Book Summary
Jesse Binga came to Chicago in 1892 with $10 and a shoeshine kit and rose to become a millionaire realtor, a national icon of African American success and Chicago’s first black banker. His achievements also made him a lightning rod for the deadliest race riot in city history.
Binga preached an American gospel of self-help and hard work and he was a symbol of hope and aspiration. He lectured with Booker T. Washington, worked with W.E.B. DuBois, and was championed by Robert Sengstacke Abbott, founder of the Chicago Defender, one of the nation’s most widely circulated black-owned newspapers, which crusaded against Jim Crow laws, racial violence and discrimination.
As the Great Migration brought thousands of Southern blacks to Northern cities in the early Twentieth Century, discrimination, segregation and a lack of housing created racial tension, but Binga found ways for his customers to buy property in white neighborhoods beyond the cramped confines of Chicago’s so called “Black Belt.” Bombings of African American-owned properties followed—Binga’s home and business were bombed eight times. Chicago became one of more than three dozen cities that exploded with race riots from Washington D.C. to Longview, Texas, during the bloody “Red Summer” of 1919. In Chicago, militant whites blamed Binga.
As Binga stood up to the violence his name and story were heralded in African American newspapers across the country. He was later interviewed by Carl Sandburg, fictionalized by James T. Farrell. and championed by Mother Katharine Drexel, who became America’s second Roman Catholic saint. Despite Binga’s skills as an enterprising dealmaker, the stock market crash in the fall of 1929 prompted a string of reversals that cost him his bank, his property, and his fortune.
Binga’s story traces the origins of racial change in one of the most segregated cities in America and tells how an extraordinary man stood as a national symbol of hope for communities isolated by racial animosity.
