We know after the end of Reconstruction in the South there was an influx of African Americans coming to Omaha, but the river boats brought immigrants from all over to Omaha as well.
Little towns that would become neighborhoods as Omaha grew dotted the landscape of the North End. Benson in 1887, my neighborhood Dundee in 1880 along with Chalco. Omaha was the fastest growing city in America in the 1880s. Immigrants brought their ethnic heritage to enclaves up and down 24th street from North to South to the stockyards and the meat packing plants. Little Italy, Sheelytown, Little Poland, Little Bohemia and Greek Town. At the North end of 24th st where Germans and Jews settled along with a significant number of African Americans.
By the turn of the century Omaha was booming, meat packing had become king and in a few years Omaha would also become the hub for goods traveling across the country.
The area grew throughout the last half of the 1800s as Omaha's suburb, with the first streetcars running up and down its main thoroughfares of 24th and 30th Streets. After the Trans-Mississippi Exposition occurred just north of the area in 1898, Kountze Park was developed to serve the area's widely varied racial and ethnic populations. Omaha's Jewish community was founded by eastern European immigrants in the Near North Side neighborhood. Two Jewish synagogues provided social and cultural activities. Other families were secular and Socialist, as were renowned author Tillie Olsen's parents. Olsen worked in the meatpacking plant as a young woman and became a labor organizer in the 1930s before being able to write full-time. Holy Family Catholic Church served successive congregations of German, Irish, Italian and Czech immigrants in the area. There was such a substantial community of Swedes in the area that a portion of the neighborhood was called "Little Stockholm."
The bustling 24th Street corridor also served these communities, with mixed European immigrant communities mingling with the African American community. Many African Americans moved to Omaha from 1910-1950 as part of the Great Migration. St. John's African Methodist Episcopal Church and Calvin Memorial Presbyterian Church were among the churches founded to serve the black community.
This growth spurred diversity, not necessarily a peaceful co-existance. There were riots in 1904, fueled by the children of European immigrants 800 students protested the inclusion of Japanese students in their schools. The
Greek Town riot of 1909 completely destroyed that neighborhood leaving one dead the community homeless.
In 1910 the first true African American neighborhood took shape in Caseytown, just north of downtown, known as the Near North Side. The need for railroad workers prompted the recruitment of African Americans from the South. The meat packers followed with the call for black workers in the South to get good paying jobs in Omaha.
As the African American population grew so did their contributions to Omaha.
At the turn of the 20th century, two African-American physicians, doctors Riddle and Madison, opened a hospital for African Americans. Citizens could not afford the facility and it failed financially. A cause eventually taken up by Zion Baptist Church. The first office of the NAACP west of the Mississippi opened in Omaha in 1912. Banks and Newspapers popped up to serve the community and the main business district of Omaha radiated from 24th St.
Reared in Omaha, Clarence W. Wigington was the first black architect to design a home in Nebraska as a student of the noted Thomas Rogers Kimball. He also designed churches in Omaha. Wigington gained a national reputation after moving to St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1914, where he soon became the senior architectural designer for the city. His legacy includes 60 surviving buildings, among which four are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
North Omaha has suffered in severe Plains weather. In 1902 a major early spring storm demolished a lot of the neighborhood in the Monmouth Park neighborhood. The tornado-like activity destroyed the original Immanuel Hospital and closed North Omaha's Franklin School. The most significant weather-related event to hit Omaha was the Easter Sunday tornado of 1913 that destroyed many of the area's businesses and neighborhoods. It cut a path of destruction through the city that was seven miles (11 km) long and a quarter of a mile wide. In the city as a whole, 140 people died and 400 were injured. Twenty-three hundred people were homeless; with 800 houses destroyed and 2000 damaged. In the 1913 Easter Sunday Tornado, the Idlewild Pool Hall at 2307 North 24th Street was the scene of the greatest loss of life. The owner, C. W. Dillard, and 13 customers were killed as they tried to take shelter on the south side of the pool hall’s basement. The victims were crushed by falling debris or overcome by smoke from fires begun when wood stoves used for heating overturned. North 24th Street was laid waste. The victims were removed to the Webster Telephone Exchange Building.[18] The building was a central headquarters as the community recovered. Operators went to work despite the building missing all of its windows.
The following pictures are courtesy of
Douglas County and Nebraska Historical Societies.
The Idlewild Club
The recruitment of African Americans for jobs with the railroad and meat packing continued thru 1920 and Omaha doubled their African American population being second only to LA in the Western states. Then the
Omaha Race Riot of 1919.
