Book Alert / Bridges of Memory

Bridges of Memory -- Chicago's Second Generation of Black Migration  -- An Oral History by Timuel D. Black, jr., Northwestern UP '07, $34.95, 392 pages, ISBN #0-8101-2295-2. Index, no bibliography or source notes, grouping of b&w glossy images.

As described so masterfully in Nicholas Lemann's Promised Land in the early 1990s, a huge wave of African-Americans, largely from Mississippi and Louisiana, surged north in the first half of the 20th century, changing forever both the land they left and their new home in Greater Chicago. Now Timuel D. Black, Jr., social scientist and one of the first wave of migrants, has chronicled the experience of those pioneers, in their own words.

His first volume of this series interviewed the first generation of migrants, who reached the Windy City from 1915 to 1950. In Bridges of Memory, he concludes their story and then "bridges" to the second generation, who stood on the shoulders of the first, and had a qualitatively different experience. Chicago was largely segregated when the  first generation arrived, whereas the second generation, many of whom took part in the civil rights movement, met a mixture of racial gains and persistent discrimination.

Those Black interviewed are those prominent largely in the Greater Chicago region. However, such national figures as actor and activist Paul Robeson, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., A. Philip Randoph, leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; and aviator Bessie Coleman, sweep through the memories of these Chicago residents.