"We Don't Want Your Kind!" Segregation in Illinois

ILLINOIS license plates bear the advertising slogan, “Land of Lincoln.” Last fall I set out to discover for myself what the racial practices were in this state of the Great Emancipator nearly a hundred years after he left it to become the Civil War President. I traveled over much of the ground of the Lincoln-Douglas debates and talked with people in a dozen towns.

I discovered that in a number of places I could not find a place to eat or a place to sleep, for I am a Negro. I found school segregation as rigid as you are likely to find in Mississippi; residential ghettos as dingy and dilapidated — and as inflexible — as in Birmingham or Atlanta. And I found official and private attitudes as dismal and depressing as in the deepest South: an acceptance of racial segregation and its consequences that, unless altered, will, in my opinion, make improvement virtually impossible for any predictable time to come.

The pattern of racial segregation and discrimination under which I lived for more than thirty years in Kentucky ruthlessly conditioned me to accept my world of black neighbors and black schools, black preachers and black teachers. I knew, for instance, that in white theaters I was expected to sit in the topmost balcony, and I did so without asking why Negroes should have to sit up there and nowhere else. I would never have been turned away from a white hotel because I would not have tried to enter. When I was very young I was conditioned in a Southern tradition of racial separatism, and I also was conditioned by parents who taught me, “Be too proud to go where you’re not wanted.” I did not question the tradition or my parents at that time.

When my mother and I visited our folks in Nashville, we entered the “Colored WaitingRoom” at Louisville’s Union Station and we rode in a segregated day coach and happily lost ourselves in the joy of riding on a train. We enjoyed seeing broad, green fields and small, dusty towns as the train sped along. We ate from our lunch pail fried chicken, potato salad, and apple pies my mother had prepared. It was of absolutely no consequence that the coach, stifling hot and crowded, smelled of fried meat, sour milk, and wet diapers. Our coach always was the first one behind the baggage car, and it swayed and rattled, but we did not care.

The few white people I knew in those days were a friendly oddity to me. Our insurance man, for one, was affable. I cannot recall that he ever knocked at our door before entering, and he always called my mother by her first name. His business with us never kept him from saying a few words to me. I would stand in front of him, head bowed and grinning. He would say to my mother with the same authority he used in telling her what kind of insurance was best for us, “Ada, this boy might amount to something.”

Deep inside me I felt that this man was something I was not and could never be even when I grew into manhood. When I stood in front of him, it was like standing before God. Later in my life my memory of him was clouded with the suspicion that the warm affection I had for him as a child was a tangle of emotions, perhaps similar to Winston Smith’s love for Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984. The memory was tied closely to my early assumption that white and Negro people were not members of the same human race.

Even Santa Claus was white. I started hating Santa early in life. His race — as I thought then

had nothing to do with it. He spoiled one of the delightful fantasies that should be a part of childhood by openly defying the love I had for him. It happened during a visit to a department store where my aunt had taken me specifically to see him as a reward for keeping my face washed and my clothes clean.

My aunt slowly edged me into the circle of children whom Santa was inviting one at a time to his knee. I waited and waited, but the fat old man never beckoned to me. My aunt, apparently sensing my heartbreak, gave me a gentle shove, and before I knew it I had my hands on Santa. He smiled and with a sweep of his arm sent me stumbling back to the sideline while the children laughed at my confusion.

On the way home I noticed that my aunt was crying and trying to hide her tears with a handkerchief. When I asked her why she was crying, she said the most horrible thing I had ever heard. “He was dirt mean to shove you like that,” she said. “Why didn’t he shove the white children? He’s just as dirt mean as the rest of them.” From then on I attributed Santa’s failure to honor my Christmas list to his personal dislike of me and not to my mother’s pocket book.

I think of the incident whenever my children talk of Santa. I thought of it last fall in Cairo while a Negro high school student told me how he got a badly swollen right hand during a fight with white schoolmates. One of them ground his heel into the Negro’s hand while the others pinned him down on the street. His mother kept cutting in on the boy’s story by saying, “They’re dirt mean, that’s all they are. They just don’t want him in their white school.”

CAIRO, at the southern rim of Illinois, closer to Little Rock than to Chicago, farther south than Louisville and Richmond, was a good starting point for the look at race relations in Illinois. The Ku Klux Klan had burned crosses in this river town as late as five years ago. The city lay only a river’s width from cotton farms of southeastern Missouri. Cairo had known Negroes since slavery, when runaway slaves managed to breach the gap and to find sanctuary there. From the levee you could see the dazzling colors of fall moving down the Mississippi; a brilliant orange and yellow spectacle lining the Missouri shore. I had entered Cairo posing as a migrant field hand seeking any kind of common labor.

