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Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Jim Crow Economy Is the True Horror in Sinners
This article contains light spoilers for Sinners. Sinners is a symphony of vampire bites, gunshot wounds, people being staked in the heart and left to burn alive. Ryan Coogler's film about twin gangsters trying to strike it rich in the Jim Crow South rapidly swerves toward supernatural horror when an ancient vampire seeks a way into the juke joint the twins have set up with their ill-gotten gains. But the true horror in the film is the economics of Jim Crow, which drives every event in the plot, including the vampire bloodbath that ultimately cuts the musical revelry—and the twins' dreams—short. Coogler's films tend to incorporate deep historical research that gets revealed subtly through brief, easy-to-miss moments and story details. Sinners is almost two movies in one: a vampire slaughterhouse film that's also a period piece about the near-impossibility of upward mobility in the segregation economy. The sawmill the twins convert into their juke joint becomes a bloody trap from which there is no escape, much like the system they are born into and seek to transcend. [Read: The triumph of a film that flips on us halfway through] The movie's protagonists, the Smokestack Twins, known as Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan), are flamboyant entrepreneurs and World War I veterans returning from Chicago to Clarksdale, Mississippi, a city long associated with the blues, in the 1930s. One of the twins remarks that Chicago is merely 'Mississippi with tall buildings,' and the viewer is left to speculate why, but history offers at least one possible explanation. In 1919, just after the end of World War I, Black veterans in Chicago would have witnessed one of the worst race riots of that 'Red Summer' of lynchings, sparked by the death of a Black teenager named Eugene Williams, who drowned after a white man threw rocks at him while he was swimming in Lake Michigan. Williams had apparently drifted across an invisible whites-only line that the man who killed him was enforcing. The police refused to arrest the perpetrator, and dozens of Black and white people were killed in the ensuing violence, which saw white mobs rampaging through Black neighborhoods. Black World War I veterans, some of whom defended their communities during the riot, were themselves frequently targeted for racial violence rather than admired for their service, as the Equal Justice Initiative notes; segregationist legislators feared they would return and expect to be treated as equals. The Mississippi Senator James K. Vardaman warned that, for the Black soldier, military service was 'but a short step to the conclusion that his political rights must be respected.' The historian Chad Williams writes in Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era that 'conflict in the South and the major urban race riots of the postwar era reflected the conscious determination of many black veterans, emboldened and politicized by their army experience, to resist continued subjugation.' That context helps explain the twins' cavalier attitude toward the white man they purchase the juke joint from in the film. When Smoke and Stack tell him they'll kill any KKK member who trespasses on their property, the seller, secretly a Klan leader, falsely insists the KKK no longer exists. In actuality, the second incarnation of the Klan remained influential, but Klan denial was a common propaganda strategy. We later learn that the capital the twins use to buy the property was stolen from the Irish and Italian mobs in Chicago, for whom the twins worked before returning to Mississippi. It would have been very difficult for them to acquire that seed capital otherwise; as the legal scholar Mehrsa Baradaran has noted in her study of the racial wealth gap, white banks at the time generally would not extend credit to Black borrowers. The strict separations of the Jim Crow economy are illustrated in perhaps the most striking shot in the movie, when a young Chinese American woman, Lisa Chow, crosses the street to speak with her mother in their whites-only shop. Until that point, we have been shown only the Black side of town, where the Chows also maintain a store. The sweeping shot reveals that the town's white residents are mere feet away, but they might as well be on a different planet. Part of a group of immigrants to Mississippi known as the Delta Chinese, the Chows are neither Black nor white and are allowed to sell to both customer bases at the same time. The twins soon discover, however, that the same segregated economy that deprives them of seed money means that their clientele cannot afford to pay for their products in cash. 'The black peon is held down by perpetual debt or petty criminal judgments; his rent rises with the price of cotton, his chances to buy land are either non-existent or confined to infertile regions,' W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1907. 