No Place to Go: John Bartlow Martin and James Hickman

For millions of veterans following the end of World War II, their return home resembled what they had gone through upon their induction into military service—long waiting in long lines. On Friday, February 16, 1946, after filling out the necessary paperwork at an army separation center at Camp Ulysses S. Grant, located on the outskirts of Rockford, Illinois, John Bartlow Martin, who in civilian life had been a freelance writer for a variety of true-crime and national magazines, achieved what he had been seeking for many months—discharge from the U.S. Army. He took a train to Chicago and by 8:00 p.m. had made it to his home in Winnetka, where he hugged his wife Fran and daughter Cindy.

Martin had trouble readjusting to life as a civilian. Harried by the army and its regimented ways, he had longed for “the old comfortable things” of his former life but discovered that they began to weigh on him after a time. He admitted to a friend that it was going to take him several months to recover his bearings. Writing a story about a private detective, William V. Pennington of San Francisco, Martin found that he was “a lot less facile and more awkward than I used to be—and facility was never a strong point of mine, writing always did come hard. It comes like molasses now.” He had also lost a bit of his confidence, realizing it would be some time before he could say to an editor: “The legwork will take 6 days, 3 days to write, 2 days to revise, two in the mail—you can have the [manu]script in 13 days from now.”

Luckily, before leaving for stateside service during the war, Martin had developed a solid relationship with Frederick Lewis Allen and the staff at Harper’s magazine. Although it had a small circulation (109,787 in 1940) and offered its contributors paltry fees (usually $250 for articles) in comparison to other magazines, Harper’s reached a vital audience, what one of its editors described as “the intelligent minority” of opinion makers in the United States, “the thinking, cultured reader who seeks both entertainment and an enlarged and broadened point of view.” Allen, who had taken over as Harper’s editor in October 1941, said the magazine under his watch intended to print within its pages “the exciting, the creative, the lustily energetic, the freshly amusing, the newly beautiful, the illuminating, the profound.”

Martin’s post–World War II work for the magazine often examined crime and the individuals caught in its vortex. Crimes, Martin learned, did not happen by blind chance—something caused them. “Sometimes the matrix is social, sometimes psychological, most often both,” he said. “Writing about an individual criminal case, then, offers also an opportunity to write about a whole society. Crime in context.”  

 
His pieces in Harper’s included examining the murder of Don Mellett, a crusading newspaper editor in Canton, Ohio, who had been uncovering corruption among the city’s police and politicians (“Murder of a Journalist”), and the killing of Toledo, Peoria, and Western Railroad president George P. McNear, whose armed strikebreakers had shot dead a union member on the picket lines during a strike (“The McNear Murder”). Martin’s Harper’s story on McNear’s still-unsolved murder had been reprinted in Reader’s Digest, and the editor who handled it for the magazine, Paul Palmer, had been intrigued enough by it to suggest that Martin should explore a recent mine disaster in Centralia, Illinois. The resulting Harper’s article in March 1948, “The Blast in Centralia No. 5,” made Martin’s reputation, with writer Marc Rose, in a 1952 issue of The Quill, the magazine of the Society of Professional Journalists, calling the Centralia story “one of the most magnificent examples of magazine journalism” he had ever seen.

A piece Martin did for Harper’s just five months after his Centralia investigation proved to be just as powerful and moving as his exploration of the mine disaster, and it opened the nation’s eyes to racial segregation in a Northern city years before the civil rights movement and the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision striking down separate public schools for white and African American schoolchildren. “I wanted to do not an article, crammed with demographers’ statistics,” said Martin, “but, rather, a story about a man.”

As he explained, Martin tried to avoid doing what he called “articles,” preferring instead to think of them as “stories.” The difference to him was that an article was “about a subject while a story is about a person.” He tried to find a broad subject area to write about and then find a specific person “to whom something has happened, so that the piece will have a narrative story line. There has to be drama.” Although such a piece might never have the same penetrating quality as truly great fiction, Martin said it could have “more penetration . . . than any ‘article’ or second-rate fiction.”

The person he found for his Harper’s story was James Hickman, an African American who had moved from the Deep South to Chicago in 1945 seeking a better life for himself and his family. Instead, Hickman ran headlong into tragedy with a fellow African American, his landlord, David Coleman, whom he shot and killed after a suspicious fire burned to death four of Hickman’s children in their tiny apartment at 1733 West Washburne Avenue.

To prepare for his Harper’s story, Martin read Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal’s classic 1944 study of race relations, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, which Myrdal described as “not a study of the Negroes but of the American society from the viewpoint of the most disadvantaged group.” Martin conducted extensive interviews with Hickman and his wife, as well as with Coleman’s relatives. “I simply told the story of Hickman’s and the landlord’s lives,” said Martin, “and their world—the world below.” Martin visited the slum neighborhood where the Hickman family lived, making notes and gathering atmosphere for his story by walking the same streets they had walked.

