Bennett Johnson’s story, and others I’ve gathered over recent months, helped inform and inspire Tim Rhoze and Stephen Fedo, the writers of the play “A Home on the Lake.” The production, a collaboration between Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre and Piven Theatre Workshop, is a fictional story about race and property in Evanston, and runs from April 20 through May 20.
The idea for the play was sparked after Tim heard older Black Evanston residents remembering houses being moved--and Black residents being displaced--from white areas of Evanston in the 1940s to what is now the historically Black fifth ward.
I was honored and grateful to have spent a few hours with Bennett Johnson, drinking tea at Curt's Cafe South recently. He also took me on a drive to show me “his” Evanston--the Evanston where he grew up.
On our drive, as you’ll read, Bennett himself told me that he remembers a friend’s house being moved, and seeing another being moved, when he was about 11 years old. He told me so much more. Thank you, Bennett, for your willingness to share some of your many adventures and patiently answering my onslaught of questions.
Read a short story about Bennett’s life and excerpts from my interview with him below.
Listen to our tour of Evanston in the video.
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Bennett Johnson, 89, is a walking encyclopedia of the Chicago (and national) civil rights movement, and the sports, music and literary scenes of his earlier days. Talking to him is like listening to a multi-chapter audio book about race, anger, activism, family, and history, with a twist of dry humor--read by the author.
Bennett is the middle child and only son of Kathryn Burnice Hill Johnson Casimere Samples and Bennett Jones Johnson. In 1931, recently separated, his mother brought two-year-old Bennett and his two sisters from Chicago to Evanston, where they lived with Bennett’s great-aunt and five boy cousins in Evanston’s Black fifth ward.
From Kindergarten to second grade, Bennett and his siblings attended Foster School, the city’s only Black school. The building, at 2010 Dewey Ave., is now home to Family Focus and a variety of nonprofit organizations.
When Bennett was seven, his parents reconciled. His father got a job working on the property of a wealthy businessman named George Bridges. The family moved from Dodge Street to the coach house of the Bridges’ mansion, which was located east of Sheridan Road on Milburn Street, right on the lake, and the Johnson children had to start a new school.
Bennett says his commitment to championing the rights and talents of African Americans began then, when he and his sisters were forced to walk a long way from the Bridges’ home to the integrated Noyes Elementary School (now the Noyes Cultural Arts Center), instead of going to all-white Orrington, the neighborhood school just blocks from the Bridge’s coach house.
“We would be walking to Noyes, and we’d pass white kids going to Orrington. And my first thought was, ‘if I was white I wouldn’t have to do this,’” Bennett told me one day as he drove me around “his” Evanston.
“And then I began to think. I said no! We got Joe Louis. We got Marian Anderson. We got Paul Robeson. They [white people] don’t know who we are, but I’m going to teach them who we are. And I’ve been doing it ever since.”
In middle school at Haven, and at Evanston Township High School (ETHS), Bennett was an athlete: from age 12, he played semi-pro football with an adult league on Sundays, and he was a star football player on ETHS’ Junior Varsity team. Though he was an outstanding player, no Black students were allowed on the school’s Varsity team.
Bennett was devoted to football, and playing the game allowed him to release his aggression and channel the anger he felt at the injustices of racism. But ultimately it was the racism and discrimination of this very outlet that infuriated him: though he had excellent grades and could have attended the college of his choice, when he graduated from ETHS in 1946, he chose a small, historically Black college.
“When I left high school I was mad, I was just totally angry,” Bennet says. “I didn't want to go to school with white people, so I went to Paine College in Georgia. It was the best move I ever made, because although it was a small school, they played in a league that was fairly high class. Anyway, I got a big trophy for being the best all-around athlete. So I got my self-esteem back. It made me realize it wasn’t me, it was them. And the other thing it taught me--because then you had signs, ‘black only,’ ‘colored only,’ ‘white only'--I learned that the thing about the south is that they’re not subtle. They’re very direct about what you’re supposed to and what you’re not supposed to do.”
