Of all the Chicago names to have faded away, to be buried by history’s dust, Jesse Binga’s is among the most baffling.
That is because for a time “in the 1920s just hearing the strange and poetic sound of his name conjured up an image as constant and permanent as the chiseled letters on the front of (his) bank.”
Those words were written by Don Hayner and Binga’s name has been wandering around the head of this retired newspaperman for decades.
“I first came across it in the 1980s when I was researching a story about Chicago’s oldest white and black families,” he says. “So many of the names I knew, but when I came to Binga’s, I said to myself ‘How could I have never heard of this guy?’”
He began to explore the history of the man, at first at the slower pace available to one with full-time and demanding jobs as reporter, editor and eventually editor-in-chief for the Sun-Times.
After his retirement from the paper in 2012, Hayner was able to devote more time to Binga’s life and times, and it is not an exaggeration to say that he now knows more about the man than anyone alive.
The proof is between the covers of “Binga: The Rise and Fall of Chicago’s First Black Banker” (Northwestern University Press, 2019), a book peppered with Hayner’s sharp reporter’s instincts, stylish writing and, yes, a good editor’s keen awareness of what’s important and what is not.
His book does Binga proud, filling out the portrait of this fascinating and driven man. There will always remain mysteries surrounding him — he had few close friends and never courted publicity — but the Binga who pops from these pages is unforgettable.
The book also provides a compelling and enlightening look at the colorful and vibrant neighborhood where he was, for a time, a king and, as Hayner writes, “a symbol of success in the Black Belt, someone who embodied the possibility of the American Dream. “
He arrived as a 27-year-old. Born and raised in relatively pleasant circumstances in Detroit, he was married, had worked for an attorney and then hit the road as a Pullman porter, years later explaining that he did so “in order to get a general idea of the conditions about the nation and also acquaint himself with the different cities and to satisfy a desire to travel.”
Of all those “different cities,” Chicago exerted a strong pull and he arrived for keeps in 1892 with, Hayner writes (quietly displaying his attention to details) “a shoe-shine kit, some well-worn luggage, and ten dollars in his pocket.”
What follows is a rags-to-riches story worthy of the most inventive novelist. Competing against what Hayner estimates were 30,000 other street peddlers, Binga scratched out a living, rented space in his own quarters to others, saved money and eventually started to buy what would become the foundation of a real estate empire; founded the Binga Bank in 1908, the first black-owned bank in the city; with his second with Eudora, the sister of crime boss John “Mushmouth” V. Johnson, practiced devout Catholicism and helped promote the city’s cultural landscape; threw almost unimaginably lavish Christmas parties, taking over an entire hotel, understandably becoming the Black Belt social events of the year.
His “kingdom” was roughly the area extending blocks on either side of State Street, from 22nd St. south to 39th St. Known as the Black Belt and later (and today) as Bronzeville, it was, Hayner says, a “section where wealth and poverty existed side by side … sometime uneasily.”
He sold homes to blacks in what were then predominantly white neighborhoods, enraging racists factions who made him the target of almost monthly bombings of his home and offices for a couple of years and put him at the center of the city’s ugly race riots of 1919.
It’s all here, finely detailed and told with narrative force. In describing the Black Belt, Hayner writes, “The world of Jesse Binga’s State Street could be a harrowing place. … Despite the gambling and prostitution, the dangers, the poverty and housing woes … Jesse Binga was one of a growing class of people who were bringing business to State Street. … Binga was the future. Binga represented success.”
It is obvious that Hayner came to know Binga on an intimate level. “I interviewed a few people who had known him, and I learned that he could be a cold guy,” Hayner says. “He was an unapologetic capitalist and I have come to admire that.”
As a lifelong South Sider, for decades in the Beverly neighborhood, Hayner has a solid grasp of the racial tensions that have long marked this city. He believed that may be one reason why Binga and his story has faded, his legacy lost.
“He was such an inspiration for others,” says Hayner. “A symbol of self-sufficiency and self-worth. But he left are few papers, letters and other materials to fully explain this man. Also, there is a tendency — and I say this as a former newspaperman — to overlook the history of the South Side. That, of course, has a great deal to do with race and our ongoing struggle to deal with it.”
Hayner did relish digging into the past for his book, pouring over microfilm and dusty files. Not everything is available through Google, you know. He did the same in the mid-1980s when he and Tom McNamee (still ink-stained as a Sun-Times writer/editor) wrote “Streetwise Chicago” (Loyola University Press ), a charmingly informative catalog of the origins of the names of every street in the city, from Abbott Avenue through more than 1,100 other byways.
There is no Binga Boulevard here. His majestic house still stands on what is now Martin Luther King Drive. His bank was razed long ago, and its former site is now part of the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology.
His fall — which included time in jail — was fast and hard. You can, as did Hayner, find his grave. But you will not find his name there.
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