My first move was to telephone Robert and David Lansden, white attorneys who gained statewide notice in 1953 when they joined with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to challenge the legal status of Cairo’s segregated school system. Irate whites had stoned Robert’s home during the controversy. A friend of theirs in Chicago told me if I needed anything to look up the Lansdens, because in Cairo “they’re the best friends Negroes have.” I wanted to discuss the school situation with them, and I also wanted them to recommend a nice hotel where the rates were not too high.

Their offices were on the top floor of a narrow, two-story building in the heart of the business section, across the street from the City Hall and the Cairo Hotel. It had become dark, and I was fortunate to catch them before they had left for home.

“We knew you were coming,” said Robert Lansden. David extended his hand. They were tall, rawboned men with heavy shoulders.

I inquired about a hotel.

“We can save you a lot of trouble by telling you first that no white hotel in town will take you,” David Lansden said. He telephoned a Negro family who said I could stay with them. The Lansdens drove me to the house, which was located on the fringe of a railroad switching yard. It was an old two-story frame, but the modest pieces of furniture inside, the gay-colored slip covers on the sofa and chairs, and the starched, embroidered centerpiece on the large oak table indicated a pride of ownership.

My landlady was a large, friendly woman who greeted me warmly, wiping her hands on her apron before extending one to me. She led me to a room at the head of the stairs in which there was an extraordinary, wide bed. From the window near the bed I caught a glimpse across the tracks of a Negro settlement of shotgun shacks that lined both sides of an unpaved street. Children romped and played out there as though it were high noon.

I was quite hungry, because I hadn’t eaten since leaving Chicago, but the subject of food never came up as my landlady went about her work of preparing the room. She sang as she worked, and even later when I bedded down I heard the refrain of the old hymn she was still singing: “ Jesus will take care of you.” The sound of moving freight trains and the constant barking of a dog were disturbing at first, but soon the noise was blacked out by deep sleep in a bed that was soft as chicken feathers.

Refreshed by nine hours of sleep, I was hungry as a bear when barking dogs awakened me. My landlady asked if I slept well, but she said nothing about breakfast. I drove down to the business area, where I had noticed several small restaurants while en route to the Lansdens the night before. At two drugstore food counters the waitresses said I would have to carry the food out. At a small dingy restaurant that smelled of hamburger and fried onions, a man in a soiled apron hardly let me get inside the door before he shook his head.

“Can’t get anything?” I asked.

“Just move on,” he said, staring at me as though nothing would please him better than to strike me. “Don’t start anything. You know durn well we don’t serve colored people.”

I bought a quart of milk in a grocery store and headed toward the levee. The mist was rising from the Mississippi in the early sunlight.

Later I told the Lansdens that finding a place to eat threatened to be a problem for me. David said, “The best thing for you is to have a little talk with Miss Hattie Kendrick. She’ll be able to put you in touch with a restaurant. Matter of fact, she’ll be able to put you straight on many things that you’ll be wanting to know.”

Miss Kendrick was a very dark Negro woman with gray hair at the temples. I found her seated with her blind mother in the living room of her house on the same street where I was staying. “It’s hard for a visiting colored man to find a decent place to eat down here,” she said, “We have a few restaurants, but they sell mostly barbecue”— then she laughed — “but I know you wouldn’t want hot barbecue for breakfast; I wouldn’t.”

Miss Kendrick formerly taught school in Cairo and was a member of the local NAACP chapter. I mentioned to her that if I could find work I should like to live there.

“What for; didn’t Mr. Lansden tell you that most of our people are on relief?” Miss Kendrick asked. “The people down at the state job office will tell you there’s precious little here for a colored man to do. You go down there, they’ll not bite their tongue telling you.”

I called at the district offices of the Illinois public aid commission to see what my chances were for a job of some kind. The offices were located in an old store-front building two blocks from the main business district. Only the bookkeeper was on duty, and she was pessimistic about my chances. She said, “Being a Negro, you’re lost here unless you can teach or do something like that. If there’s no farm work, you’re out of luck. Earlier you might have got a job chopping cotton across the river in Missouri, a lot of our people do. Now you’re too late for that, and you haven’t been here long enough to qualify for a relief check.”

Leaning on the counter that separated the inner offices from the applicants, the bookkeeper continued: “Would you believe that I am the only Negro woman in town with an interracial job. if you don’t consider the teachers? That should tell you that we’re not doing much down here in the skilled labor field. If I were you, I’d go to East St. Louis. There you might find factory work. One thing for sure, I wouldn’t stay here.”

“I wouldn’t either,” said Miss Kendrick when I mentioned the interview to her. “The only reason I don’t leave home is that I’m too old and too tired. Just too old to pick up and leave.”

