Cultural Call and Legislative Response: Harold Washington in Harmony with Chicago House
By Haley Bergeson
The creative underground has history as a form of refuge, a space carved out for the sake of a badly needed collective deliverance. The Chicago Black Social Culture Map at Honey Pot Performance illuminates the histories of Chicago house venues as just this kind of sovereign space, namely for people of color and members of the queer community. During a panel discussing the basements, pubs, and clubs of the house movement, Darrel Hill reminded listeners that “during the decade of the 60s and prior, homosexuality was considered a mental illness. It was also illegal for men to gather in a bar, and dancing was definitely illegal” and that as such, “it's really important to understand that the music we consider ‘house music’ was not commercial, it was underground. What that means is, the only places that you could hear the music was a gay venue or one of these (house) parties that Fredrick mentioned.”
What Hill makes clear through his statement is that while house music has blossomed into an industry-standard genre of music over time, its beginnings were anything but corporate or industrial. Conceptualizing house history as a grassroots culture by an underground community is crucial to understanding and appreciating its essence. Along with this, it's vital to remember that the underground house movement was not directly and purposefully politically oppositional —it was a space of fugitivity, a hideaway from scrutiny. It required no pledge to activism or personal commitment to any kind of faction - the only requirement was that it met a liberatory need for the demographic which it both served and was created by. To me, this represents functional cultural ecology: self-sustaining and natural, spiritually beneficial, and for all these things: beautiful.
Despite their severance from deliberate activism, underground movements have not gone on without making their marks on history. Most underground movements can be easily associated with a spike in linear social progress relative to the circumstances which caused them to emerge. Veteran Chicago DJ Dana Powell finds it helpful to view house itself as a historical timeline to which each participant has a story to contribute. DJs, partygoers, and dancers of the house movement weren’t rewriting legislature, they were carving out space for themselves to truly live in. But to look at the timeline of house is to be delighted in finding a neat correlation between the movement and political progress for the disenfranchised citizens of Chicago it served. It seems an argument can be made for understanding the severance of house from activism while also acknowledging the timely legislative response it garnered. Could it be that the spirit of the underground functions as a diagnostic for dysfunctional structures, and even a call to action? If so, how can a movement severed from any larger faction be of concrete political use to its community at large?
As I’ve worked through the Chicago Black Social Culture Map, I’ve imagined myself looking down this line loaded with unfettered human narratives, and it has revealed to me the unique kinds of purity and freedom that fire from an underground movement. Crucial to the qualification of a movement as “underground” is its self-organization, its formulation without corporate or governmental sponsorship, and its secrecy. Queer citizens during the late 60s were forced into this kind of secrecy, as it wasn’t until January 1st of 1962 that Illinois became the first state to even decriminalize homosexuality as an orientation. Despite this progress, the police raid of New York City bar Stonewall occurred in a year as late as 1969, and resulted in meaningless violence against the gay men innocently gathered there. House music, its movement, and its community represented safety from these kinds of violence; as a result, house crystallized because it absolutely had to.
As I became more intimate with Chicago house through CBSCM’s documentation, I noticed a symbiotic relationship between the people of Chicago and Harold Washington, who was elected the first black mayor of Chicago in 1983. The concurrence between house as a movement and Harold Washington’s time as mayor speaks not only to the special connection Washington had with his city throughout his political career, but even more to how independent creative movements can be of use to policymakers, politicians, and anyone with power and a city's best interests in mind. Harold Washington was an entity separate from the underground house movement, but at the same time “one of us, a boy from nowhere” as he is described by a Chicago citizen in Harold Washington Remembered. In general, Washington’s time as mayor is celebrated as a time for progress, for collaboration between the work of local government and the ideals of the diverse Chicago communities. Washington specifically valued open democratic processes as crucial for minorities, in that an open democracy created access and opportunities for those previously disenfranchised. He discouraged political practices which led to favoritism through political action such as backroom deals, promotions from within, and poor dissemination of information. Washington collaborated with Black and Latino leaders to redraw the city districts and as a result, produced four new minority-controlled wards. According to scholars John J Betancur and Douglas C. Gills, “No administration before or after Washington paid as much attention to the development of low-income neighborhoods through people-centered fairness strategies as he did.” Perhaps one of the most poignant examples of Washington’s decisions as mayor was his dealings with policing and disciplinary actions. While administrations before and after Washington utilized separate schooling for students with “disciplinary issues'', (which have later been identified by many as “tracking” facilities that funnel youth of color one step closer to jail by way of difficult circumstances), Washington expanded public education and created more accessible training opportunities for all.
