The Demise of America’s Onetime Capital of Black Wealth
Chicago was once known for its power marriage of Black business and politics. Today, many Black-owned companies have shuttered, dramatically changing the city's landscape.
Alvin Boutte Sr. (far right) speaking with Edwin C. “Bill” Berry (second from left), the executive director of the Chicago Urban League, and two others. | Photo courtesy of the Boutte family
By LEE BEY
12/07/2021 11:00 AM EST
Updated: 12/08/2021 03:09 PM EST
Lee Bey is the author of Southern Exposure: The Overlooked Architecture of Chicago’s South Side, a book that showcases his photography and architectural and social commentary. He is also a member of the Chicago Sun-Times editorial board.
CHICAGO — Every now and again, Alvin Boutte Jr.’s travels take him past 79th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue on Chicago’s South Side. And the memories come flooding back.
The retail corner in the city’s Chatham community, with its handsome 1920s brick-and-terracotta buildings, boasted a host of Black-owned businesses from the 1970s through the 1990s. It had stores, a pharmacy, dentists, a nightclub, a funeral home and the jewel of them all: Independence Bank of Chicago, with more than $100 million in assets, right there in a big new modern building at 7936 S. Cottage Grove Ave.
Boutte remembers that one particularly well. His father was Alvin Boutte, Sr., Independence Bank’s chair and CEO.
“Colgate Palmolive [executives] used to fly in and go sit up there in my dad’s corner office,” the younger Boutte, 50, says now. “It was always cool to see and hear him tell me about all the people that would come to Independence — to 79th street — from New York, from California or wherever their corporate headquarters were.”
Alvin Boutte, Sr., Independence Bank’s chair and CEO.
But after more than 30 years in the game, Independence ended its run in 1996 when it merged with the Chicago community development bank, ShoreBank, which failed in 2010. The swanky bank building Boutte’s father built in the early 1980s — the place that employed and made loans to Black people who were ignored by white-owned banks and was an emblem of Black financial and political capital — is still there, but is now the Providence Bank and Trust.
Since the 1920s, Chicago — with one of the nation’s largest concentrations of Black residents — has been a capital city for Black millionaires and businesses. Their footprint wasn’t just local, but national: Chicago was headquarters to global brands such as Ebony and Jet magazines, and Afro Sheen hair care products.
No longer. Johnson Products, the parent company for Afro Sheen, shuttered its South Side factory. Oprah Winfrey moved Harpo Studios from the West Side to West Hollywood. Gladys’ Luncheonette, which served up smothered chicken and peach cobbler to the likes of Martin Luther King Jr., comedian Redd Foxx and a host of politicians and other luminaries, is now gone. Significant regional businesses like Independence Bank disappeared.
Brands like Ebony and Jet magazines and Afro Sheen hair care products highlight the breadth of success of Chicago-born Black-owned businesses throughout the 20th century. | Wikimedia Commons and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History
And, as the Chatham streetscape shows, others are vanishing, too, thanks to a variety of factors, including disinvestment, globalization and the nationalization of local businesses.
Though their absence is visible and tangible, numbers tallying how many businesses have shuttered are hard to come by. But there are clues. In 1990, three Chicago companies — Johnson Publishing, Johnson Products and Soft Sheen Products — placed within the top 20 of Black Enterprise magazine’s list of the country’s largest Black-owned businesses.
Today, only one Black Chicago area business even cracked the magazine’s top 50, Baldwin Richardson Foods, based in the suburb of Oakbrook Terrace, Ill. And according to the magazine, five of the nation’s 25 largest Black banks were located on Chicago’s South Side in 1990, including Independence Bank, which was ranked fifth. All of the five banks in the 1990 tally either went out of business or are no longer Black-owned. Only GN Bank, located in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, made the list in 2020.
Meanwhile, as Black residents leave Chicago in droves, the city is grappling with shifts in political power as its electorate morphs.