FIFTY miles north of Cairo in Williamson County lay Marion, and there two motel attendants were dead sure that they couldn’t accommodate me. In the lobby of the first motel the men were talking about the World Series. As I walked to the reception desk, the room stilled. The attendant, an elderly woman with a kind face, smiled as she apologized for having kept me waiting. She continued to smile as she said, “I’m so sorry, but we don’t accept colored guests. But I know of a nice tourist home here run by one of your people. I’ll be very happy to tell you how to find it.” And she gave me careful directions.

Less than two miles from that beautiful and spacious court was another one with green lawns stretching back from the highway. This motel had advertised along the highway: “Continental breakfast, central heating, radios, and air conditioning.” The young and pretty attendant was the only person in the office when I entered.

“Yes?” she said with a hardness in her voice that didn’t match her comeliness.

I asked if she knew of a motel where I could get a room and possibly have coffee and toast served me on the premises.

“I think I know just the place,” she said. Then she gave me the directions to the Negro Tourist Home.

“But what about this place?” I asked. I told her I had read the signs, and the vacancy flag was flying.

“Sorry, but we don’t take colored people,” she said. The hardness had returned to her voice.

Outside, it was warm and bright and there was not a cloud in the sky. Driving back to the business section in Marion, I noticed another sign. It pointed the way to a nearby Baptist church, and the key word was “Welcome.” I decided to visit it and meet the minister.

“I’m concerned about segregation in Marion,” said the young pastor, who looked larger than he really was, seated behind the desk in his study. “A man’s skin has nothing to do with his gaining the Kingdom of God, I’ve told my congregation. Why, during the trouble at Little Rock I said that a man who hates another man because his skin is black is subject to eternal damnation. That brought ‘aniens’ from every corner of the church.”

The preacher paused, wiped his glasses before continuing. “But I must admit that we leave colored people alone. Whether this attitude is right or wrong, it’s an old custom. I came here from North Carolina, though I was born in Illinois. When I accepted the call here, one of the first things I did was to tell my deacons that I should like to send missionaries over to the colored settlement to take them the Word of God. They told me to leave those people alone, that they had churches of their own.”

After leaving the minister, I called on a lawyer, a long-time resident of Marion whose name had been given me by a mutual friend in Chicago. His second-floor offices were over a drugstore in the city square. I stopped in the drugstore for a cold soda drink. The clerk said I couldn’t drink it in the store.

“I’m not surprised at all.” the lawyer said when I mentioned it. “We have roots in the South, and we’ve kept customs of the South. But, I might say too, that we don’t have trouble with our colored people. They don’t go looking for trouble by pushing too hard. Segregation is no issue in Marion; we simply never discuss it.”

Of the city’s ten thousand population, only three hundred are Negroes. In the early 1920s, a number of Negroes were brought up from the South to work the coal mines around Marion, and some of them were shot and killed as scabs during the strike of the United Mine Workers Union. Those remaining became farmers of small plots, some of them moving ten miles northwest to the dirt-road village of Colp. It was obvious that bitterness between the races still persisted.

As NIGHT closed in, I headed for the Negro Tourist Home. It was a rambling frame cottage, and Mrs. Aline Hodge, the proprietor, made me feel at home by immediately inviting me to join her at supper. I was her only guest.

“I knew you would be sent here if you stopped by the motels,” Mrs. Hodge said. “They remember me whenever a Negro drives up. In the hunting season I do a very good business, because my place is the only one in Williamson County for our people.”

I was happy at the Negro Tourist Home. Mrs. Hodge had a big brown and white collie named Buster, and it was fun romping with Buster on the spacious lawn. And Mrs. Hodge served hot bread twice a day with heaping meals of green beans, white potatoes, beets, and fresh corn. Food had become an obsession with me, and I hadn’t eaten so well since leaving home.

On the third day I drove over to Colp to visit with William Hatchett, the village’s wealthiest citizen, tavernkeeper, and president of the Colp School Board. He was a young, broad-shouldered Negro, full of fear and frustration. Last summer Hatchett’s plush New Orleans Club was ripped by dynamite. He blamed it on business rivals.

Turning to his school problems, climaxed by the resignation of the board’s three white members, Hatchett said, “The whites in this town want to send their children to Carterville to school rather than have them mixed with our kids. If we were to permit that without a fight, it would be impossible for us to run the system on the taxes that Negroes contribute, because most of them are without work and are living on relief checks or old-age pensions.” Hatchett said that the school budget, even with state aid, amounted to only $18,000 a year, and with this money they had to pay five teachers and take care of two buildings.

“Anybody can plainly sec that it would be better to consolidate the schools,” said Hatchett, “but no, they want to run out on us and send their children out of town to school. Those fellows who resigned, justifying their prejudice, accused me of buckling under to what they said was pressure from the NAACP to push consolidation.”

