African Americans in Chicago (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781531659479)

The story of black Chicago is so rich that few know it all. It began long before the city itself. "The first white man here was a black man," Potowatami natives reportedly said about Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, the brown-skinned man recognized as Chicago's first non-Indian settler. It's all here: from the site of DuSable's cabin--now smack-dab in the middle of Chicago's Magnificent Mile--to images of famous and infamous residents like boxers Jack Johnson, Muhammad Ali, and Joe Louis. Here are leaders and cultural touchstones like Jesse Binga's bank, Robert S. Abbott's Chicago Defender, legendary filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, Ida B. Wells, the Eighth Regiment, Jesse Jackson, Oprah, and much more . . . including a guy named Obama. Here is the black Chicago family album, of folks who made and never made the headlines, and pictures and stories of kinship and fellowship of African Americans leaving the violent, racist South and "goin' to Chicago" to find their piece of the American Dream. Chicago has been called the "Second City," but black Chicago is second to none.

Author: Lowell D. Thompson
ISBN-10: 1531659470
ISBN-13: 9781531659479
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Library Editions
Language: English
Published: 02/06/2012
Pages: 130
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.91lbs
Size: 9.61h x 6.69w x 0.38d