Crucibles of Black Empowerment: Chicago’s Neighborhood Politics from the New Deal to Harold Washington by Jeffrey Helgeson (review)

How did Harold Washington, a black liberal, ever become mayor of Chicago? Although Washington rose to office on the wave of other American cities’ first black mayors, his ascent in Richard J. Daley’s Chicago is hard to explain. Chicago was one of the most racially divided cities in the country, and successful black politicians were notoriously subservient to Daley’s Democratic Party machine. Jeffrey Helgeson’s Crucibles of Black Empowerment, part of the University of Chicago Press’s Historical Studies of Urban America series, does not point to a temporary electoral coalition as the answer. Instead, Helgeson grounds Washington’s mayoralty in what he calls the “politics of home,” an extension of Earl Lewis’s concept of the “home sphere” (Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth Century Norfolk, Virginia [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993]). During the six decades preceding Washington’s election in 1983, black Chicagoans built a tradition of pragmatic liberalism that emphasized day-to-day quality-of-life issues.

Even where they lacked established power, Helgeson argues, black Chicagoans worked to improve their quality of life. Active in organizations ranging from block clubs to churches to labor unions and government agencies, they pushed back against the symptoms of racism and industrial capitalism that made life in the twentieth century urban North a constant struggle. Helgeson examines three key arenas where black Chicagoans created opportunities for improvement: community development, housing, and employment.

Sometimes those efforts reflected individualistic goals, and at other times they aspired to change the broader community. During the New Deal era, for example, Helgeson identifies black homeowners who invested themselves in beautification efforts at the home and neighborhood levels. Not all black Chicagoans, of course, managed to find acceptable family homes, much less own them. Strategies for improving African American housing conditions included pushing both for access to public housing and for private development of housing for black consumers. Although these strategies manifested different economic relationships with the housing market, both strategies widened African Americans’ chances to live in decent conditions. In labor as well, black Chicagoans pragmatically pursued multiple strategies for improvement. Some took advantage of the job-placement programs of the United States Employment Services and the Chicago Urban League (CUL), while others made spaces for themselves within the city’s unions.

As these dual approaches suggest, black liberalism was constantly in tension with more radical visions and more militant activism. Black Chicagoans, even those who worked for relatively conservative organizations such as the CUL, could often see the need for structural change but nonetheless pursued more limited strategies. For example, the CUL pursued job placements rather than economic expansion. Like other scholars, such as Priscilla A. Dowden-White and Touré F. Reed, Helgeson argues that the radical and liberal strains of black politics were more complementary than they were antagonistic (Priscilla A. Dowden-White, Groping toward Democracy: African American Social Welfare Reform in St. Louis, 1910–1949 [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011]; Touré F. Reed, Not Alms But Opportunity: The Urban League and the Politics of Racial Uplift, 1910–1950 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008]). This view implies that activists differed less on ultimate goals than on the strategies needed to achieve them and what to tolerate in the interim. Indeed, Helgeson finds, even people who preferred radical solutions sometimes compromised pragmatically. Black Nationalist Lu Palmer, for example, who usually denounced voting, registered in time to vote for Harold Washington’s first campaign against Richard J. Daley in 1977 (255). What distinguished Chicago’s black liberals was devotion to changes that eased present conditions while they awaited larger gains.

Helgeson does not explore the psychological dimensions of this pragmatism among black liberals, but his approach suggests that it may have been rooted in a fundamental skepticism about the likelihood of...