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Skyscrapers and Segregation: A Century of Black Fortunes Three new books explore how Black fortunes were built and lost in the first half of the twentieth century. BY EILEEN LI
“M
oney is a wonderful thing,” an editorial in The HalfCentury Magazine declared in 1922. “If you have enough of it, the world voluntarily places a coat of white wash over your blackest crimes. Money opened the doors for some of the most exclusive places to the Jews. Enough money would blind the eyes of the white race to our own color.” The Half-Century Magazine was established by Black businessman Anthony Overton as a forum for advertising his personal care products company. In 1922, Overton controlled a fortune of $300,000$500,000 through his Bronzevillebased Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Company.Nearly 98% of his wealth would disappear in just two decades. Three recent books, including a biography of Overton, trace the accumulation and loss of Black wealth on the South Side of Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century. The Merchant Prince of Black Chicago, by Wichita State University history professor Robert Weems Jr., provides a richly documented account of the life of Overton and his particular talent in advertising. In Binga: The Rise and Fall of Chicago’s First Black Banker, Don Hayner, the retired editor-in-chief of the Sun-Times, explores the life of Black banker Jesse Binga with storytelling that reads like a fast-paced novel. Both born around 1865, Overton and Binga’s lives intersected through their collaborations, their rivalries, and their downfalls, painting a rich picture of Black ambition in the first generation after emancipation. Moving Up, Moving Out, by Metropolitan State University historian Will Cooley, traces these patterns forward into time, diving into the battles for desegregation waged by middle-class
Black Americans from the 1910s through the 1970s. Together, the books cover over a century of Chicago history. But it is the 1920s—the so-called golden age of Black business— that rises to the fore. During the 1920s, Binga and Overton were at the height of their wealth and prominence. Their business empires included a newspaper, personal care products, life insurance, apartments, storefronts, two banks, and investments all across the South Side. They socialized at lavish Christmas parties with the who’s who of the city’s elite, and commanded respect in Black and white publications around the country. The 1920s both set the bar for dazzling accomplishments in a segregated world and set the stage for how far these moguls would fall. Tracing to the root of the moment when the South Side became associated with Blackness, these revived stories dispel the narrative that the disparities in racial wealth we see today were natural and inevitable, and ask us to question the circumstances that led to their formation.
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n 1900, the Black population in Chicago was about 30,000 in a city of one million. But as waves of Southern migrants arrived in the coming decades, this population would double again and again. New arrivals to the city would find that most mainstream economic opportunities were closed to them: they could not join a union, learn a trade, work white collar jobs, or live outside the Black Belt, the chain of neighborhoods on the South Side that held most of the city’s Black residents in the 20th century. But the growing Black population had another effect: enabling Black entrepreneurs
to rise by catering solely to their own. Increasingly, an economically successful class of Black Chicagoans had to confront new questions: What does success mean in a world where most doors are still closed to you? And what are your responsibilities to other Black people, who face the same discrimination as you? Anthony Overton and Jesse Binga represented two archetypes of success in the boomtime decades. Overton was considered a refined businessman and known as “a polished man with a regal bearing”; before arriving in Chicago from the South, he had gone to college and law school. He made his fortune selling face powder and makeup to Black women with a message akin to modern-day body positivity, telling Black women that they did not need to aspire to white standards of beauty and that they were inherently beautiful. As his wealth grew, Overton leveraged his success into broader financial ambitions, helping to open the Douglass National Bank in 1921 and founding the Victory Life Insurance Company in 1924. Binga, on the other hand, was a polarizing figure. In Cooley’s history of housing in Chicago, Binga is portrayed as one of the worst slumlords. After coming to Chicago as a street peddler, he built a real estate empire by renting out rooms and subdividing apartments, capitalizing on Black population growth. He negotiated deals in white neighborhoods and, once the white tenants fled, charged new Black residents rents that were forty to fifty percent higher. By 1909, he was the landlord to over two thousand people. Binga made his fortune as a Black real estate agent at a time when real estate was soaked with tension and violence. Caught
between Black tenants who complained about his high rents and white people who resented his incursions, Binga himself appeared to simply believe that he was doing what he was supposed to as an American: making money off of opportunities. This belief in capitalistic exceptionalism led him to found perhaps the biggest symbol of Black wealth in the city: Binga Bank. Then as now, the world of high finance, where fortunes are made, was seen as a critical piece of the struggle for racial equity. Banking was a powerful symbol of the path to a better future. Together, Binga and Overton controlled “36 percent of the combined resources of all Negro banks in the United States.” And for both men, banking was inseparable from a broader agenda for racial uplift. When asked for advice for other Black Chicagoans, Binga told them, “Learn business: Establish a credit: Provide for your own wants. That is my message to our group.” Overton, meanwhile, made a forceful case against using white banks. When Black people deposited their money in white banks, he said, “These same Negro funds are loaned to white business institutions that likewise would not give employment to one of our race in any capacity. The Negro’s money is used to close the door of opportunity in his own face.” Because of the rarity of their wealth and the smallness of the Black Belt, Overton and Binga inhabited much the same world, and both Hayner and Weems, Jr. bring it to life with a glittering array of side characters. Langston Hughes famously commented that “midnight was like day” on South State Street, as Bronzeville nightlife thrived in jazz clubs. Black business leaders navigated a lifestyle somewhere between that of AUGUST 19, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9
