraska, in 1909 a mob of one thousand men stormed into Greek neighborhoods, vandalized stores, burned homes, and brutally assaulted people they believed to be Greek. Newspaper articles in Utah referred to Greeks as “ignorant, depraved and brutal foreigners,” “a vicious element unfit for citizenship,” and “the scum of Europe.”3 The Ku Klux Klan threatened Greeks with violence in Utah, Michigan, and Florida. In the aftermath of World War I, the American Legion in Utah condemned Greeks for reading Greek-language newspapers , speaking their language in public, and sending their children to Greek schools for language instruction.4 A 1920 candidate for office in Alabama proposed the disenfranchisement of Greeks and Syrians.5 Restrictive covenants written into deeds to homes in many cities required home buyers to pledge never to sell their property to Greeks. In western mining communities , Greek workers found themselves forbidden to live in housing designated for “whites” and required to share housing with Black, Mexican, Japanese, and in some cases Italian workers, all of whom were deemed nonwhite . Public opinion polls found that more than 40 percent of “Americans” opposed granting citizenship to Greeks.6 Yet Greek immigrants became citizens in droves during the 1920s, not because they felt welcomed, but precisely because they believed they 2 Central Avenue Breakdown needed citizenship to protect themselves against nativist prejudice. This Americanization effort was led by the American Hellenic Educational Progress Association (AHEPA), originally founded in Atlanta in 1922 to help Greek immigrants defend themselves against the Ku Klux Klan. In the late 1930s, AHEPA would become the first non-Jewish U.S. ethnic organization to denounce...