Bronzeville
Oct 27 '05
The Bottom Line This is a sample part of a chapter from my own labor of love - a project covering various Chicago neighborhoods.
BLACK METROPOLIS
Many experts argue that rebuilding decayed, drug-infested communities requires identifying and capitalizing on the geographic and social assets of a neighborhood rather than overemphasizing its problems. Chicago’s Bronzeville area, situated about as close to the Loop on the south as Lakeview is to the north, presents as many promising avenues for revitalization as it does threats to sustainability. Unemployment and poverty rates have risen while the population has plummeted over the last half of a century. Nevertheless, the current dismantling of public housing projects may invite business and provide opportunities for renewal. Razing the projects might also strip this community of its most precious resource – its families.
Before the introduction and subsequent deterioration of notorious public housing projects like Stateway Gardens, Bronzeville was a vibrant Black Metropolis teeming with jazz clubs that employed and entertained both blacks and whites. Frontrunners like Robert Mott’s Peking Inn, Bill Bottoms’ Dreamland and Thomas McCain’s Pompeii carved an economic and political niche in the early twentieth century for Southside blacks who would work as musicians, managers and waitstaff, or find recreation and stimulating conversation after working long hours in the stockyards. Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and Bo Didley played the Bronzeville circuit, which spanned from 21st Street on the north to 51st Street on the south, Lake Michigan on the east and the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific railroad tracks on the west.
While Bronzeville was hardly unaffected by the political and institutional manifestations of racism, the "hot music" that would eventually come to be known as jazz brought scores of blacks and whites together to dance and laugh in a shared space. There were, of course, black-owned clubs that played only to whites as well as those that disallowed mixed orchestras. White "slummers" from the Gold Coast frequented their favorite clubs
and a few hired black "fixers" to search out the best rent parties and prostitutes to close the evening, but the seedier attractions in Bronzeville did not deter from its magic. Touring musicians of the time compared and contrasted Chicago’s Bronzeville to New York City’s Harlem, noting the excitement and friendliness of the area.
A DREAM DEFERRED
The height of Chicago’s Jazz Age co-occurred with the Great Migration of African-Americans from the south. The number of black residents living in the Douglas/Grand Boulevard community (which includes Bronzeville) exploded by 1940 to more than six times its 1910 figure. Major news conduits, such as the Chicago Tribune, published inflammatory headlines about the influx of blacks and the possible repercussions to the city, inciting fear among whites and alarm in Irish immigrants. The Irish, in spite of sharing some common historical threads with immigrating blacks, did not welcome increased competition for jobs and political access. African- Americans were often strategically hired as strikebreakers for industry, and some whites formed gangs to prevent black men from getting to work in the stockyards. Following the five bloody days of the 1919 race riot, many Irish and Jews who settled here after the Chicago Fire fled the Bronzeville area.
Still, Southern blacks continued to pour into Chicago, hoping that the worst treatment here rivaled the best there. Influential journalists, most notably Robert S. Abbot and Ida B. Wells, championed black rights and challenged white supremacy, making their homes in Bronzeville after being exiled from southern states for their humanistic views and entrepreneurial talents. Many blacks who wandered along the neighborhood’s borders were beaten, including the renowned poet Langston Hughes. Hughes would make black music of the first half of the twentieth century inextricable from black struggle in the 1951 poem "Dream Boogie." He writes: "Listen closely: / You’ll hear their feet / Beating out and beating out a - / You think / It’s a happy beat?"
As a result of the War on Poverty, public housing high-rises replaced dangerous slums, and low-income blacks in Bronzeville were moved to austere "towers-in-the-park." While planners sought to cross-ventilate apartments and flood their rooms with light, the projects quickly became prisons that lay on beds of concrete instead of grass, where mothers could not supervise their children on the streets, housing authority officials admitted criminal applicants and buildings fell into disrepair. Many working-class families left for safer neighborhoods, leaving low-income families to grapple with drugs and crime. Community organizers’ lives were threatened by gang members, and fear permeated the fabric of Bronzeville’s families.
FROM ACROSS THE SEA
In the early 1970’s, Dr. Sokoni Karanja returned to the United States after a pivotal trip to Tanzania where he helped to build schools while working on his dissertation. Born Lathan Johnson in Topeka, Kansas, the MacArthur "genius" grantee was first called Sokoni Karanja by an elder woman in an African village. The name translates to "person from across the sea with knowledge." Dr. Karanja had accepted a fellowship at the Adlai Stevenson Institute on the University of Chicago campus and was asked to set up several day care centers surrounding CHA property. The centers would come to be known as Centers for New Horizons, a family-focused agency that incorporates Swahili philosophy (or Asili) and operates out of the notion that a sustainable urban black community is possible if families are given supportive services that promote self-reliance and determination.
With an annual budget of 10 million dollars, Centers for New Horizons is one of the largest employers in the Bronzeville neighborhood. Its programs include seven early learning centers and two after-school programs, foster care services and employment training for youth. With 20% of Bronzeville children living in a home other than that of their immediate family, Centers receives huge contracts from the Illinois Department of Child and Family Services revolving around placement, assessment, foster parent training and adoption services.
Dr. Karanja has established a wide range of partnerships to improve the lives of Bronzeville’s families. His African-centered approach counters the Chicago Housing Authority’s vision of a more diverse, mixed-income neighborhood. He is concerned that families are being forcibly uprooted from the area as part of Bronzeville’s "restoration." In a segment from the Centers for New Horizons website, Dr. Karanja pleads for adequate schools for former Bronzeville families who have been relocated and concludes, "We must build a sense of community across classes so that Bronzeville does not become, like so many other so-called mixed-income communities, two separate communities – one of gates and highly selective schools for middle-income families, the other of inferior housing and low-performing neighborhood school for low-income families."
copyright 2005 Meagan Downey
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
meagandowney
|
 in Online Stores & Services |
 - Top 500 |
|
Member: Meagan Downey
Location: Chicago, IL
Reviews written: 358
Trusted by: 217 members
About Me:Can't find the online store or service you'd like to review? Request it here.
|
|
|
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.