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 Blacks moving into their neighborhood were pitted against whites who sympathized with Blacks 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.
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.
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 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, Blacks 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]
