William H. Twiggs

William H. Twiggs (1865-1960), entrepreneur and community leader. Twiggs was born to free parents in Davenport, Iowa the year that the Civil War ended, part of a small but prosperous black community that included lawyers, business owners, three churches, fraternal and sororal orders, and other institutions. In 1884 he moved to the Chicago suburbs of Evanston, part of the most rapidly growing urban community in the world. Chicago was home to only 4,000 people in 1840 but 299,000 in 1870 and 1.7 million by 1900, and Evanston became home to wealthy families who were seeking an escape from the crowded city and who were drawn by the educational institutions Northwestern University and Garrett Biblical Institute (now Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary). Few of these new residents of the Chicago area were African American, though. In 1900 blacks were less than 2% of Chicago’s population, and there were only 737 African Americans in Evanston, nearly all domestic servants for the prosperous white families. One of the exceptions to that rule was the teenaged Twiggs, who became one of the only black students at Garrett before going to work in a barbershop and then opening a shop of his own. Until the modern safety razor was invented in the early 1900s, most upper and middle-class white men went to barbershops daily to be shaved, and many of the barbers who serviced them were black men. Most black men worked as manual or farm laborers for little money, and so barbers like Twiggs were respected tradesmen and community leaders with higher incomes and access to the white power structure through their clients. Twiggs also learned the printing trade and founded a newspaper called the Afro-American Budget with his former roommate from Garrett. In a time when the mainstream white media mostly ignored African Americans except to mock them or report on crime, the Budget was one of hundreds of black newspapers around the country that advocated for racial equality and reported positively on black life. The paper started in 1889 and was initially printed by a university-affiliated white press, but Twiggs shortly thereafter started his own printing business and issued the Budget through that.

The late 1800s and early 1900s were the worst period in the history of American racism, with African Americans were hindered by southern segregation, disenfranchisement, and violence and by northern white indifference, and many sought to survive and rise up by forming their own community institutions and promoting economic power through black businesses. In Evanston this included Ebenezer African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, which Twiggs served for seventy years as Sunday School superintendent and trustee. He was also active in local chapters of the fraternal orders Prince Hall Masons, Knights of Pythias, and Order of the Eastern Star. When African Americans were banned from joining the local YMCA, Twiggs led a fundraising team to start an all-black YMCA. The Emerson Street YMCA opened in 1909 and erected a new $23,000 building five years later. This organization provided counseling services, a meeting place for other organizations, housing to black Northwestern students who were barred from the dorms, and physical education to Evanston Township High School students who were not allowed to take part in sports. Access to beaches and swimming pools was so limited for African Americans that the 1919 Chicago Race Riot, in which white Chicagoans murdered twenty-three blacks and destroyed more than 1,000 black-owned homes, was sparked by a black boy crossing an imaginary line in the water at a South Side beach and being killed by rock-throwing whites, but in Evanston the pool at the Emerson Y provided generations of African Americans with a place to swim. Twiggs and his wife also helped organize a daycare center that looked after black children while their mothers were at their domestic service jobs. Additionally, although there were few black elected officials anywhere in the country, many northern white politicians tried to win the favor of black voters by appointing community leaders like Twiggs to various positions. He was named City Sealer by the mayor of Evanston in the late 1890s, holding this position for two decades, and in 1915 was appointed Permit Clerk by another mayor. He also continued to run his print shop, issuing publications such as his newspaper, the Evanston city directory, the newsletter for the Knights of Pythias, and tickets for the 1933-34 Century of Progress exposition in Chicago, which drew more than 48 million visitors. His office contained a “Historical Den” with photographs and other records of Evanston’s black history, although most of its contents were destroyed by a fire shortly before his death. The black communities in Evanston and broader Chicago grew rapidly after World War I, with Evanston’s black population reaching 8,000 by 1924 (including his granddaughter Kay Davis, who sang with the Duke Ellington Orchestra during the 1940s) and forming a distinct neighborhood on the west side of town. This helped increase black economic and political power, as numerous other black businesses were created and in 1935 both Twiggs and another African American ran for the city council, with his opponent ultimately winning. In the 1950s Evanston’s white institutions finally began to fully desegregate, but this led to the demise of many black institutions. In 1969, for instance, the Emerson Y that William H. Twiggs had helped found was closed and absorbed into the white YMCA, which was opened to all.  He himself did not live to see this, having died in 1960 at the age of 95. In 1986 Evanston dedicated William H. Twiggs Park in the west side neighborhood that had been home to so many of the black businesses, churches, and other organizations that he led from the end of Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement.

©David Brodnax, Sr.