Back in the day, Black business represented a certain kind of power in Chicago, from access to City Hall to funding political campaigns to financing civic projects like a local performance center. Perhaps more important, those businesses represented possibility, creating a world where everything was “for us, by us”: movie theaters, cab companies, clothing stores, banks, real estate companies, restaurants, nightclubs, bars — and even vice. And as that evaporates, it is having a similarly important, if hard to measure, effect on the city.
Top: Jolyn Robichaux, head of Baldwin Ice Cream, with her husband, Joseph Robichaux, at a 21st Ward party in 1964. Bottom: Representatives of the Joe Louis Milk Company ride atop their float during the 1958 Bud Billiken Day parade in Chicago. | Courtesy of the Robichaux family and Robert Abbott Sengstacke/Getty Images
During the 20th century, Chicago — even with its serious racial flaws and inequities — was still a city bristling with opportunity, earning it the sobriquet “the Promised Land” by Black people escaping the oppressive South during the Great Migration. Today, it has become almost an article of faith that this kind of opportunity has dried up.
“You tell me where you can drive in the city of Chicago right now and find [any substantial Black business ownership]?’ said Maze Jackson, a talk radio host and political consultant. “Not the stores, not the chicken [restaurants], not the fish [restaurants], not anything.”
‘Lost to history’
It hasn’t all evaporated, of course. Boutte notes there are fewer Black businesses in the city, but some are doing “much, much better,” pointing out successful and lucrative Black-owned investment houses and bond-selling firms, such as Ariel Investments and Loop Capital, that give Black owners and investors some local clout.
Ariel manages a staggering $17.3 billion in investments — a figure the old school Black companies could only dream about.
But the overall shrinkage has been dramatic.
The South Side’s 87th Street, for instance, was a stronghold of Black businesses, particularly during the 1980s.
During its heyday, there was Soft Sheen Products, a $100 million-a-year manufacturer of Black hair care products near 87th and Dobson. The company’s Care Free Curl product line turned Soft Sheen into a $55 million a year business by 1982. And its owners, Ed and Bettiann Gardner, proved to be political powerhouses, funding campaigns and voter registration drives. Meanwhile, at 87th and Cottage Grove, there was Black-owned Seaway National Bank, which, at its height, boasted more than $400 million in assets. Among its first depositors when it opened in 1965 was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, headed by Martin Luther King Jr.
Then there was Johnson Products, which made Afro Sheen and Ultra Sheen hair care products from its factory at 87th and Lafayette. Owned by George E. Johnson, Sr., the company was a main sponsor for “Soul Train,” helping the program rapidly grow from a local TV show here to a nationally syndicated cultural icon in the ’70s. Filling in the gaps between these businesses were Black-owned clothing stores, insurance companies, restaurants, gas stations and more.
The view along S. Cottage Grove Avenue and 64th Street, a couple miles away from Independence Bank, in Dec. 1987. | Library of Congress
Most are gone now. Soft Sheen’s plant is now a self-storage facility. And while the company is still in businesses, it’s no longer based on 87th Street, or even Chicago. It’s now owned by French cosmetics giant L’Oreal.
This network of Black-owned businesses was responsible for the rise of Black political power in Chicago, laying out the cash that funded political campaigns, most notably Harold Washington’s successful 1983 bid to become Chicago’s first Black mayor.
Washington’s fundraising chief was Al Johnson, whose Al Johnson Cadillac was the country’s first Black-owned Cadillac dealership when it opened in 1971. A media campaign encouraging Black voter registration — “Come Alive October 5” — helped sweep Washington into office.
Having capital changed the expectations of what Black Chicagoans could ask for politically. “For a lot of Black people, if you were a middle-class school teacher or a member of the city’s corporation counsel’s office, or a social worker, chances are your check was being cut by the same government folks [in City Hall] that you were pushing to get out of there,” said attorney Quintin King, a lobbyist and political science professor at DePaul University.