'If by accident or miracle he escapes and becomes a landholder, his property, civil and political status are still at the mercy of the worst of the white voters, and his very life at the whim of the mob.' This century-old observation is almost a summary of the film's setting, just without the vampires. [Read: Ryan Coogler didn't want to hide anymore] The film conveys two forms of peonage prominent in the 1930s South—labor arrangements not far removed from slavery. One is convict leasing, which we see as Stack, his cousin Sammie, and a veteran bluesman called Delta Slim pass by a chain gang on their drive to the juke joint. Because the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery 'except as punishment for a crime,' many southern states passed laws that, in practice, allowed authorities to arrest Black people for minor crimes such as 'loitering' or 'vagrancy' and then coerce them to work for free under heinous conditions. The other is sharecropping, the details of which are the catalyst for the eventual vampire massacre. Early on in the film, we see Sammie, an aspiring musician and preacher's son, picking cotton in the morning so that he can fill his quota and spend the rest of the day playing his guitar. Under the sharecropping system, Black people and poor whites were kept in an interminable cycle of debt by landlords, no matter how hard they worked, and so were bound to continue—Du Bois described it as a form of serfdom. Landlords would pay sharecroppers in 'scrip,' paper or wooden tokens that could be used to purchase only highly marked-up goods from the landlords' own stores. As the writer Michael Harriott notes, the Chows' shop would have been one of the few places in town where Black residents could expect fair prices. The twins successfully pack the juke joint with customers who are intoxicated by Sammie's supernatural skills with a guitar—Delta Slim describes Black music as a kind of magic, and in another striking scene, Sammie's playing summons the spirits of the revelers' ancestors and descendants. But the twins soon discover that much of their clientele can purchase drinks only with scrip—which means breaking even on their investment will be impossible. Their business faces other barriers: A plot point that sees the twins stealing electricity for the juke joint recalls the fact that most of the South, kept poor and underdeveloped by the demands of the segregated economy, didn't have electricity until the New Deal, under FDR. Elsewhere in the film, the Irish vampire Remmick, pursued by Choctaw vampire hunters, tricks his way into the protection of a pair of Klan members living near Clarksdale and turns them into creatures of the night. Shortly after Stack realizes that the juke joint isn't making enough money, Remmick shows up with his progeny. Attracted by Sammie's virtuoso playing, they ask to be invited in but are rejected because they are white; another aspect of the era was that white businesses could sell to Black customers, but Black businesses were limited to Black clientele. As vampires, they are forced to wait outside. When Mary, Stack's old flame and, in the parlance of the time, an octoroon who is passing for white, learns from Stack that the juke joint is unprofitable, she offers to go see if Remmick and the others have U.S. currency. Mary becomes the vampires' first juke-joint victim and is then invited inside, where she promptly seduces and kills Stack, who later rises again as a vampire. But the entire reason any of this happens is that running a profitable business as a Black person in the Jim Crow economy is nearly impossible. If the Smokestack twins could borrow capital from white banks, they wouldn't have needed to rob the mob and leave Chicago. If the sharecroppers were paid with actual money, the juke joint would have been profitable. And if the juke joint were profitable, then Mary would never have walked outside and been turned by the vampires. The economic constraints imposed by segregation are what, in the end, expose the twins and their customers to the supernatural horror Remmick represents. Interestingly, Coogler treats Remmick sympathetically, offering hints about Remmick's own experience of oppression and his doomed quest to seek out his loved ones, who are long dead. Remmick is a monster, but his homeland was colonized by some of the same rapacious forces that brought the twins' ancestors to America. The tragedy of persecuted people brought into bloody conflict with one another by forces beyond their control is a consistent theme in Coogler's films, including his two Black Panther movies. [Read: The tragedy of Erik Killmonger] The only unadulterated monsters in the film are the Ku Klux Klan, who show up at the juke joint the next morning to kill the twins and take back the property the Klan leader sold to them, thus pocketing the money. This outcome is foreshadowed earlier in the film, during a story Delta Slim tells as they are passing the chain gang. Slim recalls a friend who was lynched for carrying too much cash, which a group of white men assumed he had stolen. Slim's tale illustrates a deadly catch-22 of Jim Crow economics: Whatever Black people acquired, white people could take by force. The final conflict between Smoke and the Klan ends in a satisfying Western-style shoot-out, but it also shows that the twins were always doomed. The powers that be in Clarksdale were never going to allow them to prosper. That's a different kind of horror story, one that is all the more terrifying because it lacks any supernatural element. Unlike vampires, the Jim Crow economy was real, and it shapes America to this day. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Real Horror of Sinners Isn't Supernatural
