Gallery 2:
Finding Liberation in the Islamic East
Americans of African descent faced a dilemma in an era of lynching and Jim Crow segregation: how could they break out of the vice of dehumanizing racist institutions and representations? For some, the Orient offered hope: as the Rev. Edward Wilmot Blyden had pointed out in his 1887 book, Christianity, Islam, the Negro Race, Islamic societies were far more opposed to racism than majority Christian ones. After all, one of the Prophet Muhammad’s first companions was Bilal, an enslaved Meccan of partial Ethiopian ancestry whom the Prophet freed and made the first mezzuin, the man who issues the Muslim call to prayer.
William Henry Johnson, c. 1842–1926, who portrayed “Zip, What Is It?” for P. T. Barnum. Johnson, a microcephalic man from New Jersey, may have performed before more people than any other Black entertainer during his long run depicting the evolutionary “missing link” between apes and humans. This virulently racist character demonstrates the severity of the racism Black people faced in finding positive representations in the media— and the attraction of Islamic and Moorish societies for many, which in American terms were “racially” integrated, as in the depiction of Moorish society below.
Hassan Ben Ali’s Moorish Caravan, part of the Sells Brothers Circus, in 1893. Such displays not only commodified Moorish Muslim identities with performers who would have been considered Black in the US but also made a show of Muslim religious acts, in this case the hajj. John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art.
Maude Allan dressed as Salome. Allan was a feminist and modern dance pioneer who created a shocking dance in 1908 to accompany the 1905 Richard Strauss musical version of the 1896 Oscar Wilde play. Wilde intended to shock and offend with the play about the woman who charmed King Herod II with a dance and then demanded and received the head of John the Baptist. Feminist Allan— whose revealing costume and sensual dancing was a sensation, set of a fad for “Salome” dancing, adding to the “hoochie-coochie” or “cooch” dance craze when US women imitated and sexed-up Middle Eastern dancing witnessed at the 1893 Columbian Exhibition and later world fairs.
Princess Sotanki in a 1913 publicity photo. Note the similarity to Maude Allan's costume, as well as the giant snake winding its way up her abdomen. Sotanki performed “The Hindu Dance of Death” which ended when she pretended to be bitten and die, acting out the tug of war between eros and thanatos with sequins, a snake, and a shake. With the Salome dance craze, Princess Sotanki’s star began to eclipse her husband’s, and she received top billing in the Sotanki Hindoo/Hindu magic troupe after 1903.
The Bristers were part of a community of African American “Oriental Magicians” who frequently plied their trade in circus sideshows and vaudeville theaters. As the Great Migration during WWI drew thousands of Black Southerners to the north, their movement weakened the Southern Black theatrical circuit and attracted some of these magicians north. There many of them ministered to migrants with root tonics and healing services, as Walter Brister would after he and his wife Eva faked his death in Chicago in 1914 and he began living as his brother, Thomas Drew, aka Professor Drew in Newark, New Jersey. This collage of ads from The New York Amsterdam News shows some of the Harlem healers who wore turbans or fezzes, some of whom claimed to be Hindu, Mohammedan, and/or African.
Building a Mecca & Bucking the Machine in the Chicago of Capone, Big Bill Thompson & Emperor Insull
The First Annual Convention of the MSTA, October 1928. This was the height of Noble Drew Ali’s personal and political power, with anywhere between 7,000-15,000 members, alliances with Chicago’s elite like the banker Jesse Binga and the politician Oscar Stanton DePriest, and an array of profitable businesses that made him a very rich man, principally the wholesaling of medicines made from roots. Formerly, as Professor Drew in Newark and New York, he suffered three arrests for practicing medicine without a license. Now, like business tycoons such as Samuel Insull, who centralized manufacture and distribution, he became a wealthy man by centralizing and wholesaling medicines traditionally associated with African American healing practices.
An American Patriot
“Inspired by the lofty teachings of the Koran, we have it as the revealed word of God Allah. We shall foster the principles of its teachings among our members. This is our religious privilege as American citizens, under the laws of one of the greatest documents of all time– the American Constitution.”
—Prophet Noble Drew Ali
Prophet Noble Drew Ali seated at the October 1928 convention between leading South Side politicians Louis B. Anderson (left) and Oscar DePriest (right). City Attorney (and Thompson machine member) Aaron Payne is seated at bottom right. The MSTA attracted an extraordinary number of the South Side’s most elite and powerful African Americans among its members and well-wishers, which is completely exceptional for an alternative religious movement and testifies to how deeply ingrained were positive associations with Islam through sources as varied as the Arabian Nights and the Shriners. But as the Chicago machine teetered in 1928, strife inside the MSTA led to murder and put the prophet on the wrong side of the machine. Dr. Clarence Payne-El cared for the prophet as he sickened and died, signing the death certificate that said the cause was tuberculosis.
