"Mayors Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel have touted and promoted Chicago as a "world class city." The skyscrapers kissing the clouds, the billion-dollar Millennium Park, Michelin-rated restaurants, pristine lake views, fabulous shopping, vibrant theater scene, downtown flower beds and stellar architecture tell one story. Yet, swept under the rug is the stench of segregation that compromises Chicago. The Manhattan Institute dubs Chicago as one of...

"At once incendiary and icy, mischievous, and provocative, celebratory and elegiac, a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of the author's rarefied upbringing and education among a black elite concerned to distance itself from whites and the black generality, while tirelessly measuring itself against both. Born in 1947 in upper-crust black Chicago--her father was for years head of pediatrics at Provident, at...

-The rise of the Chicago Blues scene fairly shimmers with verve and intensity, and the large, diverse cast of characters is indelibly portrayed with the perfect pitch of a true artist.---Melanie Benjamin, New York Times bestselling author of The Swans of Fifth Avenue The bestselling author of White Collar Girl and What the Lady Wants explores one woman's journey of self-discovery and love set against the backdrop of a musical and social revolution....

The South Side is a quietly powerful story of how a white, middle-class, and largely Jewish neighborhood, built from prairie on Chicago's far South Side in the optimistic years after World War II, rapidly and dramatically changed to a middle-class black community in the 1960s. It is a tale of two communities that collided almost by accident at a moment in America's history when race relations were starting to explode, and the profound impact this...

This classic volume of reportage by the Pulitzer Prize—winning poet and journalist examines the racial tensions that erupted in the Red Summer of 1919. In July of 1919, a black child swam past the invisible line of segregation at one of Chicago's public beaches. White men on the shore threw rocks at the boy until he was knocked unconscious and drowned. After police shrugged off demands for those white men to be arrested, riots broke out that would...

"Operation Breadbasket is a narrative of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Operation Breadbasket, 1966-1971, an economic empowerment project that Martin Luther King Jr brought to Chicago as part of the Chicago Freedom Movement. Rev. Martin L. Deppe was a founding and active member of Breadbasket's steering committee throughout the life of this program. Using the power of the pulpit to galvanize consumer support including occasional economic...

In this comprehensive history of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party (ILBPP), Chicago native Jakobi Williams demonstrates that the city's Black Power movement was both a response to and an extension of the city's civil rights movement. Williams focuses on the life and violent death of Fred Hampton, a charismatic leader who served as president of the NAACP Youth Council and continued to pursue a civil rights agenda when he became chairman...

Will Cooley discusses the damage racism and discrimination have exacted on black Chicagoans in the twentieth century, while accentuating the resilience of upwardly-mobile African Americans. Cooley examines how class differences created fissures in the black community and produced quandaries for black Chicagoans interested in racial welfare. While black Chicagoans engaged in collective struggles, they also used individualistic means to secure the American...

"Penned by a former editor in chief of the Chicago Sun-Times, Binga is the definitive biography of the first black banker in Chicago as well as a history of race, politics, and finance in early twentieth-century Chicago"--

"Chicago was, notes Nicholas Lemann, "the capital of black America" in the 1940s, supplanting Harlem as the center of black culture and nationalist sentiment, home to such notables as Joe Lewis, Mahalia Jackson, Congressman William Dawson, Defender newspaper editor John Sengstacke, Ebony magazine publisher John H. Johnson, and Nation of Islam Leader Elijah Muhammad." "Bronzeville presents over 100 full-page black-and-white photographs of bustling...