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Memories of the Southside: A Conversation with Chuck Smith
By Tanya Palmer
Born in the same hospital and only a few years apart, Goodman Resident Director Chuck Smith says that he has always felt a connection to Emmett Till. "If someone would say, 'I wonder what Emmett Till would be doing if he was still alive,' you could look at Chuck Smith," he explains. "We lived in the same neighborhood and went through the same experiences." In a recent conversation with Goodman Literary Manager Tanya Palmer, Smith recalls some of his experiences growing up on Chicago's South Side in the 1940s and '50s.
Chuck Smith: My family all grew up on 32nd Street and Vernon. I look back now, and those were some of the happiest days of my life. It was a true village. I felt very safe in my neighborhood. I walked to Douglas Grade School, and I was safe as long as I stayed within two or three blocks of my house.
I sort of had two houses because my parents split up when I was very young. My mom lived at 3743 South Park, which is now King Drive. On the weekends, I would stay with Mom, and then go back to my grandma's because my mom had to work. My grandma was on 32nd and Vernon-that's where she raised our family. They came up from Alabama right after my mother was born, in about 1917. My grandfather came up to Chicago, got a job at the stockyards, and then went back for my grandma and my mom. They had five more kids, a total of three boys and three girls. They're all gone now. They were all born in Chicago except my mom. So we're "Chicagoans."
Tanya Palmer: Do you have brothers and sisters?
CS: No, I was an only child. But my uncle was my contemporary. He was about two years older than I am, so he got stuck with me. On Sunday afternoons, we'd come downtown to State and Lake to see stage shows and a movie. The Chicago Theatre had stage shows, the Oriental had stage shows. Or, if we wanted to stay in the neighborhood, we'd go to Warwick Hall on 47th and see a show.
TP: What kind of shows did they have?
CS: TThey had big band music: Cab Calloway, Billy Eckstine, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman—big bands. It was exciting. I came downtown about twice a month, on Sundays. And then when I was old enough, my mother and sister and grandma let me go out alone. My grandma wanted to keep me close, but my mother said, "Nope, let him go." So when I got to about seventh or eighth grade, I started coming downtown on my own. I'd come down on Sunday afternoons. Nobody bothered me because I was alone. Chances are if there were four or five of us, we might have gotten some flack.
TP: So the area you were in was a black community.
CS: Yeah, strictly black community. You very seldom saw whites, except for the insurance man or the bill collector.
TP: Were there a lot of kids on your street you'd play with?
CS: Oh, yeah, tons of kids. And we all played in the street because there were very few cars. I remember that two of my friends had cars. They were sort of well-to-do. The beautiful thing about the old neighborhood was that all the black people lived together. The two guys who had cars on my block were a real-estate guy and a doctor. And then the people next door to me were on welfare. But all the kids played together.
What happened to the neighborhood was integration. Once they were able to leave the neighborhood, the people with money were gone. They left, they cut out. They started thinking they could live wherever they wanted to, and then they left everybody else-people with low incomes were all there because they couldn't go anywhere. But at the time, we were all there together. I would say, in relation to the black community, my parents were middle class. Everybody worked. We were never on welfare or anything like that. I never had a hungry day. There was never a day when I didn't have a roof over my head or clothes on my back. And I worked for my money. Everybody went and got a job.
TP: What kind of jobs did you have?
CS: : You know, paper boy, that kind of stuff. I delivered groceries. Like Travis Young, the character in Raisin in the Sun who was always saying, "Let me go carry groceries," and his mama said, "No it's too cold." I've heard that so many times. It wasn't like: "Give me money, give me money." No, you had to earn it. You always had to earn your money. Today I can't even think of not working. The idea of retirement-what's retirement? If you don't work, what are you doing? When we grew up, everybody worked. If you didn't work outside, then you had to work in the house. The other thing about living in the community in those days was that everybody looked out for you. If you did something wrong, you were going to get caught.
TP: Did that ever happen to you?
CS: Oh yeah, all the time. I was a kid—I was a boy. So I used swear words. And I'd get home, and somehow my grandma would know. "What's this I hear you said—all these bad words."
TP: What kind of music were you listening to?
CS: All kinds—Billy Eckstine, Nat "King" Cole, all the singing groups that were around in those days. Everybody sang—everyone. All the voice types would get together and sing. You'd stand on the corner or on somebody's porch and harmonize. Doo-wop stuff.
