The story of the Negro takeover of the northern cities is simple in broad outline, but complex in the detail. E. Michael Jones’ book The Slaughter of Cities required 668 pages counting indexes. Very few Americans of my acquaintance are aware of this history. People younger than around 50 probably assume that your typical American city has simply always been a Negro hellhole; they probably think that the few islands of civilization that still remain are the result of gentrification; but this is not at all the case. Most of the transformation took place during a typical Boomer’s lifetime. In addition, most people (except those actually raised in northern cities in the 50s and 60s) think that racial tension is a Southern thing. This is almost the opposite of the actual case. The South is unique in tempering the tensions of life near Negroes with some grace and humor. Its segregation was legal, leaving much room for affection in the gaps. Segregation in the North was not by law: it was all done at the street level, and left little place for affection. I will try to summarize the main outlines of the story, so everyone can at least be vaguely aware, and hopefully, have their appetites whetted to dive into Jones’ opus. It will require several posts. In this installment, I want to focus just on how Whites at that time were able to organize and push back, something that seems inconceivable today. It can serve as a note of encouragement on this day our rulers have set aside to honor this most wicked man, Martin Luther King, Jr.
First the bird’s eye view. There had been a trickle of Negro incursion into the North since the Civil War, but it was negligible compared to what was to come. World War II gave the double impetus for the mass migration: a large number of the country’s youth were drafted into the Army at the same time that there was a huge and artificial demand for industrial output. That is, there was a sudden increase in demand for factory labor at just the time that the local supply was crimped. The solution was to comb through the South and recruit sharecroppers with the lure of high factory wages and easier living. And recruited they were. Vast numbers of Negroes started pouring into virtually every northern industrial city. They continued to pour in after the war was over. The traditional ghettoes were bursting at the seams, so lots of new areas to live were needed.
So much for Act I, setting the stage for the conflict.
The prologue also needs to be written, and is not covered by Jones. This is the fact that the bulk of the Anglo-Saxon (and German and Scandinavian and Huguenot and Hungarian) Protestant people had drifted out to the suburbs, or soon would. The cities were settled in a quilt-like patchwork of specific ethnic, and Catholic, neighborhoods: Poles, Italians, Irish, Czechs, Lithuanians, each clustered in somewhat homogenous patches of the city, each with its parish cathedral.
Why the Protestants tended to diffuse while the Catholics tended to hang together ethnically is a story that I would love to learn about: I wish Mr. Jones might tackle that. For this book, it is taken as a presupposition.
We need to remember that the villains in the story are rarely the Negroes. Left to natural development, but hedged in by White culture, and the noose always waiting when needed, the Negroes would have settled in their own sections and lived relatively peaceful, happy lives, with jobs provided by Whites, police protection provided by Whites, welfare provided by Whites, medical care provided by Whites, and infrastructure provided by Whites. They would have worked enough to get by, made music and whoopy, gotten drunk, and taken naps.
No, the villains of the story, by which the Negro was turned into the unwitting shock troops for a relentless, physical war on American Christendom, are almost completely jews and White liberals, especially Quakers, but also the Catholic intelligentsia, the corrupted WASP establishment, Rockefeller, and the richly endowed foundations. Even the Negroes recruited into the war, such as King himself, were largely pawns of larger, sinister forces. This does not let Marin off the hook. King was a very evil man, but would have just been another locally-contained evil man, just another lascivious preacher, had it not been for his sponsorship by jews, communists, and other revolutionaries.
I want to focus on Chicago during King’s campaign. Lots of the Chicago story took place before King was ever on the scene, so some backfill will be needed later, but we need to honor the day.
In Chicago, the strategy followed by King and the civil rightsers in general had shifted from voter registration, which had been the focus in the South, to staging grand marches through white neighborhoods to protest — well, to protest what? Jones asks. That Poles exist and live there? What exactly were they protesting? “King’s gift for moving masses of people had now been grafted on a Quaker campaign of manipulating the real-estate market for political ends that only worked when no one knew it was occurring. This unthinking combination of the movement’s northern and southern strategies was a formula for disaster” (p. 504).
What King couldn’t seem to reckon with was the stiffness of the resistance that his marches were met with.
