Erik S. Gellman - Troublemakers: Chicago Freedom Struggles through the Lens of Art Shay

Erik S. Gellman

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2020 by The University of Chicago

Photographs Art Shay Projects, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2020

Printed in China

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-60392-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-60408-4 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226604084.001.0001

This book has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor; Roosevelt Universitys Gage Gallery; and the UNC at Chapel Hill Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gellman, Erik S., author. | Container of (expression): Shay, Arthur. Photographs. Selections.

Title: Troublemakers: Chicago freedom struggles through the lens of Art Shay / Erik S. Gellman.

Description: Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019009719 | ISBN 9780226603926 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226604084 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Social conflictIllinoisChicago. | Civil rights movementsIllinoisChicago. | Chicago (Ill.)Race relationsHistory20th century. | Social conflictIllinoisChicagoPictorial works. | Civil rights movementsIllinoisChicagoPictorial works. | Chicago (Ill.)Race relationsHistory20th centuryPictorial works. | Shay, Arthur. | Documentary photographyIllinoisChicago.

Classification: LCC HN80.C55 G45 2019 | DDC 305.8009773/11dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019009719

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

When do people have the right to make trouble? This question defined postwar Chicago, the nations social laboratory, where residents tested new forms of protest and social control. By the 1968 Democratic Conventionwhen demonstrators chanted, The whole world is watchingthey understood that other cities looked to Chicago as their residents dealt with similar currents of dissent and urban crisis in an era of rising prosperity and growing inequality.

Chicagos postwar social movements advanced ambitious visions of a democratic society that drew swift retaliation from city authorities. These activists created new solidarities as they traversed the labor, civil rights, peace, and Black Power movements, whose neat boundaries only make sense in retrospect. They confronted the politicians, officials, and power brokers, who feared that conflict stymied development and damaged Chicagos fragile reputation as the Second City. Demanding a form of civility that masked inequalities, these elites disparaged protestors as outsiders, insisting that real Chicagoans supported the citys efficient Democratic organization. This system helped those willing to profess their loyalty and left everyone else behind.

On both sides of these confrontations over urban democracy, Chicagoans pointed to each other as the real troublemakers. Indeed, the citys scrappy reputation was hard-earned. Chicago: City on the Make, Nelson Algrens 1951 prose-poem, profiled the hustlers and Do-Gooders whose clashes animated city life while warning that these identities were easily traded. The same was true several decades later. Power struggles in postwar Chicago involved a carnival of street actors, reactors, and bystanders who took pragmatic approaches to securing their place in the postwar city.

This book fuses history and photography to capture these dynamics. Historians often stud their texts with images to illustrate people or places. Interweaving photographs and historical analysisusing each piece to inform the otherbrings a new narrative of postwar Chicago into focus.

The photographs in the pages that follow are the work of Art Shay. He grew up in the Bronxs large Eastern European Jewish immigrant community during the Great Depression, served with distinction as a U.S. Air Force navigator during World War II, and then landed a job in California as a journalist for Life magazine. Going on assignments with the magazines ace cameramen, a reporter later wrote, gave Shay a photo education unequaled at any school. But Shay wanted to explore photography on his own, both as a career and an art form. Shortly after his 1948 move to Chicago, he became a new kind of free lance photographera difficult but enticing lifestyle that required him to live off his wits while allowing for more creative autonomy. Shay sold work to Life, Ebony, Fortune, the Saturday Evening Post, and a host of other major periodicals, but he also wandered Chicago photographing whatever caught his eye. His curiosity about the citys diverse people and neighborhoods pulled him across the invisible yet palpable lines of racial and class segregation. He documented decades of the citys hidden history as it unfolded.

This editorial process made its subjects more digestible and honed a consensus approach to the poor and working class, and especially racial minorities. For example, as new movements coalesced in the mid-1960s, many press outlets hewed to tried-and-true depictions of Black activists as violent and criminal, and antiwar demonstrators as spoiled white teenagers. Shays body of work included photos he could sell and many more that fell outside of these conventions.

Shays photographs offer a new perspective on the struggles over rights, space, and power in mid-twentieth-century Chicago. Thus, while this book is not about Shay, his photographs define it. Shay did not consider himself an activist; he rarely took part in the conflicts he witnessed. He was sometimes cynical about the efficacy of protests and the earnestness of protestors. But in turning his keen eye to democratic protest activity against all forms of fascism, Shay revealed himself. He adopted a brazen yet sometimes humorous approach as he foregrounded concerns and grassroots actors that are often overlooked, then and now. His images convey the volatile and contingent energy that activists generated by making trouble. At the same time, they show the enormous effort that went into containing that trouble in order to perpetuate power imbalances and entrenched corruption.