James Joseph Burke: the Story of Anger, Greed, and Revenge

By Connor Tooman

It was March of 1937, and James Joseph Burke – one-time president and executive secretary of the Woodlawn Property Owners Association (WPOA) – was submitting his resignation letter. Legal suits tearing down the web of racial covenants segregating neighborhoods in Chicago and throughout the United States were in the making, and Burke had plans to help make them. “Improvement” associations like the WPOA served as one of the primary coalitions created by property owners to support private covenants in the early 20th century. Just three years earlier, in Burke v. Kleiman (1934), James Burke and the WPOA had successfully defended their right to enforce a racial covenant against Isaac Kleiman, a white property owner seeking to lease his property to a black physician, James Hall. [1] Yet, in 1937, Burke severed ties with the WPOA and in 1940 would testify against them in court. [2] What caused James Burke’s radical change of heart? The story of Burke v. Kleiman, the WPOA, and James Burke’s double-crossing involves fraud, university money, and nothing less than plain-old revenge.

The story of James Joseph Burke begins in New Jersey in 1875, where he was born to an Irish immigrant father and a Scottish or Irish immigrant mother. [3] Accounts of Burke’s early life are scarce, but U.S. Census data suggests he had moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma by 1920. [4] Burke seems to have found employment in multiple fields during his time in Tulsa, with records listing him as both an architect and the president of the Citizens Paving Company. [5] While in Tulsa, he lived in a rented home with his wife, Olive Burke, until at least 1923 and experienced the birth of his two children, James Burke and Mary Burke in 1921 and 1923, respectively. [6] Sometime before 1930, the Burke family left Tulsa and moved to Chicago, where they lived at 6039 Vernon Avenue in the northwest corner of Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood. [7] It was here that Burke would come to lead, and then double-cross, the Woodlawn Property Owners Association.

By the time James Burke rose to lead the WPOA as its president, it had grown to become a powerful and influential organization within the Chicago community. The WPOA was established in the mid-1920s; by July of 1933 under Burke’s presidency, the WPOA counted as many as 3,000 members as part of its association. [8] Throughout the 1930s, the WPOA was involved in more than five separate cases seeking to enforce violations of racial covenants in the Washington Park subdivision of Chicago. [9]. The cost of fighting these legal battles was no small expense. Critical to the WPOA’s ability to fund them was the financial support of the University of Chicago. 

Administrative leaders at the University of Chicago were dedicated to preserving a whites-only district in the Washington Park neighborhood in which the school resided. Accordingly, organizations dedicated to creating and enacting racially restrictive covenants – like the WPOA – received significant financial support from the university as they fought to enforce these private agreements in courts. [10] Truman K. Gibson Jr., an alumnus of the University of Chicago Law School and member of Hansberry’s legal team, recalls meeting with the university’s president, Robert Maynard Hutchins, along with fellow black alumni of the law school. Hutchins began by describing the university’s funding of the WPOA as, “a matter of economics,” – of “protecting” the university’s “huge investment in the South Side.” When pressed, however, Gibson Jr. describes Hutchins as eventually blurting out, “Why don’t you people stay where you belong!” [11] This attitude led the university to lend their full support to Olive and James Burke and the WPOA when, in 1932, they filed suit against Isaac Kleiman for seeking to lease his property to a black man.

Map of the University of Chicago Campus in Hyde Park, South Side of Chicago

In the case of Burke v. Kleiman, a number of factors were critical to the courts’ eventual decision to enforce James Hall’s eviction from Isaac Kleiman’s rented property in 1934. Critically, in 1928 Burke had helped to successfully manipulate a circuit court judge into declaring the WPOA’s racial covenant valid on the basis that more than 95% of the white property owners in the area covered by the covenant had signed the agreement. [12] In Burke v. Kleiman, both the superior court (in which the complaint was originally filed) and appeals court judges thus accepted the validity of the covenant as fact. [13] On this basis and the argument that Hall’s residency in Washington Park would help to “greatly depreciate values of real estate in said district… and [would] cause irreparable injury to” Burke and the covenant’s signees, both the superior court and appeals court ruled in favor of Hall’s eviction. [14] Burke, the WPOA, and the University of Chicago had succeeded – Washington Park would remain free from black residents. Yet, a storm loomed on the horizon; one that, three years later, would see Burke vow, “I will get even with the Woodlawn Property Owners Association by putting n------ in every block.” [15]

Burke’s support for the WPOA and friendly association with the University of Chicago ended for much the same reason it began: money. In November, 1936, the university withdrew its support for the WPOA, feeling it both ineffective in legally enforcing the racial covenant it was created to uphold and a source of bad publicity for existing primarily to do so. [16] An organization with more well-rounded goals, including supporting the development of community infrastructure, was created in its stead: the Woodlawn Property Owners’ League. A month after this restructuring, James Burke’s Washington Park home was foreclosed. [17] As an auto salesman in the midst of the Great Depression, Burke could not have been flush with sales. [18] Nevertheless, associates of Burke noted that he often complained of delayed salary payments from the WPOA before his eventual resignation from the organization in March, 1937 – an issue likely exacerbated when the University of Chicago withdrew its funding from the association. [19] In the course of this separation, Burke made his infamous threat, swearing to fight tooth-and-nail to tear down the racial covenant he had previously sought to protect.