Social tensions simmered in the postwar years, as the nation adjusted to returning veterans, competition for jobs, and fears about labor unrest. After a summer of race riots in numerous industrial cities across the country, Omaha was tense, too. The newspaper had inflamed feelings with sensational stories accusing black men of crimes. The black population increased dramatically from 1910-1920 when they were recruited to work by the stockyards. When many black men worked as strikebreakers, resentment by other working-class, ethnic white men rose against them. The "independent political boss" Tom Dennison was later implicated of contributing to racial tensions in an effort to turn out a reform mayor.
The spark of the Omaha Race Riot of 1919 occurred when a black man named Will Brown was arrested and accused of raping a young white woman from South Omaha. A mob of mostly white ethnic young men marched from South Omaha (rallied and led by a henchman of Dennison's) and converged on the Douglas County Courthouse, where the jail was. In the evening the crowd grew larger and set the courthouse on fire, forcing police to turn Brown over to them. They lynched him, hanging him from a lamppost on the south side of the courthouse, then dragging his body through the streets and burning it. The mob was mostly European-born immigrants and ethnic European Americans. The mayor attempted to intervene and was also hanged; he was saved only by a last-minute rescue by federal agents. The city had to ask for help from Federal troops to quell the disorder, and their arrival was delayed because of a series of communication problems. The commander stationed troops in South Omaha to prevent more mobs from forming, and in North Omaha to protect the blacks.
When the dust settled segregation took hold in earnest. Redlining and restrictive covenants became the rule as African Americans continued to be pushed and kept in North Omaha. Many businesses would not serve Blacks, many more would not hire them, including good paying city jobs. The African American community was expanding culturally and economically.
A late 20th-century documentary reported about the 1940s, "On the surface the black community appeared quite stable. Its center was a several-block district north of the downtown. There were over a hundred black-owned businesses, and there were a number of black physicians, dentists, and attorneys. Over twenty fraternal organizations and clubs flourished. Church life was diverse. Of more than forty denominations, Methodists and Baptists predominated.
During the 20's thru the 60's the community in North Omaha flourished particularly in music. It was described as their golden age, with the scene radiating from the Dreamland Ballroom. My cousin left the farm and came to 24th St to play jazz with Preston Love Sr. among others and went on to be the arranger for Count Basie in the 50s.
Even so the Depression it the working class hard, the Federal Government built two housing projects in North and South Omaha. They were only meant to be temporary housing for about 2100 people but the pressure of returning soldiers, the loss of thousands of jobs in Omaha increasingly mean it was the last resort for housing the very poor. In 1921 The KKK started its first Klavern in Omaha.
n 1947 a student-led civil-rights group called the DePorres Club was forced off the Creighton University campus, where they started. Mildred Brown, a community activist and publisher, invited them to meet at the Omaha Star, the paper she directed for the African-American community for decades.
Omaha jazz legend Preston Love reported that in the 1950s he saw signs in Omaha restaurants and bars that said, "We Don't Serve Any Colored Race", but that he was always welcome as a musician.In the 1950s, the United Meatpacking Workers of America (UPWA) helped use their power to have businesses in Omaha integrate their facilities.
The late 1950s and early 1960s was the period which Lois Mark Stalvey wrote about in The Education of a WASP. She recounted her activist efforts to desegregate a middle-class West Omaha neighborhood for an African-American surgeon and his family who wanted to live in the area. Such efforts took place in a different environment from the struggles of most working-class families in North and South Omaha.
In 1955, the State of Nebraska took Omaha's main amusement park, Peony Park, to district court. The state believed that the park, founded in 1919, violated Nebraska Civil Rights Law when African American swimmers at the Amateur Athletic Union Swimming Meet held at the park on August 27, 1955 were discriminated against. In State of Nebraska v. Peony Park, the Nebraska Supreme Court found that two African-American participants were illegally barred from the meet because Peony Park barred them from the pool. On September 7, 1955, the court fined Peony Park $50 and costs of the trial. Additional civil suits were settled out of court.[18] The Omaha Star newspaper reported extensively on the trial, using the opportunity to highlight segregationist policies around the city as well as the city's burgeoning civil rights movement.[19]
By the early 1960s, economic progress by many African Americans and ethnic Americans became unraveled in the massive job losses caused by restructuring of railroad and meatpacking industries. By the mid-1960s, North Omaha had much more poverty than before and increasing social problems.
Map of dots by Dustin Cable Blue/Whites, Red/Asian, Green/AA, Orange/Latino
We are now at the 60's Race Riots. Below is the trailer for A Time for Burning Oscar nominated documentary about the racial unrest here in 1966. The speaker is Ernie Chambers and it is the problem facing the African American community here and a great many place in this country. It is a powerful indictment of everything we have done and not done. A Time For Burning was chosen by the LOC to be among the 100 films of such social and historical value they must be preserved for future generations.
Part One
Part Two