This article contains light spoilers for Sinners. Sinners is a symphony of vampire bites, gunshot wounds, people being staked in the heart and left to burn alive. Ryan Coogler's film about twin gangsters trying to strike it rich in the Jim Crow South rapidly swerves toward supernatural horror when an ancient vampire seeks a way into the juke joint the twins have set up with their ill-gotten gains. But the true horror in the film is the economics of Jim Crow, which drives every event in the plot, including the vampire bloodbath that ultimately cuts the musical revelry—and the twins' dreams—short. Coogler's films tend to incorporate deep historical research that gets revealed subtly through brief, easy-to-miss moments and story details. Sinners is almost two movies in one: a vampire slaughterhouse film that's also a period piece about the near-impossibility of upward mobility in the segregation economy. The sawmill the twins convert into their juke joint becomes a bloody trap from which there is no escape, much like the system they are born into and seek to transcend. The movie's protagonists, the Smokestack Twins, known as Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan), are flamboyant entrepreneurs and World War I veterans returning from Chicago to Clarksdale, Mississippi, a city long associated with the blues, in the 1930s. One of the twins remarks that Chicago is merely 'Mississippi with tall buildings,' and the viewer is left to speculate why, but history offers at least one possible explanation. In 1919, just after the end of World War I, Black veterans in Chicago would have witnessed one of the worst race riots of that 'Red Summer' of lynchings, sparked by the death of a Black teenager named Eugene Williams, who drowned after a white man threw rocks at him while he was swimming in Lake Michigan. Williams had apparently drifted across an invisible whites-only line that the man who killed him was enforcing. The police refused to arrest the perpetrator, and dozens of Black and white people were killed in the ensuing violence, which saw white mobs rampaging through Black neighborhoods. Black World War I veterans, some of whom defended their communities during the riot, were themselves frequently targeted for racial violence rather than admired for their service, as the Equal Justice Initiative notes; segregationist legislators feared they would return and expect to be treated as equals. The Mississippi Senator James K. Vardaman warned that, for the Black soldier, military service was 'but a short step to the conclusion that his political rights must be respected.' The historian Chad Williams writes in Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era that 'conflict in the South and the major urban race riots of the postwar era reflected the conscious determination of many black veterans, emboldened and politicized by their army experience, to resist continued subjugation.' That context helps explain the twins' cavalier attitude toward the white man they purchase the juke joint from in the film. When Smoke and Stack tell him they'll kill any KKK member who trespasses on their property, the seller, secretly a Klan leader, falsely insists the KKK no longer exists. In actuality, the second incarnation of the Klan remained influential, but Klan denial was a common propaganda strategy. We later learn that the capital the twins use to buy the property was stolen from the Irish and Italian mobs in Chicago, for whom the twins worked before returning to Mississippi. It would have been very difficult for them to acquire that seed capital otherwise; as the legal scholar Mehrsa Baradaran has noted in her study of the racial wealth gap, white banks at the time generally would not extend credit to Black borrowers. The strict separations of the Jim Crow economy are illustrated in perhaps the most striking shot in the movie, when a young Chinese American woman, Lisa Chow, crosses the street to speak with her mother in their whites-only shop. Until that point, we have been shown only the Black side of town, where the Chows also maintain a store. The sweeping shot reveals that the town's white residents are mere feet away, but they might as well be on a different planet. Part of a group of immigrants to Mississippi known as the Delta Chinese, the Chows are neither Black nor white and are allowed to sell to both customer bases at the same time. The twins soon discover, however, that the same segregated economy that deprives them of seed money means that their clientele cannot afford to pay for their products in cash. 'The black peon is held down by perpetual debt or petty criminal judgments; his rent rises with the price of cotton, his chances to buy land are either non-existent or confined to infertile regions,' W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1907. 