Stronger and more confident, Bennett left Paine in 1948 after three semesters, returned to Chicago, and attended Roosevelt University, a hotbed of civil rights activity and the only college in the area that did not have quotas for Jews and Blacks.
There he met friends, collaborators, and business partners including such notables as the writer Frank London Brown, Joe Segal, who founded the famous Jazz Showcase in the The Blackstone Hotel, Illinois Congressman Gus Savage, who Johnson calls “a genius, but dysfunctional, and not really much fun to be around,” and Congressman and Chicago Mayor Harold Washington who, at the time, was president of Roosevelt’s student council.
“Gus and I were thorns in Washington’s side,” Bennett says, “because we were radical students on the Student Council and he was its president and had to ally with the University. But we became fast friends.”
Bennett, who was a full-time student studying Chemistry, also held down a full-time job at the post office, but still managed to help organize a sit-in at a nearby restaurant that refused to serve Harold Washington. He also co-wrote the University’s first constitution--which stayed in place for the next 25 years--in one Saturday afternoon.
In January 1950, after falling asleep during an exam, Johnson, 21, was diagnosed with TB. He left his studies and spent till April of the following year at the Oak Park Sanitarium.
“I remember sitting there and looking out the window,” Bennett told me, “and I was surprised to see the world was going on without me. I had been busy doing so many different things, I thought the world couldn’t continue without me. It was quite humbling.”
When he recovered, Johnson headed for California and UCLA, for the better weather and because his father lived there. He was forced to switch majors from Chemistry to English because TB had left him unable to be around Benzine gas.
Bennett was the President of the Board of UCLA’s NAACP branch, and It was at the 1956 NAACP national convention, held at the University, that he met Dr. Ralph Abernathy and Dr. Martin Luther King. They kept in touch in the years that followed, and Bennett played a key role in facilitating the famous meeting between King and Elijah Muhammad in 1966.
Johnson graduated from UCLA with a BA in English, a minor in science, and a concentration in education. After graduation, Bennett got a job with Douglas Aircraft as a riveter.
“I was the only Black doing anything skilled,” he says. “And then I got tonsillitis. When I got well, I’d lost my job.”
His next job--which he worked from 6 a.m. every Friday through 6 a.m. on Monday--was as a probation counselor just north of LA, working with kids ages 16 to 21 with indeterminate sentences. During the week, he’d spend his time hanging out in the office of attorney Herbert Simmons (“he had a very pretty niece who was his secretary,” Bennett laughs), also known as the Clarence Darrow of Central Avenue, whom he’d met through the Los Angeles NAACP, where Bennett was the student representative on the board.
“So what happened,” Bennett says, “is that Herb asked me to investigate police brutality out in Watts. So I went out to this club where all this stuff was taking place, and within a couple of weeks I got 150 valid depositions. There were these three white policemen who would constantly show up.
Every night. And they’d accuse Black men of being drunk when they weren’t, and take them in. That was their pattern. So my friend was a filmmaker, and we climbed onto the roof with a camera and filmed through the skylight. That’s how we got the evidence. So we sued the police for $5 million in 1956. That was a big number.
In 1957, Bennett returned to Chicago--he and his Roosevelt friends lived in Cabrini Green--and began to teach English, and, he says, manners, at Farragut High School. That year, Ralph Abernathy contacted him to ask him to arrange a meeting for King in Chicago with a wealthy couple who supported civil rights. Johnson drove King around and even played a game of pool with him in Evanston.
Johnson started the Chicago League of Negro Voters in 1958, which later became Protest at the Polls, a group that advocated electing Blacks to city positions. He closely advised Harold Washington through his career in Congress, his mayoral campaign, and his time as Chicago’s first Black mayor.
