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

Margaret Garb’s meticulously researched new book makes a compelling case that Chicago’s importance to African American history began long before the Great Migration. Beyond providing a prequel, however, Freedom’s Ballot offers a nuanced portrait of the entwined histories of African American politics and the development of Chicago itself, beginning with antebellum struggles over black citizenship and concluding with the 1915 protests of Birth of a Nation. Garb argues that despite small numbers—less than 2 percent of Chicago’s population before 1910—black Chicagoans influenced the political order of the city as well as national debate on race, rights, and representation. The book joins a growing body of literature, including Stephen Kantrowitz’s work on Boston and Stacey Smith’s recent study of California, in shifting focus away from the South in order to explore the national history of African American politics.¹ Garb’s work shares the literature’s concern both with understanding how local context shaped political practices and with illuminating how those practices were connected to national developments.

Beginning with an examination of African American activism in Civil War–era Chicago, Garb effectively delineates the connections between the politics of abolition and racial equality. Illinois’s status as a free state did not spare people of color from legal disabilities tied to race. Garb carefully reconstructs the story of how John Jones, born free in North Carolina, navigated this hostile legal environment to achieve remarkable economic success and political influence, ultimately becoming the first African American elected to office in Cook County. She argues that in this period business connections with elite whites were critical to black activists’ efforts to agitate for emancipation and racial equality. Garb’s biographical approach brings the rapidly shifting political terrain of the era into focus but also leaves the complex political dynamics of the war itself only partially explored. For example, the political ferment that postemancipation migrants and Civil War veterans stimulated, richly explored by Kate Masur and Leslie Schwalm, receives modest treatment here.²

The book provides a rich discussion of the role of civic institutions in the development of African American political culture in Chicago. Garb argues that the “interracial elite comity,” which had served men like John Jones well, began to fragment in the 1880s, elevating the need for racial solidarity (51). Freedom’s Ballot carefully reconstructs how the back press, along with fraternal organizations and women’s clubs, fostered a sense of common political concern around racial identity in Chicago while building bridges to national movements for racial equality. Focusing on civil society highlights the canny leadership of women like Ida B. Wells and Fannie Barrier Williams in using the Chicago World’s Fair to challenge racial exclusion and draw national attention to demands for African American representation in culture and politics.

Garb is concerned with Chicago not only as a unit of governance but also as a physical space. Her account is attuned to how the organization of work and the emergence of segregated spaces in the city shaped African Americans’ political engagement, including their participation in unions and reform movements. While much of the book focuses on political leaders who emerged from Chicago’s professional classes, Garb’s exploration of the successful labor actions of the Culinary Alliance, a biracial union, highlights another path of political action. Although black Chicagoans were excluded from much industrial employment, the restaurants that became critical to the functioning of a commercial urban core provided black men steady employment as waiters. Through carefully coordinated walkouts in the early 1890s, the Culinary Alliance gained significant, if temporary, improvements in working conditions. Although Garb acknowledges that racial divisions created fault lines in unions that employers exploited, she argues that the Culinary Alliance’s walkouts in the early 1890s effectively challenged regressive racial stereotypes of black men.

The two final chapters...