Hank Williams Village
Hank Williams Village
Site #2 Description…
On the second stop of our tour, we look to Uptown’s Appalachian community and their grassroots movement for affordable housing that emerged in the late-1960s. If you need a refresher on the neighborhood’s southern white constituency, visit our section on the group in A People’s History of Uptown tour. The mining, lumber, and livestock barons that built Chicago—this business elite who patronized 1920s Uptown—were reliant on the resource-rich American hinterlands for their wealth. The levels of resource extraction that urban and industrial growth demanded was unsustainable and soon led to the environmental and economic collapse of entire regions like Appalachia.
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The region and culture of Appalachia is widely stereotyped. On the one hand, Appalachia is often romanticized as part of the founding story of America. In such portrayals, Appalachian settlers are shown as idealized pioneers, self-made in battles with the elements and Native Americans. Of course, this representation masks the genocide that settlement entailed. Much was also made of Appalachians’ Anglo-Saxon heritage and their alleged racial superiority. However, as the Appalachian frontier was enveloped by industrial mining interests around the turn of the 20th century these settlers became seen as “backwards” due to their preference for subsistence farming over wage labor and their unwillingness to assimilate to ideas of respectable whiteness. Although Appalachians are white, the ways in which they have been stereotyped closely mirror how white populations in the West saw Native and African Americans and the people in their overseas colonies—either as “noble savages,” or as animal-like and barbaric.
The industrial and manufacturing boom centered in American cities during the late 19th century and through World War I drew extensively on resources from the naturally abundant and forested regions around the Appalachian mountain range. Pressure from intensive lumbering and mining activities in these regions converted most of the subsistence farming communities there into industrial labor, and the lands began to deplete from over-mining and deforestation. Automation and the industrial downturn during the Depression left many Appalachians jobless and soon thousands of families were migrating northwards to cities—along with African Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South—looking for jobs to fend off starvation. And so, during the 1940s and 1950s, thousands of poor Southern and Appalachian families, seeking jobs in the city, began to fill the once-lavish apartments of Uptown, many of which had been converted to low-income housing during the Great Depression and the war years.
In this short clip from a 1995 PBS documentary, Anndrena Belcher, a performer and activist from Uptown who draws from her Appalachian roots for her work, speaks about leaving West Virginia to come to Chicago with her family. Anndrena’s sister, Belinda, was a major figure in the fight for state support for black-lung affected ex-miners from Appalachia. Source: “Interview with Anndrena Belcher,” Washington University in Saint Louis, contributed by Blackside, Inc.
Uptown, with its large supply of pre-war apartments, was well-situated to meet the increasing demand for urban housing during the Depression and World War II. Many of the neighborhood’s well-appointed apartments and houses emptied out and fell into disrepair as the wealthy moved out of the city into newly developed suburbs. Countless apartments were repurposed and split into smaller units, increasingly served as housing for working-class families and individuals. The large, once-luxurious, apartment hotels already offered small units, and these buildings simply began to serve a different clientele. Uptown began to attract poor migrants of various races and ethnicities, displaced by the war and the Depression and seeking cheap housing and jobs in the city. Most settled in the “heart of Uptown,” those blocks around the Wilson “el” station, and by the 1950s, around 38 percent of Uptown’s racially diverse population comprised white Appalachian migrants. At the same time, Uptown’s business elite was struggling to revive its image as an entertainment and retail hub after the Depression.
The massive influx of this culturally distinct group soon invoked antagonism among Uptown’s remaining wealthy residents and its significant class of now suburban-dwelling absentee property holders. The migrants were derisively termed “hillbillies” and Uptown became “hillbilly heaven.” Of course, life as a hillbilly in Uptown was far from heavenly. The migrants came to be caught up in the complex ecosystem of urban poverty, where their lives were entirely at the mercy of exploitative employment agencies, the welfare bureaucracy, slumlords who controlled their living spaces and the real estate sector, and the rich of Uptown, who had the sole say in urban planning decisions. The white Appalachian migrant became the face of all the issues that Uptown faced—increased crime, poor sanitation, overcrowding and a decline in property value. The same values that were celebrated in Appalachians—stoic, rustic, and unchanging—made them undesirable in Uptown and seemingly impervious to welfare agencies’ efforts to “assimilate” the newcomers. Newspaper articles regularly featured condemnations of the hillbillies of Uptown.
Charles Geary-- a Kentuckian migrant who became a prominent activist in Uptown—talks in his autobiography about the indignity of being a “hillbilly.”
“My only thought was that I would be able to get work in Chicago.
I got a ride with a salesman who told me he’d been poor once, but had now made a lot of money. Hearing him talk and seeing the beautiful apartment buildings along Lake Michigan made me start dreaming of the wealth and possessions I wanted to have someday.
Suddenly the man’s voice shattered my dream: ‘I’ll let you off up here.’ The car slowed. ‘Just walk a few blocks away from the lake. That’s where all the hillbillies go when they get to the city.’
Just who did he think he was, calling me a hillbilly? He wasn’t such hot stuff. Yet, in a way, I knew he was right. I had nothing, and I thought I could get rich quick… (29)”
Geary also talks about the kind of labor exploitation that was common in Uptown, where daily-wage agencies colluded with companies to make sure that people couldn’t find long-term employment:
“…I found out that day labor is really slave labor. We couldn’t work at any of the places where we’d done day work, because they had signed agreements with the day-labor places to buy the contracts of any men they wanted to hire for a full-time job.