In 1961, Johnson co-founded Path Press Inc. -- the country’s first Black-owned publishing house--along with Gus Savage, and authors Herman Gilbert and Frank London Brown. He also organized the first Black-owned real estate investment, trust, Merit Trust.
In 1966, Bennett acted as the primary liaison for the historic meeting between Elijah Muhammad and Dr. Martin Luther King.
In later years, he worked as a consultant, which had him traveling to Teheran with Muhammad Ali during the U.S. embargo, consulting with the government of Lesotho, and, in 2008, he was named Uganda’s Honorary Consul General to the Midwest. He was also the first President of the Evanston Minority Business Consortium, and in May 2000, he founded and published the The Evanston Sentinel Newspaper, which focused on news about and by African Americans.
I can’t possibly include all the fascinating details of Bennett’s life in a Facebook post--this one is way be too long as it is. In the meantime, here are some highlights of Bennett’s adventures, in his own words, as he took me on his tour of Evanston!
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Borders and Boundaries--a Tour of Evanston with Bennett Johnson
I met Bennett one afternoon, in the parking lot opposite the Gibbs-Morrison Cultural Center, on the corner of Church and Dodge. And right there, he shared this first piece of history with me--about Dr. William “Doc” Morrison, one of the men after whom the center is named [Thomas Gibbs, the other honoree, owned a gas station on the corner of Church Street].
BJ: Yeah, Doc Morrison. He was a pharmacist. His first place was on the corner of Lyons and Darrow. And we used to hang out there, on the steps of his pharmacy. Then he moved over here.
DE: And when you used to hang out here, was it to get sodas and things?
BJ: Yeah, and just to sit and talk. The bad kids were the ones that smoked cigarettes. Seriously.
DE: Were you one of those?
BJ: No, no, I didn’t smoke. I was a big-time athlete. So I only drank, I didn’t smoke. I didn’t do that for football team.
[Pointing out the window] Anyway, this was the border line [Church Street]. Black folks lived on the south side. The first guy to move on the north side of Church Street was Doc Morrison. He bought a house on the other side of the high school. Can’t remember what year it was, but William Morrison broke the barrier.
And I’m a little vague about when Black folks moved here--north of Church Street. But if I recall correctly, there were no Blacks on this side of the street. It was just that defined. And the fifth ward’s original line really confined the Black community. Defined it.
So this, McCormick Boulevard, was the eastern end of the black community. And when we were kids, the canal bank didn’t have trees on it. So we used to go down to the canal bank and we were big at stealing apples and things like that. There was a guy further down this road here, he had an apple tree, two, three of them. So we used to raid his orchard.
DE: And you’d come to the white side of Evanston to do that?
BJ: Yes. From the canal bank we would go across the street. I’m not sure, but the belief was that they would shoot at us. And in fact I do believe it, I just can’t remember exactly. So when we’d see the guy, we’d run across the street and dive back over the fence. [laughs]
DE: Was it scary and daring to cross over McCormick onto [the white] side of Evanston?
BJ: Well, it wasn’t scary, but it was kind of bravado and daring.
Now the houses, one of my best friends lived in one of the houses that they picked up and moved into the Black community. The houses were here, on the west side of where Kingsley school is now.
DE: Who was your friend?
BJ: A guy name Gaylord Mance [who died last year]. And his cousin was Junior Mance. Junior became a very famous jazz pianist. Worked with Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie and Gene Ammons, you name it. He has dementia now, but he’s still around.
And Gaylord’s father, Stonewall Jackson Mance, was a leader of the Masons. And the Masons built the Masonic Temple [at 1229 Emerson Street]. That was built by Blacks. [It’s architect was Walter Bailey, the first licensed African American architect from the University of Illinois].
And this is where those houses were, about three or four, I can’t remember exactly. They were right here on the corner. And they just picked them up and put them across, and put them down. Literally.
DE: And how do you know that?
BJ: Well, I saw it.
DE: What did you see?
BJ: Houses on rollers, and they were being pulled down the street.
