For much of the 20th Century, Chicago has maintained a reputation as one of the nation's most segregated cities, its African-American population consigned to the Black Belt on the South Side and then to particular neighborhoods on the West Side. Once viewed as a promised land by Southern blacks, Chicago's multiple barriers to black residential expansion dashed countless hopes.
A professor of history at Rutgers-Newark and a native of Chicago and its environs, Beryl Satter skillfully and creatively weaves the story of her own family into a powerful narrative of neighborhood decline, economic exploitation and individual and community activism. The result is a moving and eloquent account of the forces black Chicagoans were up against, and the efforts of reformers, black and white, to combat them. Hers is a complicated story that is extremely well told. Read on>>>