‘You know,’ I said to Bill, ‘if that’s the way it works, once you sign a day-labor contract, they’ve almost got you for life.’ That wasn’t the half of it. To get a job, we needed a work record. The day-labor outfits wouldn’t supply reports on us. That was another tactic to keep men in line at their doors.
Finally, we had to go to an employment agency that demanded a week’s pay to find anyone a job. (33)”
The Firing Line was the local Uptown newspaper of the community organization JOIN (Jobs or Income Now). The paper drew its name from an Appalachian song (“Keep on the firing line”) which dated to coal miners’ labor union struggles during the early 20th century. The newspaper’s longtime editor, Peggy Terry, was a prominent figure in the struggle for justice in Uptown and nationally recognized advocate for the cooperation of poor and working-class peoples across racial and ethnic lines.
Scan of a JOIN (Jobs Or Income Now) poster from the 1960s, when the organization was based in Uptown. JOIN began as a local project of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), but quickly incorporated many Uptown community members, especially among the neighborhood’s White working class and poor migrants.
These migrants soon learned that they had simply traded rural poverty for urban poverty as Chicago and the nation faced another recession in the 1950s. Like much of the urban poor, Appalachian whites in Uptown were treated as second-class citizens and faced a lack of basic amenities. They also faced community-specific issues—one being the prevalence of “black lung disease,” the result of coal dust depositing in the lungs over decades of mining. The government often colluded with the elite in characterizing migrants and their culture as the problem, rather than seeking solutions to ensure equal opportunity. Uptown’s transformation from a cultural hub for the urban elite to a poverty-ridden “hillbilly heaven” may seem surprising, but these narratives are correlated parts of a larger story of unsustainable economic growth thriving on inequality. In the 1960s, poor and racialized people all over the US began radical movements responded by demanding a different vision of progress. These waves of resistance swelled in Uptown, where northside “hillbillies” joined hands with unlikely allies to wage a remarkable battle against displacement, one that would define the community’s fate.
Listen to this 1971 interview between the well-known broadcaster and oral historian, Studs Terkel, and Buddy Blankenship, an Appalachian ex-miner who lived—and was killed by a stray bullet—in Uptown. Blankenship talks about starting back-breaking work in the mines as a teenager. He lived in a “mining camp” in the early years of the Depression, where the struggling company made sure that all the cash paid as wages was spent in the company store. Blankenship also talks about his love for farming, and his declining health—he was suffering from black lung disease.
Image from Roger Guy’s 2013 paper “We Shall Not Be Moved” in the journal Humanity and Society.
In 1968, as part of the nation-wide Model Cities program, Chicago’s city authorities announced the decision to build a city college in the North side of Chicago. Of the options available, the area chosen was a few square blocks directly adjacent to the Wilson Red Line station, home to most of Uptown’s southern white population. According to various estimates, the plan would displace between 1000 to 1500 people. This was welcomed by the Uptown Conservation Council and other bodies that were against the migrants, who saw that the college would attract investment and middle-class in-migration.
When community activists in the Model Cities council of Uptown, such as Charles Geary and Irene Hutchison, saw that they had no real power to refuse the building of a city college in Uptown, they resigned, formed the Uptown Area People’s Planning Coalition (UAPPC), and pushed for a different plan. They were then asked by the city authorities to come up with a viable alternative, and so, with grant funding, the UAPCC hired an architect couple, Rodney and Sydney Wright, to develop a new plan.
In this clip from the documentary, American Revolution II, Charles Geary rallies the Southerners of Uptown to disrupt an upcoming city planning meeting. Geary was a Pentecostal preacher, originally from Kentucky. Though Geary’s tobacco-chewing, guitar strumming persona seemed flamboyant to outsider observers, it became a crucial factor in gaining trust in a community that was infamously reticent towards patronizing welfare workers.
A draft of the layout of development according to the Hank Williams Village plan.
The result of the UAPPC’s work was the Hank Williams Village plan, developed through extensive consultations with the residents of Uptown. The plan was for a fundamentally community-centric space, with pedestrian pathways, homes, community centers, childcare facilities, and even a hotel for migrants. Rather than forcing the Southern migrants into low-value housing, this plan centered their idea of home and well-being. The plan was named after the “King of Country Music,” Hank Williams.
The plan was initially considered by city authorities, which stalled the college construction, but ultimately the UAPCC could not resist the powerful vested interests behind the city college plan. In 1969, it was decided that the city college would, after all, be built in Uptown. By 1976, when Truman College began operations, many of the “hillbillies” of Uptown who had organized against its construction had left the neighborhood. Some had of course been forcibly displaced to other areas of the city by the building of the college. Others had elected to move back to Appalachia or other southern regions as opportunities for blue-collar employment in Chicago disappeared with the advent of the neoliberal era. These changes signaled the closing a remarkable chapter in working-class migrant activism in the city. However, the spirit of this resistance lived on and fueled a new wave of “poor people’s power” already taking shape in Uptown. We will see this wave crest in the 1980s when gentrification and private development interests garnered sharp resistance from residents, community organizations, and local officials.
Marc Kaplan, a long-time Uptown organizer, recalls the efforts to build Hank Williams Village, what the community learned from the rather bitter experience, and what they won in the fight. Notably, while the UAPPC’s plan was rejected, they did win a significant sum of “seed” money, funds that were used to found Voice of the People, an Uptown community organization that continues to manage many units of affordable housing today.
Workers with Voice of the People renovate a large apartment building on North Clifton, directly adjacent to the city college campus. Source: Chicago Rehab Network Newsletter May 1985. Courtesy of Chicago Rehab Network.
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