Burke’s defection from the WPOA helped to publicly expose the final, and perhaps most crucial, component of the WPOA’s racial covenant – its fraudulence. Truman Gibson Jr. recounts discovering this fact for himself after spending a year and a half laboring in the office of the Cook County Recorder of Deeds to compare property deed signatures to those on the WPOA covenant. Whereas judges in the Burke v. Kleiman case had ruled according to the belief that 95% of the home owners covered by the covenant had signed it, Gibson Jr.’s research suggested the true number of signatories stood at just 54% of homeowners. [20] Meanwhile, a vengeance-minded Burke assisted Carl A. Hansberry, a prominent black real estate developer and NAACP official, in purchasing a three-family apartment building located in the dead center of the area covered by the WPOA’s racial covenant. [21] In the Hansberry v. Lee case that followed, Burke himself would testify that the WPOA covenant’s signatures – and the judicial ruling validating it – were the result of collusion and fraud. [22] Burke, it would seem, had found the revenge he was looking for. 

Whatever satisfaction Burke may have found upon taking the witness stand in Hansberry v. Lee, it almost certainly evaporated upon the release of the initial circuit court opinion in the case. The circuit court judge’s decision centered around the “unclean hands” of the “wrong-doer” and “evil-minded” James Burke and his fellow “conspirators,” accordingly ruling against them and in favor of evicting Hansberry on the principle of res judicata – the idea that, ironically, the issue at hand had already been tried and decided in Burke v. Kleiman. [23] It would take two more years, and the intervention of the U.S. Supreme Court, before the decision would be overruled. Another eight, and the era of court-enforced racial covenants would itself end. One has to wonder if James Burke recognized these growing winds of change when he assisted in Hansberry’s purchase of a home at Washington Park, or if, as the record suggests, his mind was fixated on other things – things like anger, greed, and revenge.

Notes

1. Wendy Plotkin, “Deeds of Mistrust: Race, Housing, and Restrictive Covenants in Chicago, 1900-1953,” PhD diss., (University of Illinois at Chicago, 1999), https://search.library.northwestern.edu/permalink/01NWU_INST/p285fv/cdi_proquest_journals_304572637.

2. Truman K. Gibson, Jr., Steve Huntley, Knocking Down Barriers: My Fight for Black America, (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 44-45. 

3. “James J Burke in the 1930 United States Federal Census,” 1930 U.S. Census, Ancestry, https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/85158998:6224?tid=&pid=&queryId=9e35d7bf-46cc-4fae-a0d2-0adab42c49ec&_phsrc=BAV2&_phstart=successSource.

4. “James J Burke in the 1920 United States Federal Census,” 1920 U.S. Census, Ancestry, https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/105294763:6061?tid=&pid=&queryId=3392d9ac-b768-437f-8af0-2366c38fded9&_phsrc=BAV10&_phstart=successSource.

5. “James J Burke in the U.S., City Directories, 1822-1995,” Tulsa City Directory 1922, https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/919022348:2469.

6. “James J Burke in the 1930 United States Federal Census,” Ancestry.

7. “James J Burke in the 1930 United States Federal Census,” Ancestry.

8. Philip Kinsley, “More Letters Praise School Board’ Economy Program,” Chicago Tribune, July 22, 1933, https://www.newspapers.com/image/355162248/?terms=%22James%20Joseph%20Burke%22&match=1.

9. Wendy Plotkin, “Deeds of Mistrust,” 122-123. 

10. Wendy Plotkin, “Deeds of Mistrust,” 116-117.

11. Truman K. Gibson, Jr., Knocking Down Barriers, 46. 

12. Truman K. Gibson, Jr., Knocking Down Barriers, 45-46. 

13. Burke v. Kleiman, 277 Ill. App. 519 (Ill. App. Ct. 1934) https://casetext.com/case/burke-v-kleiman-1.

Bibliography

Burke v. Kleiman, 277 Ill. App. 519 (Ill. App. Ct. 1934) https://casetext.com/case/burke-v-kleiman-1.

Gibson, Truman K. Jr. and Huntley, Steve. Knocking Down Barriers: My Fight for Black America. (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2005).

“James J Burke in the U.S., City Directories, 1822-1995.” Tulsa City Directory 1922. https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/919022348:2469.

“James J Burke in the 1920 United States Federal Census.” 1920 U.S. Census. Ancestry. https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/105294763:6061?tid=&pid=&queryId=3392d9ac-b768-437f-8af0-2366c38fded9&_phsrc=BAV10&_phstart=successSource.

“James J Burke in the 1930 United States Federal Census.” 1930 U.S. Census. Ancestry. https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/85158998:6224?tid=&pid=&queryId=9e35d7bf-46cc-4fae-a0d2-0adab42c49ec&_phsrc=BAV2&_phstart=successSource.

Kinsley, Philip. “More Letters Praise School Board’ Economy Program.” Chicago Tribune, July 22, 1933. https://www.newspapers.com/image/355162248/?terms=%22James%20Joseph%20Burke%22&match=1.

Plotkin, Wendy. “Deeds of Mistrust: Race, Housing, and Restrictive Covenants in Chicago, 1900-1953.” PhD diss., (University of Illinois at Chicago, 1999). https://search.library.northwestern.edu/permalink/01NWU_INST/p285fv/cdi_proquest_journals_304572637.

Price, Anna. “Hansberry v. Lee: The Supreme Court Case that Influence the Play “A Raisin in the Sun.”” Library of Congress Blogs, January 24, 2023. https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2023/01/hansberry-v-lee-the-supreme-court-case-that-influenced-the-play-a-raisin-in-the-sun/.

Scruggs, Dylan. “Burke v. Kleiman & The Chicago Covenants.” Virginia Tech University. December 8, 2021. 
Waters, Enoc P. Jr. “Hansberry Decree Opens 500 New Homes to Race.” The Chicago Defender, November 23, 1940. http://turing.library.northwestern.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/hansberry-decree-opens-500-new-homes-race/docview/492644719/se-2?accountid=12861.