It is hard to imagine what happened, given our familiarity with passive and pudgy Whites that will accept any depredation with scarcely a whimper of protest. How different it was 50 years ago.
On Friday afternoon, fifty protesters arrived outside the Gage Park office of the Halvorsen Realty Company, fully intending to stay there until Saturday morning. Once darkness fell, the demonstrators realized that they had miscalculated when a mob of 1,000 angry counter-demonstrators surrounded them and began taunting them and pelting them with missiles of various sorts. When it became clear that the police were incapable of protecting the demonstrators, they persuaded them to break off their protest, which the protesters did, retreating to their cars under a hail of rocks and bottles.
The protesters responded to Friday’s failure by redoubling their efforts. This time instead of fifty demonstrators, they marched 500 into the neighborhood itself, creating another hostile mob which again unleashed another barrage of rocks and bottles, which this time hit both Al Raby and Jesse Jackson. (504)
However, what was particularly vicious about the second day’s protest is that it was preceded by a staged “inter-racial picnic” in a local park featuring Negroes consorting with Aryanesses, some of whom feigned being pregnant using pillows under their blouses. (It would be interesting to find out where the girls were recruited from — the University of Chicago’s Sociology Department?) This was clearly psychological terror, as having your way with the women is the primary mark of having conquered a people. The demonstration would have no impact on “housing,” it was just meant to demoralize (though it back-fired in this case, as Jones insightfully explains). But we need to be aware that the ceaseless depiction of Negroes with Aryanesses on TV, in advertisements, in movies, is part of a relentless campaign to humiliate and demoralize the White man. Knowing it will help you to resist, brother!
The same thing happened when Martin Luther King arrived back in town to lead the march against the Lithuanians in Marquette Park. King stepped out of his car and was almost immediately hit on the head with a rock, a blow which dropped him to his knees…. After the protesters parked their cars and marched off into the neighborhood to protest the fact that the people who lived there lived there, the Lithuanians located the easily identifiable cars of the outsiders who had just driven into the neighborhood and then dropped lighted flares in their gas tanks. The ensuing fires further demoralized the protesters by attacking them from the rear and cutting off, at least symbolically, their ability to retreat… All in all, fifteen automobiles were torched before the police brought the area under control. One policeman’s clearest memory of the Marquette Park march was Al Raby running for his life down 71st Street. (505)
Nevertheless, “the more he failed to achieve his goal, the more King redoubled his efforts along the same lines which caused the failure in the first place.”
The Lafayette Plan, on the other hand, favored the clandestine Quaker approach based on move-ins, and Lafayette was now convinced the King’s southern strategy was jeopardizing whatever gains the Quakers had already made in the Chicago area. King’s tactics ran the danger of making Catholics aware of the clandestine campaign that had already driven so many of them out of their neighborhoods. If they knew what was going on, they could stop it as effectively as they were in stopping King’s kamikaze-style marches. Unless the AFSC and SCLC differences are resolved, it was clear that the movement was about to fall apart.” (508)
The final lunge was to be a march through the section known as Cicero. This would be as symbolic as Selma, for the first anti-integration riots had famously occurred in Cicero over a decade earlier. Governor Kerner put the state police and National Guard on alert. The leadership chickened out, but the new breed of young Negroes defiantly went in anyway.
A rump group managed to round up 200 people and send them to Cicero, accompanied by 2,700 National Guard troops and 700 police who were more or less successful in keeping the much larger crowd of counter-demonstrators from killing them. When it became apparent that the march was going nowhere, the demonstrators beat a retreat under a steady barrage of rocks and bottles. (511)
“King was clearly shaken by his experience in Chicago” (511).
Unfortunately, King’s revolution had the full backing of the Army, Navy, and Air Force of the United States, and eventually prevailed.
There are many more details of the war that are instructive, and I will continue to highlight aspects from time to time. In this vignette, I for one was very encouraged to find out how effective men in a neighborhood can be in defending themselves. It is encouraging that when it was just local powers allied with King’s revolution, the people on the street were able to defeat this Negro communist handily. We need to form bonds that are rooted in family and locality, learn how to fight, and learn how to communicate with each other through the thick jamming noise that surrounds us.
Unfortunately, much of that noise comes from the modern church.
E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing. (St. Augustine, South Bend, 2004)