It was a good time to grow up, for me. I felt very safe. Gangs were around, but if your parents stayed on you, they made sure that you were accounted for. Drugs were around, but they didn't get strong until the 1960s, when they just started taking over the neighborhood. The major vice in those days was the numbers. That was one of the negative things that you could get into, but I never explored it. And I never explored a gang, because my uncles were around. Everybody kept track of kids, if the kids were loved. And I was loved.
But then my parents had to move out of the neighborhood. We bought property in Hyde Park, and I lived at 5312 Maryland until about the seventh grade. So we moved from the black community to a predominantly white community. It was a Jewish neighborhood—and I never had an ounce of trouble from day one. Now, I was lucky, because most of my friends who went to other white neighborhoods had horror stories. I mean horror stories. They were followed home from school. I felt sorry for them because I was embraced, you know. I was never called the n-word. I never had any trouble making friends. I was lucky. And that's all I can say, I was just lucky because a lot of kids landed in some really bad situations. And I landed in a pretty good one. I ended up graduating vice-president of my grade school class, and I was the only black guy in the whole class.
It got crazy when I went to high school, though. I attended Hyde Park High School for a year and experienced reverse racism because the black kids didn't like that I had white friends. They would always say, "Hey man, how come you always eatin' lunch with those guys," and I'd say, "I tell you what, why don't you all come over here? They're cool. They're all right." They'd say, "Naw, we're not eatin' over there. You got to come over here with us." So next thing you know, I'm getting in fights with black guys because of my white friends. The first semester was just talk, but the second semester I was actually getting in trouble. And so I wasn't learning anything. My mom had moved out to Park Manor, which is in the 70s at King Drive and South Shore, so I went over and started living with her full-time. I went to Parker High School and just merged in with the black kids over there.
TP: And what was that community like?
CS: : It was not as mixed. It was changing. When I got there as a sophomore, I would say it was 30 percent black and 70 percent white. By the time I was a senior, it was just the reverse: 30 percent white and 70 percent black. When I first moved there, our dividing line was 71st Street. If you went past 71st Street, you were going to get in a fight with white guys. Then the dividing line was 75th Street, and then 79th. By the time I graduated from high school, it was past 79th. In my sophomore, junior and senior years, teenagers were cherished because we were the warriors of the community. We weren't scared—we would band together and venture out.
TP: Now do you remember hearing about what happened to Emmett Till?
CS: Yeah. See, once upon a time, in the old neighborhood, when kids would get in trouble, their parents would send them to their family down South to get away from gangs. It was a normal thing. My family had dropped all ties with the South, but 50 percent of my friends did have family down South and would visit on a regular basis. Everyone would go down South for the summer. I had never heard horror stories about the South other than, "You better watch your Ps and Qs, because it's different down there. But if you mind your business, you won't have any trouble." But when Emmett Till was murdered, it scared me. And I said, "I ain't never goin' down South."
Everybody knew about Mississippi. If you had to go down South, you'd be best going to Louisiana, someplace like that. But Mississippi was a scary place-had always been sort of a scary place. And when Emmett Till was killed, everybody in my age group said, "That could have been me." Plus, we were from Chicago. Whatever he did, if I went down there, I probably would have done the same thing. We don't know what really happened. But whatever it was, it definitely could have been me. Because if I had been in Emmett Till's spot, I probably would have reacted the same way he did.
TP: Did you feel like the same kind of thing could happen in Chicago?
CS: It did happen in Chicago. If you went into a white neighborhood by yourself, you could get seriously hurt. There were boundaries. To this day when someone says "Cicero," I back away, because in Cicero, black kids were getting beaten with baseball bats. It was the same with Mayor Daley's old neighborhood, Bridgeport. You didn't want to be messing around in Bridgeport. You know, today, I still don't feel comfortable in Bridgeport. It was dangerous if you got caught by yourself in a white neighborhood at the wrong time. There was a war zone between the black and the white neighborhoods. There was no togetherness. The only time you saw blacks and whites together was on the sports field. And after the game was over, blacks went their way, whites went their way. There was no merging. You just learned to live with it. You knew where to go, where not to go.
My grandmother was always afraid, but my mother said, "No, he's got to be able to go out. I don't want him stuck here in the black community. I want him to know what's going on out there." We would come downtown and do all the things that everyone else considered normal. My mother insisted that I come downtown, walk around and learn. We used to go to the Walgreens on Randolph and State. That was our spot. Right before we'd go home on Saturdays, we'd stop off at Walgreens and have a malted milk, and then we'd come home. My mom insisted that I knew what was going on outside of the black community. And I've always felt that Chicago was as much mine as it was anybody else's.