But the folks who organized and put together the push to unseat the political machine and to back Harold Washinton, most of them were independent businesspeople like the Bouttes and Al Johnsons, King said.
“And a slew of other people whose names have been lost to history.”
Chicago was once known for its power marriage of Black business and politics. Today, many Black-owned companies have shuttered, dramatically changing the city's landscape.
Alvin Boutte Sr. (far right) speaking with Edwin C. “Bill” Berry (second from left), the executive director of the Chicago Urban League, and two others. | Photo courtesy of the Boutte family
By LEE BEY
12/07/2021 11:00 AM EST
Updated: 12/08/2021 03:09 PM EST
Lee Bey is the author of Southern Exposure: The Overlooked Architecture of Chicago’s South Side, a book that showcases his photography and architectural and social commentary. He is also a member of the Chicago Sun-Times editorial board.
CHICAGO — Every now and again, Alvin Boutte Jr.’s travels take him past 79th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue on Chicago’s South Side. And the memories come flooding back.
The retail corner in the city’s Chatham community, with its handsome 1920s brick-and-terracotta buildings, boasted a host of Black-owned businesses from the 1970s through the 1990s. It had stores, a pharmacy, dentists, a nightclub, a funeral home and the jewel of them all: Independence Bank of Chicago, with more than $100 million in assets, right there in a big new modern building at 7936 S. Cottage Grove Ave.
Boutte remembers that one particularly well. His father was Alvin Boutte, Sr., Independence Bank’s chair and CEO.
“Colgate Palmolive [executives] used to fly in and go sit up there in my dad’s corner office,” the younger Boutte, 50, says now. “It was always cool to see and hear him tell me about all the people that would come to Independence — to 79th street — from New York, from California or wherever their corporate headquarters were.”
But after more than 30 years in the game, Independence ended its run in 1996 when it merged with the Chicago community development bank, ShoreBank, which failed in 2010. The swanky bank building Boutte’s father built in the early 1980s — the place that employed and made loans to Black people who were ignored by white-owned banks and was an emblem of Black financial and political capital — is still there, but is now the Providence Bank and Trust.
Since the 1920s, Chicago — with one of the nation’s largest concentrations of Black residents — has been a capital city for Black millionaires and businesses. Their footprint wasn’t just local, but national: Chicago was headquarters to global brands such as Ebony and Jet magazines, and Afro Sheen hair care products.
No longer. Johnson Products, the parent company for Afro Sheen, shuttered its South Side factory. Oprah Winfrey moved Harpo Studios from the West Side to West Hollywood. Gladys’ Luncheonette, which served up smothered chicken and peach cobbler to the likes of Martin Luther King Jr., comedian Redd Foxx and a host of politicians and other luminaries, is now gone. Significant regional businesses like Independence Bank disappeared.
And, as the Chatham streetscape shows, others are vanishing, too, thanks to a variety of factors, including disinvestment, globalization and the nationalization of local businesses.
Though their absence is visible and tangible, numbers tallying how many businesses have shuttered are hard to come by. But there are clues. In 1990, three Chicago companies — Johnson Publishing, Johnson Products and Soft Sheen Products — placed within the top 20 of Black Enterprise magazine’s list of the country’s largest Black-owned businesses.
Today, only one Black Chicago area business even cracked the magazine’s top 50, Baldwin Richardson Foods, based in the suburb of Oakbrook Terrace, Ill. And according to the magazine, five of the nation’s 25 largest Black banks were located on Chicago’s South Side in 1990, including Independence Bank, which was ranked fifth. All of the five banks in the 1990 tally either went out of business or are no longer Black-owned. Only GN Bank, located in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, made the list in 2020.
Meanwhile, as Black residents leave Chicago in droves, the city is grappling with shifts in political power as its electorate morphs.