'If by accident or miracle he escapes and becomes a landholder, his property, civil and political status are still at the mercy of the worst of the white voters, and his very life at the whim of the mob.' This century-old observation is almost a summary of the film's setting, just without the vampires. The film conveys two forms of peonage prominent in the 1930s South—labor arrangements not far removed from slavery. One is convict leasing, which we see as Stack, his cousin Sammie, and a veteran bluesman called Delta Slim pass by a chain gang on their drive to the juke joint. Because the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery 'except as punishment for a crime,' many southern states passed laws that, in practice, allowed authorities to arrest Black people for minor crimes such as 'loitering' or 'vagrancy' and then coerce them to work for free under heinous conditions. The other is sharecropping, the details of which are the catalyst for the eventual vampire massacre. Early on in the film, we see Sammie, an aspiring musician and preacher's son, picking cotton in the morning so that he can fill his quota and spend the rest of the day playing his guitar. Under the sharecropping system, Black people and poor whites were kept in an interminable cycle of debt by landlords, no matter how hard they worked, and so were bound to continue—Du Bois described it as a form of serfdom. Landlords would pay sharecroppers in 'scrip,' paper or wooden tokens that could be used to purchase only highly marked-up goods from the landlords' own stores. As the writer Michael Harriott notes, the Chows' shop would have been one of the few places in town where Black residents could expect fair prices. The twins successfully pack the juke joint with customers who are intoxicated by Sammie's supernatural skills with a guitar—Delta Slim describes Black music as a kind of magic, and in another striking scene, Sammie's playing summons the spirits of the revelers' ancestors and descendants. But the twins soon discover that much of their clientele can purchase drinks only with scrip—which means breaking even on their investment will be impossible. Their business faces other barriers: A plot point that sees the twins stealing electricity for the juke joint recalls the fact that most of the South, kept poor and underdeveloped by the demands of the segregated economy, didn't have electricity until the New Deal, under FDR. Elsewhere in the film, the Irish vampire Remmick, pursued by Choctaw vampire hunters, tricks his way into the protection of a pair of Klan members living near Clarksdale and turns them into creatures of the night. Shortly after Stack realizes that the juke joint isn't making enough money, Remmick shows up with his progeny. Attracted by Sammie's virtuoso playing, they ask to be invited in but are rejected because they are white; another aspect of the era was that white businesses could sell to Black customers, but Black businesses were limited to Black clientele. As vampires, they are forced to wait outside. When Mary, Stack's old flame and, in the parlance of the time, an octoroon who is passing for white, learns from Stack that the juke joint is unprofitable, she offers to go see if Remmick and the others have U.S. currency. Mary becomes the vampires' first juke-joint victim and is then invited inside, where she promptly seduces and kills Stack, who later rises again as a vampire. But the entire reason any of this happens is that running a profitable business as a Black person in the Jim Crow economy is nearly impossible. If the Smokestack twins could borrow capital from white banks, they wouldn't have needed to rob the mob and leave Chicago. If the sharecroppers were paid with actual money, the juke joint would have been profitable. And if the juke joint were profitable, then Mary would never have walked outside and been turned by the vampires. The economic constraints imposed by segregation are what, in the end, expose the twins and their customers to the supernatural horror Remmick represents. Interestingly, Coogler treats Remmick sympathetically, offering hints about Remmick's own experience of oppression and his doomed quest to seek out his loved ones, who are long dead. Remmick is a monster, but his homeland was colonized by some of the same rapacious forces that brought the twins' ancestors to America. The tragedy of persecuted people brought into bloody conflict with one another by forces beyond their control is a consistent theme in Coogler's films, including his two Black Panther movies. The only unadulterated monsters in the film are the Ku Klux Klan, who show up at the juke joint the next morning to kill the twins and take back the property the Klan leader sold to them, thus pocketing the money. This outcome is foreshadowed earlier in the film, during a story Delta Slim tells as they are passing the chain gang. Slim recalls a friend who was lynched for carrying too much cash, which a group of white men assumed he had stolen. Slim's tale illustrates a deadly catch-22 of Jim Crow economics: Whatever Black people acquired, white people could take by force. The final conflict between Smoke and the Klan ends in a satisfying Western-style shoot-out, but it also shows that the twins were always doomed. The powers that be in Clarksdale were never going to allow them to prosper. That's a different kind of horror story, one that is all the more terrifying because it lacks any supernatural element. Unlike vampires, the Jim Crow economy was real, and it shapes America to this day.