DE: And what year was that about?
BJ: I don’t remember. I guess when I was around 10, 11, 12 years old, something like that. That had to be 1941, ’42.
BJ: And why do you think they moved the houses from ...
BJ: The white people decided they didn’t like the Black folks living there, so they picked up the houses and moved them.
DE: So there were Black folks here and they moved them into the fifth ward to get them out of the white area?
BJ: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Whites on that side, Blacks over here. Integration was you know, anathema, for want of a better word. That was the last thing in the world anybody would think of doing until we started marching.
Foster Field was the center of the Black community because that’s where the all-Black school was [Foster School]. That’s where
we did our recreational stuff. We played football, that’s what we did back then, we were athletes. I mean we drank … But nobody did drugs or killed each other. We would have fights ... but athletics, basketball team, baseball team, football team, that’s what we did.
DE: Why are there more drugs and violence now, do you think?
BJ: Fleetwood-Jourdain. I mean we could go there almost any time of night until 9 or 10 o’clock and you know that was IT. Everybody was there. There was a guy named Charles Bouyer who was a PE teacher at Foster School. He was instrumental in keeping kids involved in athletics. A guy named Jack Bracket also. He was a real organizer of the kids. He would make them do things, you know, structured kind of play. And those were some of the reasons why ... I mean we drank … but I can count the guys who got involved with drugs. Nobody did it. It wasn’t the thing to do.
[At Emerson and Greenbay] Now, again, this is the Black community over here. This was kind of a commercial area that had three pool rooms--one over here where the gas station is, one across there in the Masonic Temple, and one on Emerson on corner of Asbury. Later they built one at Church and Darrow.
And another interesting thing is there were no Jews living in Evanston. But down on the corner, in the Masonic Temple, was Stein and Glickman. They were the tailors, and everybody bought their zoot suits, anything, from Stein and Glickman.
Then there were a couple of offshoots from the Black community. One on Emerson Street where Ebenezer AME -Evanston IL is [1109 Emerson] and across the street was the Black YMCA, the Emerson Street YMCA. So Ebenezer was one of the first churches here. Blacks lived in this area all down this street. And the Emerson Y, right here. Another Jewish guy had a store there. He was the one who made me aware of the fact that Jews couldn’t live in Evanston.
Photo cred: Shorefront Legacy Center
DE: So Jewish people could have a store in Evanston, but they couldn’t live in Evanston?
BJ: There was one Jewish family that lived in Evanston. And that was a guy named Greenberg. And the only reason he moved here was because he was one of the architects for Perkins & Will, [the architecture firm] that built the high school.
And right next to the Y, at 1024 Emerson St., was Henry Butler’s business, ever hear about Henry Butler?
DE: Sounds familiar … but I’m not sure.
BJ: Henry Butler was one of the richest guys in Evanston. I didn’t say Black guys, I said richest guys, in Evanston. The way the story went is that at the time of the Chicago Fire [1871], his family was living in Wisconsin. His father was Black, mother white. Chicago Fire came, the father went to see the damage from the fire. Drove through Evanston, liked it, and moved his whole family to Evanston.
Henry Butler, as a young guy, worked for a wealthy family as a footman. And he started a livery service and became the largest livery service, blacksmith service, and taxi service on the North Shore.
And the story goes, Henry Butler decided he wanted to build his dream house. And so he bought some land east of Dempster, right near the lake. But they wouldn’t allow it. They didn’t want a Black living over there.
And … they put landfill in the lagoon, to move him further away from the lake. So he said okay, and instead of moving there, he built three walk-ups here [we’re on Dempster, at Chiaravalle Montessori School] and moved Black families to the walk-ups and built a small community. So instead of just having Henry Butler at the lake, they had a whole lot of Black families here [laughs]!
DE: And where did you live? Where did you grow up?
BJ: I grew up on Dodge Avenue, 1930 Dodge. That’s where we first moved. And then my grandmother, who worked for a wealthy family in Winnetka, she spent the week in Winnetka and would come down for the weekend.
