Black Chicago's First Century: 1833–1900 by Christopher Robert Reed (review)

Originally published in 2005, the first paperback printing of Christopher Robert Reed's Black Chicago's First Century: 1833–1900 in 2017 aims to establish "a long-term, comprehensive saga of continuous African American community life, including both setbacks and accomplishments" (3). The monograph begins with a historiographical introduction that discusses the dearth of scholarship on nineteenth-century black Chicago, examines at length the source material Reed uses to tell his story, and ventures some overarching arguments about black Chicago's class structure that borrows from St. Clair Drake's sociological research. A prologue examining the area's first permanent settler, black trader Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable, precedes five chronologically-organized chapters, each of which begins with a brief section on the city's black demographics before examining various aspects of the community including labor, politics, intra-and interracial relations, and associational culture (religion, club life, leisure, and the like).

Composing a history of nineteenth-century Chicago—particularly of the antebellum decades when black Chicagoans numbered fewer than one thousand (always around 1 percent of the city's total population during the nineteenth century, even with the influx of black southerners after the Civil War)—poses some methodological problems because the source material is somewhat scant. Reed's narrative relies heavily on a handful of published reminiscences of early settlers (sometimes at a distance of half a century or more) as well as the federal pension records of black Civil War veterans (which provided accounts of as many as two hundred black Chicagoans' lives); as he puts it, "First-person accounts based on memory are herein accorded special treatment as representative of particularized, valued experience" (25). This methodology has its benefits and drawbacks. The first-hand accounts Reed highlights help offer unparalleled insights into the lived experiences of notable black Chicagoans like abolitionist and businessman John Jones and the activist and clubwoman Fannie Barrier Williams. But memories are malleable and experiences vary widely; here they tend toward what is perhaps an overly optimistic account of inter- and intra-racial harmony—a saga that emphasizes accomplishments over setbacks—crafted largely by the comparatively small black middle- and upper-classes.

That is not to say that Black Chicago's First Century sanitizes or ignores intra- and especially interracial conflict. Indeed, one the book's strengths is the glimpse it offers of emerging class stratification and respectability politics in the black community. Even stronger are accounts of the Illinois Black Laws, the rise of anti-black sentiment during the Civil War, the painful struggles of black working-class Civil War veterans, the exploitation and subjugation of those who held service jobs in the restaurant industry or for the Pullman Company, and the emergent pattern of residential race segregation dating to the city's founding. All of this points to the myriad ways in which the race discrimination that would plague black Chicagoans in the Great Migration era actually originated decades earlier, somewhat paradoxically in a city that also had been a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment. But the dissonance between those struggles and rosier first-hand accounts are not entirely resolved and leave the reader wondering how to square these seemingly disparate histories. Contentions that "a cultural like-mindedness among African Americans provided the group with a cohesive base for unified action against external constraints" (59) and, later, that "Impoverishment produced interracial commiseration" (391), for instance, are thinly supported—even contradicted elsewhere—and risk casting this pre-Great Migration era as an idyllic period of intra- and interracial harmony before the flow of black Southerners further exacerbated tensions.

Representative of this central narrative tension is Reed's account of black Chicagoans' involvement in the 1893 World's Fair (for Reed's more extensive treatment of the Fair, see All the World is Here! The Black Presence at the White City). Consistent with the monograph's more general tone of optimism, Reed argues that "African Americans claimed and won a meaningful role as workers, patrons, lecturers...