Yahoo
13-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Vintage Chicago Tribune: Walgreens has been the backdrop for our city's history
Charles Rudolph Walgreen Sr., son of Swedish immigrants, moved here from Dixon, Illinois, just as people from around the globe arrived for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Walgreen struggled, however, to keep a job that excited him. It took a near-death experience in Cuba while fighting with the Illinois National Guard for Walgreen to pursue a slower pace of life. What Walgreen found at 4134 Cottage Grove Ave., on the first floor of The Barrett Hotel, was a shabby, dimly lit apothecary owned by Isaac W. Blood. Though poorly stocked and short of customers, Walgreen realized the South Side store's potential. Through hard work and innovation, the 20-something saved up enough money to buy a partnership in the business. For a while it was known as Blood-Walgreen before Walgreen bought it outright and had the name 'C.R. Walgreen, placed in gold letters above the store's entrance. The year was 1901 and the establishment became the very first Walgreens location. Today, Deerfield-based Walgreens has more than 12,500 locations across the United States, Europe and Latin America. Last week, the company announced it is being acquired by a private-equity firm for $10 billion, which will take it private. As Tribune photo editor Marianne Mather looked through the Tribune's photo archive she realized that much of the city's history has been intertwined with the Walgreens chain. Here's a look back at some of what she discovered. By then incorporated as Walgreen Co., the drugstore became popular in the early 1910s for its speedy drug delivery known as the 'two-minute drill' — in which the items were at a nearby customer's door before they ended a phone call to the pharmacist — and its elegant soda fountains that not only served fizzy, nonalcoholic drinks but also hot meals during colder weather. But it was a long, hot summer in 1919 that would give Walgreens and other local businesses a front seat to the city's most violent racial conflict that became known as 'Red Summer.' Seventeen-year-old Black boy Eugene Williams was stoned to death on July 27, 1919, at 29th Street Beach at Lake Michigan after he floated into a swimming area designated for whites. Vintage Chicago Tribune : After race riots of 1919, a special report outlined many problems Chicago still faces today Williams' death played a pivotal role in inflaming existing racial tensions that led to a weeklong race riot that left 23 Black and 15 white people dead. More than 500 people were injured and hundreds homeless due to arson. The 1919 riots 'didn't seem to make it into the timeline alongside titanic stories about Fort Dearborn, Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable, the World's Columbian Exposition, the 1968 riot, Richard J. Daley, or Harold Washington,' wrote Eve Ewing in her book of poetry '1919.' In fact, only a small marker on the beach near the spot Williams was killed commemorates the days of rioting that followed. Walgreen's introduced in April 1933 a perfume bar for women, which was believed to be the first of its kind in the U.S. The amenity joined chocolate-dipped candies and employee Ivar Coulson's chocolate malted milk shake — which was invented in 1922 at the Loop store, 17 E. Washington St., before becoming available at all 33 outlets in 1923 — as early Walgreens mainstays. But that same month, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Cullen-Harrison Act into law and the Prohibition era neared conclusion. For the first time in 13 years, thirsty Chicagoans could legally buy a beer and enjoy it in public — even at Walgreens. Walgreens survived the Great Depression — while opening four stores at the 1933 Century of Progress on Northerly Island — and saw its first change in leadership with the death of Walgreen Sr. on Dec. 11, 1939. Charles R. Walgreen Jr., who had earned a pharmacy degree from the University of Michigan, was tapped to take over. Writing kits, comic sheets, playing cards and smoking tobacco were inexpensive options at Walgreens stores to mail to service members stationed overseas during World War II. But when Victory in Europe Day arrived, the drugstores closed for business on May 8, 1945, to celebrate with the rest of the city. Walgreen Jr. led the company's change to a new concept that was sweeping the nation post-World War II, called self-service retailing, where customers could choose products from shelves by themselves. Previously, most retail goods were kept behind the counters and store employees would gather products for customers. Stores were becoming larger and carried a wider variety of merchandise. By the early 1960s, Walgreens had established its own line of vitamins and supplements, packaged prescription medication in childproof containers and hosted a call-in show with a doctor on WBBM radio. Three generations of the Walgreen family were at the opening of the more than 20,000-square-foot outlet at Harlem-Irving Plaza — the chain's largest at the time — on Aug. 20, 1964. The fiscal outlook for 1966, according to Walgreen Jr., would be a 'very good