Hickman had been born on January 19, 1907, “in the country,” as he put it, near Louisville, Mississippi, the son of sharecroppers raising corn and cotton. At the age of sixteen he married a neighbor girl, Annie Davis, and when their first child, Arlen, was born, Hickman, a deeply religious man, had vowed to God: “I was the head of this family and had to make a support for them. I was guardian to see for them as long as the days I should live on the land.” Trying to raise a family that eventually included nine children on the paltry wages sharecropping afforded, Hickman looked to the North for the opportunities, including education, denied to African Americans in the South.

Staying with an older daughter who had married and lived in Chicago, Hickman found a job with International Harvester’s Wisconsin Steel plant near the Indiana border, receiving $1.25 an hour for guiding the burning steel as it rolled off the hotbed. “On the farm I’d be charged for a lot of things, I couldn’t see what it was for,” he said of his experiences as a sharecropper. “In the factory work it [his wages] come to my hand.” He marveled at the size of the country’s second largest city, as well as seeing whites and blacks riding together in buses and his fellow African Americans working in banks and post offices.

Life in a northern city provided its own hardships for Hickman, particularly when it came to finding decent and affordable housing for his family. By the mid-1940s approximately 80 percent of Chicago’s residential housing was covered by racially restrictive covenants that excluded blacks from buying or renting property in white neighborhoods. The city’s African American population of 400,000 squeezed into a seven-square-mile area, called the “Black Belt” by Martin in his article, located on the south side from Twenty-second Street (Cermak Road today) to Sixty-second Street between Wentworth and Cottage Grove Avenues. European immigrants who prospered in their new homeland could scatter throughout the city, noted Martin, disappearing and blending into the general population. “‘Disappearing’—how can a black man disappear?” he asked. “He is not wanted. He is condemned to inhabit the areas nobody else wants.”

Landlords in the black ghetto, African American and white alike, did all they could to maximize their profits as the demand for already scarce housing rose during and after World War II. They divided apartments into smaller and smaller units, often called “kitchenettes,” and charged outlandish rents for the tiny spaces they provided their tenants. “In this artificially restricted market, people of means bid high for hovels; rentals skyrocket; landlords gouge,” Martin said. Hickman also had trouble finding a place to live because many landlords did not want to rent to someone with children.

Unfamiliar with Chicago, Hickman sometimes wandered into white neighborhoods seeking a place to rent. He experienced little trouble, as people guided him to areas where African Americans were allowed to live. “I was born in a country where there’s nothin’ but white folks,” Hickman told Martin, “and I knowed how to talk and carry myself and they treated me mighty fine.” After a year of painstaking effort, Hickman finally found a home for his family at a four-story brick tenement owned by Coleman, who had also come to Chicago from Mississippi, worked hard to improve his station in life, and thought of himself as a businessman.

Hickman, his wife, and six of their children huddled together in a small room in the building’s attic that measured about fourteen feet by twenty-one feet in size. “There was no electricity; they used a kerosene lamp,” wrote Martin. “There was no gas; they used a stove and heater burning kerosene. There was one window. There was no water; they had to go down to the third floor to use the toilet or to get water for washing and cooking.” Hickman later told people he had never lived so poorly in Mississippi as he and his family had to live while in Chicago. Coleman had hinted to Hickman that a larger apartment might soon open up for his family on the second floor, but it never materialized, and Hickman, tired of the runaround and wanting back the $100 down payment he had paid Coleman, tried, but failed, to have his landlord arrested.

To increase his rental income from the property, which he needed to meet his own late payments on the building, Coleman had sent a contractor to 1733 Washburne to divide the existing apartments into the more lucrative kitchenettes, but the tenants had resisted, saying it would take a court order to evict them. A defiant Coleman had threatened: “I am the owner, I don’t have to go to Court to do that, I will get everybody out of here when I want to if it takes fire.”

Coleman’s dire threat came true on the evening of January 16, 1947. Hickman had gone to his job at the steel mill at 9:00 p.m., leaving his wife to help their children with their homework. The family went to bed at about 10:00 p.m.; an hour and a half later Annie woke up after hearing the “paper popping” on the ceiling—a fire. As flames raged throughout the attic space, Charles, the Hickman’s nineteen-year-old son, escaped down the stairs, and Willis, the oldest son, and Annie barely managed to escape the fire by going out the window and falling to the ground below, escaping with only minor injuries. Unfortunately, four Hickman children—Leslie, fourteen; Elzena, nine; Sylvester, seven; and Velvena, four—were killed in what a Chicago fire chief called a “holocaust” of flames.

