In segregated Chicago, black and tans provided lively nightlife in the early 20th century
In 1922, Genevieve Forbes took Tribune readers on an armchair tour of Chicago’s demimonde. She regularly covered crime and high society, but it was a slow news day. So she wrote about black and tans, as nightclubs with a mixed-race clientele were known. At one, she noted that a patron had more than a little too much to drink.
“She is lifted vaguely, on her way to the ladies room,” Forbes wrote. “She is assisted, here by a white hand, there by a black hand and finally disappears.”
Its frame made that word picture an attention grabber: In a segregated America, by law and custom, Blacks and whites led separate and unequal lives.
Yet both were having a ball at the Ritz Carleton on Cottage Grove Avenue. “Two white girls, beautifully and expensively gowned, very young, with ‘honest’ pink and white complexions, dance with their white escorts but wink at the colored men,” Forbes noted. Her story, like much of the Tribune’s coverage of black and tans, employed language that was common for the time but is often offensive and in many cases simply racist.
Earlier in the story, she noted a mixed race couple on the dance floor.
“She snuggles in under his arms and nestles her blond curls against his throat,” Forbes wrote. “Arms interlocked, bodies pressed close to together, she gets some of the ‘loving,’ she desired.”
In the 1920s, black and tans were the product of a society buffeted by cross currents: A younger generation hungering for sexual freedom confronting holdover Victorian mores, also drawn by the exciting new musical genre of jazz. Prohibition backfired, giving booze an allure akin to forbidden fruit. Bootleggers were transformed into celebrities, as were prohibition agents such as William D. Yaselli, who regularly targeted the black and tans.
“The most dapper of the government’s dry agents was back in Chicago gleaning information on the black and tan all night cafés of the South Side” the Tribune wrote in 1922 of Yaselli’s latest exploit.
Forbes offered one explanation of the genesis of black and tans, a topsy-turvy slice of a largely segregated city.
A cafe “manager grew angry with white musicians who beat a listless drum and played a wearied piano along about 3 in the morning. Colored artists, he discovered were just getting warmed up then,” she wrote. “But the audience was still white. Gradually the guests grew dark.”
That evolution took place chiefly in the Black Belt. Chicago’s original ghetto, it ran south along State and parallel streets. Known for vice and crime, white people generally avoided the area. But for some, danger was one of the attractions.
On Forbes’ visit to the Ritz Carleton, she saw “a party of eight, all white but two colored girls, are discussing the ‘swell time’ they had recently at the ‘grand defense benefit’ given here for Sailor Friedman, the pugilist, and his companions involved in a ‘shooting.’ All the elite of this stratum of the world were there, and it was some party, the table companions allow.”
On other strata, after-party reports would include descriptions of the centerpieces. Stories of a black and tan soirees noted not just table talk of violence, but actual incidents witnessed, such as this dust-up at the Dreamland Cafe on South State Street.
“John Woods, ventriloquist,” the Chicago Defender reported, “seized a liquor bottle and threatened to damage the dome of his opponent, before the gladiators clinched, and detective Parker intervened, preventing the glassware with coming in contact with the young man’s head.”
Dreamland’s proprietor, Bill Bottoms, was a larger than life character. His exploits were regular fare for the Chicago Defender. He drove one of the most fashionable automobiles of the day, a Stutz roadster seven-passenger touring car.
The dance floor of his Dreamland Café could accommodate 800 “high steppers,” as jazz fanciers were known. The kitchen’s upmarket offering was Chinese food. But it also riffed on down-home African American dishes.
Bottoms improvised a champagne and chitterlings supper for officers of the Progressive Lodge No.1 of the Knights of Pythias, a fraternal order. One visitor, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, perhaps putting on airs, said he didn’t know what chitterlings tasted like.
The Dreamland’s bandleader was Joe “King” Oliver, which made the club a mecca, especially for a group of young white musicians who came to be known as the Austin High Gang. Across from their West Side school was “The Spoon and Straw,” an ice cream parlor where there was a phonograph and a stack of records. One of the Austin High Gang played a record of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings.
Hearing jazz for the fist time, they wanted to learn to play it. Joseph “King” Oliver was one of the first performers to bring the original Black version from its New Orleans birthplace to Chicago.
In 1923, saxophonist Bud Freeman and others of the Austin High Gang went to the Lincoln Gardens, a South Side black and tan where Louis Armstrong was playing with King Oliver’s band. “There was nothing else like it on earth. If you couldn’t dance, it made you dance. We knew we were hearing the real thing,” Freeman, who went on to play with the Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman big bands, later recalled.
Six years later, Armstrong moved to New York. He became jazz’s apostle, circling the globe on behalf of America’s unique art form.
The Chicago jazz pioneer Muggsy Spanier was too young to get into a black and tan when King Oliver played them. So he sat outside, transfixed for hours by Oliver’s blaring coronet.
“Later, one night, Muggsy had a chance to sit in with the Oliver band for just three choruses of ‘Dippermouth,’ and it’s still one of his happiest memories,” Tribune nightlife columnist Will Leonard wrote in 1956.
Chicagoans had different opinions of the black and tans, which were often depicted as dens of licentiousness. Racist attitudes played an obvious role, as evidenced by a 1917 Tribune story on the former Beaux Arts Club, renamed the Cascade dance hall, on South State Street.
A police lieutenant who stopped at the club found the dancing “very disgusting,” the Tribune reported. “There were 300 white and colored couples on the floor, the majority of whom were doing an underworld dance.”
Elected officials loudly denounced the black and tans while quietly accepting them (and cash offerings) as a fact of political life. But in 1923, a reform-minded Mayor William Dever revoked the black and tans’ licenses. Their owners produced injunctions that judges had issued, protecting them from interference by the police.
“Those injunctions would never have been issued if the city had been properly defended,” countered Leonard Grossman, assistant corporation counsel. “Now we find that the injunctions are used as a cloak for disorder, lewd dancing, and debauchery.”
Periodically the cops and feds were stirred into action by residents’ protests that a wide-open Black Belt stymied their desire for a middle-class life.
“More than 21,000 Negro residents of the Second Ward have petitioned the chief of police, state’s attorney, and the city council to relieve them of the plague spots known as the Entertainers’ and Sunset cafes and the Paradise Gardens,” the Tribune noted in a 1921 editorial.
“City Hall politics has allowed the immoral black and the immoral white to combine in the worst combination which the two races can make — that of vice,” the Tribune wrote.
The editorial traced the 2nd Ward hijinks to their source: The considerable votes the Black and tan operators produced for William “Big Bill” Thompson, a less than abstemious mayor.
One of the intermittent crackdowns cost Bill Bottoms his flourishing business. After that, he was employed by Joe Louis, a Chicago boxer known as the “Brown Bomber,” en route to a heavyweight championship. Bottoms was his training camp cook, although in at least one instance he was referred to as Louis’ “dietitian.”
Another famed boxer was in the crowd at Bottoms’ Dreamland Café when feds attempted to shut it down in 1924. Jack Johnson, who in 1912 briefly owned an opulent Bronzeville club called the Cafe de Champions, was determined that a crown jewel of the black-and-tan world would have a dignified death. Appalled by the circus of agents and journalists, Johnson promised a broken camera and skull to any photographer who dared take a picture of it.
“Look here Mr. Uncle Sam, there won’t be any fireworks around here even if we allow you to put on the locks,” Johnson said. “They didn’t take any pictures of this joint when it was hot and they’re, not goin’ to start now that she’s cold.”
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