year,' he told the Tribune. With the debut of Medicare, Walgreens expected to benefit from a greater number of prescriptions filled. In the company's 65th year, it expected to open 48 outlets and was recognized for filling its 150 millionth prescription. Mayor Jane Byrne was at State Street Mall (stretching from Wacker Drive to Congress Parkway, which is now known as Ida B. Wells Drive) on Oct. 29, 1979, to lay a ceremonial paving stone. A week of celebrations featured a polka band, dancing dalmatians, trick unicyclists and members of the Honey Bears, the cheerleading squad for the Chicago Bears, passing out chrysanthemums, the Tribune reported. Flashback: The State Street Mall, billed as a car-free shopping mecca, started with high hopes but ended in failure and bus fumes The city hoped that the $17 million project would revitalize the downtown shopping district and increase property values. The opening of Walgreens' 1,000th store at Dearborn and Division's street on the city's North Side on Sept. 6, 1984, was attended by Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson, Chicago Mayor Harold Washington and husband-wife actors Cary Grant and Barbara Harris. The Tribune's 'Inc.' column took note of Harris' 'enormous sapphire and diamond ring' and called it inappropriate for the 9 a.m. event. Grant, then 80 years old, attended the event on behalf of Faberge, which was a major supplier of goods for the chain. The decade started energetically for the company, which filled its 500 millionth prescription in October 1980 and became the first drugstore chain to top $2 billion in sales, according to 'Pharmacist to the Nation: A History of Walgreen Co.,' written in 1989 by Tribune reporters and father-son duo Herman Kogan and Rick Kogan. As Americans navigated shutdowns and the disappearance of goods like toilet paper and Clorox wipes from store shelves, Walgreens became a frequent destination for quick trips to buy face masks, household supplies and medication. Others booked appointments for their first COVID-19 screening or vaccination at the chain. Walgreens emerged from the pandemic, buoyed in part by its key role in providing COVID vaccinations for Americans yearning to emerge from lockdown isolation. 'The role of the pharmacist and local pharmacy is now more vital than ever,' then-CEO Roz Brewer said in October 2021. Become a Tribune subscriber: It's just $12 for a 1-year digital subscription Thanks for reading! Subscribe to the free Vintage Chicago Tribune newsletter, join our Chicagoland history Facebook group, stay current with Today in Chicago History and follow us on Instagram for more from Chicago's past. Have an idea for Vintage Chicago Tribune? Share it with Kori Rumore and Marianne Mather at krumore@ and mmather@
Chicago Tribune
13-03-2025
- Business
- Chicago Tribune
Vintage Chicago Tribune: Walgreens has been the backdrop for our city's history
Charles Rudolph Walgreen Sr., son of Swedish immigrants, moved here from Dixon, Illinois, just as people from around the globe arrived for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Walgreen struggled, however, to keep a job that excited him. It took a near-death experience in Cuba while fighting with the Illinois National Guard for Walgreen to pursue a slower pace of life. What Walgreen found at 4134 Cottage Grove Ave., on the first floor of The Barrett Hotel, was a shabby, dimly lit apothecary owned by Isaac W. Blood. Though poorly stocked and short of customers, Walgreen realized the South Side store's potential. Through hard work and innovation, the 20-something saved up enough money to buy a partnership in the business. For a while it was known as Blood-Walgreen before Walgreen bought it outright and had the name 'C.R. Walgreen, placed in gold letters above the store's entrance. The year was 1901 and the establishment became the very first Walgreens location. Today, Deerfield-based Walgreens has more than 12,500 locations across the United States, Europe and Latin America. Last week, the company announced it is being acquired by a private-equity firm for $10 billion, which will take it private. As Tribune photo editor Marianne Mather looked through the Tribune's photo archive she realized that much of the city's history has been intertwined with the Walgreens chain. Here's a look back at some of what she discovered. Summer 1919: Race riots By then incorporated as Walgreen Co., the drugstore became popular in the early 1910s for its speedy drug delivery known as the 'two-minute drill' — in which the items were at a nearby customer's door before they ended a phone call to the pharmacist — and its elegant soda fountains that not only served fizzy, nonalcoholic drinks but also hot meals during colder weather. But it was a long, hot summer in 1919 that would give Walgreens and other local businesses a front seat to the city's most violent racial conflict that became known as 'Red Summer.' Seventeen-year-old Black boy Eugene Williams was stoned to death on July 27, 1919, at 29th Street Beach at Lake Michigan after he floated into a swimming area designated for whites. Williams' death played a pivotal role in inflaming existing racial tensions that led to a