Freedom’s Ballot: African American Political Struggles in Chicago from Abolition to the Great Migration by Margaret Garb

For expanding free black communities in the Midwest, the African American elites of Chicago constituted one of the most important black leadership structures from the period of abolition until the early decades of the twentieth century. During this period Chicago emerged as a city where local, national, and global forces overlapped. Shaped by industrial capitalism, urbanization, and racism, Chicago’s increasingly diverse population intersected in complex ways which often created formidable challenges to residents. African Americans (especially black women), European immigrants, white progressives, and organized labor waged campaigns against the social, economic, and political problems that became increasingly salient during the era. Some of these campaigns were visibly interracial and focused on matters like the Fugitive Slave Act, suffrage, and the fight for stronger labor standards.

The period from 1880s to the 1910s witnessed the expansion of the African American civic structure. This included the black press, ministers, clubwomen, fraternal societies, and a growing entrepreneurial and professional class that increasingly turned to race rather than political parties to address issues of inequality. These subgroups not only formed the heart of Chicago’s black political class; they organized African Americans within Chicago’s black belt and set forth agendas using residential space to address local and national issues of citizenship. By 1929, Chicago had emerged as a national model in terms of the growth of black political power on the local and state levels. The city had also produced the nation’s first black congressman since the Gilded Age.

Anyone interested in the rise of black politics in Chicago from the antebellum era to the early twentieth century should read Margaret Garb’s Freedom’s Ballot. Drawing on extensive research, Garb thoughtfully analyzes more than seventy years of black political struggles within a structural framework of industrial capitalism, race, class, gender, and urbanization. The book will be an important addition for further scholarly inquiry into Chicago’s history. It should also exert a strong influence on our understanding of the foundation of urban black politics in the North.

Freedom’s Ballot does not simply address critical questions for the history of Chicago and the origins of northern black political culture. Garb also draws upon her analysis of government documents, newspaper articles, editorials, maps, and secondary sources to challenge dominant historical narratives relating to black politics during the Civil War era. To date, these have been mostly southern histories. In the period after Reconstruction, these narratives emphasized a perpetual loss of civil rights and social power as they assumed African Americans occupied a place outside the enormous economic and social forces that transformed late nineteenth century America. Garb argues persuasively that the political struggles of African Americans in northern cities reveal a very different story. In 1900, blacks comprised just 2.5 percent of the population in the urban North, yet 70.5 percent of northern African Americans lived in cities. Although constrained by law, racist customs, and white extralegal violence, northern black activists operated in a political culture that was markedly different from the rural South. Black activists in the North occupied an industrial society that depended on wage labor and was rapidly filling up with European immigrants. For Garb, the diversity of economic opportunities, new nationalities, and the rapid transformations of urban society chipped away at older institutions and opened new spaces for political activism for African Americans that did not exist in the South (2).

In addition to challenging older historical narratives, Garb does an exemplary job of showing the interconnections between industrial capitalism, spatial transformation, race, and black politics. Readers see how protests shaped strategies for the ballot; they also learn of important shifts in black political culture that led to the emergence of a new institutionalized form of African American politics in Chicago’s black belt by the early twentieth century. Most importantly, the vice trade within the city’s black community provided an economic basis for a new class of black leadership that was no longer depended on white patrons. By exploring the relationship between the commercial core of black Chicago in the 1910s, the expansion of South State Street, “the Stroll,” and black politics, Garb shows how saloons, dance halls, and movie theaters created new types of urban spaces. Within these spaces emerged a new culture of commercial leisure as well as a new class of entrepreneurs which boasted economic power and political strength. State Street’s commerce from vice became the subject of a rising, politically engaged reform movement, and it also helped sustain another important site for African American political engagement: black churches. Churches along with commercial venues—virtue and vice—set political agendas and generated capital to sustain black politics in the early twentieth century (147–49). After 1900, black activism looked to black entrepreneurs and an increasingly organized African American constituency to sustain their political work. Black politicians were neither controlled by ward bosses nor independent of the city’s machine politics. Rather, they employed the ballots they influenced to promote personal ambition and serve community interests. These achievements came at a price (149).

Freedom’s Ballot focuses on the origins and transformations of black politics in Chicago during the long nineteenth century. While issues of obstructionism by white progressives are touched upon, Garb does not supply a sound critique of the ways Progressivism hindered black politics nationally during the period. Nevertheless, this will be an important book on black politics in the urban North from the Civil War era to the early twentieth century.