My uncle, who was a World War I veteran, was somewhat eccentric. In fact, what he did--you see these Hispanic guys driving these trucks picking up junk in the alley? He didn’t have a truck, he had a handcart, and he’d pick up rags, and iron, and so forth, and sell it. Then every weekend he’d go downtown and drink and come back home.
But the other thing was that he talked to himself. So you know how now you see people talking to themselves today, but they’re on the phone? Back then he would talk to himself. He had a phone right to God [laughs].
Anyway, when I was around seven, my parents reconciled. Elizabeth Hill’s father, you heard of Dr. Hill right*? Well, her father was a friend of my father, and he told my father about a job with a guy named George Bridges, who was one of the managers for Inland Steel, which was headquartered in Chicago. So we moved over to the Bridges’ house at 570 Milburn when I was in second grade.
DE: So you moved from the fifth ward to a house on the lake on Sheridan Road?
BJ: We had a house that was 20-plus rooms. We lived in a coach house, four-car garage, seven-room coach house. A greenhouse immediately east of the coach house, private beach, garden, big old garden. And the value to me was that it made me realize there was no big deal having a big house. I knew what a big house was. And the other thing too was that I realized that living large wasn’t, you know, wasn’t all that it’s made out to be.
DE: Was it strange that you as a Black family were living on Milburn?
BJ: Oh, more than strange. Unheard of. And the problem was that we were supposed to go to Orrington school.
[Pointing as we drive on Sheridan Road] See … there’s the lighthouse. And we lived in back of the waterworks, there’s a water reservoir there now. This is where our house was.
DE: So the house is gone?
BJ: Yeah, the house is gone.
DE: And that was a private beach?
BJ: Yeah, the private beach, yeah.
DE: And you were living there because your dad worked for him …
BJ: Yes, as a chauffeur, gardener, handyman, he did it all. He was quite a guy.
DE: And what did your mom do?
BJ: She was the manager of a grocery store, Watkins Grocery store.
DE: So, anyway, you were saying, you were supposed to go to Orrington …
BJ: Yes, let me show you where Orrington is and show you what they did to us. Which was when I was a seven-year old kid. That made a difference in my entire life.
[driving from Milburn to Orrington south on Sheridan Road]
Okay now, this is us walking to Orrington School, right? Now turn one block this way. Of course, this was a white neighborhood .... Here’s the school, right? Three blocks, right? But they wouldn’t let us go there. We had to go to Noyes School [now Noyes Cultural Arts Center at 927 Noyes]. I mean, my father tried to enroll us, they turned him down. Mr. Bridges tried also, and they turned him down.
And at that time there was no expressways. So Sheridan Road and Sherman were heavily traveled streets. So instead of going to Orrington, a three-block walk, we had to go to Noyes School. Noyes was integrated, of course.
DE: So Noyes was integrated, Foster School was Black, Orrington was only white ...
BJ: And Dewey was integrated, and that was it. I’m sorry, and the two junior schools, Nichols and Haven--they didn’t have Chute School then--were integrated. Then of course everybody went to the same high school.
DE: When your dad told you you couldn’t go to Orrington, what did it mean to you?
BJ: Well the first thing, we would be walking to Noyes, and we’d pass white kids going to Orrington. So when my first thought was, if I was white I wouldn’t have to do this. And then I began to think. I said no. We got Joe Lewis. We got Marion Anderson. We got Paul Robeson, they [white people] don’t know who we are. But I’m going to teach them who we are. And I’ve been doing it ever since.
DE: So you reacted to it by being empowered rather than defeated.
BJ: That’s right, instead of being depressed, on the contrary.
DE: Were you angry?
BJ: Oh man, yeah, I was angry. That’s a whole other story. I mean, I played football, so that took out a lot of my aggression. I was an athlete, that was a real outlet … But this is Noyes here. Had a great principal too. He was really an extraordinary guy.
