Chicago Letter: The city is a reminder that for many black Americans, old problems stay new

“Chicago is the great American city,” Norman Mailer wrote in opening his famous account of the tortured Democratic convention of 1968, striking a tone that made it sound as though his saying so rendered it a fact beyond dispute.
More than half a century on, it’s an assessment that holds up on a week of heaven-sent August weather that made Lake Michigan turn aquamarine and the infamous winds whipping around the corners balmy and welcoming. Chicago in this mood is breathtaking and probably best seen from the elevated looping train system that snakes through the downtown boulevards and is a rickety, breathing work of art in its own right.
But it is a city with many faces and many sides. On the final day of the convention, many of us stumbled on Lowell Thompson, who had set his fold-up chair near the black perimeter fence that forms a hard border around the big arena where the Democratic jamboree was taking place. He was out to catch the crowd headed for the security perimeter. He had a ready smile and a patch covering his right eye behind his glasses and he wore a cap that he reckoned might be his best creation in the many decades since he was among the first African-Americans to break into the elite advertising game.
“Like my cap?” he called to passersby. It was a standard black baseball cap but read “Karmala” and he had already had it trademarked. Wordplay on the vice-president’s first name has become a hot game since she replaced Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate and it’s easy to see this variation catching on.
Thompson reckoned he lucked into the advertising game. He was 20 and had decided he needed to find work to help his family rather than pursue the scholarship he was given to the Art Institute of Chicago. It was 1968 and once the rioting that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King had been quelled, he discovered, as he recalled in an interview he gave a decade ago, that “corporate America suddenly got interested in coloured folks in anything but menial positions”. Through the National Urban League, set up to help African-Americans make the crossing into the world of white collar America, he learned of an intern position in a big city advertising firm with an office next to the Tribune Tower.
“The personnel man at [advertising agency] FCB was a guy who made Don Draper and his boss on Mad Men look like plumbers,” he said in that interview.
“Slicked back silvery white hair and even whiter teeth. He was so smooth, he could sell fins to sharks. He welcomed me into his big, wood panelled corner office overlooking the Chicago river as if I was his long-lost runaway slave son. After I found out exactly what FCB did, I knew I’d found a career.”
By the time he’d retired, Thompson was executive vice-president of the company, but the fusion of commerce and creativity never left him – and the cap might be his equivalent of Don Draper’s Coca-Cola epiphany at the end of that iconic show. “Once an ad man,” he laughed with those of us who stopped to chat with him for a moment.
All week, the Democratic convention has hosted stories of unlikely, fabulous rises to prominence and about the potential within American life for anyone to set out on a transformative journey – given half the chance.
Lowell Thompson’s personal journey is, in its own way, as epic as any of those heard at the DNC. He grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes, the Bronzeville social housing project that opened in 1962 and is remembered now as one of the most notorious examples of failed, oppressive urban policy in postwar America. The development was named in the memory of Robert Rochon Taylor, a black American architect and social housing advocate who had a bold vision for a mixed-race, mixed-income development that would mitigate against the very segregation and slum conditions which the homes quickly became. His vision ran up against the determination of official city planners to sequester entire communities and he resigned his position and died in 1957.
The project named in his memory was Chicago’s alternative skyline: 28 identical brown high-rise buildings stretching over a linear two-mile span. Designed to home 11,000 people, by the late 1970s, 27,000, almost all black Americans, were crowded into what was in effect a ghetto: a food-desert, a barren no-go area dominated by rampant poverty, unemployment, drug abuse, murders, three prevailing gangs and a policing policy that came to mirror that of the prison system. It was a hell.
When the buildings were demolished in 2007 – a year before the city celebrated the historic presidency of Barack Obama – the intention was to remove the rubble and legacy of tens of thousands of thwarted lives and to replace it with something more akin to Taylor’s vision. It has partly worked. Bronzeville is becoming gentrified and, like almost everywhere in the United States, property prices have shot upwards over the past decade.
Meanwhile, however, Chicago’s black population is experiencing a sharp decline. It peaked at 1.2 million in 1980 but has dropped by a staggering 32 per cent since then, with black Chicagoans leaving for the suburbs or for southern states in search of better living, employment and schooling opportunities. It’s the opposite of the Great Migration, when the arrival, in the first half of a century, of half a million predominantly southern black Americans left an indelible mark on the music and food and culture of Chicago.
On a week that marked a homecoming for the Obamas and when the city revolved around the Democratic swell of support for Kamala Harris, Chicago is a reminder that for many black Americans, old problems stay new.