I’ve been thinking a lot over the past week about the intersections and connections between individual acts of desperation and the social structure within which we live. In particular, I’ve been thinking about James Hickman.

On January 16, 1947 in a Near West Side building in Chicago, a fire broke out in the attic and took the lives of 4 children: Lester (14), Elzina (9), Sylvester (7), and Velvina (4).

On July 16, 1947 James Hickman, the father of those children, shot and killed his landlord/building manager, David Coleman.

On December 16, 1947 James Hickman walked out of court, a free man, after a jury could not reach a verdict on his murder charge and prosecutors offered a plea deal to a lesser one. Writer and activist Joe Allen recounts Hickman’s story in his 2011 book “People Wasn’t Made To Burn: A True Story of Race, Murder, and Justice in Chicago.”

James Hickman was part of the migration of Southerners who moved North to improve their lives. Hickman, a sharecropper, moved to Chicago from Mississippi in 1944. He came without his wife and younger children at first. He lived with his older married daughter and her family for 10 months while working at Wisconsin Steel. He planned to save money and find a place to live before sending for his family. The search for adequate living quarters was long and fruitless. Hickman found some apartments but they didn’t want children. Others took his money but never actually rented him an apartment.

In January 1946, he thought that he had a place to live and sent for his family to join him in Chicago. When the family arrived, the rental fell through so Hickman, his wife Annie, and children had to stay with the older daughter. Her landlord found out and insisted that the family had to move out.

Out of desperation, Hickman located a dilapidated apartment at 1733 West Washburne. David Coleman, a young African American budding entrepreneur, was their landlord. Hickman and his family were living in a tiny kitchenette apartment that was inadequate to their needs. It was a one room attic apartment for six and sometimes seven people. Chicago was suffering from a crisis of overcrowding for black people due to racial covenants and redlining. Many fires were also raging throughout black communities; some attributed to terrible maintenance and others to suspected arson by unscrupulous landlords.

James Hickman complained to his landlord, Coleman, about the awful conditions in his building. He wanted his $100 deposit back so that he could find another place to live. The landlord refused to comply. After several more complaints, David Coleman threatened to “burn [Hickman] out.” Annie and James reported the threat and the terrible building conditions to the police. They took out a warrant for Coleman’s arrest but nothing actually happened. The police never arrested him.

When James Hickman got the news at work that there was trouble at home in January 1947, he didn’t initially suspect fire. When he arrived at the scene, he tried to enter his building but was prevented by police officers. Hickman responded: “Man, you tell me I can’t go up there, what’s the trouble? I am James Hickman, I live there (p.32).”

The police said that a fire had broken out in the attic. Hickman asked about his family and it was left to a neighbor to tell him that four of his children were dead and that his wife and older son were in the hospital. Hickman started to cry and sunk into a major depression that he would be unable to shake.

After an inquiry into the fire at 1733 West Washburne, David Coleman, the landlord was fined $350 plus $250 for fire and building code violations and the failure to get a permit for construction. No criminal charges were brought against him. James Hickman was beside himself with grief. “Paper was made to burn and rags,” Hickman told his older son. He added: “Not people. People wasn’t made to burn.”

Hickman, a very religious man, had made a solemn pledge to protect his family at all costs. He felt that he had failed and heard a voice directing him to kill David Coleman who he held solely responsible for his children’s death. On July 16 1947, Hickman left his home to look for Coleman. He found him sitting in his brother’s cab on the Southside of Chicago and shot him several times. Thinking that he had killed Coleman, Hickman went home with a sense of relief.

Coleman however had not died. He spent several days in the hospital before eventually succumbing to his wounds on July 19th. When the police arrived later on July 16, Hickman was waiting for them. They took him to the hospital where Coleman identified him as the shooter. Hickman signed a confession and was booked. He explained what happened this way:

“I said you got my hundred dollars and you started the building fire and you caused a lot of unhappiness in my home. I shot him twice and then I stepped back and a man ran away from the car and I said to this man don’t make a move. I had a gun in my left hand, and I went back to the car again, and Coleman said Hickman I’ll pay you your hundred dollars and I said to him ‘Coleman you set the building on fire didn’t you?’ and he said ‘Yes’ and I shot at him two more times (Allen, 2011: p.106).”

James Hickman was charged with murder and the state would seek the death penalty if he was convicted. It would fall to the black community along with a group of Chicago Trotskyites including organizers Mike Bartell & Frank Fried of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) to launch a “Free James Hickman” campaign. The campaign would enlist support from pastors, writers, and movie stars like Tallulah Bankhead. It hired attorney Mike Meyer to represent Mr. Hickman. At a press conference, Meyer laid out his theory of the case:

“In Hickman’s mind all evidence pointed to Coleman’s responsibility for the burning to death of his four children. This idea has obsessed him until it reached the point where he could no longer control himself. At the bottom of this case are terrible housing conditions under which human beings are compelled to live and particularly the Negroes whose situation is even worse because they are compelled to live in restricted areas. The blame for this killing, as for the death of the four Hickman children, lies squarely on the inhuman housing conditions under which the Negroes are compelled to live (p. 116).”

A vigorous support campaign using media, petitions, public demonstrations, and more helped shape the public’s opinion of James Hickman and his tragedy. When a jury hung and could not reach a verdict, the Free Hickman campaign put pressure on the state’s attorney to drop the charges against Mr. Hickman. State’s attorney Freeman offered to drop the murder charge if Hickman would plead guilty to manslaughter. The prosecutor agreed to recommend that the judge sentence him to two years’ probation. Hickman accepted the offer.

Joe Allen (2011) described why Freeman pursued this deal:

“Standing before Judge Desorts, Freeman told the judge that one of the major reasons his office didn’t want a retrial was the public support for Hickman that had emerged across the country. He held up letters of support, resolutions, and telegrams. ‘They are too numerous to read all of them here,’ Freeman declared, ‘but the general opinion is to the effect that mercy ought to be shown to an individual who, under the stress of the loss of four children, has been punished to such an extent that society can be magnanimous and afford him a chance to return to his remaining children and wife, and spend the rest of his lifetime in peace (p.185-186).”

James Hickman was free.

The Hickman story underscores the connections between individual desperate acts and the larger social forces that necessitate them. Poverty, segregation, and racism led James Hickman to rent unsafe housing for his family. He had no other choices. He worked tirelessly to provide for his family. He tried consistently to find adequate housing. He couldn’t and this was not because of his individual efforts but because of public policies that forced black people to live in particular parts of the city where they could be taken advantage of by exploitative capitalists. Indeed James Hickman’s ‘choices’ were severely limited and constrained.

Mr. Hickman’s story also brings to mind the subjectivity of concepts like “justice” and “criminality.” His story lays bare the contradictions inherent in these ideas. In Hickman’s case, many in the public believed that he was justified in killing David Coleman because he was distraught and avenging his children’s death by fire. So in their eyes, Hickman was not a criminal but was instead a grieving father pushed to the limits when he could not get ‘justice’ for the death of his beloved children. Racist housing policy was labeled criminal, put on trial and found culpable. The country’s history of official violence was taken into account and James Hickman’s actions were contextualized.

I greatly enjoyed Joe Allen’s book and recommend it. He does an excellent job of tracing the larger story of racism and discrimination that black Chicagoans faced in the mid-20th century through an extraordinary story of one migrant family. Below is a video of Joe Allen describing the Hickman case. It’s worth watching.

Note: For sociologists, the book has the added bonus of featuring Horace Cayton and highlights the role that a social scientist played in exposing the racist housing system in Chicago.