In 1952, there were no Negroes in Chicago. At least, you’d have thought not if you read the Chicago Tribune.

The Chicago Sun-Times occasionally editorialized about civil rights issues, always on the “pro” side. But the Sun-Times did not report the incidents that inspired these pro-civil rights editorials, and only rarely published other news involving blacks. So if Sun-Times readers knew Negroes existed, it was mostly by inference.

I have been spending hours in the Library of Congress, reading microfilms of both newspapers to immerse myself in the period that is the setting for the next “Steve and Sass” novel. I don’t mean to sound naive, but … I’m astonished.

You think Fox News is biased? Fox News is Solomon compared to Col. McCormick’s Tribune.

Take Dwight D. Eisenhower. In this period running up to the 1952 elections, when “Ike” still hadn’t declared his candidacy, he was like the Negroes: There was no news of him in the Tribune either (although the Trib ran endless news stories on the doings of Bob Taft, the Trib’s favored candidate for the GOP nomination). What stories the Trib did run about Ike were propaganda pieces masquerading as news, calling Ike a tool of “Wall Street” and “eastern internationalists.”

Simultaneously, the Sun-Times ran a Page One editorial endorsing Ike for President, providing strong evidence that Ike actually did exist.

And Communists. Holy cats. It’s easy to forget, but fear of Communism suffused everything in those days (much as fear of terrorism suffuses everything these days). Every time Sens. Jenner, Mundt or Hickenlooper (let alone McCarthy) breathed, it was news in the Tribune. The Sun-Times wasn’t immune either. The following paragraph appeared on P. 1 of the Sun-Times for Saturday, March 1, 1952:

“The Korea truce talks took on their gloomiest aspect in months Saturday when Communist negotiators insisted on Russia as a neutral nation to guard any armistice. Red propagandists [my emphasis], meanwhile, howled for renewed war.”

But back to Negroes, as they were quaintly known then.

In 15 or 20 hours of scanning through the microfilms, I saw only two photographs of blacks in the news pages of either paper. Both ran in the Sun-Times. One was of a black soldier killed in Korea. The other was an elderly black woman who had submitted a winning religion piece to a Sun-Times contest. She was rewarded with $20, publication of her piece, and her picture in the paper.

I would say I’m shocked, shocked, but … I participated in this sort of journalism myself. Ten years later.

At City News Bureau of Chicago, my first job out of college, the following practices were in place during 1962-64:

â–ª Deaths of ordinary black citizens were not news, by definition. When we City News kids phoned in a “coroner case,” the Desk’s first question would be: black or white? If the answer was black, the Desk’s response was: “Cheap it out.” (Some individuals who manned the Desk didn’t use the word “Negro” or “colored” or “black.” They used a fanciful code word instead: “Is it ‘blue’?”)
â–ª In every story where the subject was black, he or she was described thus: ‘John Jones, 42, a Negro …’ The newspapers never printed stories this way, of course. Our descriptions were merely a helpful guide, enabling the Trib and the Sun-Times to determine whether or not a particular story was ‘news’ — based on the skin color of its subjects.

This situation was occurring while Chicago’s black population was nearly doubling — from 282,244 in 1940 to 509,512 in 1950, according to a University of Chicago analysis of Census data published in the Sun-Times (about the only such story I encountered in either paper). In other words, in 1950, about one-sixth of Chicago’s population was black.

Truth is, in 1952, there were three different Chicagos: The isolationist, head-in-the-sand white Chicago of the Tribune; the lip-service mushy-liberal white Chicago of the Sun-Times; and the black Chicago of The Defender, about which possibly more next time. (I’d talk about The Defender this time only I haven’t yet gotten to those microfilms. But in researching To Love Mercy, I spent many hours poring through the 1948 Defender, and I am here to tell you: If white Chicagoans were living in different worlds, black Chicagoans were living on a different planet.)

Ralph Ellison wrote a famed novel about blacks in America during this period. The title was Invisible Man. Ralph wasn’t kidding.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. Yes, you heard it right: The next “Steve and Sass” novel. Michele Rubin of Writers House, my new literary agent, thinks she can sell a major publisher the “Chicago Trilogy” — To Do Justice, To Love Mercy and To Walk Humbly. I’m psyched. The ideas for To Walk Humbly (or possibly To Walk Humbly with Thy God) are tumbling out.