{"id":1945,"date":"2015-05-14T20:23:26","date_gmt":"2015-05-15T02:23:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=1945"},"modified":"2015-05-14T20:32:26","modified_gmt":"2015-05-15T02:32:26","slug":"is-the-pullman-national-monument-whitewashing-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/05\/is-the-pullman-national-monument-whitewashing-history.html","title":{"rendered":"Is the Pullman National Monument whitewashing history?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"Pullman<\/a>
Pullman strikers outside Arcade Building<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Or maybe \u201cblackwashing\u201d would be more accurate.<\/p>\n

Bear with me for some context:<\/p>\n

The Chicago Tribune had an article<\/a> today about the Pullman National Monument, in particular, plans to create a mural featuring\u00a0A. Philip Randolph, the head of the Pullman Sleeping Car Porters\u2019 Union, which reminded me of the peculiarity of this retelling of history, connecting up the Pullman district with the Pullman union, and implying that the latter happened in Pullman rather than, in reality, in New York \u2014 I wrote about this back in February<\/a> and linked to a Trib columnist who provided more detail.<\/p>\n

But the article today I was struck by the fact that the history of the Pullman porters was identified as the heritage of its residents, and here\u2019s a\u00a0Fox News article<\/a> on the National Monument designation, from March 1st, that makes this linkage even more forcefully:<\/p>\n

Chicago bought the town from Pullman in the 1890s, and the neighborhood became officially incorporated into the Windy City. It has remained a primarily African-American neighborhood, with many longtime residents recalling firsthand the days before Pullman Company, as it was last known, turned out its last subway cars for Chicago, New York and Boston in the 1980s.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a fantastic place and I\u2019m glad to be born and raised here and that my mother was born and raised here,\u201d said Marilyn Gartelmann Quiroz, 74. \u201cShe came from a very poor family, but we raised ourselves up,\u201d<\/p>\n

Quiroz and her husband of 50 years, Al, joke they are third generation \u201cPullmanites.\u201d Her mother was born in one of the blockhouses in Pullman, the same building that Quiroz\u2019s husband would later be born in. Her father and her father\u2019s uncle worked at Pullman, and her father\u2019s uncle moved through the ranks from the bottom of the company to become a plant manager.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Great story, eh?<\/p>\n

Except that the reality of racial segregation in Chicago means this didn\u2019t happen.<\/p>\n

Quiroz? \u00a0The article implies that she\u2019s black, don\u2019t you think? \u00a0But she\u2019s not; she\u2019s white (and on facebook<\/a>), as is anyone with that much family history in Pullman.<\/p>\n

Because for the first half of the twentieth century, blacks in Chicago were largely\u00a0restricted\u00a0to the \u201cBlack Belt\u201d \u2014 a 30 x 7 block stretch along State Street, due to residential covenants and other restrictions keeping even middle-class blacks out of white neighborhoods. \u00a0See this bit from Wikipedia<\/a>, and the page on the Pullman-museum.org<\/a> site about the connections between African-Americans and Pullman, and, for a very visible and dramatic illustration of the Black Belt and segregation,\u00a0look at this time-lapse map<\/a> of Chicago neighborhoods; Pullman is neighborhood #50, the rectangular one towards the bottom right. \u00a0(See Wikipedia<\/a> for further identification.) \u00a0I\u2019ve watched this repeatedly \u2014 Pullman doesn\u2019t lose it\u2019s majority-white status until 1970, and doesn\u2019t become majority-black until 1980, as a consequence of subsequent white flight .<\/p>\n

Remember Ta-Nehisi Coates\u2019 The Case for Reparations<\/a>? \u00a0No, I\u2019m not going to make you re-read it \u2014 I didn\u2019t even re-read it just now. \u00a0But I recall that a lot of his case, when it comes to Northern cities, was based on past racism in housing policy, exactly this sort of extreme segregation. \u00a0Remember the Robert Taylor Homes<\/a>, formerly the eyesore along I-94 as you head south out of Chicago? \u00a0These massive public housing high-rises were built in order to squeeze as much public housing into the Black Belt as possible.<\/p>\n

Which means that, in order to create history where there was none, to create this\u00a0continuity between the current black residents and the union activity of the (white immigrant) Pullman factory workers, and subsequent unionization triumph of the (black) porters, this history of segregation had to be erased.<\/p>\n

Hence, a \u201cwhitewashing\u201d: \u00a0in the sense of erasing a part of history; or, a, to coin a really clumsy term, perhaps it\u2019s \u201cblackwashing\u201d \u2014 because if \u201cwhitewashing\u201d is to make something appear as if it\u2019s \u201cwhite,\u201d either figuratively, without problems, or literally, by removing racial minorities from the story, then here, it\u2019s the white immigrants that are being removed from the history of Pullman, with the ironic consequence of removing the entire history of segregation.<\/p>\n

Am I being nit-picky? \u00a0I don\u2019t think so. \u00a0It matters that we get history right, rather than just come up with inspirational stories.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Or maybe \u201cblackwashing\u201d would be more accurate. Bear with me for some context: The Chicago Tribune had an article today about the Pullman National Monument, in particular, plans to create a mural featuring\u00a0A. Philip Randolph, the head of the Pullman Sleeping Car Porters\u2019 Union, which reminded me of the peculiarity of this retelling of history, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":1380,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nIs the Pullman National Monument whitewashing history?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Or maybe "blackwashing" would be more accurate. 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