Told at work that there had been trouble at home, Hickman returned at about 7:30 a.m. the following morning, only to be greeted by another tenant, who told him: “Mr. Hickman, I hate to tell you this, four of your children is burnt to death.” The news devastated Hickman, who fell to the ground and had to be carried into the building’s basement. “Mr. Hickman looked pretty bad, like he was losing his mind,” a neighbor said to Martin. Hickman kept thinking about the threat Coleman had made to burn down the building if the tenants failed to clear out. A coroner’s jury, however, failed to deliver any indictments for arson.

Convinced that Coleman had been responsible for the fire, and that justice had failed him, Hickman became bitter, sitting alone and having conversations with his dead children. “Paper was made to burn, coal and rags,” he said again and again. “Not people. People wasn’t made to burn.” Taking a .32-caliber pistol he owned with him, he took a streetcar and bus to Coleman’s residence, found the landlord reading a newspaper while sitting in a Buick taxicab owned by Coleman’s half-brother, engaged in a brief conversation with him, and shot Coleman several times. “I had put a heavy load down and a big weight fell off of me and I felt light,” recalled Hickman, who took a streetcar home and confessed what he had done to his wife. The Homicide Squad arrested him that afternoon and he confessed his crime to them. After Coleman died three days later, authorities indicted Hickman for the landlord’s first-degree murder.

Interviews of Hickman by two local newspapers, the Chicago Daily Defender, the city’s leading African American newspaper, and the Chicago Daily Tribune, caught the attention of an organizer for the Socialist Workers Party, Mike Bartell, who found a lawyer to defend Hickman, M. J. Myer, a local labor and civil rights attorney. Two other attorneys—Leon Despres and William H. Temple—joined Myer in the case and they formed a Hickman defense committee to raise money to defend him in court and to educate the public about the horrible conditions in which African Americans lived in Chicago. Groups involved included the American Federation of Labor, the Independent Voters of Illinois, and the Committee on Racial Equality. “Many such groups degenerate into luncheons and resolutions,” Martin observed. “Hickman’s defenders worked hard, effectively, fast, and according to plan.” The committee held rallies, collected donations from jars set out in African American businesses, and sought help from other like-minded organizations.

During his trial, Hickman spoke eloquently and almost biblically, noted Martin, about what had happened to his children. When asked by his lawyer to describe his feelings between the fire and the shooting, Hickman responded: “I had two sons and two daughters who would some day be great men and women, some day they would have been married, some day they would have been fathers or mothers of children; these children would have children and then these children would have children and another generation of Hickmans could raise up and enjoy peace.”

The defendant’s first trial resulted in a hung jury, with six men and one woman voting for acquittal and five women for conviction. Thanks to pressure brought on Chicago’s political establishment by the defense committee, and people from all over the country, however, an agreement was reached with Assistant State Attorney Samuel L. Freedman and, on December 16, 1947, a judge found Hickman guilty of manslaughter and placed him on probation for two years; he was home in plenty of time to celebrate Christmas with the surviving members of his family. “We really felt good when it was over,” Willoughby Abner, an African American labor leader who had been involved in organizing assistance for Hickman, told Martin. “It shows everything isn’t in vain, isn’t all injustice, people will rally, it shows what can be done.” The Hickman family found new accommodations in a housing project near the airport and intended to stay in Chicago. “I like Chicago,” said Annie Hickman. “I used to like it very much when I had my children.”

Martin failed to share Abner’s optimism, pointing out that both Hickman and Coleman had been victims of Chicago’s segregated system of housing—a system that showed no signs of changing. “The North has failed the Negro no less than the South, there is no place in this country for a black man to go,” Martin wrote, calling Chicago’s postwar housing record a total failure. “The housing problem is bad everywhere in America, in no major city is it worse than in Chicago, and Negroes are at the bottom of the heap because we put them there and keep them there.” The more African Americans who moved to the city for a supposedly better life, the more they would be met with fierce white resistance—new restrictive covenants, Molotov cocktails and rocks thrown at their homes in white areas, and political speeches promising “racial purity.”

A year after the fire, Martin returned to 1733 West Washburne Avenue and found the building where the Hickman children had died deserted, its windows boarded up and charred, black timbers poking up to the sky. Martin came across an elderly black man tending a fire behind the abandoned building. The old man told him that he had heard rumors of the building’s owner fixing it up and offering it for sale. Asked by Martin if anyone would ever again live in such a place, the man laughed and said people would “be lined up here putting in their application. People got no place to go.”