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explained. “If I went to every professional man in the town, I would not be able to raise two hundred dollars. But if I went to the vice lords and policy kings, I would get two or three thousand from a couple of them.”
    At Dawson’s urging, Mayor Kelly protected the policy kings. As Dawson put it, “If anybody is going to make money out of the frailties of my people, it’s going to be my people.”
    But after Kelly went, so did the protection. As soon as Kelly was out of power, Chicago’s organized crime mob, known as the Outfit, began knocking off policy wheel operators in a hostile takeover of the numbers game. Dawson appealed to Kelly’s successor, Mayor Martin Kennelly, to defend his most important source of campaign funds. Kennelly, Chicago’s postwar mayor, fancied himself a reformer (which made him completely out of place in city hall), and reformers don’t stand up for gamblers. Dawson didn’t forget the snub. When Kennelly tried to run for a third term in 1955, Dawson helped dump him in favor of Richard J. Daley. The Dawson-controlled black wards gave Daley over 70 percent of the vote.
    Dawson was able to amass more power than DePriest because the Black Belt had changed since DePriest’s day. In 1948, the Supreme Court outlawed restrictive housing covenants, and the well-to-do professionals who had provided the Black Belt with intellectual and political leadership immediately left for more prosperous neighborhoods. They were replaced by blacks of the Second Great Migration, many of them sharecroppers dispossessed from the Mississippi Delta by cotton-picking machines. Poor, barely literate, and country to the bone, these newcomers needed the jobs and welfare that only a machine could provide. Dawson could get you a nice apartment at one of the brand-new high-rise housing projects or a gig at the post office, sorting mail from midnight to eight.
    Mayor Daley, who refused to allow anyone other than Mayor Daley to make decisions in Chicago, did not allow Dawson to choose his people’s aldermen. Instead, he stocked the city council with a cast of docile South Side and West Side mediocrities known as the “Silent Six,” who could be counted on to vote with the Machine, even when the Machine was blocking an open housing law that would have allowed poorer blacks to escape the ghetto. Dawson resisted Daley’s power play, but as it turned out, the Silent Six helped solve a thorny problem for Daley’s Machine and Dawson’s sub-Machine.
    â€œThe blacks wanted out of their ghetto,” wrote Bill and Lori Granger in Lords of the Last Machine: The Story of Politics in Chicago . “But how could the Machine encourage this without breaking up the old ethnic neighborhoods that gave it its strength? Nor did black Machine leaders have any interest in breaking up the tight black ghetto. Under Bill Dawson it was a powerful force as well as economically tied to the Dawson machine. Why let the chickens get out of the coop?”
    DePriest, Dawson, and Powell all had one trait common to pioneering black politicians: light skin. Down unto Obama, mixed-race politicians have made advances that were later shared by the entire community. Virginia’s Douglas Wilder, the first black governor since Reconstruction, was also light skinned. It’s as though the color barrier can only be breached by someone whose ancestors have already lived on the other side.
    â€œThey were considered white,” Timuel Black says of Chicago’s first black congressmen. “They had to be smarter because they had white ancestors. That’s part of the culture of America. That’s true even today. Nobody speaks about it, but they can see it.”
    Black Chicago’s fealty to the Machine began to fall apart during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The poor black wards, controlled by Dawson, had provided the votes to put Daley in office and keep him there. One West