Charles Smiley

Going Against the Grain

[Reprinted from Issues & Views Fall 1994]

When one studies the business history of American blacks, it becomes apparent that more was at work in preventing economic development than racist laws imposed by outsiders. One encounters behavior and attitudes so peculiar that they are unknown to any other ethnic group. To understand the mentality of typical black elites of bygone days, is to understand why blacks as a group fell off the entrepreneurial track, to which earlier generations had been firmly committed.

Take Chicago in the late 19th century, for instance, where the doctrine of self-help was vigorously promoted by black businessmen. While such men emphasized the importance of business enterprise as the path to increased affluence and self-respect, other prominent blacks just as vigorously discouraged the creation of any black institutions.

Among the city's most successful entrepreneurs was Charles Smiley, who owned the dominant catering business in Chicago and its suburbs. So respected was he for his outstanding professionalism that the demand for his services reached even into the adjacent states of Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan.

Smiley was actually following in the footsteps of many black men throughout the country who made fortunes through their skillful management and promotion of the catering trade. When he arrived in Chicago as a young man, in 1881, with little formal education and 50 cents in his pocket, he took a job as a janitor, and used his spare time to hire himself out as a waiter at catered dinners and parties. As he developed contacts among wealthy Chicagoans, he saw the possibility of these people becoming clients of his own catering business.

Well-disciplined from a youth spent as a laborer, Smiley began his business on a shoestring. Booker T. Washington was to later say about this period in Smiley's life, "He possessed, however, several assets more valuable than mere money. He had a resolute character, good powers of observation, ambition, and brains."

As his business grew, Smiley became well-known for taking total responsibility for a client's catered affair, an unusual idea at that time. His staff not only provided the cake for a wedding, and the floral decorations, canopies and other accessories, but provided ushers, and even delivered the wedding invitations. If costly wedding presents needed to be guarded, he provided the detectives to do so. Eventually, he had a fleet of 16 horses for his delivery wagons.

What makes Smiley's story so special is that he was part of a circle of black entrepreneurs who survived in a social environment where other black elites openly discouraged members of their race from creating institutions of any kind. Chicago's black leaders opposed the establishment of any institution under specific Negro auspices.

As staunch integrationists, these elites feared that if blacks appeared capable of too much self-sufficiency, whites might come to look upon them as not desirous of integration. Prominent blacks not only crusaded against the establishment of black organizations, but worked to undermine those who dared go against the grain. For such enterprising behavior, they believed, sent the "wrong signals" to whites and might work against integration with them.

Allan Spear writes in Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, "To the integrationists, any type of separate Negro institution smacked of segregation and represented a compromise of principle." Even when it was apparent that a separate black institution might be necessary for the benefit of the community, these elites fought against those who dared attempt to create it. When, for example, the journalist, Ida B. Wells, visited Chicago for the Columbian Exposition in the 1880s, she was amazed to discover that this fear of being kept out of white institutions was so great, that it was "hampering an attempt to supply the need of the Negro community."

She tried to organize a kindergarten for black children, but was opposed and ultimately defeated by black leaders who feared that such a school "would be drawing the color line and thus make it impossible for Negro children to be accepted at [the white] Armour Institute kindergarten."

For this same reason, in 1889, a group of blacks were unsuccessful in establishing a YMCA in a black neighborhood, which would necessarily have been all-black. And even while other ethnic groups celebrated their "special" days at the Columbian Exposition, black leaders refused to support a similar day for black Americans. For, nothing must give hint to whites that blacks placed any importance on their own separate culture.

Spear writes, "This social and cultural elite was, by and large, antagonistic to the ideology of self-help and racial solidarity popularized by Booker T. Washington and his followers. As direct heirs of the abolitionist tradition, they held fast to the old creed of militant protest for the attainment of equal rights."

Through their narrow, myopic eyesight, these notables saw in the push for economic advancement by blacks the possible delay of their entry into what they referred to as "mainstream" society. Such people helped to stifle the creativity of many blacks, while encouraging the brightest and most innovative to expend their energies attempting to bring their skills to the companies and organizations of others.

Chicago elites were not alone in their integration fervor, for this was the teaching of most northern black leaders. They disparaged those who sought to establish economic or cultural entities as being "for segregation and discrimination." It is the charge of "separatist" that was constantly hurled against Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee leaders, whose mission was to encourage blacks to create businesses and acquire land to achieve prosperity.

Chicago was but a microcosm of a national pattern, and it was this philosophy of "integration or bust" that eventually won out across the nation. With its success began the barrage of lawsuits against whites and persistent political pressure to force whites to open the doors of their public, as well as private institutions. That which was created and owned by whites was viewed as the "real" institutions. According to the mentality of these black elites, anything that was Negro-initiated was merely a substitute for the real thing.

History shows that these elites have been instrumental in undermining the work ethic among poor blacks by publicly demeaning low level jobs, in the same way that they diminished incentives to take entrepreneurial initiatives. Surely, no other group can tell such a story about its own better-off and most influential class.

Charles Smiley and others like him avoided political entanglements with Chicago's black dignitaries. Instead, Smiley devoted his energies to his initially fledgling business, which he turned into a phenomenally successful enterprise, ultimately providing employment to a great many blacks (as well as whites). As Booker T. Washington put it, "Mr. Smiley is said to give employment to more colored men than any other man of his race in the West." One wonders what legacy was left by those elites who opposed industrious entrepreneurs like Smiley.

Copyright 1994 Issues & Views