And it was stated plainly at the time. The Black worker was the last hired and the first fired. He had been the most recent to win his place in the factory. And he held the lowest and most vulnerable jobs. So, when the layoffs came, his name was at the top of the list.
Employers cut their Black workers before their white ones as a matter of course. The foothold that the migrant had fought so hard to win turned out to be the first thing swept away. The numbers from Chicago show how brutally the rule was applied. Unemployment among the city's Black workers ran far above that of white workers at every level. Among professionals, Black unemployment was five times the white rate.
Among skilled and clerical workers, it was three times higher. Even among the unskilled laborers, where Black men were most concentrated, their unemployment ran at twice the white rate. At every rung of the ladder, the Black worker was thrown off first. And the depth of it kept growing. By 1932, somewhere between 40 and 50% of all Black workers in Chicago were unemployed.
In a city where overall unemployment had reached a staggering 40% by 1931, with some 750,000 residents out of work. The Black worker carried a burden heavier than almost anyone. Close to half of Black Chicago simply had no work at all. The consequences rippled through every Black household. The wages stopped.
The rent on the kitchenette still came due. And the inflated price that segregation had always charged did not fall just because the paycheck had vanished. The family that had been climbing was suddenly sliding backward. And there was no government safety net worth the name to catch them. Because the programs that would later become social security and unemployment insurance did not yet exist.
The cruelty of the timing was total. The Black worker had spent the prosperous 1920s clawing his way into the industrial economy. Building a foothold, a community, and a small cushion of savings. He had done everything the promise of the North had asked of him. And the depression rewarded that effort by taking his job before anyone else's.
Precisely because he had been allowed in last and kept at the bottom. The position that had been his only opening became the trapdoor beneath his feet. A man could survive losing his job if he had savings to fall back on.
The Black worker of Chicago believed he did. He had put his money faithfully into a bank that his own community had built. A bank that stood as a symbol of Black achievement and Black security. And in the summer of 1930, that bank betrayed him in a way he never saw coming.
The bank that took his savings
The bank was called the Binga State Bank. And for the Black community of Chicago, it was far more than a place to keep money. It was a symbol of everything the migrants believed they could become. And in the summer of 1930, it collapsed and took the savings of thousands of Black families down with it. The bank was the work of one remarkable man, Jesse Binga.
He had come to Chicago in the 1890s with $10 in his pocket and through real estate and sheer determination, he had built himself into a millionaire and a bank president. In 1908, he had founded the first privately owned Black bank in the city. To Black Chicago, Binga was living proof that a Black man could build wealth and power in America. And his bank was where the community placed its hope and its hard-earned dollars. So central was it that the Binga State Bank and one other Black bank together held fully 1/3 of all the deposits in Black-owned banks in the entire United States.
But the same depression that was throwing Black workers out of their jobs was undermining the bank from beneath. The bank's money was tied up heavily in mortgage loans. And many of those loans had been made to the churches and the fraternal societies of Bronzeville, the very institutions at the heart of Black community life. As the members of those churches and lodges lost their jobs, they could no longer make their payments. And here, Jesse Binga made a choice that revealed his character.
He refused to seize the properties of the community institutions that could not pay. He would not foreclose on the churches. That decency, in the merciless logic of banking, helped doom the bank. With its loans frozen and its depositors frightened, the Binga State Bank could not stay afloat. Binga turned to the Chicago Clearing House, the association of the city's banks, of which he had been a dues-paying member for more than a decade and asked for the help such associations existed to provide.
The clearinghouse refused. Every other member of that association would survive the depression. Binga's Bank, the Black one, was left to fall. On July 31, 1930, the state auditors shuttered the Binga State Bank. It was the first bank in Chicago to close in the Great Depression.
As the news spread through the South Side, frightened depositors swarmed the bank building at 35th and State Street, but it was too late. Their money was gone, the savings of thousands of Black families, the careful accumulations of years of labor in the stockyards and on the rails, simply vanished. The great Black scholar W.E.B. Du Bois saw in the bank's fall something more than bad luck. "Binga," he said, "was not the kind of man they wanted to see succeed."
And indeed, while the bank's white counterparts were rescued and survived, Binga himself would be prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned, and would die in 1950 so poor that he could not afford a headstone for his own grave. For the ordinary Black worker, the meaning was simpler and more devastating.