I saw a lot of Dr. Stephens as a child. He served on the deacon board with my father and was our family dentist, but I never saw Mrs. Stephens until that fall day. After my cousin and church organist Beverly Steele introduced us, McCann said we never met because she attended Saint Augustine Episcopal Church.
"We sing operatic music," she says. But "I made sure my children went to a Baptist church," she adds, believing they would get better Christian instruction. As I finally chatted with her for this article about her now 98 years of Earth-bound experiences, her love for classical music kept finding its way into her story.
"I have the background of the opera because of my mother," she explains. Her mother moved from Galveston, Texas, to Chicago during the Great Black Migration, hoping to be an operatic singer. "We had a baby grand at home on the first and third floors," she recalls.
1940s Chicago, Black Jobs, Jews, and More
In post-World War II Chicago, McCann started high school at Wendell Phillips, Chicago's first predominantly Black high school. However, she soon transferred to the majority White Englewood High. She has fond memories of her classmates, including some young Polish women whose mothers had survived Nazi rapes.To my surprise, it was less privileged Blacks moving into South Side neighborhoods who would harass McCann on her way to Wendell Phillips. "Black people called me (the n-word)," she recalls.
Her family lived in a fashionable brownstone with her Aunt Lola, whom many assumed was White, at 4050 South Parkway (originally Grand Boulevard, now Martin Luther King., Jr. Drive) in the Bronzeville neighborhood. Aunt Lola rented one room to a non-relative and owned a seven-passenger Buick.
McCann also spoke of Black-Jewish relationships. "If you wanted a job," she says, "Blacks would often go to a Jew."
A deeper look into her household tells a more revealing story of the times. While in the military, officers initially stationed her father with the Whites. Though he could pass as White, he did not, she says. "People would tell on you," she recalls if you tried to pass.
Unlike some other mothers on her block, McCann's had to work outside of the home since her light-skinned father could not earn enough as a "Negro” lawyer. "Black postal workers would make more money than my father," she says.
Besides the post office, another "good" Black job was working on the railroad, as documented at Chicago's A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum. "The railroads were a salvation for Black people," confirmed McCann. Aunt Lola's brown-skinned husband, Uncle Banks, also had a "respectable," steady job. He was a barber.
While her father worked at a practice where Black lawyers could find work, Black doctors could only practice at Provident Hospital, founded by Dr. Hale Williams. Williams also performed the first heart surgery at Provident, now known as Provident Hospital of Cook County. Sundays were equally segregated. Her godfather was Reverend Samuel J. Martin, Chicago's first Black Episcopalian priest.
McCann also spoke of Black-Jewish relations. "If you wanted a job," she says, "Blacks would often go to a Jew." She affirms that much of what Blacks have achieved was partly due to this alliance of outcasts. However, it wasn't until she was an adult and joined the Jewish Federation that she understood that it was improper to call Chicago's Maxwell Street shopping district "Jewtown."
