High Hopes, Mixed Fortunes And the New Promised Land
FROM THE DEPRESSION TO the years of the civil rights movement, a desperate river of people barely noted by the mainstream transformed the American North. They were sharecroppers and domestics and...
View ArticleAn Intimate Look at Welfare: Women Who've Been There
The upper room of a community center in a worn corner of Chicago got tense and quiet the other night as a half-dozen women squinted to read about what might happen to a welfare system that perhaps no...
View ArticleCHICAGO
GRANT PARK IS THE formal face Chicago presents to the world. It smells of lilacs in spring, roses in summer and is painted red with tulips in their half-hour of bloom. Its 320 acres stretch grandly...
View ArticleCries and Whispers
I SHARED THE DREAM The Pride, Passion and Politics of the First Black Woman Senator From Kentucky. By Georgia Davis Powers. Illustrated. 324 pp. Far Hills, N.J.: New Horizon Press. $25.95.
View ArticleWhose Side to Take: Women, Outrage And the Verdict On O.J. Simpson
PERHAPS the last time in an extraordinary week that Americans shared a single emotion was the cruel second before the verdict in the O.J. Simpson case. That was before "not guilty" undraped a racial...
View ArticleA Passenger Lands Safe, And Sorry
THE flight to London was set to leave at 8:50 P.M., but hours later the MD-11 sat helpless on a Chicago runway waiting for a wicked lightning storm to finish its tantrum. It was as if the sky was...
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Your figure you're safe by Memorial Day. The sky gods owe you this. You came out of the other side of a Chicago winter, survived the snow and the so-called wind chill and endured the faux sympathy of...
View ArticleThe Late Jim Crow
LEAVING PIPE SHOP Memories of Kin. By Deborah E. McDowell. 287 pp. New York: Scribner. $23.
View ArticleA Great Escape, A Dwindling Legacy
STANDING at ground zero of the Great Migration of blacks from the South to the promised city of Chicago, along the ribbon of barely recognizable land just below the Loop, you must suspend what the...
View ArticleAngela Whitiker's Climb
Angela Whitiker arrived early and rain-soaked at a suburban school building with a carton of sugar water in her purse and a squall in her stomach. It was the small hours of the morning, when the...
View ArticleA Success Story That's Hard to Duplicate
The case of a welfare mother of six pulling herself into the ranks of the middle class is rare enough to compel experts on class and poverty to zero in on a single question: What would it take to...
View ArticleScattered in a Storm's Wake and Caught in a Clash of Cultures
Hurricane Katrina's evacuees have become nomads in their own country, caught in a web of red tape and cultural miscues.
View ArticleThe Untamable Mississippi River
There have been floods before. A 1993 report and a selection of photographs recall some of the worst.
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A Native Caste Society
Caste is alive and well in this country, where a still unsettled multiracial society is emerging from a starkly drawn social order.
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Northern Passage
Set against the backdrop of the Great Migration, Ayana Mathis’s novel is a brutal and poetic allegory about a family beset by tribulations.
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When Will the North Face Its Racism?
The protests against police shootings are a referendum on the black condition since the Great Migration.
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‘Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series,’ by Leah Dickerman and Elsa Smithgall
The images in Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series are perhaps the most recognizable images of African-Americans in the 20th century.
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Our Racial Moment of Truth
As the Confederdate flag and Atticus Finch both fall from grace, we are in a moment that might allow us to finally face ourselves, as we really are.
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Emmett Till and Tamir Rice, Sons of the Great Migration
African-Americans still haven’t found the freedom they left the South for 100 years ago.
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