Cecil A. Partee Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

Filipino or some man may be married to a white woman pr some woman may be
married to a white man or something. That was very, very, very seldom seen.
It was basically black. It would be 99% black.
Q: And were most of these, then, fairly recent arrivees in Chicago?
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E A: Well, no, not all of them. A lot of people had been born in Chicago.
There were a large number of people who had come up from other states,
generally from the South. They, you know, covered the full spectrum. They
were from maids and cooks to school principals and people who did--doctors,
lawyers, all kinds of people. You know, pretty much across the board kind
of population.
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9: Was there much industry in that section?
A: Industry in the context of manufacturing, no. There were a lot of
businesses. Within that particular area, there were four streets that had
substantial business interests, from drugstores to cleaners and all kinds of
regular service businesses.
Q: Of the other ward committeemen, were there any that you were becoming
well acquainted with at that time?
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A: Well, yes. As a matter of fact, at that time there were only about three
or four black ward committeemen in Chicago and I knew them all and attended
their annual affairs and that kind of thing. It was almost a social kind of
thing, too, because each ward would have a massive fund-raiser every year, a
social affair, either a dance or a dinner dance or something of that sort. And
we would always at tend those.
Q: Who were these other black committeemen?
A: Well, af course, Congressman Dawson was committeeman of the 2nd ward and
Ralph Metcalf became the committeeman of the 3rd ward, after he replaced a man
named Committeeman WPmbish, Senator Wimbish. And Attorney Holman was the
committeeman of the 4th ward and an engaging undertaker by the name of Bob
Miller was the committeeman of the 6th ward. Those were the four wards that
had black committeemen at the time I first started. And that, of course, grew
and developed to the point where now there are about fifteen black ward
cormnit teemen.
Q: Were you, as president, then, involved with holding this annual fundraising
dinner ?
A: Oh, I was involved, sure. There were occasions when I was to speak or
there were occasions when I was the master of ceremonies, generally, of our
fund-raisers. We did various kinds of fund-raisers, they weren't always a
dinner. Most of the time it was a dinner dance but on other occasions we
would have--I remember once we had a wrestling show and another occasion we
had a theater party. We sort of varied the themes so that people didn't get
bored,