Dangerous Characters
Criminal Mastermind
Jack Guzik
We remember some of the power brokers in the heyday of Chicago racketeering and gangsterism, but not others. Reporters loved Al Capone, but the brains between the Capone syndicate was Jack (or Jake) Guzik, a Jewish pimp who was the eldest and savviest member of the four men who controlled illicit alcohol and prostitution in Chicago, the others being Al Capone, his brother Ralph, and their cousin Frank Nitti. The Guzisk/Capone/Nitti syndicate cut a deal with the South Side’s “King of Gamblers” Daniel M. Jackson, and powerful alderman and syndicate boss Oscar Stanton DePriest, to leave gambling in Black hands in exchange for the right to distribute alcohol in the Black community. This truce between white and Black gangsters began to break down in Harlem when white gangsters kidnapped numbers king Casper Holstein on September 28, 1928. Jackson sped from Chicago with a handbag full of cash to pay Holstein’s ransom. Jackson himself died suspiciously only days before his political racketeering trial was to begin, when he could have testified against Congressman-elect DePriest. Jackson’s successor Robert Cole was similarly kidnapped by white gangsters in 1932.
Mayor “Big Bill” Thompson
Though only 6 feet tall, Big Bill innovated a xenophobic political movement he called “America First” and loomed large in Chicago during Prohibition. While one biographer attempts to deny his corruption, his political career originated with his fellow gamblers in the Sportsmen’s Club of America, and it was said that the Guzik-Capone-Nitti syndicate contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars and a thousand thugs to ensure his return to office in 1926/27. In his second term, gangsters with handguns bulging from their pockets roamed City Hall twisting arms of aldermen, and prostitution spread without control into Black neighborhoods. He also courted Black voters, with whom he was incredibly popular, and gave Black supporters enough jobs that racist opponents started to call City Hall “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Although initially Prophet Noble Drew Ali allied himself with Thompson machine politicians like Black aldermen Louis B. Anderson and Oscar Stanton DePriest, he broke with the machine in early 1929 as he struggled to retain control of his movement.
Alderman & Congressman
Oscar Stanton DePriest
A real estate investor and political operator who was twice indicted but never convicted for collecting from vice operators on the South Side in exchange for tribute to and protection from the police and the Thompson political machine, opponents also accused him of buying South Sider’s votes for public utilities baron “Emperor” Samuel Insull. After Clarence Darrow got him off of a electoral graft charge in 1916 he briefly retired from public life but returned to become alderman. Indicted again in 1928 with his rival Dan Jackson, he won a vacant Congressional seat that year while under indictment. Charges were dropped only days before he took his seat in Congress and the investigator who dropped the charges— the same man who entrapped Marcus Garvey— got a plum job at the US Justice Department. After Jackson’s death only days before he was set to testify, DePriest’s path to assuming his seat finally was cleared. His time in Congress was marred by the racism of his colleagues and his own opposition to the New Deal, and he was voted out of office in 1934, the first Black man to be elected to Congress since Reconstruction and the first from the North, but also the last Black Republican to do for decades.
“Emperor” Samuel Insull
In many ways the most powerful forgotten American, Insull was the single most powerful businessman in the 1920’s United States. He controlled Chicago’s Commonwealth Edison, the El trains, the interurban railroads, and the power grid in 100s of Chicago’s suburbs as well as communities spread throughout the midwest and southeast. In all, his power was staggering. By 1929 the former personal secretary to Thomas Alva Edison was the president of eleven companies worth $3 billion (about $45 billion today), the chairman of sixty-five more companies, and a director of another eighty-five.
Insull excelled at corrupting public officials. His personal attorney Samuel Ettelson became Mayor Thompson’s Corporation Counsel, in charge of negotiating with public utilities. He also purchased Unity Hall as the headquarters for DePriest’s People’s Movement, through which he bribed voters to support Insull’s candidates and issues.
The year after Noble Drew Ali died, tended by Dr. Clarence Payne-El of Provident Hospital, Insull led a $3 million fundraising drive for the hospital.
After Unity Hall, which was managed by the King of Gamblers Dan Jackson, became the headquarters of the Moorish Science Temple of America, Insull met a group of Moors there, although it appears that neither group knew who the other one was. Insull’s ownership of Unity Hall and association with DePriest and Jackson did not become widely known until 1934, when Insull fled the country by yacht for Greece. He eventually returned to the United States, faced trial for securities fraud, and was acquitted.
Sometimes cartoonists dare to say more than journalists. The Tribune cartoon on the left shows a crane marked “Insull dough” fishing the Insull traction deal that would have given a 10 cent fare and a perpetual franchise to use city streets out of the creek, while Governor Len Small is splayed over a barrel. Thanks to the Tribune’s crusade, the bill failed in the state legislature. On the right, on the very day that the Chicago Defender reported the death and burial of prophet Noble Drew Ali, it ran a front page cartoon showing a fat Black politician listening to a gramophone like those sold in Samuel Insull’s Commonwealth Edison stores, saying “do as I tell you and these dollars are yours.”