Colp, whose six hundred population was about equally divided between the races, resembled an abandoned wild-West movie set with its glowing patch of saloons and row on row of miserable shacks. Noticeably absent were the happy voices of children, because Colp was largely a town of old people. A dreadful loneliness possessed me as I drove along the dirt roads. People glared at me as though I were something bringing trouble.

Before entering Colp, I had stopped in Carterville, a mile south of the village. In the window of a supermarket was the sign: “Help Wanted.”

“It’s a clerk job for man or woman,” the young man at the check-out counter informed me when I inquired about the job. “I don’t think you would do, though, because we prefer someone with a college education,” he added.

I told him I had gone to college. I told him also that I needed that job or any job the store could offer me because I was out of work.

The clerk looked directly at me as he dropped his hands from his apron. He said, “Honestly, I don’t know how to put it, but it wouldn’t do you any good to apply. It just wouldn’t look right having a Negro working in the store of a town where Negroes don’t live. Maybe later it might be different, but right now that’s the way it is.”

I told Hatchett about the conversation with the clerk.

“That’s nothing,” he said, “there’s a large factory just out of town that employs at least a thousand people. If there’s one Negro working there,

I don’t know about it. They’ll take your job application and say they’ll call you, but they never do. If it wasn’t for state charity, I don’t know how most of the people in this town would live.”

I asked Hatchett what Negroes living in such poverty in his town thought about. Didn’t they have the ambition to better their condition; to do something beyond living like sheep under the ruthless yoke of a community attitude that branded them as inferior people?

Hatchett, rubbing his check and looking down at the floor, said, “They go to church on Sunday and they sing, ‘Bringing in the sheaves, bringingin the sheaves, we shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.’ Maybe the school fuss is our line; where we take our stand. Maybe a new outlook will come if we win this fight.”

I DROVE back to Marion, picked up my few things, ate a whopping meal at Mrs. Hodge’s table, and told her I was going to East St. Louis.

“We don’t have much to offer here,” she said, “but if you ever need a place to retire to where in summer the weather is wonderful and in winter you can toast yourself by the fire, come back.”

I drove out state Route 1 3 across rolling country that was incredible in its beauty. Well-kept farms were all around, and the villages I passed through reminded me of small New England towns in their neatness. At the southern edge of East St. Louis I pulled up to a small roadside tavern for a package of cigarettes. Two bartenders behind the counter eyed me coldly as I moved toward the cigarette vending machine.

“We don’t have any cigarettes,” one of the men said. I looked at the vending machine, and I looked at him.

“I said we don’t have any cigarettes; now get out of here,” he said, in the same voice you use when you chase the cat off the living room couch.

I entered another tavern less than a mile away. I had only stepped through the door when the barmaid said, “Nothing doing, and I mean nothing doing. We don’t allow your kind of people in here.” I left without saying anything.

I had made a number of stops en route to East St. Louis, so when I finally arrived I was completely worn out. 1 wanted a bath and sleep more than anything else.

Driving into the business section, I saw the bright lights of the Broadview Hotel, and I headed in that direction. But a strange thing happened to me; I drove on past the hotel toward the bridge that would take me to St. Louis. I was afraid; that’s why I was running like a scared rabbit to St. Louis. Afraid that the Broadview would turn me down. I didn’t want to stand again in a hotel lobby and be told that T couldn’t have a room because I am a Negro. In St. Louis I knew I could get a room.

In Illinois I had traveled over a large section of the state seeking an answer to the question: “What is it like being a Negro in the ‘Land of Lincoln’?” Near Belleville a gas station attendant had waved me on, refusing to sell me gasoline when he saw I was a Negro. In Mounds a Negro member of the board of education had said, “No,

I wouldn’t push integration in our schools, because I don’t think the community is ready for it.” At Carbondale the Negro principal of a Negro high school had declared, “The trouble with the integration program here is that white people don’t want Negroes teaching their children.”

Now I found myself running from the land of the Great Emancipator to St. Louis, my escape hatch against possible humiliation.

You get tired of running. You get sick at heart. You get angry.

I turned back without registering at a St. Louis hotel. I drove to the Broadview Hotel in East St. Louis. I was prepared to argue, to fume, to sue.

I wanted to be turned away so that I could tell the clerk what I thought of him, his hotel, and the whites who discriminated against Negroes because they were black. But it never came off—and I am glad.

“How many are in your party, sir?”

The bellhop said as he escorted me to my room, “I think Milwaukee is going to take the Yanks, don’t you?”

It is the humiliation of segregation that is so bitter for a Negro. And in the North it cuts twice as deep, because in such common matters as eatingin a restaurant or sleeping in a hotel he expects reception, but he never knows when he will be turned away and humiliated. In the North a Negro never quite knows what his reception will be. In the South he does. That is the major difference.