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IN 1949, A UNION OFFICIAL INVITED COLLEAGUES TO HIS ENGLEWOOD HOME.
SOME WERE BLACK. VIOLENCE ENSUED.  
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Ron Grossman
November 3, 2024
Chicago Tribune
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_ Race riots were a sadly persistent theme of American history. But
this one was a bit different. _

The empty lot at 5643 S. Peoria St. in Chicago’s Englewood
neighborhood, shown on Oct. 29, 2024, was the site of a large race
riot that lasted five days in November 1949. A union meeting held
there sparked the riot., Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune

 

On Nov. 8, 1949, Aaron Bindman, the secretary treasurer of a warehouse
workers union, invited 16 shop stewards to his home at 5643 S. Peoria
St.

The get-together was called in part to celebrate a victory by striking
sugarcane cutters in Hawaii, two of whom were touring the country and
were on hand to tell their story. Bindman’s home was in a white
section of Englewood. Half of his guests were Black.

The victorious strikers received a hearty reception in Bindman’s
home. By 9 p.m. the liquor was gone, and two guests set out to buy
more. Though white, they were confronted by an angry group of
neighbors who threatened to burn the house down.

The guests hurried back to their host’s home, grabbed their coats
and left the friendly get-together that triggered five days of
violence.

Race riots were a sadly persistent theme of American history. But this
one was a bit different. In 1949, on Chicago’s South Side, white
people fearful of Black people moving into their neighborhood were
pitted against white people who sympathized with Black people who had
been denied their civil rights.

Bindman didn’t foresee that issue when he bought the house on Peoria
Street. Bindman and his wife, Louise, were nonobservant Jews and
former members of the Communist Party. But they hadn’t bought a home
in Englewood in order to preach the gospel of Karl Marx in a
working-class neighborhood. They simply needed an affordable place to
live in a post-World War II era when the price of homes was
skyrocketing. The Bindmans previously lived in a one-bedroom apartment
in the Kenwood neighborhood and wanted to start a family.

The Englewood home was affordable, they calculated, if they shared it
with Bill and Gussie Sennett. In the 1930s, Bill Sennett had gone to
Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a group of communists and
other radicals that fought the fascists trying to overthrow Spain’s
elected government.

The real trouble started the day after Bindman hosted the union
get-together on Peoria Street.

On Nov. 9, a representative with the Chicago Commission on Human
Relations reported that a crowd of 200 people marched on the
Bindman-Sennett home shouting antisemitic slurs, “Communists” and
“Burn the House.”

“Anyone showing up from outside the neighborhood or wearing
horn-rimmed classes was labeled a communist,” Louise Bindman later
said.

The Chicago Police Department openly sided with the hooligans and
ignored the plight of the besieged. The priest of the local Catholic
parish, Visitation, backed the neighborhood hooligans who stoked the
violence.

On the third night of violence, rioters climbed up on the Peoria
Street home’s porch.

“Aaron and I had called upon some of our friends to come to the
house to help provide protection. There were police officers there and
they were simply watching the windows being broken,” Sennett
recalled in “Communist Functionary and Corporate Executive,” a
memoir tape-recorded for New York University’s Tamiment Archive.

The Chicago Tribune reported on the rioting on Nov. 12, 1949.

Trade unionists and students from the nearby University of Chicago
responded to the call. Clashes with rioters ensued. But the courts
joined the police in taking the rioters’ side.

The New Republic, a liberal weekly, reported the courts had a sliding
scale for bail for those arrested during the disturbances: “$25 for
the students and sympathizers, $10 for rioters.”

When their cases were tried, a judge attempted to explain the
rationale for that sliding bail bond rate.

“Judge Joseph R. McGarry in Municipal Court asserted yesterday that
disturbances last November near 57th and Peoria Streets were not race
riots but were the result of a miserable conspiracy, hatched and put
into effect by a small but highly organized and vocal band of
subversives, professional agitators and saboteurs,” the Tribune
reported on March 14, 1950.

But press reports of the violence on Peoria Street led Mayor Martin
Kennelly to insist that police officers go through the motions of
responding. Police were stationed in front of and behind the
Bindman/Sennett home for a year. At the same time, Aaron Bindman was
being tailed by members of the police department’s Red Squad, which
spied on suspected subversives.