Back in the day, Black business represented a certain kind of power in Chicago, from access to City Hall to funding political campaigns to financing civic projects like a local performance center. Perhaps more important, those businesses represented possibility, creating a world where everything was “for us, by us”: movie theaters, cab companies, clothing stores, banks, real estate companies, restaurants, nightclubs, bars — and even vice. And as that evaporates, it is having a similarly important, if hard to measure, effect on the city.
Top: Jolyn Robichaux, head of Baldwin Ice Cream, with her husband, Joseph Robichaux, at a 21st Ward party in 1964. Bottom: Representatives of the Joe Louis Milk Company ride atop their float during the 1958 Bud Billiken Day parade in Chicago. | Courtesy of the Robichaux family and Robert Abbott Sengstacke/Getty Images
During the 20th century, Chicago — even with its serious racial flaws and inequities — was still a city bristling with opportunity, earning it the sobriquet “the Promised Land” by Black people escaping the oppressive South during the Great Migration. Today, it has become almost an article of faith that this kind of opportunity has dried up.
“You tell me where you can drive in the city of Chicago right now and find [any substantial Black business ownership]?’ said Maze Jackson, a talk radio host and political consultant. “Not the stores, not the chicken [restaurants], not the fish [restaurants], not anything.”
‘Lost to history’
It hasn’t all evaporated, of course. Boutte notes there are fewer Black businesses in the city, but some are doing “much, much better,” pointing out successful and lucrative Black-owned investment houses and bond-selling firms, such as Ariel Investments and Loop Capital, that give Black owners and investors some local clout.
Ariel manages a staggering $17.3 billion in investments — a figure the old school Black companies could only dream about.
But the overall shrinkage has been dramatic.
The South Side’s 87th Street, for instance, was a stronghold of Black businesses, particularly during the 1980s.
During its heyday, there was Soft Sheen Products, a $100 million-a-year manufacturer of Black hair care products near 87th and Dobson. The company’s Care Free Curl product line turned Soft Sheen into a $55 million a year business by 1982. And its owners, Ed and Bettiann Gardner, proved to be political powerhouses, funding campaigns and voter registration drives. Meanwhile, at 87th and Cottage Grove, there was Black-owned Seaway National Bank, which, at its height, boasted more than $400 million in assets. Among its first depositors when it opened in 1965 was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, headed by Martin Luther King Jr.
Then there was Johnson Products, which made Afro Sheen and Ultra Sheen hair care products from its factory at 87th and Lafayette. Owned by George E. Johnson, Sr., the company was a main sponsor for “Soul Train,” helping the program rapidly grow from a local TV show here to a nationally syndicated cultural icon in the ’70s. Filling in the gaps between these businesses were Black-owned clothing stores, insurance companies, restaurants, gas stations and more.
The view along S. Cottage Grove Avenue and 64th Street, a couple miles away from Independence Bank, in Dec. 1987. | Library of Congress
Most are gone now. Soft Sheen’s plant is now a self-storage facility. And while the company is still in businesses, it’s no longer based on 87th Street, or even Chicago. It’s now owned by French cosmetics giant L’Oreal.
This network of Black-owned businesses was responsible for the rise of Black political power in Chicago, laying out the cash that funded political campaigns, most notably Harold Washington’s successful 1983 bid to become Chicago’s first Black mayor.
Washington’s fundraising chief was Al Johnson, whose Al Johnson Cadillac was the country’s first Black-owned Cadillac dealership when it opened in 1971. A media campaign encouraging Black voter registration — “Come Alive October 5” — helped sweep Washington into office.
Having capital changed the expectations of what Black Chicagoans could ask for politically. “For a lot of Black people, if you were a middle-class school teacher or a member of the city’s corporation counsel’s office, or a social worker, chances are your check was being cut by the same government folks [in City Hall] that you were pushing to get out of there,” said attorney Quintin King, a lobbyist and political science professor at DePaul University.
But the folks who organized and put together the push to unseat the political machine and to back Harold Washinton, most of them were independent businesspeople like the Bouttes and Al Johnsons, King said.
“And a slew of other people whose names have been lost to history.”