Hillbillies and O'Hair

It was J.C. O’Hair’s commitment to the local church, more than anything else, that made his ministry a national success. His Chicago church impacted the whole country in the ‘40s and ‘50s.

At one point, North Shore Church (at the corner of Wilson and Sheridan) organized a men’s grace fellowship that was attended by up to 400 men each month.

“Three or four times a year they would buy a full-page in the Chicago Tribune for $28,000—a lot of money back then—and O’Hair would write a gospel message,” says Jordan.

“In the late ’60s, all that kind of went away and I used to ask questions about why and guys would lament how it just fell apart. You know what happened to the Grace Movement? It fell out of the hands of the leaders of local churches and into the hands of para-church institutions, and when it came time for them to do some of the things the passage in I Corinthians 16 says to do, they didn’t have the context of the local church to do it out of.”

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A very fascinating cover story, entitled “Hillbilly Heaven,” appeared last month in the Chicago newsweekly “New City.” It was about how Uptown, on the same streets surrounding North Shore Church, was inundated with Southerners starting in the ‘late ‘40s.

The article read, “ ‘The ‘hillbilly’ presence overlapped Uptown, probably ranging from Sheridan on the east and Ashland on the west and Addison to the south and Foster to the north,’ says Patrick Butler, who covered the area for the Lerner Newspapers during the sixties, seventies and eighties. ‘They also had concentrations in Lincoln Park, Lakeview and the Bowmanville neighborhoods.’

“In fact, records show that while the forties, fifties and sixties saw as many as 400,000 African-Americans migrate to Chicago from Deep South states like Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, an estimated 70,000 whites also settled in Chicago after the Korean War. These migrants came from the Mid-South, the mountainous regions of states like North Carolina, Kentucky, Eastern Tennessee and West Virginia.”

Writer David Witter informed, “Like most new immigrant or migrant groups, they were immediately vilified. Yet perhaps because they were largely of the same race and spoke the same language, their own habits and customs were even more vehemently derived in the press. Albert N. Votaw, executive director of the Uptown Chicago Commission wrote an article titled ‘The Hillbillies Invade Chicago,’ for the February, 1958 edition of Harper’s magazine stating:

“ ‘These southerners bring with them suspicion of landlords, bosses, police, principals, and most church people, settling in deteriorating neighborhoods where they can stick with their own kind, living much as they did back home, often removing window screens, they sit half-dressed where it is cooler and dispose of their garbage in the quickest way.’

“A series of Chicago Tribune articles, penned in 1957 by reporter Norma Lee Browning and reposted on a Chicago magazine web page, painted an even worse picture.

“ ‘Skid row dives, opium parlors, and assorted other dens of inequity collectively are as safe as a Sunday school picnic compared with the joints taken over by the clan’s fightin’, feudin’ southern hillbillies and their shootin’ cousins, who today constitute one of the most dangerous and lawless elements of Chicago’s fastest growing migrant

population . . . Authorities are reluctant to point a finger at any one segment of the population or nationality group, but they agree that the southern hillbilly migrants, who have descended on Chicago like a plague of locusts in the last few years, have the lowest standard of living and moral code [if any] of all, the biggest capacity for liquor, and the most savage and vicious tactics when drunk, which is most of the time.’

“Articles from this era can easily be described as insensitive and sensationalistic journalism that would not appear in a major newspaper or magazine today. Yet as somebody who grew up in Lincoln Park in the 1970s with the last remnants of the ‘hillbillies’I can testify that some of the stereotypes depicted in these articles are not entirely without precedent. The neighborhood even had its own version of ‘The Hatfields and McCoys’—The Corns and The Tates. I remember my friend Norman got into a fight with Dell Tate at Alcott School. As soon as school ended, about ten Tate males holding sticks, thick Coke bottles and garbage-can lids were standing in back of his house near Clark and Drummond, the eldest one shouting,‘You mess with one of the Tate’s, you mess with the whole family!’ ”