The Tribune reported on Nov. 13, 1949, that Chicago’s mayor and the
police commissioner decided to assign 200 police officers to Peoria
Street in hopes of quelling the rioting. (Chicago Tribune)

Per the mayor’s order, he was trailed by an entourage: a team of
police officers to protect him from harm, another trying to get him
indicted by a federal grand jury for treason.

The FBI also harassed Louise Bindman, a social worker at a retirement
center.

“At one point, the director of the Drexel Home called me in and
said, ‘Hey, what’s going on? The FBI was here, and they wanted to
know what kind of a person you were. I told them you were wonderful
and a good worker.’ And as I left his office he said, ‘Be
careful,’” she told the Chicago Reader for a story that ran in
2000.

The two families pledged to stay in their Peoria Street home despite
ongoing harassment. “We decided to endure the inconveniences in
order to let others know that we wouldn’t be forced out of the
neighborhood because we had Black friends,” Aaron Bindman said.

The Sennetts’ young daughter would ask when it thundered: “Are the
police coming?” She associated a crashing sound with the police
officers who responded when rocks were thrown though their windows.

Finally, the Sennetts and Bindmans had to leave. Their fire insurance
was canceled because their carrier said rioters might torch the
property. Their mortgage broker bailed out because his collateral
wasn’t insured. Both families left Chicago altogether.

The empty lot at 5643 S. Peoria St. where the Bindmans and Sennetts
had once lived in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood is seen on Oct.
29, 2024. (Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune)

The Bindmans left Chicago in 1959 and Aaron Bindman became a professor
of sociology at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

In 1998, the Bindmans made a visit to Chicago. By then, Black people
had long been living in neighborhoods that fought to keep them out.
Peoria Street was intact, except for 5643, which was a grass-covered
empty lot.

The Sennets left Chicago in 1957. Bill Sennett became wealthy as an
executive of a trucking company. He was a capitalist with a
socialist’s soul. He pressed bureaucrats to loosen the regulations
that crimped a truck driver’s earning power.

In the mid-1970s, he helped a friend establish “In These Times,” a
lively leftist weekly published in Chicago.

When Sennett tape-recorded his memoir, the interviewer asked: “Do
you still believe that the workers of the world should unite, that
they have nothing to lose but their chains?

“Absolutely,” he replied, “and they have a world to gain.”

_Editor’s note: Thanks to Bill Kurtz for suggesting this vintage
story. __Have an idea for Vintage Chicago Tribune? Share it with Ron
Grossman and Marianne Mather
at [email protected] and [email protected]_

_Tribune reporter RON GROSSMAN turns 90 on Nov. 18. Despite his
portfolio of thousands of bylines, he did not take a direct route to a
career in journalism._

_Curiosity sent him on that path. The Albany Park native was a
professor at Lake Forest College in 1972 when Gage Park High School
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were pulled out of the school by their parents due to the Board of
Education’s integration plan. The parents were called racists.
Tempers flared. Demonstrations took place outside the school. Grossman
went to the Southwest Side neighborhood to check out the situation._

_“In short, I found in Gage Park what I’d known in Albany Park —
love of neighborhood — and reported that in the Chicago Journalism
Review,” Grossman recalled in 2013
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“The Tribune reprinted it, which gave me a new career and a subject
matter: the kaleidoscope of Chicago’s ethnic communities. I got paid
to walk the streets of my own youth, and other people’s youth.”_

_After freelancing for more than a decade, Grossman was hired as a
feature writer for the Tempo section in 1986. He was later tapped to
expound almost exclusively about Chicago’s history._

_Each day presents a fresh opportunity for the newsroom’s resident
historian to explore the city’s past. During an interview at his
home earlier this week, Grossman was joined on his living room couch
by a stack of library books he’s been reading as reference material
for an upcoming story._

_What keeps Grossman on the beat?_

_“Let me just quote the readers. There isn’t a week that goes by
that I don’t get something that says, ‘Thank God you wrote this
story.’ And sometimes it’s in the form of a threat, ‘Don’t you
dare retire,'” he said._

_You can subscribe to the CHICAGO TRIBUNE by visiting
subscription.chicagotribune.com/TemplateA
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1-800-TRIBUNE (1-800-874-2863). The hearing impaired can call
1-312-222-1922 (TDD)._

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