DE: In what way?
BJ: Oh you know, field trips were unheard of back then. He would take us on field trips. He would make sure that we were integrated. He didn’t cater to the black kids, but he made sure that we were involved, you know. And he took us to the Field Museum, the Museum of Science and Industry, to the stock yards. He was really a great guy. Phillip Jacobson.
DE: The Black community. Was it tight-knit?
BJ: Yeah, it was like an extended family. Everybody knew everybody. If you got out of line, somebody would tell your mother or straighten you out. And it was really very, very close. Everybody, it was impossible not to know who was whose cousin, brother, sister, whatever.
DE: Do you think it was like that in the white community?
BJ: No, because you had different areas. The area where we were, near Orrington School, it was kind of an enclave that a lot of Northwestern folks lived. Then, immediately west of there, that was a different group of folks. And Southeast Evanston was a different group. So they really had very little connection to each other except for their organizations and politics.
DE: Right, they were more spread out. They had the whole of Evanston.
BJ: And then the other thing is that you had a large Polish population that lived north of Robert Crown. And that was another large group. They were working-class folk because we had two or three factories in town.
[Driving down Central Street, east of the tracks]
DE: Wasn’t there once a movie theater here?
BJ: Yeah. The Stadium. And the Coronet was on Washington and Chicago. But the two main ones were the Varsity, on Sherman, where the Panera is now and the Valencia was were the Rotary Building is now [1560 Sherman]. The Varsity had a balcony-only policy for Blacks. They wouldn’t let Blacks sit on the first floor. We had to protest, and I led that protest.
In the forties, exactly ’45, my sister and I started a chapter of CORE in Evanston-- Congress of Racial Equality. Jim Farmer was a main founder of CORE in Chicago. He went to the University of Chicago. I went to a meeting in Chicago with him and then brought it to Evanston. Anyway, CORE started the sit-in movement.
In Evanston, there was a place called Cooley’s Cupboard on Main Street that wouldn’t serve Blacks. So we sat in at Cooley’s Cupboard until they finally, you know, decided to serve us. And then there was one called Robin Hood’s Barn over there on Howard near the Ridge. It’s a physician’s office right now. We sat in there and they, most of them, caved in quickly.
DE: So how old were you when you were doing sit-ins?
BJ: About 15.
DE: So you were an activist from a very young age.
BJ: The Dominion Room was, you know where the Davis Street Fishmarket used to be on Davis? That was called the Dominion Room at the time. That was a restaurant that was more upper-class, and we never were able to break them down to serve Black folks. But we sat in there too.
Then the housing marches started in Evanston in the sixties. And they were led by a woman named Alderman Mayme Spencer. And as a result of that the restrictive covenants that whites had against Jews were broken, so Jews started moving in.
DE: And what about Blacks?
BJ: Well that happened too. That’s when we started moving outside of the restricted community …
DE: So talk about industry and economics ... now, and then.
BJ: Well, then you had, you know where the Valli Produce grocery store is now [Dodge-Dempster Plaza]? That was Clayton Mark, they made tubing and pipe. And it was a huge employer, that whole industrial area. And Rust-Oleum. And we had several other large industrial companies that aren’t here anymore. The point is you had a lot of hiring, companies that hired a lot of people in Evanston. Black and white.
In fact, I have a funny story about Clayton and Mark. I worked for them when I was in high school. Me and my friend Gaylord. I had two good friends a guy Leslie, and Gaylord. And we were making 75 cents an hour, great money. And Gaylord was caught sleeping in back of the building in a wheelbarrow, and got fired. That was tragic. [laughs]
DE: While we’re driving around, what does it feel like? Is it nostalgic?
BJ: No. I’ve been here all this time. All the scars. I know how they got there. It’s just a scar.
DE: You don’t feel a sadness for the loss of that community?