While Washington did directly support cultural development in the city, what he did best was respond to it with legislative action. He seemed to identify that if the community was listened to and cared for, its citizens would enhance Chicago’s existing culture by simply being who they were. That is exactly how the house movement was able to thrive with such freedom during Harold’s administration. House emerged from the underground into the above-ground sanctity of the after-hours juice bar in the second half of the 70s, which was shortly before Washington’s election. In this way, it was a call for liberation which transcended traditional activism and worked as a productive dialogue between a leader and his community. One of Chicago’s most well-known juice bars, The Warehouse, was opened in 1977 by promoter Robert Williams. Williams’ parties were huge and notoriously brought together straight and gay identifying people. Shared space between individuals with different identities, as well as the movement of house music into William’s commercial space, brought house out of an underground territory and into mainstream popular culture. William’s first project in Chicago was US Studio, which took inspiration from the Chicago loft parties he’d frequented since he’d moved there. While most bars in the city closed at 3 a.m., US Studio was open all night as a liquor-free establishment. US Studios was only a foreshadowing to the great success of The Warehouse, which is spoken about with such affection by so many of The Chicago Black Social Culture Map’s panelists. By the mid-70s, the house movement and the queer and black folks who comprised its majority emerged from a utopian underground and began of the process of synthesizing with the general public in a way that felt safe.
It was tragic for the city of Chicago when Washington’s death and a subsequent city ordinance ended the meaning in the legal life of the juice bar. On January 7th of 1987, the Chicago Tribune announced the ordinance, which restricted juice bars hours of operation.
Ald. Bernard Hansen (44th) plans to ‘rewrite closing-time restrictions in a controversial Chicago City Council ordinance he cosponsored that would have forced so-called juice bars to close at midnight. Hansen will introduce an amendment at next Wednesday's council meeting to allow the city`s nonalcoholic bars to remain open until 2 a.m., just like bars that serve alcohol, said Michael Quigley, an aide to Hansen. But the amendment would also impose age restrictions that were not in the original ordinance, Quigley said. It would require patrons under 16 to leave the clubs by 10:30 p.m. weeknights and 11:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday nights, in compliance with city curfew rules. ''The amendment probably removes any last chance of challenging this,' said Quigley, referring to threats of legal action that some club owners have made.
The release of this ordinance so shortly after Washington’s death is perhaps the most striking, albeit the most tragic, synchronicity of these timelines. As I’ve illustrated, this independent, underground turned commercial movement seemed to move ahead of and in collaboration with the political work of Harold Washington, calling him to make changes in the legislature, which oppressed minority and disenfranchised identities. The complexity of social progress as it relates to power, oppression, and other elusive forces can leave us unsure of what causes what, making it difficult to “prove” that Washington’s leadership was likely influenced by this call. Additionally, it is not as if the house movement was the only emergence of liberatory space in Chicago at the time which indicated the communities need for change. Social progress is a process full of dialectics, and it is always a culmination. The fact of Washington’s death and the immediate ordinance which followed it, however, makes clear that legislation directly affected house. This was clear to both Washington and Daly, and they made their respective choices in response to that clarity. In looking to this brief moment of synchronicity between local government and the interests of the house movement, we find a blueprint for a meeting point between an underground utopia and democratic reality.