weeklong race riot that left 23 Black and 15 white people dead. More than 500 people were injured and hundreds homeless due to arson. The 1919 riots 'didn't seem to make it into the timeline alongside titanic stories about Fort Dearborn, Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable, the World's Columbian Exposition, the 1968 riot, Richard J. Daley, or Harold Washington,' wrote Eve Ewing in her book of poetry '1919.' In fact, only a small marker on the beach near the spot Williams was killed commemorates the days of rioting that followed. April 7, 1933: Beer boom Walgreen's introduced in April 1933 a perfume bar for women, which was believed to be the first of its kind in the U.S. The amenity joined chocolate-dipped candies and employee Ivar Coulson's chocolate malted milk shake — which was invented in 1922 at the Loop store, 17 E. Washington St., before becoming available at all 33 outlets in 1923 — as early Walgreens mainstays. But that same month, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Cullen-Harrison Act into law and the Prohibition era neared conclusion. For the first time in 13 years, thirsty Chicagoans could legally buy a beer and enjoy it in public — even at Walgreens. 1945: World War II's end Walgreens survived the Great Depression — while opening four stores at the 1933 Century of Progress on Northerly Island — and saw its first change in leadership with the death of Walgreen Sr. on Dec. 11, 1939. Charles R. Walgreen Jr., who had earned a pharmacy degree from the University of Michigan, was tapped to take over. Writing kits, comic sheets, playing cards and smoking tobacco were inexpensive options at Walgreens stores to mail to service members stationed overseas during World War II. But when Victory in Europe Day arrived, the drugstores closed for business on May 8, 1945, to celebrate with the rest of the city. Walgreen Jr. led the company's change to a new concept that was sweeping the nation post-World War II, called self-service retailing, where customers could choose products from shelves by themselves. Previously, most retail goods were kept behind the counters and store employees would gather products for customers. Stores were becoming larger and carried a wider variety of merchandise. By the early 1960s, Walgreens had established its own line of vitamins and supplements, packaged prescription medication in childproof containers and hosted a call-in show with a doctor on WBBM radio. Three generations of the Walgreen family were at the opening of the more than 20,000-square-foot outlet at Harlem-Irving Plaza — the chain's largest at the time — on Aug. 20, 1964. September 1966: Fills 150 millionth prescription The fiscal outlook for 1966, according to Walgreen Jr., would be a 'very good year,' he told the Tribune. With the debut of Medicare, Walgreens expected to benefit from a greater number of prescriptions filled. In the company's 65th year, it expected to open 48 outlets and was recognized for filling its 150 millionth prescription. Oct. 29, 1979: State Street Mall opens and Walgreens location looks to benefit from foot traffic Mayor Jane Byrne was at State Street Mall (stretching from Wacker Drive to Congress Parkway, which is now known as Ida B. Wells Drive) on Oct. 29, 1979, to lay a ceremonial paving stone. A week of celebrations featured a polka band, dancing dalmatians, trick unicyclists and members of the Honey Bears, the cheerleading squad for the Chicago Bears, passing out chrysanthemums, the Tribune reported. The city hoped that the $17 million project would revitalize the downtown shopping district and increase property values. Sept. 6, 1984: 1,000th store opens The opening of Walgreens' 1,000th store at Dearborn and Division's street on the city's North Side on Sept. 6, 1984, was attended by Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson, Chicago Mayor Harold Washington and husband-wife actors Cary Grant and Barbara Harris. The Tribune's 'Inc.' column took note of Harris' 'enormous sapphire and diamond ring' and called it inappropriate for the 9 a.m. event. Grant, then 80 years old, attended the event on behalf of Faberge, which was a major supplier of goods for the chain. The decade started energetically for the company, which filled its 500 millionth prescription in October 1980 and became the first drugstore chain to top $2 billion in sales, according to 'Pharmacist to the Nation: A History of Walgreen Co.,' written in 1989 by Tribune reporters and father-son duo Herman Kogan and Rick Kogan. March 2020: Coronavirus pandemic As Americans navigated shutdowns and the disappearance of goods like toilet paper and Clorox wipes from store shelves, Walgreens became a frequent destination for quick trips to buy face masks, household supplies and medication. Others booked appointments for their first COVID-19 screening or vaccination at the chain. Walgreens emerged from the pandemic, buoyed in part by its key role in providing COVID vaccinations for Americans yearning to emerge from lockdown isolation. 'The role of the pharmacist and local pharmacy is now more vital than ever,' then-CEO Roz Brewer said in October 2021. Want more vintage Chicago? Thanks for reading!