BJ: I don’t feel any emotional thing about it. We fought a good fight. We did what we were supposed to do. The problem is not emotional, the problem is economic.
DE: So what’s your assessment of where Evanston is now, when we talk about housing and segregation versus diversity and inclusion?
BJ: Remember I told you I was a math major? Well I think of the relationship between human beings as a parabolic curve. The negative part, you don’t ever get there. And you go toward love, and you never reach it. I don’t ever think we’ll get to the promised land in a real sense, but there have been so many changes.
Like I told you, when I grew up, the Black community was south side of Church street to the canal, then up the canal to the little area by Kingsley School, come back up Greenbay Road, go to Emerson Street, and Garnett and Emerson--black folks lived there. Come back and go to Ashland. And then you go down to where two Black families lived on Lake Street. And one Black family lived on Maple near Davis Street. And that was it. Everyone else lived in the ‘hood [the fifth ward].
DE: Where do you live now?
BJ: Immediately south of Main, west of Chicago Ave. We’ve lived there for 40 years.
DE: So what does it feel like, you know, that it’s 50 years since Dr. King was assassinated?
BJ: Well, I was at a very popular bar in Milwaukee when I heard about it on TV. And I called Harold and said we have to go see what’s happening. So we went to see Jesse Jackson at his house, but he wasn’t there. And we talked to Jackie [Jackson’s wife] and she told us that he was in Memphis too. We didn’t know that.
DE: And when you think about what’s going on today do you think things have changed?
BJ: Oh yeah, sure. But the thing about it that a lot of people don’t have awareness of is that King’s death was redemptive. It wasn’t until he died that a movement started. Because King’s popularity was down in the Civil Rights movement when he died. And so the fact that he was killed the way he was made him into what he is today.
DE: So do things look better to you now?
BJ: They are better. But not perfect. Of course not.
DE: And will they never be?
BJ: Well, I can’t say never, but I think there’s always gonna be the fact that people are different.
DE: So it’s a matter of people wanting to live around people who are like them, but being able to live wherever they want if they so choose?
BJ: The thing that really nailed it, that continues to perpetuate the gap between black and white, is that after World War II, the Federal Housing Authority had a thing where they allowed whites to get mortgages, but Blacks couldn’t. And it subsidized the production of subdivisions and suburbs with a requirement that no homes could be sold to Blacks. So that meant a guy who bought a house for $10,000 back in 1947, ‘48, ‘49, is worth $200,000 or $300,000 or more now. And Blacks didn’t have that opportunity. And so they never developed that kind of wealth.
Back in the day, Blacks couldn’t get mortgages. But in Chicago neighborhoods, and in Evanston, there were many Black businesses, the way they were funded was because of ‘Policy,’ the numbers game* run by the infamous Jones brothers. It was an illegal gambling racket, but the Jones brothers would lend money to many people to start legitimate businesses. In Evanston, it was the Perrins family that ran it.
DE: Have you ever lost it and physically expressed your anger?
BJ: On the Football field. The other thing is when I grew up, we were in a ghetto. I didn’t know what it meant to be poor. I didn’t know what it meant to be Black. Until we moved to Milburn. That’s when I found out we were Black and poor. But at six, seven years old, it didn’t matter to me what kind of house we lived in. What mattered was who I was with, my family.
But one day I got close. I got on the subway, and there were two black women sitting on the bench seat, and there was a white man sitting as far away as possible from them. So I said, I know what I’ll do. So I squeezed in and I gave him a hip, and he fell on the floor. I wanted to kill him with my bare hands. Oh yeah. I was really angry. He just got up and walked away. Then I realized that I had the problem. He didn’t have the problem. The system made him a fool, but my anger was unjustified.
DE: Why haven’t you written a book about your life?
BJ: I felt I couldn’t serve two masters. I’m a book publisher, so I felt that if I got off into my own thing it wouldn’t be right.
The other reason: I’ve been too busy fighting the fight.
